Episode 39: Leveraging Humility as a Junior Dev, Executive and Startup Founder
A peak inside the mindset and strategies Dan Lines harnessed for rapid career growth.
Junior Dev. Team Lead. Youngest Junior Exec.
Before Co-Founding LinearB, Dan Lines was thrust into a position of power early in his career.
Instead of pretending to know things he didn't, Dan decided to leverage that which he did: The Engineers he'd worked with for years.
Harnessing the power of humility and empathy, Dan became a conduit between senior leadership and the developers at the heart of the operation.
A few topics we cover in this conversation:
How to land a role as a junior dev without a CS degree (even though Dan has one)
Co-founding a company
Improving the developer experience
Starting and growing a Podcast
If you prefer reading or want to search through the conversation, here’s the transcript.
[00:00:33] James Hudnall: Hey everyone. Today I'm joined by Dan Lines, co-founder and COO at LinearB. Dan is also the host of the Dev Interrupted podcast. Dan, welcome to Exponential Growth.
[00:00:45] Dan Lines: Hey James. Thanks for having me on today.
[00:00:47] James Hudnall: Excited to have you on. And Dan, I had an awesome conversation with your co-founder Ori, not that long ago, and I'm interested to dive into your version of the linear B story. But before we do that, why don't you maybe introduce yourself briefly, tell us what you do. High level.
[00:01:04] Dan Lines: Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, I'm Dan Lines. I'm one of the founders at Linear B. That's great that you had a great conversation with Ori. He's a pretty cool dude. He's my co-founding partner. And at a high level, yeah, I'm on this entrepreneurship journey. We've built this really interesting company for engineering leaders with linear B, but on the career side I've been in the industry now for many years.
[00:01:28] Dan Lines: Which I'm sure we'll get into. And on the family side, you know, I have my wife Lauren, a three-year-old daughter, another baby on the way. So kind of got the, you know, busy on the home life, busy on the work life.
[00:01:41] James Hudnall: Nice. Yeah, no, and I'm gonna dive into work-life balance as well because yeah. I, as a father of a 15 month old, I can definitely relate to that and Dan.
[00:01:49] Dan Lines: Yeah.
[00:01:50] James Hudnall: I think the little bit of research I did, it looks like you had more of a traditional path, but let's start at the beginning.
[00:01:55] James Hudnall: Take us as far back as you feel is relevant. What was it like growing up? What did you think you wanted to do?
[00:02:00] Dan Lines: Yeah. Yeah. I'll try to take you as far, back as I can. So, my earliest days of anything that has to do with like tech or like computers or anything like that, my father, I wouldn't call it a startup company, but had a small business in telecommunications in the nineties. And so that's like the, you know, like this telecom area you know, like.
[00:02:23] Dan Lines: Area of time and you know, we had like a, got like a computer and all of that, but I wouldn't say that I was obsessed with like programming or something like that. My earliest exploration is like, okay, this internet thing is starting, but I'm like a little kid at this time and I. Started building websites and I don't know, it depends how old you are listening, but there was this whole era of like GeoCities, AngelFire, all this kind of stuff.
[00:02:54] Dan Lines: And I was also like a kid that was watching a lot of Simpsons. This is like dating me when Simpsons used to be funny back in the day. And so I started making Simpson's websites when I was in like sixth grade or something like that. And that was like, you know, and that was like the air. Era also where there was like a counter at the bottom of the website, like how many people visited like, it's like early, it's like nineties, like that timeframe.
[00:03:18] Dan Lines: But the only reason that I tell that story is like, that was like my way into this whole thing of like, oh, I could build something. And like people maybe will come and see it or like I could connect with them even if it just sounds dumb with these like Simpsons websites. I think that was kind of like my first way into the world of tech.
[00:03:39] James Hudnall: Yeah. No, it's magical. I mean, it's like, it's a way to express your, the creative side, especially if you can, you know, reverse engineer and figure out how to do it. I still find that magical today. And to your point, I remember back in the days of, for me, it was, I think Dreamweaver, and aside from the name, I don't remember a whole lot about it, but yeah, it was, it was like magic.
[00:03:57] James Hudnall: The first time that I threw up a website.
[00:03:59] Dan Lines: Yeah. So it's like the creative aspect for me is kind of like the way that I got in. And then as I started getting a little bit older, like high school and that type of thing, I started building computers from scratch, like order all the parts. And I realized, oh, okay, like Dell is charging like 2000, you know, $500 if I order all these parts and like build it myself.
[00:04:24] Dan Lines: It's like 500 bucks. It was like 600 bucks. So I started selling these to like my friends
[00:04:30] James Hudnall: Nice. How old were you at the time?
[00:04:32] Dan Lines: How old was I? Probably 15. Cool. Yeah. Like high school, like sophomore year, junior year, something like that. Yeah. So I started ordering parts, selling computers, you know, maybe sell 'em for like a 800 bucks, a thousand bucks, something like that.
[00:04:46] Dan Lines: I was also like the kid in school that would like burn CDs for people, like I was always like selling something that had to do with tech. So you like. Yeah I think my vibe was a little more on that, like creative side entrepreneurship as opposed to like hardcore programming, which shows like, like different ways to get in.
[00:05:05] Dan Lines: Now I did go to school at Villanova University and got. A computer science degree. But even then I remember my father saying, Hey, some advice for you, like getting a compsci degree is cool and like you'll get a good job and all of that, but you don't have to.
[00:05:24] Dan Lines: it's more about, yeah, you go to school to meet people and to mature yourself. You can become a programmer, get into tech like many different ways. You don't have to have this formal education. It's optional. And that's, one thing that, that I will say you can do this formal path, but I don't think like, Going to school for me and getting this Comp Sci undergraduate degree is like how I got into tech.
[00:05:49] James Hudnall: I love it.
[00:05:50] Dan Lines: yeah, like another piece to the puzzle. But it's like not mandatory. I think it's more about like what you're creating in that type of stuff,
[00:05:57] James Hudnall: I love that you highlighted that and I'm absolutely partial coming from a non-traditional background, you know, I used to work on boats and thankfully, you know, LinkedIn's got an awesome apprenticeship program that I was able to secure a role in. And to your point, I guess this really hits home for me personally right now, Dan, because there's a video circulating the past couple of days.
[00:06:16] James Hudnall: You may have seen it where this guy is talking about, I'm a software engineer, I make $150,000, and you have to get a computer science degree to do this. I don't know anyone that hasn't, and that could not be farther from the truth. I get why he's doing it, but at the same time, he's wrong. Like I have nothing against CS degrees and honestly like if I was at that point in my life, if I knew what I knew now and if I was the type of person that I was, now I would pursue that. There's a lot of value to be had. I totally acknowledge that. But if you're someone like me who was in his mid thirties and you have this light bulb moment, I mean, you're not, that's not defeat right.
[00:06:50] James Hudnall: There, there are different ways to your point, to, to get into tech.
[00:06:53] Dan Lines: Yeah I like a thousand percent agree. I would even say like, Honestly, the most genius programmers that I know did not go to school for compsci. Just like giving some extreme examples, like, you know, they've been doing it since they were kids or whatever. Like you, you don't have to.
[00:07:11] Dan Lines: What I will say is, so when I went to apply for my first role, which. It was a while back. Now let's say like, two thousands, you know, timeframe. I interviewed at a startup company and I really wanted to work at a startup company that was doing some type of like software and tech. In this case it was like a secure, like security software, like cloud, data security.
[00:07:37] Dan Lines: And when I went to the interview, I remember two things. One is. I brought a bunch of drawings. To this interview because I had this idea back then, and it's doesn't mean that it's a good idea, but I like kind of reimagined, oh, like what could the internet like a webpage look like if it was better? And it was kind of this idea like, okay, for anytime that you see a link in a webpage, you could hover over it and kind of like this light box or like popup.
[00:08:10] Dan Lines: Not like a bad popup, but like a hover popup would come and say like, oh, here's like, A visualization of what this link would lead you to. It was just like an idea. And I came with like this design, and in my interview, I like just pitched this idea. And you know, they really liked it. They were like, oh, this is like really cool.
[00:08:29] Dan Lines: Like, tell me more about this idea. Another question they asked me is like, how good of a programmer are you? And I was like, honestly, I don't know. I did programming in school. It doesn't mean that I can like program, never been on a team. So like rate yourself one to 10.
[00:08:45] Dan Lines: And I said like a three outta 10. Like probably not that good. And they really I think respected that. But I said, I'm willing to learn. And I got great ideas and like I just wanna join a team. many years later I ended up becoming the VP of engineering of that same company.
[00:09:02] Dan Lines: They didn't care that I didn't have all of the experience. They actually loved all of the idea generation. I wanna be a part of the team. I'll learn this programming stuff. That really launched my career. And that's the reason I'm telling that story is I did not come with like, "I'm some unbelievable developer." I just came with passion. Some drawings. Some ideas. Yeah.
[00:09:22] James Hudnall: yeah. I love that man. Let me ask, so I guess as you look back at your life, have you always had that dimension of humility in your character makeup, or did you develop that over time?
[00:09:33] Dan Lines: I hope so, but I think it's something to always work on because, you start getting some of these successes, you become like a, I don't know, a director of engineering, then a VP of engineering, and then a founder and you gotta check yourself, make sure it's not going to your head, or like we got the podcast going Dev interrupted now, which has taken off.
[00:09:54] Dan Lines: I would say it's like an ongoing journey to check yourself, let's put it that way.
[00:09:59] James Hudnall: Yeah, no, for sure. And it's, it's good that you're cognizant of it, Dan. Because so many people aren't. And I feel like to your point, the minute that I think I know it all is like the minute that I stop growing and I never wanna get to that point, and I tell everybody close to me.
[00:10:11] James Hudnall: If I ever seem like I'm getting to that point, I want you to slap me right then and there and stop me in my tracks because that is not me.
[00:10:17] Dan Lines: That's why. Yeah. I mean, that's why you gotta go have good friends. That's why I have Ori as a partner, he can slap me whenever if I'm like my ego's getting too much.
[00:10:26] James Hudnall: No, for sure. So let me I wanna back up just a little bit because I know you had mentioned the four year CS degree that you got at Villanova, but I think you also got a minor in business and I'm curious about that decision.
[00:10:36] Dan Lines: Yeah, for sure. I mean, that, that was another like I had like a good family conversation. That was like the conversation with my father. Like again, remember, I. You do not have to go to school to become like a programmer. You can always do that.
[00:10:50] James Hudnall: Yeah.
[00:10:51] Dan Lines: Let's like round this out a bit with a business minor because what I always felt like is maybe the triple threat or, something like that is you have the technical background and you were like a developer.
[00:11:04] Dan Lines: And then you layer on top of that good communication skills and you layer on top of that business acumen.
[00:11:12] James Hudnall: Yep.
[00:11:12] Dan Lines: And if you are choosing to go more down that manager path, like you wanna be a VP of engineering, those three skill sets will accelerate you on that journey, if that's what you're looking for.
[00:11:26] Dan Lines: And that's what I found. So I kinda like. Combine those three things and it led me into more of like an executive founder type lifestyle for me.
[00:11:36] James Hudnall: That's a powerful combination and maybe Dan, to those listening out there now, even if they don't plan on moving over or into the management style and above, I still feel like that three-pronged attack will serve them well in whatever. Role there. And even if that's just trying to get a junior position as a dev.
[00:11:52] James Hudnall: 'cause I remember my manager shared an article with me recently, I think it was the product minded engineer. And it speaks a lot to your point of understanding the business needs and the thought process behind the ultimate goal as opposed to just tunnel visioning on, you know, your Jira task at hand.
[00:12:06] James Hudnall: To have that additional context is invaluable to the business.
[00:12:10] Dan Lines: Yeah. I mean, if you're like a developer interviewing, I think you'll blow people away. If you come with a question and you like you do well on like the technical stuff, you come with a question of like, Hey, what's our user retention rate in the product? whoa. Didn't see that coming. Oh, where did you learn that?
[00:12:26] Dan Lines: Oh, yeah we talked about like retention and G R R and like why it matters in school. Okay. That's cool.
[00:12:33] James Hudnall: yeah. Not a lot of people have that.
[00:12:35] Dan Lines: No, not a lot.
[00:12:36] James Hudnall: Now you graduated, if I'm not mistaken, in 2007. And I do remember we had a pretty bad economy shortly thereafter. So take us back, what was that like? Was the economy bad yet, or what, or was it maybe not quite
[00:12:48] Dan Lines: so like the students at that time that really got crushed was like the 2008 graduating class. So I was like barely before it. And yeah I, I, I landed my first role like we said, like a really great job, like a great. You know, standard software developer job now that the real name of that company was called Vicor, and it was acquired by Nuance shortly after I joined.
[00:13:17] James Hudnall: Okay.
[00:13:17] Dan Lines: But the vibe of that company was very old school. The vibe was like long release cycles, work on the project for nine months. Don't know when it's going into production. And so I only stayed at that company I think even less than a year, maybe like one year. And that's when I decided, hey, I feel like there's something out there missing for me.
[00:13:41] Dan Lines: Let me go into the startup space, which was what that story that I talked about, like, you know, showing like. This like design and all of that. But what I will say is if there's any job in the world that's like recession proof, Or close to it. It is something that has to do with software tech, something like that.
[00:14:04] Dan Lines: Because the whole world, you can, like, if you don't know it, I'm sure people listening to this pod know, but it's like every company behind the scenes is a software company, and so I think it's like a really, if you do choose to go get like a degree in Compsci or something like that, I think it's a very safe.
[00:14:25] Dan Lines: Like play. That's how I would describe it with a lot of upside opportunity.
[00:14:30] James Hudnall: Yeah. No, I love that. And to those listening out there that maybe they are at that age where maybe they're even in high school and they're looking to make a lot of money, Dan, and they hear that CSS is a good. Field to pursue for that reason? What? What would you say to that person?
[00:14:45] Dan Lines: I don't know, like, how much money do you wanna make? Like there's like a, I think there's like a certain I dunno, level of income where it might not matter to you anymore, but here's like something that someone told me. 'cause it's all depends on your perspective of what a lot is. I think like software developers, you will get paid a lot like, and I think it's increasing, not decreasing.
[00:15:11] James Hudnall: Yeah.
[00:15:12] Dan Lines: If you wanna make a lot, a lot, a lot, own your own business.
[00:15:18] James Hudnall: I like
[00:15:18] Dan Lines: that.
[00:15:18] Dan Lines: You know, it's like you want like millions of dollars or something crazy like that. Yeah. Usually the people that like go start the tech company, that's a good way to do it.
[00:15:28] James Hudnall: Yeah. No, I love that, man. Now let's talk about your days at CloudLock. You went from, or maybe you even got, were you hired as an engineering manager? 'cause I think
[00:15:37] Dan Lines: I was, that was like the story that I told you. Like, where it was like, yeah, I can like program a little bit. I don't know if I'm even that good at it. I came in as a junior frontend engineer was my first role there at
[00:15:48] James Hudnall: but I think as you, you kind of mentioned it, and I see it on your LinkedIn as well. You kind of worked your way up over time. It looks like you became manager, then director, then VP of engineering and Operations. So talk to us about, I mean, that's a lot right there that I covered. Why don't you unpack it a little bit?
[00:16:02] James Hudnall: What was that like?
[00:16:03] Dan Lines: So I was the second employee to be hired at that company. It was a startup company with three founders in Boston, and that's the one I went in and like showed my, you know, idea of like the next wave of the like internet ui. And they hired me as like a junior front end developer.
[00:16:21] Dan Lines: And anytime, like my mindset was I just wanna take a shot to work with some creative people to build something and I wanna join a company that has not made it yet. Like has not been successful yet. So that was my mindset going in. And I got in early with the founders. I got like super passionate about what we were doing.
[00:16:43] Dan Lines: I just had the mindset I'm here to do anything to help the company succeed and that allowed me to become, yeah, I became like a team leader event engineering. I. You know, after a year or two you start, get some people reporting to you, you get a little more responsibility. Then I became a director of engineering of the, you know, US engineering team.
[00:17:04] Dan Lines: This is the timeframe that me and Ori met, like my current founder that, you know, co-founder that you mentioned. ORI came in and actually started to build the engineering department in Israel. So we had like a US and I reported to ORI for a period of time, so I was like a director of engineering.
[00:17:22] Dan Lines: He was a VP of engineering. You know, time went by a little bit, maybe a few more years, and then ORI passed the entire engineering team back over to me. I became the VP of engineering. I had a team in the us. I had a team in Israel. I had. Team in Ukraine and uk. The company's getting bigger, a hundred plus people now.
[00:17:46] Dan Lines: So I was on the executive team, you know, kind of like a junior executive, maybe youngest, like, definitely youngest person in that room. But it's always a good thing, I think in the tech industry. And we were acquired
[00:17:58] James Hudnall: I wanna pull on that thread. How did you handle that, being the youngest person in that room in such a senior
[00:18:02] Dan Lines: I remember I was like 27 or 28 at the time or something like that.
[00:18:06] Dan Lines: That's like the ultimate time to handle it with humility. I just like went in with the mindset of, yeah, I already know. I don't know as much as everyone here, but I know I can work hard. I think I was really connected with individual contributors. Like people that were more my age, which was like, you know, kind of the engineering organization.
[00:18:25] Dan Lines: I was able to bring the vibe. Like, you know, when there's that situation where the executive team is like disconnected to the people that are like really doing the hands-on work, which is the worst. Okay. I knew that I couldn't give like direction to like the business of like, how should we increase more ARR I wasn't at that level, but I could say, Hey, this is what's going on with our people. This is like the disconnect between them and us in the executive room. I think I can help bridge that gap. Here's some ideas. So I more so just took it with like, okay, where could I contribute? 'cause I know that I'm not gonna be able to contribute in like demand generation ARR maybe a lit definitely on the product, but not on those like, so it just like kind of found my way.
[00:19:14] James Hudnall: I mean, I still feel like that speaks to your character, Dan, because so many people. I think would go into that role and just pretend. They would pretend that they know things that they don't and that wouldn't be good for them, nor for the company, the board that they're sitting on. So, kudos to you for that.
[00:19:28] James Hudnall: And to those out there listening, if you take nothing else away from this conversation, I think it's gonna get even more fun than we're at so far. But if you take nothing else away from this, listen to the humility that Dan showed throughout this career arc that he's on and just. Take that away because you have direct ownership in demonstrating that.
[00:19:46] James Hudnall: And I mean, to your point, Dan, genuine empathy and humility will get you far, not just in a career, but in life in general, I find.
[00:19:54] Dan Lines: Absolutely.
[00:19:55] James Hudnall: You're being humble, you're contributing where you can in that and. Let me ask you, going back to you and Ori, were you and Ori plotting anything, maybe informally in the background?
[00:20:04] James Hudnall: Did you have a close relationship at that time, or was that gonna maybe blossom later on?
[00:20:09] Dan Lines: Well, I think we had like a great relationship. I would say at that time Ori was like my mentor, like if you remember. So it's like I was reporting into him for a period of time and then we became actually peers on the executive team. I became VP of engineering. He took like 10 engineers and started to do like advanced, you know, stuff with the product and like threat detection and security.
[00:20:31] Dan Lines: So he wanted to get more hands on and I think through that, Time period. Yeah. You have this like re reporting structure, so it's like kinda like the mentor then kind of moved into like friends, you know, friend friendship and then like a mutual respect I would say is like the journey and. At that time, I don't think either of us were plotting anything to work together.
[00:20:57] Dan Lines: We were all in to make that company, it was called CloudLock successful. Like both of us were spending all of our waking hours on that. Still great partnership, but it was all about that company, which was acquired by Cisco. So we got to like an exit state. And only after we were at Cisco and I stayed for about a year and then I resigned, you know, to make sure like all my people were settled at Cisco, make sure everyone had like a good path.
[00:21:26] Dan Lines: And I was like, you know, this larger companies not for me. And I kind of need a break. Only after that, like Ori and I started talking about the next thing.
[00:21:35] James Hudnall: Okay. Yeah, no, I remember. Or he told me that he stayed on for a little while as well. And I know I had asked him, but I'm gonna ask you as well and get your perspective on this. So, after that acquisition and after that year at the, at Cisco or the combined company, what was your plan next? Or maybe you were in a position where you didn't have to have an immediate plan and maybe just trusted.
[00:21:54] James Hudnall: That you were gonna figure things out.
[00:21:56] Dan Lines: I don't think I, I had like the perfect plan. My mindset was I actually did a two and a half week trip across the us like in a car, so, I was working really hard at the cloud lock startup for, you know, seven years or whatever it was, maybe nine years. And so I said, you know what, I'm gonna go like reconnect with some people from college.
[00:22:21] Dan Lines: So I did this road trip to start visiting people that hadn't seen in a while. 'cause I was like, work probably working too hard. So, you know, I. I started in Boston. We went to, you know, New York. I, we had like mapped out all these different cities all the way, and we landed in LA, Los Angeles. So it was like two and a half weeks.
[00:22:44] Dan Lines: Go see college friends, see all these cities I hadn't seen before. You know, stay in Airbnbs and whatever. And I eventually made it to la. My girlfriend at the time who's my wife now, she got into school there for Chinese medicine and acupuncture. So that's why we were headed to la.
[00:23:03] James Hudnall: Okay.
[00:23:04] Dan Lines: When we got there, yeah, we didn't have a place to stay.
[00:23:06] Dan Lines: We just started living in Airbnbs for a while and on that road trip, that's when Ori called me and said, Hey, you know, I saw that you like left Cisco and all of that, all good. I think I'm gonna do the same. Let's talk about doing a company together. I'd love to do something with you. And I said, great.
[00:23:24] Dan Lines: Once I get to LA let's start talking. And I remember I was talking to him while I was living in these Airbnbs. Also, it's ATI time in my life. Like no kids, not, you know, not married, nothing like that. And I kind of just gave myself breathing room, I would say, to catch up on what was going on in the world.
[00:23:41] Dan Lines: That's the way that I would describe it. Catch up on friends. I watched a ton of documentaries. What's going on? You know, looked into the space, you know, of like, you know, asked some spiritual questions. Why are we here? And all of that just took some time for myself. And then, yeah, I got back into it with Ori and founded Linear b.
[00:23:59] James Hudnall: yeah. No, I love that. Did you figure out the meaning of life? If you have a, I'd love for you to distill that wisdom on me, Dan.
[00:24:05] Dan Lines: I would just say like, improve yourself. Like, learn something. I don't know the meaning of life, but basically when I took a look at like all religions out there, 'cause I'm not religious, but I just like examined all of them. It was more so like, you're here to like, learn something and improve that.
[00:24:21] Dan Lines: That's all I know.
[00:24:23] James Hudnall: Yeah. I love that. I love that man. Now maybe the natural follow up question is you wanna talk about the. I guess the origin story for linear B. I know we've already hinted at it, but what I haven't mentioned this episode is, you know, Ori, to those listening, if you haven't listened to that conversation, I would encourage you to do so, but he's thousands of miles away from you, Dan.
[00:24:43] James Hudnall: So what was that like? You're not just, you know, co-founding what is now seems to be like a very successful, pretty massive company
[00:24:51] Dan Lines: Yeah.
[00:24:51] James Hudnall: in the same room. You know, you're doing it from thousands of miles apart. So what was that like?
[00:24:56] Dan Lines: Yeah. So Ori is in Israel and when we founded the company, I was in Los Angeles, I recently moved back to the East Coast. So yeah, you have like a 10 hour time difference. You have a cultural difference, all of that. One thing for us is we were used to working together. So we had worked together for many years, which I think. really important, especially if you're gonna be that far apart. So what does it mean? We're used to, we're we were used to remote communication. You know, we were used to finding the times of day that, you know, work for each of us, you know, getting on Zooms or whatever. And there was already, I think a trust built before we started linear b.
[00:25:47] Dan Lines: Which again, I think if you can do it that way, is super important. And yeah, I mean, I can get even more into it, but we did form, you know, from the beginning. We were a remote multicultural company, which I think now has served us super, super well.
[00:26:06] James Hudnall: Yeah.
[00:26:06] Dan Lines: But I don't think I would recommend someone doing that unless you really trust the other person I.
[00:26:13] Dan Lines: Because it's, I think, harder to build trust with a long distance and not being together.
[00:26:19] James Hudnall: Yeah. No, I love that. And I was going to ask about the, I guess the linear be company culture. If it was remote first. It sounds like it was built to be remote first, which you know that I know I'm telling you things you already know, but to those listening, you know, now you know your applicant. Pool instead of just being in Dan's location in the US or Ori in Israel, it's the entire globe.
[00:26:39] James Hudnall: So it's so that, that's so cool. And it's just interesting to hear how the bits and pieces and the steps that you and Ori took along the way kind of led to this point to create that.
[00:26:50] Dan Lines: and it's also funny 'cause we founded Linear B in 2019. Everyone know what ha happened in 2020. So we were kind of ahead of the game, I think of going remote. It just ha happened that way. But yeah, I mean, when we were thinking about ideas for the company, I. We knew that we, we did like a idea generation.
[00:27:09] Dan Lines: I remember Ori flew over to Santa Monica. I was living in Santa Monica in la. It's like a little beach town, great town. And he flew over and we started like whiteboarding. We knew that we wanted to do something that had to do with like people and data. That was like kind of our thing. Like, we really like people succeeding.
[00:27:28] Dan Lines: We really like data stuff. What is the world of people and data? And we threw around a lot of different ideas ranging from like HR analytics tool, like people Analytics was a little popular then I. But we ultimately found, you know, with linear B, it's, you know, for software engineering leaders, for VPs of engineering, for product leaders, we ultimately just went back to what we knew and like what we had experienced ourselves because I.
[00:27:58] Dan Lines: Once we started to try to like dabble in some of these other spaces, you like quickly run up into problems that you have to research as opposed to like, oh, we know what it's like to be a software engineering leader. I know what it's like to be a developer. I know what it's like to have to deliver a project on time.
[00:28:14] Dan Lines: I know the stress that you know, comes with that. I know so. We, I think, made a good decision to focus. Yeah, so we are focused on people in data in the linear B, you know, platform. You'll see a lot of that, but it's also like in an area that we know and have instincts about, and I think that was like a good choice from the beginning.
[00:28:34] James Hudnall: Yeah. Alright. That makes a lot of sense. And maybe this is a good time to, to drill down into that explicitly. What is the mission statement of linear B? What problems do you solve?
[00:28:43] Dan Lines: Yeah, so like the space that we're in is software delivery management, and so everything that we've built within the linear B platform at the end of the day helps engineering leaders. I. Deliver on time with high quality. And it's funny, we actually coined this, I don't know that we coined it, but we talked about it internally called like the dual mandate problem. This problem of, of a dual mandate for an engineering leader is a little bit what you touched on. They have this one responsibility to communicate with the executive team and be at that executive table. What does the executive team ask you? Where are engineers spending time? Where are we investing time?
[00:29:30] Dan Lines: You know, when is this project gonna be delivered? We need it for sales, we need it for retention. So there's like this one world of like having to answer and like visualize and show the answers to those types of questions. And at the same time, in parallel the other side of this mandate is like the classic operational efficiency of an engineering team.
[00:29:52] Dan Lines: Are you efficient with your dev pipeline and your delivery? Are you delivering it with high quality
[00:29:58] Dan Lines: And that problem set together? Solving that is our mission.
[00:30:05] James Hudnall: Okay.
[00:30:06] Dan Lines: Yeah.
[00:30:08] James Hudnall: I like that. And I guess I've got some follow up questions. So related, related to those or these problems that you're solving. I guess how would you define the developer experience? And then maybe once we define it, we can talk about how to improve it?
[00:30:21] Dan Lines: Yeah, you know, this whole like people call it like Dev X like developer experience. It's like a hot, I would say, like topic right now or debate. And I think it's an important topic. And one, one thing that I'll bring up is. You have something in the industry right now where there's one set of people that want to measure the performance of engineers.
[00:30:45] Dan Lines: Hey, how is our engineers performing? is not something that we buy into at linear B I don't think you can like quantify because it's like a combination of art and science, like the performance of an engineer. But there is this cool thing happening with developer experience. Which is trying to quantify the experience that a developer goes through of how easy it is for them to get their job done.
[00:31:14] Dan Lines: Like, how easy is it for you to ship code? How easy it is it for you to understand what you need to deliver in an iteration or a sprint? Are you like getting bogged down by like meetings? Are you getting bogged down by other things? when we think about developer experience, I think the way that I would define it is a combination of empathy with also, I would probably say wait time.
[00:31:46] James Hudnall: Wait
[00:31:47] Dan Lines: On the empathy side, that's more of that qualitative. You could do it in like a survey or something. Like, you would just ask an engineer, Hey, you just delivered the, on the sprint. It was like a two week sprint. How'd it go for you? They'll tell you,
[00:32:01] James Hudnall: Yep.
[00:32:02] Dan Lines: was it good? Was it bad? Like, that's like qualitative on the quantitative side.
[00:32:07] Dan Lines: Wait time. How long did you have to wait for this poll request to be reviewed? How long, how ma, how long did you have to wait for your code to actually get shipped to production? How long did you have to wait for the tests to run? And there's lots of different examples of like developers like waiting or like, you know, having turmoil.
[00:32:28] Dan Lines: So if you co combine that, like empathy and wait time. And you put them together. That's how I would define developer experience or like, you know, kind of like quantify developer experience.
[00:32:40] James Hudnall: Yeah, no, that makes sense. So now you've got the metrics. How does linear B improve on this developer experience?
[00:32:48] Dan Lines: Yeah, so it's like the first thing that you need to do, like with those metrics is like measure that type of stuff, which is, you know, this, that's all the stuff that we are, you know, measuring it at linear B, but then the next question that, that came to us is like, okay, it's cool to see all of this.
[00:33:02] Dan Lines: Like, what should, what could I do about it? And that's where at linear B, then we started focusing on like dev pipeline automation. We have, you know, some of these features, GI Stream is a popular one, worker B, you know, GI Stream is a little bit more around like quantifying rules of engagement of how to handle a developer's poll request.
[00:33:23] Dan Lines: Like who should do the review? You know, can we do the review with automation or do we need like multiple reviewers? Does a security person need to come in like, It basically measures or describes a code change request. They call like a pull request for engineers and then automatically does the right thing to make sure that nobody's waiting, you know, for that review.
[00:33:48] Dan Lines: And on the other side, worker bee is like a little bit more on like the context. It's like making sure, Hey James sent you a notification that Dan is waiting for you to review the poll request. And by the way, James, we estimate that it will take like 15 minutes of your time to review. So, you know, you don't have to block like a full half hour.
[00:34:09] Dan Lines: Maybe you could get this done before you head to lunch. That's like more of the context. So you, start putting these automation tools in place. And you start reducing that wait time that I talked about and you know, I think that's one of the ways that you get better developer experience.
[00:34:26] Dan Lines: That's like our take on it.
[00:34:28] James Hudnall: Yeah, a little birdie told me that you've got strong opinions maybe against pull requests as they currently stand. So, I think you may have touched on it there. Dan, what don't you like about pull request prs or maybe how. most prs are conducted.
[00:34:44] Dan Lines: Yeah. Well, well, I mean, first of all, I would say like the whole like concept of the PR was great for the industry, right? Coming from open source, I could collaborate with someone else. I could request these changes and that person could, you know, have take their time to look at it like that concept's cool.
[00:35:00] Dan Lines: I think the concept that I don't like is, what I see a lot of engineering organizations do is treat. Every single PR exactly the same. When the truth is every PR is different, the code that's changed is different. The risk of the change is different. Who needs to review it is different. And so I, yeah, I guess I would say the thing that I don't like about them is they're kind of this natural bottleneck.
[00:35:27] Dan Lines: 'cause you're waiting on someone else. And I'm okay with that, but I'm not okay with. Doing the exact same thing every single time, making developers wake every single time no matter what the change is. And that's where like, that's why we invented Git Stream, that like all like rule automation tool that you could say, okay, I get it.
[00:35:50] Dan Lines: This poll request, it is really risky, it touches sensitive areas of code. And I agree we should have two reviewers on this one. But hey, you know what? This other one. It's behind the feature flag, or it's like documentation only changes or maybe an image only. Let's like not have two reviewers on this so we could help this developer get this like push forward.
[00:36:11] Dan Lines: That's like a very basic, you know, example.
[00:36:15] James Hudnall: No, that makes total sense. You're providing much more context at a pr specific level such that Yeah, I guess you're identifying the business needs and the potential risks and that I can see how that would improve the developer experience having been on the that side of the equation and waiting for my PRS to get approved.
[00:36:33] James Hudnall: So, I totally get that. talk to me about continuous merge.
[00:36:37] Dan Lines: Yeah, so continuous merge is. A concept that we came up with when we looked at this poll request problem, we looked at a ton of data. We analyzed like a million poll requests, something like that. And we saw that, oh, what's happening is the review stage is where a lot of them are getting like hung up.
[00:36:58] Dan Lines: That's what all the data dataset from our community, and so, Continuous merge is more like a mindset, like what do we need to do to allow developers to always be merging code? When you're always merging code, you're gonna be happier, you're gonna have a better experience. Projects are gonna get delivered on time more often.
[00:37:21] Dan Lines: So continuous merge, I would say is more just like the mindset. You know, we talked about the details, like get stream and worker bee and like. These linear B automation tools. Continuous merge is like, Hey, let's, as an engineering organization always strive to be mer merging, always be merging continuously.
[00:37:41] Dan Lines: And if there is something that is preventing that from happening, why don't we fix that problem? That's how I would describe it.
[00:37:48] James Hudnall: I love that. And again, selfishly from the developer side of the equation I'm all for the more frequent merges and you know, the dopamine hits along the way really go a long way into maintaining that. You know, momentum that, that we as developers get. Now I'm gonna switch gears. Talk to me about this podcast you started.
[00:38:07] Dan Lines: Dev interrupted. Yeah. I think it's a super cool pod. It's for engineering leaders, you know, that was, or anyone who wants to be an engineering leader, like a lot of developers will listen, or like anyone that's like looking to. Let's say they improve themselves in the engineering space.
[00:38:22] Dan Lines: And honestly the way that it started when we first founded Linear B, neither myself or Ori or like marketers, I would say, you know, when you found a company, like we were obsessed with the product and that type of stuff. But of course in any business, like you gotta get yourself out there, you gotta market.
[00:38:42] Dan Lines: And we kinda said to ourselves, okay, like, are we marketing experts? Probably the answer is, no, we're not. What are we good at? Well, I think we have a lot of knowledge about the engineering space. I think both of us have had some fairly nice careers, you know, that we discussed on even this pod instead of like, you know, I don't know, doing some like. That's standard marketing thing. Why don't we just start a podcast and like speak our knowledge and truth and see if anyone wants to listen to that.
[00:39:20] Dan Lines: And we found that people do wanna listen to that, especially in the area of like engineering leadership. There's a lot of podcasts that are just for developers, but not as much around, okay, how do you improve an engineering organization?
[00:39:36] Dan Lines: I know what you're going through. So yeah, that, I mean, that's the vibe of Dev interrupted. Anyone that wants to improve themselves, lead an engineering organization, make it better. That's kind of our audience and yeah we used that early on in the business and we're still using it today to interact with our community.
[00:39:54] James Hudnall: Yeah, I saw you started it back in 2020, I think it was. And so I would ask, you know, over the years, how has the show evolved? And maybe for any given episode, is there a commonality or maybe you explore different topics in each.
[00:40:07] Dan Lines: Oh man. There's like, yeah, there's so, so many topics. I think one way it's certainly evolved is you start getting more and more famous people that wanna come onto it. You know, you kind of start any podcast with like the people you know, and those people are wonderful. But then it starts growing.
[00:40:23] Dan Lines: You start getting like, okay, VP of engineering GitHub, and like director at Spotify. And you're like, whoa, this is like pretty cool. Not only are we getting our smart friends on this, but we're getting like, Leaders in, you know, the entire space. And I think when you start doing that, then the pod evolves because you start hearing things or like this whole thing with developer experience, right?
[00:40:47] Dan Lines: I think we had like, this awesome, you know, person Charity Majors. She's like the C t O at Honeycomb. You start hearing about it maybe a year before it becomes popular. You know, you start hearing about these trends and you're talking about them on the pod. So I would say one, one of the ways that the pods evolved a little bit is it's probably like a really good place to go to stay up to date on the, like most elite engineering like Netflix, we have like people on from Netflix, what are they doing?
[00:41:22] Dan Lines: So I think it went from like our own knowledge to like, What are the best engineering teams in the world doing? And you get an early taste of, oh, I should start thinking about that for org. where it is now. Yeah. A little more into the
[00:41:35] James Hudnall: before it happens. I,
[00:41:37] Dan Lines: Yeah.
[00:41:38] James Hudnall: I think on a recent Rogan podcast mark Andressen was saying a similar thing, different field, but same concept. He has that exposure to the founders and he can basically see things happening before they do, just because he's directly involved.
[00:41:50] Dan Lines: Yeah, I mean that's a great, like a, Andresson obviously a great investment firm and all the stuff that they, they've done. But yeah, , that's a great analogy. I think that's kind of how it's evolved a little bit.
[00:42:00] James Hudnall: Yeah. Where do you see the show in five years?
[00:42:02] Dan Lines: First and foremost, we've been getting more and more people, not just like myself as a host to participate. I think getting more people from the community, maybe to like host, host some of these pods, we've already like extended it upon just myself. We started like, a pod in Hebrew in Israel with our C T O running it. I can't say exactly where it will be in five years, but I think that we can connect to more audiences like in their like native community or like the things that they're dealing with more. That's a, that's the only thing that I can say.
[00:42:37] James Hudnall: No, and I mean, to your point, Dan, if you had asked me a few years ago where I saw myself in five years back when I was like painting on tugboats, not in my wildest imaginations would I, a, be working at LinkedIn as a developer, and b be talking to a co-founder of a company like yours. So it's good to have goals.
[00:42:54] James Hudnall: Like I, I'm not discounting that at all. But also don't close yourself off to the possibility that may happen.
[00:43:00] Dan Lines: Yeah, let it flow a little bit. Don't lock yourself into one thing.
[00:43:04] James Hudnall: Yeah. Now before you get outta here, I got a few rapid fire hot seat questions if you're up for it, so we can better understand your psychology.
[00:43:11] Dan Lines: Let's do it.
[00:43:12] James Hudnall: All right. What does your typical morning routine look like?
[00:43:16] Dan Lines: Right now I'm waking up around 5:00 AM. I'm starting with like at least a five minute meditation. I'm getting some quiet time from six to 7:00 AM to like just before getting on meetings or anything like that. And then I'm helping out my family until about 8:00 AM and then I'm starting my work day.
[00:43:37] James Hudnall: Love that. If money didn't exist, what do you think you would do every day with your time?
[00:43:42] Dan Lines: I think I, kind of the thing that I'm best at is like creating stuff. And my next goal after linear B would be like something that's a little bit more like humanitarian. I don't know exactly yet. I don't know if it has to do with food. I don't know. It has to do with like building homes, but something a little more like community oriented.
[00:44:04] Dan Lines: I, I would say if money didn't exist,
[00:44:06] James Hudnall: I love that altruism. If you could send a single message to your former self to help you during the various transitions that you've done and the pivots you've made throughout your technical career, what do you think that message would be?
[00:44:17] Dan Lines: enjoy the changes. Like, I think a little earlier on I'd be like, afraid, oh, a change is happening. Or like, I don't know. I would just say like a don't be afraid. Embrace change, just like, Observe it and like, almost like enjoy it a little more.
[00:44:35] James Hudnall: no, embrace the change. The only constant now I feel like is change the way that the world's evolving, so embrace it. I love that. Are there any books or podcasts that have had a big impact on you?
[00:44:45] Dan Lines: probably the Aubrey Marcus podcast.
[00:44:48] James Hudnall: I haven't heard of that one.
[00:44:49] Dan Lines: It's a pretty good one. I picked that up during that two and a half week road trip that I talked about, and I think it's not like a tech podcast or anything like that, but it kind of just gives like a perspective more on like a health and wellbeing like, Mindfulness, like that type of stuff, which I've tried to adopt as much as I can.
[00:45:10] Dan Lines: I'm by no means an expert, but try to get it into my routine a little bit more. And I think that type of pod like balance me out of all like the tech pods and like, you know, that, that type of stuff. It's like the other side.
[00:45:22] James Hudnall: Okay. I'll have to check that out. Well, what's next for you, Dan? You gonna keep building out linear B with ori? Anything else fun planned on the immediate horizon that you're aware of?
[00:45:31] Dan Lines: Yeah, absolutely keep building linear b I think it's it's so funny, we're always at the next most interesting time. There's never a time where like, oh yeah, everything's like, perfect and great. And right now we're more so into that scale stage where you have the largest, most interesting companies in the world coming to us and saying, Hey, , we could use your help. And I'm excited for that stage now. So, yeah, we'll leave it at that.
[00:45:58] James Hudnall: No, I love that. And there's a question I wanted to ask Ori even I'm glad I got you 'cause I wanna ask you as well. To those out there listening that may not have a formal CS degree and they wanna work at a company like Linear B, do they have a shot? What do you look for when you're looking for prospective programmers?
[00:46:15] Dan Lines: They do have a shot. I think what we value the most would be something around creation. Come show us something you built. Doesn't mean it has to be the most amazing or perfect thing, but if you came to an interview and say, "Hey, I'm looking for my first engineering job. Let me show you this project I did." That's what we like - creators.
[00:46:35] James Hudnall: I love that. Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about that we didn't?
[00:46:40] Dan Lines: No, I think we hit all. All the points have been awesome.
[00:46:43] James Hudnall: Cool. Where can people go to find out more about you?
[00:46:46] Dan Lines: You can just go to linear b.io and you can find some stuff there. And if you're interested in more of like the career advancement, check out Dev Interrupted podcast.
[00:46:57] James Hudnall: Yeah, no, I'll add links in the show notes to both. And Dan, you got an awesome story, man. I really appreciate you taking the time to share it with us.
[00:47:04] Dan Lines: Thanks for having me on.