Building the Backbone of AI Agents: Telemetry, Open Source, and the Future of Developer Infrastructure with Brian Douglas
AI agents are moving fast, but the infrastructure behind them is still catching up. In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn sits down with Paper Compute CEO Brian “B Dougie” Douglas to explore building telemetry for AI agents, open-source infrastructure, token economics, and what it takes to create developer tooling in the AI era. From local-first observability to agent runtimes and the future of AI workflows, this conversation dives into what’s next for AI-powered development.
Show highlights:
(00:00) Open Source Trust Signal
(00:16) Show Intro and Sponsor
(01:07) What Paper Compute Builds
(01:55) Telemetry for Agents Explained
(04:10) Local First Data and Sharing
(06:18) Second Time Founder Story
(09:06) Token Costs and Pricing Psychology
(14:20) Stereos VM and Safer Runtimes
(20:34) Open Source Strategy and Vibe Coding
(24:54) Whats Next and Wrap Up
About Brian:
Brian is the founder of the Paper Compute Company, a distributed systems primitives for AI agents.
Brian previously founded Open Sauced, a company dedicated to increasing knowledge and insights of open-source communities. In 2024, Open Sauced joined the Linux Foundation, further solidifying Brian’s commitment to advancing open-source initiatives. With a passion for open source, Brian has consistently supported and mentored new contributors through Open Sauced, empowering developers to excel in the open-source ecosystem.
Previously, Brian also led Developer Advocacy at GitHub, where he fostered a community of early adopters through content creation showcasing the newest GitHub features. His experience spans across notable companies in the tech industry, including Netlify, where he worked as an advocate. Brian’s dedication to open source extends beyond his professional endeavors. He currently hosts two podcasts Open Source Ready and The Secret Sauce: A podcast focusing on developer insights and experiences.
Through these platforms, Brian continues to share valuable knowledge and promote open-source culture within the developer community.
Links:
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/brianldouglas
Website: https://b.dougie.dev
Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com
S22:E7 - Starting out in Open Source (Brian Douglas)
On today's episode, Saron speaks with Brian Douglas, founder and CEO of Open Sauced, where he works on increasing the knowledge and insights of open-source communities. In the past he’s lead Developer Advocacy at GitHub by fostering a community of early adopters through conversations with the top open source maintainers on GitHub. Hear them discuss how Brain learned to code to start his own company, takeaways from working at startups, open source insights and learning through rejection.
Show Links
Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor)
Open Sauced
FreeCompute
Electron
React Native
WebPack
NoJS
CSS
SDK
Node
Angular 2.0
Angular JS
JavaScript
React
API
Linked List
Go
Open Source
Ruby On Rails
Brian Douglas
Outside of Open Sauced, Brian was most recently a member of the Developer Relations team at GitHub where he worked on the increasing use of GitHub and its API by fostering a community of early adopters through the developer programs. In the past, he’s led Developer Advocacy and Front-end development at Netlify, where he sat in a hybrid role as Frontend Engineer and Developer Advocate.
Today, Brian finds a lot of enjoyment in encouraging folks to get involved in Open Source through his organization, Open Sauced.
Building a VM inside ChatGPT, Advent of Code 2022, webdev Liam Neeson, Fedifinder & BDougie (News)
Jonas Degrave builds a virtual machine inside ChatGPT, Advent of Code 2022 is in full swing, Mat Ryer impersonates Liam Neeson as web developer, Luca Hammer’s Fedifinder project helps you join the Fediverse & we chat with Brian (BDougie) Douglas about Open Sauced at All Things Open 2022.
View the newsletter
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Featuring:
Brian Douglas – Website, GitHub, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
After GitHub, Brian Douglas Builds a ‘Saucy’ Startup
Brian Douglas was “the Beyoncé of GitHub.” He jokingly crowned himself with that title during his years at that company, where he advocated for open source and a more inclusive community supporting it. His work there eventually led to his new startup, Open Sauced.
Like the Queen Bey, Douglas’ mission is to empower a community. In his case, he’s seeking to support the open source community. With his former employer, GitHub, serving 4 million developers worldwide, the potential size of that audience is huge.
In this episode of The Tech Founder Odyssey podcast, he shared why empowerment and breaking down barriers to make anyone “awesome” in open source was the motivation behind his startup journey.
Beyoncé “has a superfan group, the Beyhive, that will go to bat for her,” Douglas pointed out. “So if Beyoncé makes a country song, the Beyhive is there supporting her country song. If she starts doing the house music, which is her latest album, [they] are there to the point where like, you cannot say bad stuff about, he pointed out,. So what I’m focused on is having a strong community and having strong ties.”
Open Sauced, which launched in June, seeks to build open source intelligence platform to help companies to stay competitive. Its aim is to help give more potential open source contributors the information they need to get started with projects, and help maintain them over time
The conversation was co-hosted by Colleen Coll and Heather Joslyn of The New Stack.
Web 2.0 ‘Opened the World’
Douglas’ introduction to tech started as a kid “cutting his teeth” on a Packard Bell and a shared computer at the community center inside his apartment complex, where he grew up outside of Tampa, Florida.
“I don't know what computer was in there, but it ran DOS,” he said. “And I got to play, like, Wolfenstein and eventually Duke Nukem and stuff like that. So that was my first sort of like, touch of a computer and I actually knew what I was doing.”
With his MBA in finance, the last recession in 2008 left only sales jobs available. But Douglas always knew he wanted to “build stuff.”
“I've always been like a copy and paste [person] and loved playing DOS games,” he told The New Stack. “I eventually [created] a pretty nice MySpace profile. then someone told me ‘Hey, you know, you could actually build apps now.’
“And post Web 2.0. people have frameworks and rails and Django. You just have to run a couple scripts, and you've got a web page live and put that in Heroku, or another server, and you're good. And that opened the world.”
Open Sauced began as a side project when he was director of developer advocacy at GitHub; He started working on the project full time in June, after about two years of tinkering with it.
Douglas didn’t grow up with money, he said, so moving from as an employee to the risky life of a CEO seeking funding prompted him to create his own comprehensive strategy. This included content creation (including a podcast, The Secret Sauce), other marketing, and shipping frontend code.
GitHub was very supportive of him spinning off Open Sauced as an independent startup, with colleagues assisting in refining his pitches to venture capital investors to raise funds.
“At GitHub, they have inside of their employee employment contract a moonlight clause,” Douglas said. Which means, he noted, because the company is powered by open source, “basically, whatever you work on, as long as you're not competing directly against GitHub, rebuilding it from the ground up, feel free to do whatever you need to do moonlight.”
Support for Blacks in Tech
Open Sauced will also continue Douglas’ efforts to increase representation of Blacks in tech and open pathways to level up their skills, similar to his work at GitHub with the Employee Resource Group (ERG) the Blacktocats.
“The focus there was to make sure that people had a home, like a community of belonging,” he said. “If you're a black employee at GitHub, you have a space and it was very helpful with things like 2020, during George Floyd. lt was the community [in which] we all supported each other during that situation.”
Douglas’ mission to rid the effects of imposter syndrome and champion anyone interested in open source makes him sound more like an open source ”whisperer”’ than a Beyoncé. Whatever the title, his iconic pizza brand — the company’s web address is “opensauced.pizza” — was his version, he said, of creating album cover art before forming the band.
His podcast’s tagline urges listeners to “stay saucy.” His plan for doing that at Open Sauced is to encourage new open source contributors.
“It's nice to know that projects can now opt in … but as a first-time contributor, where do I start? We can show you, ‘Hey, this project had five contributions, they're doing a great job. Why don't you start here?’
Supper Club × Open Sauced With bdougie
In this supper club episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott talk with bdougie about his work on Open Sauced, thoughts on getting into open source development, and his live streaming set up.
Hasura - Sponsor With Hasura, you can get a fully managed, production-ready GraphQL API as a service to help you build modern apps faster. You can get started for free in 30 seconds, or if you want to try out the Standard tier for zero cost, use the code “TryHasura” at this link: hasura.info. We’ve also got an amazing selection of GraphQL tutorials at hasura.io/learn.
FireHydrant - Sponsor Incidents are hard. Managing them shouldn’t be. FireHydrant makes it easy for anyone in your organization to respond to incidents efficiently and consistently. Intuitive, guided workflows provide turn-by-turn navigation for incident response, while thoughtful prompts and powerful integrations capture all of your incident data to drive useful retros and actionable analytics.
Get started at Firehydrant.com/syntax
Storyblok - Sponsor Storyblok is a headless component-based CMS with a real-time visual editor. It offers the flexibility for developers to craft their perfect tech stack, but it also empowers content creators to make changes independently. The result is that every team has the freedom to quickly and easily create the ideal website with limitless extensibility. Other key features include robust Storyblok SDKs and APIs, powerful internationalization options, and an eCommerce-ready platform.
Show Notes 00:36 Welcome
01:52 Guest introduction
OpenSauced.pizza
@Bdougieyo on TikTok
bdougie on Twitch
Open Sauced on YouTube
bdougie on YouTube
Jamstack
Netlify
03:36 What was the inspiration for Open Sauced?
08:23 GitHub GraphQL API
13:22 What are your thoughts on GraphQL?
GraphQL
14:36 What is the T3 stack?
16:30 Sponsor: Hasura
17:53 What is the goal for Open Sauced?
Open Sauced Beta for Hacktoberfest
20:08 What is your focus with live streaming?
T3 Stack
Vite
The Primeagan on Syntax Episode 508
Octoverse
Hot Open Sauced Pizza
21:39 What hardware and software do you live stream with?
Rode Procaster
Wave XLR
GoXLR
OBS
25:26 Should adults be on TikTok?
30:31 How do you build an algorithm?
32:44 Sponsor: Storyblok
34:01 Supper club questions
Keychron K2
Warp
Ghostwriter from Replit
A first look at GitHub Copilot
Stable Diffusion
Fig
43:17 Sponsor: FireHydrant
44:36 Interviews with open source maintainers
45:55 How should maintainers get paid?
Patreon
GitHub Sponsors
Neovim
Vim Adventures
Lunar Vim
47:47 SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ×××
51:34 Shameless Plugs
××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× bdougie: Warp
Shameless Plugs bdougie on Twitter
saucedopen on Twitter
Tweet us your tasty treats Scott’s Instagram
LevelUpTutorials Instagram
Wes’ Instagram
Wes’ Twitter
Wes’ Facebook
Scott’s Twitter
Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets
Sweet setups for easier dev
The gang talks about thier favorite software and hardware as developers. Brian Douglas joins to share his unique and open GitHub Actions flow.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
O'Reilly Media – Learn by doing — Python, data, AI, machine learning, Kubernetes, Docker, and more. Just open your browser and dive in. Learn more and keep your teams’ skills sharp at oreilly.com/changelog
Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust! Use API Explorer to interact with, test, or play with your applications in Square. You can build, view, and send HTTP requests that call Square APIs with API Explorer. Get started with Square, check out the API Explorer, or the API Explorer docs.
Sentry – Build better software, faster with Sentry’s application monitoring platform. Diagnose, fix, and optimize the performance of your code. Cut your time on error resolution from hours to minutes. Use the code PARTYTIME and get the team plan free for three months.
Featuring:
Brian Douglas – Website, GitHub, X
Nick Nisi – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X
Kevin Ball – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Show Notes:
Software
Macvim
Vim
VSCode
Neovim
coc.nvim
Fortran
Nick’s Dotfiles
tmux
GitHub Codespaces
Docker
Personalize Codespaces for your account
VSCode Live Share
iTerm2
Base16
Kitty
vim-devicons
Productivity Software
Roam Research
Zettelkasten
Calendly
Obsidian
Jamstack Radio
Dropbox Paper
Notion
Brian’s Github
Github Actions
GitHub GraphQL API
OneGraph
Relay
OmniFocus
GTD
Hardware
Spectacle
Moom
LG 38UC99-W
Easy Window Resize - Chrome Extension
RDM
Elgato HD60
OBS Studio
Apple Magic Keyboard
Keychron K3
Magicforce Mechanical Keyboard
Aplpe Magic Mouse
Magic Trackpad
Kettlebells
Canon EOS M200 Camera
Sigma 16 Lens
Aazon Basics Premium Single Monitor Stand
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
GraphQL, when to use JavaScript, JS robotics
KBall and Tim are on location at Fluent/Velocity and had the chance to talk with Brian Douglas about GraphQL and GitHub’s recent changes, Aimee Knight about knowing when to use JavaScript over CSS, and Bryan Hughes about his start and robotics with JavaScript.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Rollbar – We catch our errors before our users do because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes, and deploy your code with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Hired – Salary and benefits upfront? Yes please. Our listeners get a double hiring bonus of $600! Or, refer a friend and get a check for $1,337 when they accept a job. On Hired companies send you offers with salary, benefits, and even equity upfront. You are in full control of the process. Learn more at hired.com/jsparty.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
Featuring:
Brian Douglas – Website, GitHub, X
Aimee Knight – Website, GitHub, X
Bryan Hughes – Website, GitHub, X
Kevin Ball – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Show Notes:
GraphQL | A query language for your API
👋 Hello, GitHub | @natfriedman
JavaScript Jabber Archive | Devchat.tv
Johnny-Five: The JavaScript Robotics & IoT Platform
TypeScript - JavaScript that scales.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
