The Day-1 Decisions that Make or Break Companies w/ PlanetScale's CEO Sam Lambert

**Sam Lambert** (0:00)
We all use those products to start off being amazing when the company is like five developers, just building what makes sense to them. And they grow up, and through failures of leadership, they just end up with bloated product teams of people that don't understand the work of developers who are now to boss around their engineers.
When you hear PMs and people saying, my engineers, it just aggrates me like crazy. You have this culture of misdirection towards getting towards the product, and it hurts the developer experience. It hurts building a genuine product.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:32)
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**Dan Lines** (1:15)
Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted.
I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale. Sam, welcome to the show.

**Sam Lambert** (1:26)
Hi, thank you for having me.

**Dan Lines** (1:28)
Awesome to have you on here.
You've had a really successful career working at places like Facebook and GitHub, where you were the VP of engineering. You ran a team of 350 people. Through it all, you've been called an Oracle of Pragmatism, coolest name ever, for your ability to identify what you call sensible tech and stick to it.
In fact, you've said that most successful companies are boring.
So that's where I want to start us out today. I think you have a little story about your time at GitHub. Some of the pages were trafficked by tons and tons of people, but maybe only running on a few servers or something like that. What do you got for us?

**Sam Lambert** (2:19)
GitHub was a very pragmatic company when it came to our tech. The majority of what people think of as GitHub is a Ruby on Rails app, talking to a MySQL database and then servers that store Git. And we tried to keep it very, very simple.
The story there is that GitHub pages, the actual product that hosted millions and millions of individual developers' websites, for the longest time ran on two servers that ran NGINX with a multi-million line convict file. And at one point, I think the github.io domain name was like, github.com is the 40th most traffic site in the world, and GitHub pages was like the 100th. And so we were running a top 100 site off of two servers, essentially, because we allow people to build static sites, and we deployed it really, really simply. And we had this culture in the early days of being pragmatic and only really building what is necessary to iterate ship and get stuff done and not over-complicating things. And we had to shut out a lot of noise. It was like microservices and over-architecture and all these types of things that people were obsessing over, and we just kept it ridiculously simple. And we managed to take the site to the scale of 70 million users. We're running plain old MySQL, a bit of a test, and Ruby on Rails. And it really taught me a lot of lessons about the power of pragmatism. And how quickly you can ship. And when we started PlanetScale, we did the same thing. PlanetScale is a Rails app.
People talk to us all the time. I was talking to a customer the other day, and they were like, by the way, you ship faster than any other product we bought.
Why is that? And I was like, you know, again, it's the combo of Ruby on Rails and MySQL, and a bit of magic in just iterating super quickly. So yeah, I'm obsessed with pragmatism, keeping things super important, understanding the minimal viability that needs to be done.

**Dan Lines** (4:13)
Yeah, that's amazing. Is that GitHub where you got your name, the oracle? I mean, if you're the oracle of anything, that sounds, I don't care what you're the oracle of, where did that come from?

**Sam Lambert** (4:24)
I don't know. This is new to me. It's nice that people are calling me some, some form of oracle. I mean, I try to be like, somebody, somebody I've affected somebody out there, which feels, you know, great.