We Solved Dev Infrastructure, So Why Does it Suck to Build Stuff? w/ Hasura's Tanmai Gopal

**Tanmai Gopal** (0:00)
This hypothesis of like, why does it suck to build stuff? Like, why does it take so long? Why are there so many things to learn? Like, I want to deal with logic, I want to deal with data, but like, what is this layer upon layer upon layer of nonsense that I need to go through?
To like, get something out there and have it work.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:19)
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**Dan Lines** (1:02)
Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host Dan Lines. And today I'm joined by Tanmai Gopal, CEO and co-founder at Hasura. Tanmai, welcome to the show.

**Tanmai Gopal** (1:16)
Hey, hey Dan. Hey everybody, thanks for having me.

**Dan Lines** (1:19)
Awesome to have you here. Now we have, I think we have a really cool show today. A lot of people are probably aware, but there's a transition happening in the software industry right now. Over the last decade, it was kind of about figuring out how to handle infrastructure, the infrastructure side of things, ops side of things, a lot of DevOps stuff.
And now what a lot of people are talking about is productivity, the toil that's come upon developers.
Potentially, that's what the next decade will be about. Things like what helps teams to move faster, how can we help developer productivity, and a lot of that kind of stuff is underway, which is it's a concept that me and my team at Linear B talk about all the time. So I'm really excited for this conversation. But before we dive into it, you've had a really cool career and now you're a CEO and co-founder. So can you tell us a little bit about your career, how you made it to where you are today and what you're doing with your current company?

**Tanmai Gopal** (2:30)
For sure, for sure. I think when I studied computer science in university and I did my bachelor's and master's and I remember while I was studying, I was inclined to kind of go into research and in fact specialized in computer vision, machine learning kind of stuff that I did then. And kind of while I was doing that, I felt a little bit dissatisfied with kind of where we are with technology and development. And I was like, man, the amount of impact that we can have with technology, just fixing stuff, right? Big things, small things, it can be so much more. And it's just like it seems hard and complicated to do things. And so what I did after university was, I became kind of a freelance consultant. And I said, I'm just gonna work with all kinds of people. I'm gonna work with research labs, industry, like companies, I'm gonna work with startups, I'll work with like old school companies making their first digital product, right? I wanna see what's up.
And I spent the first few years doing that and gradually kind of built up, I met my co-founder, built a consulting business.
And what we started doing at the time was, we started kind of picking up some of the latest kind of technologies. We were, I think, pre-Docker hitting 1.0, Kubernetes hitting 1.0.
We were, I don't know if folks remember, in the container ecosystem, it wasn't clear, are we gonna put multiple processes in the same container or not? Because like OG containers with like LXC stuff, you can do whatever you want, right? It's just like, you can run as many processes you want and whatnot. But like with the way that we run Docker, for example, we have like a one process, one container model, and then it wasn't clear. All kinds of like crazy things people were doing to get multiple containers to run, and then Kubernetes came along, and we were in that ecosystem, we were contributing. And as we were kind of observing these transitions happen and working with companies, right? We were kind of like fine tuning this hypothesis of like, why does it suck to build stuff? Like, why does it take so long? Why are there so many things to learn? Like, I want to deal with logic, I want to deal with data, but like, what is this layer upon layer upon layer of nonsense that I need to go through to like get something out there and have it work? And when we kind of took a step back and we did multiple different things, we built lots of different tools.