Braden Snell: Turning a Passion for Coding into a Business! 👾
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by kirupa | Interviews with Creative People: https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm

Braden Snell (https://www.zilch.dev/) talks about turning a lifelong interest in programming into Zilch, a playful learning product for coders. The conversation covers early tools, startup runway, generalist founder work, and the tension between mission and monetization. What ties it together is a strong belief that learning should feel approachable, and that fun can be part of serious technical growth.

Watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI
A conversation with Braden Snell | 1h 10m

ABOUT THIS CONVERSATION

Braden Snell describes programming with the energy of someone who still sees software as a place to build, explore, and play. That sensibility runs straight into Zilch, the product he is creating to help people level up their coding skills through more game-like practice. The interview starts with biography, but it quickly grows into something broader: a conversation about how good learning experiences are designed, why delight matters, and how a technical interest becomes a life direction instead of a passing hobby.

One of the strongest threads in the episode is the importance of the first win. Braden and Kirupa spend time on beginner tools, approachable environments, and the value of helping people feel the magic early. The point is not to keep learning shallow. It is to sequence depth so that motivation survives long enough for the harder concepts to take hold. That makes the discussion useful well beyond education. It is really about how people enter complex systems without being crushed by them at the door.

The startup side of the conversation is equally thoughtful. Braden talks through moving from a stable development career into a much less certain path, creating enough financial runway to make that jump responsibly, and discovering how much of entrepreneurship has nothing to do with writing code. Sales, marketing, positioning, and legal work all show up. Instead of glamorizing that shift, he presents it as a real expansion of the job. A founder becomes a learner again, just in a much wider and less forgiving classroom.

What gives the episode weight is the tension between business opportunity and mission. There are easier ways to chase revenue than building the exact thing you care about, especially when adjacent markets start to look tempting. Braden is clear-eyed about that pull without losing sight of the original goal. He wants to build something effective, sustainable, and genuinely helpful. That makes this a strong conversation for anyone trying to turn a technical passion into a real business while keeping the original spark intact.

WHAT YOU'LL HEAR ABOUT

- Approachable tools can create the confidence that keeps beginners learning.
- Fun is not superficial when it helps people stay engaged long enough to improve.
- A stable job becomes easier to leave when the downside is framed as learning, not just failure.
- Startup work forces technical founders to grow far beyond engineering.
- Mission drift becomes a real risk when nearby revenue opportunities appear.
- Educational products work best when they sequence complexity instead of dumping it all at once.

JUMP TO A TOPIC

- 0:00 - Why coding should feel playful: Kirupa introduces Braden and Zilch through the idea that programming practice can be serious and fun at the same time. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=0s)
- 8:00 - Early tools and first wins: Braden reflects on the beginner experiences that made programming feel exciting and worth pursuing more deeply. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=480s)
- 16:00 - Lowering the barrier to build: They discuss simplifying development environments so newcomers can reach meaningful progress before the abstractions pile up. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=960s)
- 24:00 - Paid work and career direction: This section covers college-era work, professional experience, and how a technical career starts taking a more definite shape. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=1440s)
- 32:00 - Leaving the safe job: Braden talks through building runway and making the jump from a stable role into full-time startup work. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=1920s)
- 40:00 - Learning the whole business: The episode widens into sales, marketing, and the many non-engineering skills a founder has to pick up quickly. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2400s)
- 48:00 - Mission versus monetization: They examine the tension between following the original mission and chasing adjacent opportunities that might make more money. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2880s)
- 1:06:00 - Why fun matters in learning: The closing stretch argues that enjoyable learning experiences can change what people believe is possible for themselves. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=3960s)

TO LEARN MORE

- Braden's Zilch: https://www.zilch.dev/

TRANSCRIPT

The automatically generated captions have been organized by speaker, lightly edited for clarity, and broken into paragraphs for readability. Names and wording may still contain errors.

0:00 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=0s)

Hi everybody. Today I'm talking with Braden Snell, someone who turned his love for programming in high school into a formal pursuit in college, spent many years working as a software developer, and then embarked on the entrepreneurial journey, where he created Zilch, a fantastic learning resource that helps people learn programming in a really fun and playful way.

In this chat, we talk a lot about how to pivot from a passion project to building a sustainable business, how to identify whether your business is on the right track, how to stretch and become a generalist capable of handling all aspects of building and marketing a product, something many solo entrepreneurs get very familiar with, and a whole lot more. It's going to be a fun one, so stick around. All right, Braden, great to chat with you. Introduce yourself to all of us.

0:48 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=48s)

Yeah, I'm Braden. I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I've been building software since I was a teenager. I tell people it's like Legos, but for bigger kids. It's always been a passion of mine to build things, and I've always had a ton of fun with it. Now I'm trying to build my own thing. It's called Zilch. It's a way to help people level up their coding skills through games. I'm sure we'll dive more into that later.

1:24 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=84s)

That's actually really fascinating, and I want to get into both what you're doing with Zilch and also the really cool logo. It has a nice pixel font and all that, which is automatically the easiest way to get me excited about whatever you're building. But before we get to all of that, how did you get started with computers?

1:41 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=101s)

Computers. I had this class in middle school. It was an animation class with Flash, for anybody who remembers Flash from back in the day, and I loved it. I took this course multiple times, twice as a student and then once as a teacher's aide. I just loved it, and the teacher showed us things like, hey, you can create these, I think they were called movie clips, on the screen. Then you get this little reference where you can type stuff in this panel that pops up from the bottom, and you can make buttons to navigate around your animation or start it over again.

I thought that was the coolest thing ever, and I got more and more into it. I ended up making little Flash games, like small brick-breaker games. There's a little paddle going around the bottom and it hits the bricks. But I didn't know anything about programming. I didn't really have any formal instruction. I didn't even know what loops were. I remember paying one of my friends, just little kids back in middle school, with some snacks I had brought or something.

I was like, hey, can you take these three lines of code and just copy and paste them, then change this one thing every single time and do that a few hundred times so I can get the ball to hit-test all the blocks on the screen? It was this really fun, open-ended process. Then I took computer science classes in high school and realized, oh, this is what it was all about.

3:31 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=211s)

This is programming. Do you know what version of Flash you were learning?

3:37 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=217s)

Well, I don't remember fully because it's been so long. I remember when I started it was Macromedia Flash, and then a little further along it turned into Adobe Flash. I remember the differences, like ActionScript 2 and then ActionScript 3. I don't remember the details, but yeah.

4:03 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=243s)

Yeah, I'm dating myself here, but it might have been Flash MX 2004. That might have been the Macromedia version you were using, and then CS1 or the first Creative Suite version might have been the Adobe version. That also might have been the transition between ActionScript 2 and 3. I have a water bottle that Macromedia sent me a long time ago advertising Flash MX 2004, and I still have it with me. It's one of the few things I still carry around. That's a fun little memento of a fun era in programming and design and things like that. In AP Computer Science, what was the programming language you were learning?

4:48 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=288s)

C++.

4:48 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=288s)

Okay, C++. I know at some point they were Java, then they went to C++, or maybe it was the other way around. Was it C++ and then it went to Java? Do you remember?

5:00 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=300s)

My computer science classes in high school were just C++. I remember going into college and starting off with Java, and then they switched the introductory courses from one thing to the other. I ended up doing Java without ever doing C++ in college because of a switch that happened there, but I don't know.

5:28 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=328s)

Yeah, because there was no Twitter back then. So when tech drama caught mainstream attention, it was big drama. There was this whole discussion about whether we teach people object-oriented programming very early in their career so they don't have to know about memory management and pointers and all those things. Then there was another camp saying, no, why should they need to learn this stuff? The future is object-oriented programming. Let's move them over to Java. That played out for most of us in the AP course selection. You had to choose what you were going to do, and it was C++, even though all the AP exams and all that were Java-based.

It's always fun to see where people stood at the time on where they thought programming was going. Now I think Python might be the one. I don't know about AP or college exams anymore, but I do see surveys periodically about what intro college courses are taught in, and I think Python is by far the leading winner because it's very English-friendly. It also has applications across so many things, like robotics and data science. It's a good gateway language that can take you into all these other areas.

6:40 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=400s)

Yeah. People do have strong opinions on this, and maybe I'm one of them, but I think starting off with a language like Python or something like JavaScript, where you can get results quickly and get something that feels exciting quickly, is so important. That gives you the steam you need to keep going and dive into other stuff you're interested in. I love languages where there are a few fewer concepts you need before you can get rolling.

7:17 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=437s)

I completely agree with you on that, which is why I end up liking JavaScript a whole lot, and HTML too, because you can go from not knowing what you're doing to having a hello world or your name on the screen very quickly. You're like, oh wow, now I can take that and slowly start expanding on it. In many ways, that was the magic Flash provided for so many of us back in the day. It's like, you're drawing a square right now. Okay, I drew something. It's running on my screen. Great. Now, I can do that with an image editing tool.

But wait, if I click on this now, it does other things. That slowly gets you excited. It's a little bit of gamification, but it also gets you more comfortable exploring the unknown. It's like you can jump into the deep end, or you can have these stairs that take you one step at a time so your fear slowly decreases with each step. I think that's what object-oriented programming, and definitely Python and JavaScript and these more modern languages, really help with. Once you learn that way, you're more like, okay, now I want to learn the more advanced nitty-gritty concepts because I'm curious how these things work.

Your ability to retain that knowledge and explore it becomes so much better. For the most part, though, my AP Computer Science class was C++. I remember using something like Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0, where you just launched it, created a new file, hit Play, and it worked. Then they moved to a newer version of C++ in the middle of the year, and it was no longer just create a file, type something in, and hit Play. You had to create an actual project. I'm like, what is this project thing? Why are these other files here? I just want to add something to it.

What's going on, and how do I link this new thing with the one I made a couple of months ago in class? That world of build tools and environment complexity wasn't even fun anymore. The web was much more straightforward. Open Notepad, type some stuff, open your browser, and it would figure it out.

9:24 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=564s)

Yeah, sometimes the magic is really cool, the things these tools do, but sometimes it's nice to just start really simple so it doesn't feel like so many new concepts. I love web stuff in particular because it's so accessible. Everybody has a web browser. With my brother-in-law, when he was first getting into coding, we'd sit down in front of a browser and say, we don't even need to leave Chrome. We'd open DevTools, create a little snippet, write a few lines of code, and boom, you have a ball bouncing around on your screen. That's powerful.

Just having that low barrier to entry and immediately seeing something tangible and visual gets you excited about learning. And with WebGPU and WebAssembly, it almost comes full circle, where some of your knowledge in C++ or C actually comes back and enhances what you can do in the browser. The web went down a different path. It was like, we're going to go simple, we're going to do things very differently, and now it's combined the simplicity most people need with some of the more complex lower-level capabilities.

You can bypass a lot of the abstractions and performance bottlenecks and go straight to the GPU, or the hardware more directly, and do really compelling things. Every time I see Figma, I'm blown away that it's essentially a WebAssembly- and WebGPU-based project. I read some of their engineering blog posts and I'm like, wow, this is crazy. This is really cool.

11:10 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=670s)

I think they even got Photoshop working in the browser now as well, because transpiling that legacy C++ into WASM is finally doable. It's pretty performant in a browser environment, which is something that would've sounded impossible years ago. It's almost what Flash was trying to do, abstract away more of the details and have it run in your browser. That was scary for a lot of people at the time, but WebAssembly is almost like a backdoor way of getting back to that world. You're writing in a language that's different from what it ultimately compiles to, but the output is almost an app replacement. It replaces apps in so many ways.

Have you, oh gosh, I'm forgetting the name of it now. It's not CodeSandbox. It's another one of those in-browser ones, but they've literally taken Node. Js and compiled it down to WebAssembly. StackBlitz. Yes, StackBlitz. There's really cool stuff folks are doing with some of this. I think they use WebContainers for a lot of that work, and again, it's WebAssembly and related technologies making it happen. It's a really fun space. I don't know if you know this, but I spend time working on a browser-based IDE at Google. So for me, this is pretty much the thing I spend all day thinking about. How do we make it faster?

Where do we draw the line between abstracting away the details versus giving people a full environment? In our case, we give you a full VM so you can still run all your terminal commands. You have legacy support for all the things you might want to do, but there are pros and cons to all these approaches. It's a rich ecosystem built around figuring out the best way to take what's running natively in your local dev environment and have it run anywhere. You can be on a Chromebook or an iPad and just have it work.

That's an exciting space, which is partly why I spend so much of my day working with my team on how to pull this off. How does what you're working on compare to GitHub Codespaces? Is this an internal Google thing, or is it external?

13:26 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=806s)

External. It's currently on a waitlist, but you can try it out, and we process people very quickly. I'll start with the similarities, because VS Code is probably the most popular IDE people use outside of more specialized ones like Xcode or Android Studio. We wanted to build on top of VS Code, so we're using Code OSS, the official open source version of VS Code. It's called Project IDX, I-D-X, and being built on Code OSS means all that familiarity carries over. If your projects work in VS Code, they'll work in our environment, and a lot of extensions are available through the Open VSX Marketplace. Your VS Code habits can come with you.

Number one for us is minimizing the friction it normally takes to go from, I have everything set up and I'm familiar with this environment, to, I want to try something new. The bigger difference is what we provide beyond that. One of the terms we like to use is batteries included. If you're starting a project, we give you a variety of preconfigured starting points for whatever you're trying to do. If it's a web app, we support the various templates you might expect. It's similar to other template-based tools where you can create apps across different frontend and backend frameworks. We're also big into the mobile development space.

If you want an Android emulator that gives you a more accurate picture of what your app actually looks like, we give you those capabilities out of the box with no configuring. It all runs in a VM. So whether you're building a Flutter app or even a web app and want to preview it on an Android emulator, we give you that out of the box. That means you can be on a low-end device. I've seen people on Twitter posting screenshots from little Android tablets doing full-scale backend and frontend development using what we're building, all from the browser.

If having a dev environment in your browser is becoming a commodity, our question is, what more value can we add? A lot of that is reducing friction and complexity. What frameworks do I install? How do I configure my build machine? If you're building a Rust app, for example, there are so many tools you have to install and configure to go from writing code to having a working toolchain. That's way too much for a lot of people to have to figure out. So we want to preconfigure environments for all these things. You can imagine doing the same for WebAssembly, WebGPU, and all these other cool things.

Can we create an environment where you don't have to worry about whether you're using Clang or some other compilation tool to make it all work? And because we're built on top of VS Code, if you have a GitHub repo with existing projects, that integration works really nicely. It's about simplifying development from a professional developer's point of view. The last big piece is artificial intelligence. Google has been investing very heavily in AI for code completion and code generation, so we want to make sure that's front and center in everything we do.

Long term, and this touches on Zilch and Flash and all these things, I think we took a wrong turn in development about 20 years ago. We went from development being something that anybody could do great things with to something where you now need to be what's traditionally known as a developer before you can even get started. You need to understand projects, build files, JSON blobs, and all these things before even hello world gets on the screen. The center of gravity shifted so hard toward that audience that we've spent the last 10 or 15 years producing increasingly complicated frameworks and tools that almost make development not fun anymore.

The things that probably got you interested in programming, and got me interested in programming, are harder to reach now. If I had to start over today, I'd be lost. I'd be advertised to by 20 different products saying, use our tool, and I wouldn't have any idea how to take what I built and actually share it with people. There isn't really a GeoCities equivalent anymore. Sure, I can use something like GitHub Pages, but I don't know what's actually going on behind the scenes. So when I need to deploy to Netlify, Cloudflare, Google Cloud, Azure, or AWS, I have no idea what I'm doing because it's all proprietary, compartmentalized deployment capability.

You basically subscribe to a vendor and learn that vendor's secret handshake to make it work, and it doesn't transfer anywhere else. I think AI is going to help normalize a lot of this. We're starting with professional developers right now, but with AI I think we can melt together the worlds of pro-code, low-code, and no-code.

If all you want is, I have a problem and I need this to work, like I have an inventory Excel file and I need it on my phone so my team can access it quickly, you should be able to do that without having to know which dev tool, language, or framework to use, or whether it should be server-side rendered or client-side. Those are implementation details. Unless you care about them, you shouldn't have to worry about them. In many ways, I want development to be democratized again so it's just a set of tools that helps solve a problem. Right now it feels like the tools themselves are treated as the solution.

Nobody wakes up and says, I want to spend 8 hours writing code or 10 hours fiddling with settings in my dev tool. People just want to solve a problem and get on with their day. I think AI is going to be the big shift there. So for me, a lot of my time is spent on asking what we can do now to make sure developers today are productive, with the long-term goal of something much bigger. And long term here, given how fast AI is moving, might mean years away, or it might mean six months from now. That's where I'm putting so much of my attention.

I want artificial intelligence to make it so we're spending more time doing things we care about, not debugging why this version of React isn't compatible with the version of React Router I'm using behind the scenes. Or why I have to learn Next. Js right now because it means rewriting my old codebase. Those are the problems developers face day in and day out, and I don't think we're solving them yet. We're just creating more problems on top of the problems.

19:49 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=1189s)

Yeah, that's going to solve it. But arguing about linter rules is so fun sometimes. I agree with you. It's like the tech drama we used to have around object-oriented programming and C++. Now it's like, do I use Tailwind or not? I'm like, use whatever works. I'm not going to be the arbitrator of any of this. I mentioned earlier that I'm here in Ann Arbor, Michigan, right by the University of Michigan, and I have tons of friends working on PhDs and things like that. All of them are like, oh, now I have to learn programming to munge all this data.

They have this whole setup, it's difficult, and some of them get more into it than others, but really they're just trying to analyze data in a better way. What you're talking about would help people in so many contexts. I think AI, even today, might be able to help them a lot because I've seen...

20:55 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=1255s)

So many posts from people using ChatGPT or Gemini where they take a screenshot of a table of data and say, put this into a form that makes sense to me, or sum up all the values in this other column. It's able to process that visual information, turn it into actual tabular data, and do all this work. And if you already have the data as a spreadsheet with rows and columns, it might even give you the code. If I'm using something like Jupyter notebooks or AI notebooks in general, I think there are so many opportunities there.

As much as I'd love for people to learn Python and do it themselves, I think today they could already get by using AI to solve so much of it for them.

21:42 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=1302s)

Yeah, absolutely. So getting back to you went to college. Did you major in computer science? What made you make that jump from, I enjoy programming and I liked doing this stuff in high school, I started with Flash, I did AP Computer Science, and so on, to saying, you know what, this is what I'm going to make my career and probably large, productive parts of my life about? When did you realize this is it, this is what I want to do?

22:10 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=1330s)

Ah, that's a good question. It was something that I always really enjoyed. When I started off college, I had these thoughts that maybe I'd do something else, but it became very clear, very quickly, that I loved programming. Fortunately for me, my story might have been different if a few things had changed. If my first introduction to coding had been my university's introductory computer science class, which at the time was some CLI-based C++ pizza-ordering program, things might have gone differently. I knew a bunch of folks who took that class and dropped out. It wasn't very exciting. But I had the opportunity to engage with the tech in a really fun way.

Ability is the wrong word; it was an opportunity. I'll be honest: a lot of my intro CS classes didn't inspire me much. But the university I went to had this really good practice of giving a lot of jobs to students. I worked my entire time in university, not getting paid very much money, but getting paid and getting real experience solving real problems with code. I think that was a big thing. That pulled me along in the direction I went on to follow with computer science. Maybe 'the right direction' isn't the right phrase, but it was the direction I took.

24:09 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=1449s)

That's actually fantastic. It's one of those things you don't realize until you look back at the small things that could have gone differently and changed the path of your career in a massive way. If you hadn't had that kind of class or the opportunity to figure out, I can make a living doing this, things might have been different. Sometimes you have a job doing something, and while you're doing it, you realize, I actually like this a lot. I'm going to go further into it. For anybody who has been doing something for a long period of time, there are always moments like that.

I guess it's different from the 1800s, when your family were farmers, so naturally you went into the farming profession, or blacksmithing, or whatever it was. You just knew what you were going to be doing. For a lot of us over the last 100 years or so, what our families might have done may no longer be the thing we have to do. There are so many more things that can be done with minor adjustments to hobbies, interests, and practice. So that's actually really cool. It was a fun introduction and a fun way to get into it.

From there, you worked at companies, worked on projects, and then made the leap to entrepreneurship. What was the point? I want to say breaking point, because for a lot of entrepreneurs it's like, that's it. I'm done with corporate complications, organizational bureaucracy, and all the challenges of it. For others, it's more like, okay, I learned a lot of great skills, and now I want to see if I can do things on my own, at scale, quicker and faster, in a direction that my company doesn't really pursue. I don't want you to answer only why you left corporate life to do some of these things.

I'm always curious to know: what was the jump? On one hand, you have stability. You know exactly what you're doing as part of your day job when you're working at a large corporation or in any tech environment. Then you're going out on your own. It isn't even like the case we talked about earlier, where you're jumping into the deep end without stairs. In this case, you don't even know where you're jumping. You basically have a rough idea of the destination, and you're defining everything else along the way.

26:24 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=1584s)

Hard. It is difficult, and more difficult than I thought it would be. My move into entrepreneurship has been less about wanting to start my own company someday or be a CEO and more about this side project I'd been working on for some time called Zilch. Friends thought it was pretty cool, I loved tinkering with it, and I wanted to see if I could build it into something bigger because I love building. The other aspects of entrepreneurship, I am very much a novice at, and I still have a lot of painful growing to do.

But for me it was mostly, I want to see if I can make something out of building this thing, because it is so fun to build something, especially something really greenfield.

27:48 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=1668s)

It's a lot of fun. So how did you land on this idea? If I summarize Zilch very quickly, it's kind of like, I want to learn development and coding, but I want to do it in a friendlier, more fun way. So I get thrown into a series of games, and then I can add code to make them better. In many ways, that describes how you got started with programming. You had things there, you wrote a little bit of code, and now you're able to do some of those things. I can see so much of what got you started with programming represented in everything Zilch is trying to do.

28:23 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=1703s)

No, absolutely. The story of how it got started was, I may be mistaken on the exact year, but I think it was 2017. It was over Thanksgiving, and we were with my wife's family. My brother-in-law was taking a machine learning class in college and wanted to try out some concepts from that class. We got to chatting and decided to code together really quickly and make a little Connect 4 interface. What we did was create two input boxes, one for player one and one for player two, each pointing at a URL. I coded up a little Node.

Js server, he coded up a little Python server, and the game had a format, an API, for what the responses were supposed to look like. It provided the state of the game, and from there we could code up two bots to play each other in Connect 4. It came together pretty quickly, just a few hours. I made a simple rules-based one, like if it's three in a row, block them or go in the right spot. He used some of the fancier neural network concepts he was learning in class. It was such a fun way to engage together, write some code together, and explore new ideas at the same time.

That's sort of the genesis of Zilch. I'm the type of person who always has a side project. I have a hard time not having one. This gradually became my main side project, something I tinkered with in the evenings and on weekends and let people I knew try out. From there I started thinking, okay, this has some potential. I can see how it's adding value to people's lives. Maybe there's an opportunity to spend more time doing this.

30:47 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=1847s)

When did you decide to go from it being a side project to realizing there was more to this and that you wanted to make it your full-time thing?

31:00 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=1860s)

Well, I joined Microsoft in the middle of the pandemic, and I hadn't worked for a big tech company before. I'd just worked at startups. For those who don't know, there's typically, not always, but typically, a decent pay difference between startups and big tech. We made that move, and it didn't change our standard of life. All of a sudden we were just accumulating more money in our bank account. It was like, well, we could go buy a bigger house or a fancy car or something, but none of that felt super exciting to me. I thought maybe we could give ourselves a little runway and try to make this happen.

So it started coming together during that time at Microsoft, and we were like, okay, let's do it. When I say we, I mean me and my wife, because she was obviously a big factor in the decision too. When she saw people getting excited about it felt like something worthwhile to spend time on. I also had a lot of conversations with people, because I know the statistics as well as anybody else. When you start a new venture or a startup like this, it's very hard to bring it to a place where it's viable and profitable and where you can make a living and build an organization around it.

But I thought, what's the worst case scenario? The worst case is I spend a year or two working on something like this, it all crashes and burns, and I learn a ton, have a really good time, and move on to something else. Once I realized that was the worst case, it didn't sound so bad. I should just do it. I should go for it. And I tell you what, I have learned a lot and made a lot of mistakes in this process. It has been a super instructive process jumping into the world of entrepreneurship. We'll see how it turns out, but it has...

33:40 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2020s)

I think you have the right frame of mind for entrepreneurship and startups. So let's go back. You quit your job at Microsoft. It's day one of working full-time on Zilch. What did you do on day one?

33:58 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2038s)

I already had a mostly functional prototype. It was an Electron desktop app that integrated with Docker on people's machines to spin up different dev environments. I'd been testing that out with different folks and having people give me feedback on it. One thing that became very apparent was, okay, this is great, but it's a little tough to get started with if you're new to coding. You need to install this application, which is one thing, but then you also need to install Docker on your machine, and that trips people up.

I thought, okay, if I really want to help folks level up their coding skills, I need to make this easier to engage with. A lot of folks who are really looking to level up their coding skills are toward the more beginner end of the skill spectrum. So day one was: now I have the time, breathing room, and space in my life to think about ways to make this easier. The web-based approach that Zilch takes, integrating with some existing tools, is what I went with.

What's really cool is that you can do pretty awesome stuff in the web browser nowadays with WebGPU and different frameworks that abstract all the complicated stuff for you. You can create some compelling visuals right in the web browser without needing to be outside that environment. It's also something I'm familiar with in terms of my career and what I've done before. So day one was like, okay, I'm going to architect this new app. If I could go back to day one, I would change what I did.

But that is what I did on day one: I knew what I was going to build, and I was going to build the whole thing.

36:19 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2179s)

If you had to go back in time, what would you change, and what would you want someone to have explained to you?

36:30 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2190s)

This was explained to me not long ago. Hopefully I don't butcher the analogy, but when you're starting a new company and trying to create something that really adds value to the world, it's better to be pulled by demand than to push an idea. It's like a piece of string. If you push a piece of string, it's not going to have any effect on the object attached to it. But if that string is being pulled, then it actually has an effect.

Going back to day one, I thought I was being pulled by some interactions with friendly audiences, friends, family, and people around me who thought it was useful and thought it was a good idea. But if I could go back, I would engage right away with who I thought the actual users were, before making code changes or developing a new thing, just to make sure I was building something truly in lockstep with what they needed. I would want every decision to be informed by that. It all sounds obvious enough, but I've been a software engineer my whole career.

When you're in a company, you get bits of feedback from people and you have great product managers who serve as the voice of the user. I didn't have that skill set, and I'm still building it, that ability to engage at that level. But I've built a ton of empathy since I started working on Zilch for all the people across an organization who make different parts of a company work, from sales to marketing to everything else. Those are hard jobs that require a lot of skill, and I'm learning that firsthand.

39:06 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2346s)

Yeah, it's always interesting. This is very common among startup founders. When they wear all these various hats, they get a new perspective on things. Why was that person telling me that years ago? Why didn't we react to that customer feedback at the time? Sometimes you think, I'm just going to disagree and commit and do what I think is right. Then later you get a different perspective and go, oh, now it makes sense. You can see why that feedback, as loud as it was, wasn't necessarily the right thing to focus on. Or with any discipline, sales, marketing, legal, and all these things, you start to understand the constraints a little more.

39:46 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2386s)

Yeah, no, you absolutely do. There are big learning opportunities, and honestly even that has been valuable to me. There are some things you can hear about and learn in a theoretical sense, but if you really want to understand something, you have to experience it. You have to be in the moment and have those experiences. That's where growth happens, and it's a good place to be, I think.

40:29 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2429s)

Exactly. One of the classic phrases, and I'm probably butchering it too, is that you can read and watch as many videos about swimming as you want, but until you actually step into the water you won't really know anything about it. All the theoretical knowledge kind of goes out the window once you feel the water on your toes and hopefully start floating when you jump into the pool.

40:53 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2453s)

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. You need to live it a little bit and allow yourself to be put in a position to fail, because that's a scary place to be, but it's where so much growth happens.

41:15 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2475s)

So when you realized you wanted to work on things that had demand behind them instead of trying to force features you thought were right, what changed? What made you realize you were focusing on the wrong things to grow the business? And what was the first thing you did after that? Did you stop what you were working on and reset the roadmap? Can you walk me through that a little bit?

41:48 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2508s)

Yeah, it was a slow realization over time because I was so heads-down coding, building this and building that. I'd get little bits of feedback from folks, but not from the right people. It wasn't until I started talking with high school teachers and college professors that I thought, oh, I should have done this way earlier. There was a bit of a delayed reaction, but then it became clear that I really needed to talk to people and understand where they were coming from in a much better way.

42:37 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2557s)

Yeah, no, that's one of those things that seems obvious once you realize it, like you mentioned. Of course it makes sense. But in the moment it's tricky to recognize that there might be a better road running right alongside the one you're happily driving on.

42:55 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2575s)

Yeah, and I'm sure former Braden from a year ago could have given a more compelling answer about the choices he made then. But today's version of Braden, having learned more, looks back at it and thinks it looks kind of ridiculous. I have a hard time even making it sound sensible.

43:15 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2595s)

So what was the feedback that students, professors, and high school teachers gave you that made you think, oh, that's an interesting way of looking at this?

43:26 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2606s)

One thing that came up in a conversation with a professor was that he said, yeah, this is great and this is cool, but the problem he's trying to solve as a professor isn't necessarily teaching the students, even though in theory it should be. He's doing a lot of research, he's super strapped for time, and all of his thoughts went to things like, I wonder if there's some way to add automatic grading of solutions to this. Those kinds of features would be timesavers for him in his line of work, and of course I hadn't thought about any of that.

I'm not entirely sure that's the direction I want to branch into, but it would've been so helpful to hear some of that upfront. Even simple feedback from high school teachers was eye-opening. I had built it with GitHub integration because most people have GitHub accounts, and it makes a lot of things easier. It gives people somewhere to put the code without having to think too much about where it lives on their machine. But then teachers would say, yeah, a lot of districts, not all, but a lot, don't let students sign up for GitHub accounts with their school email as a required part of class. And that made perfect sense.

There were some very fundamental things like that where I'd done a lot of development work and validated it with the wrong audience. That also led to the bigger question of who this was actually being built for, which I've waffled on. I didn't have a laser-focused view of that. When I first started building it, and it required Docker on your machine and all these other things, I knew someone brand new to coding probably wasn't going to be able to do that. But it was still a nice way to get a development environment set up quickly for a language you didn't know, and that had value.

So I was coming from this place of maybe the people using it need a little more experience to get started. I had these fuzzy assumptions about who would benefit from it instead of being specific. It was more like, oh, people who want to level up their coding skills. That could mean beginners, or people further along. That's too broad. I hope anyone listening who has entrepreneurial thoughts of their own can internalize some of this, because it's hard to get it 100% right until you're really in it.

But if you're trying to build something sustainable, at least in this space, starting 100% from the demand side of the equation rather than the idea side is really important. It's a bit of a catch-22, because this started as a fun side project, not with me saying, let me go find a problem so I can start a company. But converting a fun side project into something sustainable requires a different mindset.

47:29 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2849s)

Definitely a different mindset. Are you ever worried that the excitement that got you started, like I personally empathize with this problem and want to spend all my time on it, might end up pulling against where the actual demand is coming from? And if that happens, do you worry it makes this less fun or less exciting than it was a year ago when you started?

47:56 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2876s)

Yes, yes, absolutely. I've talked with founders in this space who've done similar things, and they've said stuff like, yeah, we tried this and it didn't work out. If you want to make it sustainable, the money is really in recruiting and talent acquisition and things like that. Education is harder to really break into, but recruiting and talent acquisition might be a better fit for some of the things you're doing. And I'm like, I recognize that those things add value to the world, but I don't have a huge burning desire in my heart to solve the problems of recruiters and teams interviewing new developers.

It would require a different product outlook and some substantial changes to make it really fit that world. So yes, I definitely have that fear.

49:17 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=2957s)

Yeah, exactly. It's a common tension, and I face it all the time as well. With my side projects, like blogging, people want to learn about Rust, but I don't want to learn about Rust and write about it. I want to focus on development, creative coding, and things like that. At some point, this becomes a labor of love. You enjoy doing it, and the question is: is it a business, is it a passion project, or can I somehow combine them both without diluting either important part of the equation? So tell me about kirupa.

Com a little bit: the history of it, how it got started, and where you've had thoughts of an entrepreneurial mindset with regard to it. I'd be curious to learn. Yeah, it got started purely as a hobby. I had no idea that it was going to be a thing in most ways. I started playing with Flash, created some stuff for fun, and posted it on GeoCities. I think I had a whopping one megabyte of free space, which was just enough to put a few SWF files up there with an index. Html file. I was so new that I had no idea what I was really doing.

Half the time, I'd just upload my SWF files, and I didn't realize that my HTML file needed to be named something different. I'd overwrite the old HTML file every single time I uploaded, so only the most recent Flash file would be referenced in the markup itself. That's how primitive my understanding was of how everything worked. It got me thinking, okay, let me learn more about this. Let me learn how to do some of these various things. It started getting some traction, especially among my friends. They were asking, how did you create this? How did you make all this work?

I spent time writing small emails to people: here's how I built this, and things like that. As it turned out, that wasn't very scalable. I couldn't email people over and over again, nor could I say, oh, I replied to this a couple of weeks ago; just go check that out. I'm sure newsgroups were around at the time. Gopher and all those other services might have been there too, or Usenet. I didn't know what they were or use them. So I thought, let me write this, put it in an HTML file, and put it on the web. That way, I could point people to it directly.

At that time, both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer came with free web editors. I think Netscape Composer was Netscape's version, and FrontPage Express was the version that came with Internet Explorer. So I used that. I copied and pasted my email explanations and shared them with people. Doing that, I learned basic things: what's a link? How do I link from page to page, so I don't have to send people five links in an email and can have the links there directly? That slowly created an effect where people were asking me questions, I was answering them, and it was getting a lot of popularity.

I created my first forums at the time because I couldn't handle all the questions and support on my own. EZBoard was a solution. It was basically what we would call a B2B SaaS service. You signed up for a name and got a weird URL, but you could create categories and have people post forum questions without worrying about how to host it or deal with all that stuff. This was probably in the early 2000s, around 2001 or 2002, and it became really popular. I think it was popular mostly because there wasn't anything else out there quite like it. At that time, Flashkit and Ultrashock were around.

Of course, to back up a bit, what I wrote about was Flash and ActionScript and how to make things work in that environment. That's why I refer to Flashkit, Ultrashock, and all these others. It was fun to be very early in a space like that. I've talked to some of the people who worked at Ultrashock and Flashkit. Even now, I keep in touch with them and ask how it's going and what they're working on. They all had a good idea of what they were doing. I had no idea what I was doing.

I was creating forums, and I probably spent a couple of weeks finding the perfect pixel avatars for people to choose, whereas they were all working on really serious problems. But the things I was fiddling with were things that I personally thought were exciting, and they happened to resonate with a lot of people my age. People who were 12, 13, and 14 were like, oh, this is really cool. They got to use a Counter-Strike icon set when asking a question. That was the hook that separated me from Ultrashock and Flashkit, where more serious professional designers and developers congregated.

Mine had more of a Newgrounds or DeviantArt kind of crowd, but focused on development. It was like, there's pixel art going on here, and I don't know why there's music playing in the background, but I dig it. Everything you shouldn't do, I did because I didn't know any better, and that was what made it catch on. Through that, it became really popular, the forums became really big, and it became a side project. I never wanted to make it my full-time thing. For a long time, the site had ads and was monetizable.

It was great to see that part of the business and all these things through, but I really didn't enjoy it as much. I also got lucky in many ways because I really liked developer tools and design tools, like Macromedia. I accidentally stumbled into being a product manager at Microsoft, working on the first version of what would become one of their design tools, called the Expression product line. That was a lot of fun. I realized I could combine my passion for tooling and design into what ultimately became a career. I didn't want to give that up because I enjoyed the challenges too much.

I enjoyed the people I worked with and the things I was working on. As a product manager, I got to work on multiple different things at the same time, so I was never pigeonholed into doing one thing for so long that I got bored. There was always this tension: do I work full-time on my side project, which is also profitable, or do I continue working at Microsoft and doing this thing on the side? That tension played out for quite some time. I did my work at Microsoft, worked on different products, and really enjoyed being a product manager. In parallel, I was doing a lot of work on the website.

I started writing books and taking my content and putting it into video form. Sometime around 2010 or 2012, I was talking to my wife. I said, you know what? I've been at Microsoft for almost seven or eight years now. Let me take a break and see if I want to make my kirupa. Com work my full-time job. So I did. I quit Microsoft and decided to do it full-time for a bit. What I realized is that I hated every minute of it. That's why I asked what your day one was like when you quit your job and started working. I still remember my day one.

I was like, great, I have all these things I want to do. At that time, Trello was the big task-tracking tool, so I wanted to put all the things I wanted to do into Trello. Then I went to a Starbucks and started working on all these things. I wanted to write books because I really enjoyed that world. The way I write books is that all the content of my book is available for free on the website, but the book is a convenience. I'm still writing content for the website, and now I have a way of recording videos about it and putting it in book form.

The books go into schools and libraries. This is probably a very selfish way of looking at it, but I love when people email me from various parts of the world and say, hey, I was in my school library and saw this book. It might be a five-year-old book I wrote, but they learned how to do something from it. That is why I do this. It isn't because I want people to go to a website. There are so many places in the world where people learn the way we learned a while ago.

You go to a bookstore or your school library, find a tattered book that happens to have material you need, and learn from that. That's why I always wanted to take all my content and put it into a form that can go to all these parts of the world that I would never be able to reach myself. Self-publishing via Amazon, for example, doesn't help with that because it requires someone to know about the book, buy it, and ship it. Most libraries will not take content from Amazon for quality reasons. So the hassle of working with publishers was worth it because I was reaching an audience I could never get to otherwise.

During that time, I think I took about a year off to work on this. I wrote about three books, and I still update editions of those books right now. I loved all of that. What I absolutely hated was the lack of social interaction with people around me. So many of the people I spoke to and worked with were colleagues from work. Most of my friends were colleagues, especially because I went to Microsoft from college. My friends and I were also in an age group where we were more amenable to just meeting people.

I realized that when I was working on my own, there really wasn't an outlet for me to have these kinds of creative conversations. That's when I thought, you know what? I'm not cut out to be a solo entrepreneur. I didn't want to hire people and do all these things either, because that adds an extra level of pressure. It can no longer be, oh, let me try this random thing and see if it works, because now someone else's livelihood depends on making it work. I still want to do the same things I did back then, like spending time on pixel art and other random ideas.

I still think that's a very fun way to work. Even now, I need to maintain that balance. If I do what everyone else is doing, I'm never going to be successful. So I do something quirky that I find interesting, and if 10 people find it equally interesting, then I've managed to do something successful in my view. That means other people can't depend on my random whims about what needs to be done. After my three books were pretty much done, my commitment became voluntary again. I could write whenever I wanted, publish videos whenever I wanted, and so on.

I went back to Microsoft, this time to a more complicated project in the same web space. Ever since then, I've been content that I tried it out and learned I wasn't cut out for it. It just wasn't my thing. But I still get the benefit of doing side projects, publishing books and videos, having conversations with people like you, and also doing whatever day job I'm in. Right now, I'm at Google working on developer tools and bringing out a brand-new product. In my view, that product should simplify how people build apps in the future, so I get to scratch all these different itches. I'm very lucky.

Going back to the small decisions that can greatly change the course of your life, I'm a big believer that luck plays a big role in so much of what we do in our careers. It just so happened that I had this weird hobby of developing tools and design tools, which became a very hot part of the tech sector over the past 20 years. No one 20 years ago said you could build a career working on developer tools. It was mostly a place where you went because you enjoyed coasting, especially at Adobe or Autodesk, some of the companies known for building those tools.

Microsoft built Visual Studio, and that product had been around for a while. Visual Studio wasn't going anywhere, so you would work on improving it, moving the needle from one small degree to another. I never thought I'd be able to do something brand new there, but I happened to be in the right place at the right time. Then that continued at Google, where it was the right place, right time, and right ideas. I can't predict that. If it hadn't happened, I don't know what I'd be doing instead. All these experiences collide. I also believe you can gamify your luck.

Being persistent, being good at what you do, and trying to be a good team player all add value. When an opportunity arises, you can do some of these things. That's how my personal side projects and professional job collided into one big circle where I don't really know where one ends and the other begins. I'm happy because that goes back to the earlier question: at what point do your passion for something and your work diverge to the point where it's no longer fun? For me, they've never diverged too far. They've always been within arm's reach, where I still have fun doing what I'm doing.

That adds value to my side projects and the things I learn. My side projects add value to my day job, and I'm a product manager. Getting better at communication, writing, and all these things is a core part of what I do anyway. I feel like I'm optimizing everything I'm doing into just having fun. At the same time, I think you can add a lot of value to the world when you're having fun.

1:02:28 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=3748s)

I believe so, because it makes all the drudge work and drudgery so much more tolerable. It's like, yeah, I get it, but this is the part I need to do so I can have more fun later.

1:02:38 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=3758s)

Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you've had fun over the years because, like we talked about a little before we pressed record, I personally found value in the things you did. So it's really cool that we're able to connect now. That goes all the way back to when I first got into Flash and started reading about all this stuff.

1:02:59 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=3779s)

Yeah, no, I'm glad to hear that.

1:03:00 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=3780s)

And like I was mentioning earlier, the age when you were interested in all of that and the age when I was most interested in it lined up almost perfectly. I think that really was my target audience, people at that stage of life, in school or college, who are open to trying things just because they seem fun. Like, what does making these circles move randomly actually accomplish? I have no idea, but it is fun, so I'm going to learn it anyway. Meanwhile, other sites were teaching things like how to build an MP3 player or load data from a database. I was like, okay, I get that it's useful, but that's boring.

I'd rather make a random Flash photo gallery where the images load out of sequence. So I was taking a different path. And that's something I'm realizing more and more now too. When I look around at web design and development today, so much of it has been compartmentalized. It must look like this template. It must fit this format. A lot of the creativity and weirdness that made it fun 20 or 30 years ago just isn't there anymore. In a lot of my talks with designers and developers, I spend at least a few seconds ranting about that, because it really was so much more fun back then.

We've gotten to a point where everything has to be done in a way that the Twitter algorithm will boost, or LinkedIn will boost, or Facebook will boost, or YouTube will boost. Your thumbnail has to look a certain way. The link has to be framed a certain way. If it isn't, nobody sees it. That's very different from how it used to be. Back then, you just decided whether you liked something. Oh, I like this video, great, I'm going to watch it. It didn't have to follow a predetermined pattern. So those thoughts are always in the back of my mind. There has to be a better way.

But I can't fight the same system that's driving traffic to the content I'm creating. That creates this weird incentive structure where I know I'm not doing exactly what I want to do, but if I don't play along at least a little, I'm basically just talking to myself. I guess that's why it's important to have that intrinsic motivation, that desire to find value in the thing itself. Exactly. And you can use that to get better at all the other skills you're trying to develop.

As a startup founder, for example, you've probably learned way more about marketing, landing pages, calls to action, developer relations, and all these things you might never have had to do before. Whatever happens, those skills stay with you.

1:05:36 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=3936s)

Yeah, yeah. And it's good to be uncomfortable and step into those things. But what I really love about what you're saying is that this idea of fun can genuinely change people's lives in meaningful ways that go far beyond fun itself. Fun was my entry into software development, and software development gave me the means to provide for my family. It gave me freedom, lower stress, and a lot of good things in life. So there is real value in capturing people's imagination through fun, because it can lead them into a space where they end up adding a lot of value to their own lives and to society.

1:06:45 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=4005s)

Yeah. Speaking of fun, are you also the designer behind everything people see on Zilch?

1:06:50 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=4010s)

Yeah, I am. There are some assets on there that are Creative Commons, like some of the 3D stuff. I didn't build the chessboard. I did design the tic-tac-toe one by hand in Blender, though. It was fun learning 3D modeling.

1:07:11 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=4031s)

That's very cool. And the logo too, was that you who designed it?

1:07:16 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=4036s)

Yeah, yeah, I've always had kind of a foot in design and a foot in development, naturally.

1:07:23 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=4043s)

You know, I mentioned before, I don't know if it was in the recording or not, but I love pixel art. So when I first saw this, I thought, wow, this is amazing. It blends that retro 8-bit gaming feel with teaching you how to program by building some of these games. That was really fantastic. And the avatar editor you created is probably one of the most fun things I've seen. You have this grid that basically works like a pixel-art sprite editor from back in the day, and you let people use it to create their avatar. What's the story behind that?

It strikes me as a fun, quirky thing that adds a lot of personality to what you're building.

1:08:06 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=4086s)

I don't know if there's much of a story behind exactly how that came to be, but it's kind of what we've been talking about. It was like, oh yeah, that would be neat. We should definitely have a way for people to create custom avatars so the bot they're building has an identity and some personalization. And being able to design the avatar is just fun.

1:08:35 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=4115s)

Yeah. So are all the pixel bots you see on the home screen designed by you, or do you have some kind of random procedural generator making them?

1:08:44 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=4124s)

Automatically. Most of them are randomly generated. There are a few, like the Zil bot, that have a fixed design, but the others are just generated randomly with the same generator people use when they're creating their own bot in Zilch.

1:09:07 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=4147s)

Nice. And last question about the Zil bot. What was the inspiration behind the robot looking the way it does? I mean the overall feel of it. It's a very classic design. The reason I ask is that growing up I loved playing the MechWarrior and BattleTech games, and it reminds me a little of the Vulture, where it had lasers in its hands and missiles coming off the shoulder pods. That's probably the best a robot can get. So I wasn't sure if you were going for that nostalgic factor, where people who grew up with that would look at it and think, wow, this is the Vulture.

1:09:50 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=4190s)

So I didn't know that, and I'm not familiar with it, so that wasn't what I was going for. What I wanted was for it to be possible to make the Zilch logo, that Zil bot, using the same editor anybody has access to when they create avatars for their bots. So I worked within those constraints. I wanted it to be this many pixels by this many pixels, and I had to make the logo from that. I just thought that was a fun way to do it. Those were the constraints that informed how the logo would be made.

1:10:30 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=4230s)

Well, I think it's amazing. Braden, it was great chatting with you and learning about how you went from working for a company to working for yourself, and all the unknowns you've been navigating while building this fantastic product. Thanks again for taking the time to chat with me about it.

1:10:51 - Braden Snell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pu1hBqBWeI&t=4251s)

Yeah, no, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.


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