Highlighting the Code Remix Summit with Moderne’s Jonathan Schneider

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Techron tv.

You know, it's not often I get to interview people in Florida U Unfortunately, he still down in Miami, didn't want to come up to the Boca Studio maybe next time, but, but at least he's nearby. Uh, I wanna introduce you or reintroduce you to Jonathan Schneider. Jonathan is the co-founder and CEO of a company called Modern.

They do really cool stuff. He's gonna tell you all about it as well as a little bit about himself. But let's welcome Jonathan.

It's great to have you back on Text Drunk tv. Thanks, Alan. It's becoming a habit.

Happy to be back. Good. Well, we're always happy to have you.

So, Jonathan, you know, we're gonna talk about this code remix event coming up in about a month, less than a month now. But before we do, let's, for those who maybe are not familiar with you and, and Moderna, give them, give them, you know, what's the story? Sure, yeah.

Moderna is a, is a large scale application modernization, security, vulnerability repair sort of company. So we're going into source code and making large scale changes across whole business units backed by an open source technology called Open Rewrite. I founded that Netflix about 10 years ago.

And, uh, yeah, we're, we're just working with a lot of the most important companies in the, in, in the, in the US and Europe. Um, uh, helping them with, uh, dealing with their old source code. Absolutely.

So you mentioned you were at Netflix, right? And Netflix is sort of legendary for a lot of IT and engineering innovation, both in the DevOps world, security, chaos, and virtual Chaos Engineering. Um, then you went right from Intel into Moderna.

Yes. Went from from Netflix to Pivotal first. So Pivotal was the company that the Spring team was part of.

So I was working on the spring team there at Pivotal, uh, pivotal. Oh, okay. Uh, also had a platform called Cloud Foundry and Sure.

Really kind of a lot of large enterprise customers. So we started, uh, the modern co-founder, Zi and I were working on large scale continuous delivery, um, with a product called Spinnaker at the time with these large enterprise customers. And, uh, they were Now part, well That Google, we just kept hearing the same problem that was involved In that too.

Right. Google Was involved Amazon. CDF.

Right, Exactly. Continuous Delivery Foundation. We mm-hmm.

Actually, who was it? There was a company that was doing like a commercial Spinnaker, It was called Armory at Armor the time. Armory Armory, yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I knew, uh, the, uh, the CEO founder of Armory. Nice guy.

Anyway, I digress. Yeah, no worries. Came, came, came to Modern, but Modern's had some, I think the last time you were on was before the first of the year.

You guys have had some nuisance then, if you wouldn't mind sharing. Yeah, we have a couple things that have been big, you know, big lately. First of all, uh, we successfully raised Series B late last year.

Um, so, you know, that was led by Mark Crannick at a crew. But the, the thing I I I, I'm also proud of is the participation of American Express Ventures and Morgan Stanley Ventures and TIA ventures, and, and it just goes to show the kind of organizations we work with from day to day. Um, also on the product side, you know, we've been working with large code.

So, um, I think, you know, one of our largest customers has those almost 5 billion lines of source code in platform. Uh, and we're used to being able to run transformations and impact analyses on these, on these large code bases. We started exposing these open rewrite recipes and the data that they produce directly to large language models, uh, this year as, uh, as part of this new tool function, uh, calling paradigm, um, that emerged at the end of last year.

Um, that's now allowing large language models to effectively navigate, explore, and transform code, um, at massive scale, uh, in the enterprise. And it's kind of unique, uh, there a lot of the, the exciting stuff happening in AI code is really about authorship. It's about net new code writing, and the, a lot of those assistants and, you know, and agents are effective because they're able to get data out of the IDE, they get what the IDE knows about the code and it's all, its symbols and everything.

And really what madin has is the same data representations in the IDE, but for the whole business all at once. And so it's, I think it's a really bright future here on, on, on where this is going. Absolutely.

I love it. Hey, uh, just a quick detour. We were talking earlier today on our text Sean gang episode with what went on here with CVEs this week.

The whole CVE database was kind of in jeopardy. Look, this is, I mean, that's a, that's a, a resource that you guys I'm sure rely on. What, what's your feeling on that, Jonathan?

I think it's, uh, there's, there's been a couple steps in this direction, this being the most recent news, but already I think NIST was, uh, was really struggling to, to serve Yeah. Vulnerability database that's been falling down. It has, should, Should we go to some sort of foundation model, maybe like we, like Linux Foundation does open source, maybe 'cause they filmed something called the CVE Foundation now that is gonna make a play to take this over and Yeah.

So we're not at the mercy, and the question is budgets. The question is who's gonna finance it? Right.

And I think, yeah, the folks that, that more directly do scanning there probably should. Uh, for our, from our perspective, we tend to integrate our auto remediation solutions directly into customer's views of vulnerabilities, which tend to be not the vulnerability database directly, but rather an amalgamation of different products that themselves rely on it. And so rather than plugging into NVD, we will plug into, I'm thinking of one customer has an internal product called Compliance Buddy.

We'll wire to that API, so that the remediation has the same view of the problems that the security team is already promulgating across their organization. So we're a bit removed from it, at least with one level. Yeah.

Cool. Thanks. Thanks for that.

So, hey, other big news on, on Moderna that you guys have a, a big event coming up just about a month from now down in Miami. Down In Miami. Bring it Home like anyone needs an excuse to go down to Miami.

That's right. Miami. And I know, but it's called the Code Remix event.

What's it about, John? I mean, obviously it's about what Moderna does, but give us an idea about the event. It's a bit broader than that.

First of all, I am just really proud of us being able to bring another high level developer conference to the United States to be bo to be honest with you, I've seen a lot of the, my, my most favorite events kind of disappearing, uh, recently. Strange Loop in St. Louis.

I treasured a lot is gone now. Um, I look to Europe and I see DevOps, J Con, uh, and, and just a much healthier, uh, developer conference ecosystem. And in, in the United States, I've, I'm, I'm increasingly having few options.

So, um, really, you know, we're going, um, we're starting a new conference called Co Remix Summit, which is part of the No Fluff Just Stuff series. Um, working with Jay Zimmerman on this. Jay's ran Uber comp and Tech Leader Summit ACON for many years.

And so we're just adding another one to that series. Um, topics will include of course, you know, auto remediation, but, um, you know, we're gonna have do cats from Morgan Stanley down talking about what they're doing at scale there. Um, but also happy to have a speaker from Spotify talking about continuous profiling and Google and Amazon and Josh Long from the spring team.

And Vencat, he's pretty famous in the, in the Java ecosystem. Sure. Um, and really just do our part to try to bring another dev focused conference to the United States.

Jonathan, why do you think we're seeing the Dev conferences drying up? I mean, I know with COVD, everything sort of went virtual, but you know, from everything you hear conference in-person conferences are back. Why, why?

I don't know if I can put my finger on the Cause I think there's been a kind of a shift towards more, um, the ones that are big in the United States, reinvent, you know, uh, they, they tend to be more, uh, vendor focused. And so, um, it, it just, it just hasn't been a, a goal, I think to create something a little with a little bit of a broader umbrella. And I think we're, we're happy to do that.

We're experimenting here with a format too, and this is risky if you're gonna start a new conference, but, um, we're doing three tracks, uh, dev track, which is really just developer focused talks. That's where we're talking about continuous profiling, spring ai, a lot of things like that. A leader track, which is, that's where Dove will talk, um, where we'll have, uh, Nick Washburn from Intel Capital talking really on kind of the like, high level concerns focused, you know, more towards the executive, uh, team.

And then the third one, and the one that's I think is interesting here is called the Hack Track. Not a hackathon, but rather it's going continuously all three days. Um, we're gonna have experts there from the open rewrite recipe developers.

We'll have folks from, uh, stack Lock there, from Azure, from uh, uh, Volek, from Diff Blue. They're at high top tables ready to like do work with attendees on their code throughout the event. And so we've put together a, uh, a packet for attendees called Pack for the Hack, which is here's what you need to do to bring with you to the conference so that you can go home with some work done on, on your code base and bring value back to your, bring your work laptop, get security to approve it before you come.

Get all your dependencies resolved before you come so that we can send you home with something. And, um, that's great Man. I'm interested to see how this goes.

ai, um, and like you said, it's gonna be in, we say Miami, but actually in, uh, in the Hollywood area right along the beach. Um, oh Really? You knows, where is it?

If you don't Minds? It's gonna be at the, the Margaritaville there in, in Hollywood, So. Oh, sure.

I I've actually docked my boat there a few times. There's, there's a good little, there's a good bar right on the Intercoastal side of it. It's, you know, across the street.

It's A fantastic venue By Lit Tub or whatever it's called. It's right there too. I, I know it well.

That's Right. Know It well. Yeah.

Very excellent, fun place to do a conference. I think so, yeah, I think in years, if you wait, if you don't come this year, you wait a couple more years, we may grow out of that space, but, uh, for now I think it's gonna be, um, probably one of my more memorable conference venues. Good man.

We are gonna try to have some Textron coverage there. It'd be great. Con Congratulations.

See, and, and, uh, good luck with this launch of, of Code Remix. Keep doing what you're doing with Modern though, man. It's, it's exciting stuff.

And keep coming on here and keeping us posted. Yep. Thank you Alan.

Always, always happy to come back. Alrighty. Jonathan Schneider, co-founder, CEO of Modern here, uh, on, uh, TechOne tv.

Check out Code Remix, coming to actually Hollywood, Hollywood Beach, Florida May 12th to the 14th at the Margaritaville Resort, which is a fun place. Bring your laptop, make sure it's in good working order. You got security clearance because there's gonna be good stuff going on.

We're gonna take a break here on Textron Gang. Uh, Textron tv. We'll be right back in a moment.