00:02:19 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:02:19] S1: Yeah. Actually, one of things [00:02:20] S0: I wanted to ask you about is quite I always found it very unusual. It's like how you met your cofounder with that story and then maybe you could start with that and then transition on the actual story of North Flank. Yeah. Absolutely. So my cofounder and I so I'm the cofounder and CEO and Fred is my CTO. We've known each other for a very very long time, maybe, I don't know, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years, however long it is now. Can't remember exactly. But we mess in our multiplayer game. So I I had been trying to build a number of gaming communities as you do as a kid. You, you know, make a clan, you try and make a small gaming community. [00:02:55] S1: Which game? [00:02:57] S0: Mount and Blade Warband. Warband? Yeah. It's quite a niche game on PC on Steam. [00:03:02] S1: But Yeah. What is it? [00:03:03] S0: It was a medieval RPG game where you could build mods. There were a number of mods we used to, you know, support host game servers, things like that. [00:03:12] S1: Yeah. Is it a little
00:03:12 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:03:12] S1: Yeah. Is it a little [00:03:13] S0: bit like RuneScape or It's it's much more like it's it's it's more three d Okay. Than RuneScape. But I did play RuneScape as well. So we met online and then we started to build things together. So we started to build applications together. And Fred's not in The UK? No. He's he's German living in Switzerland. And we haven't spent that much time in person together. Like, probably maximum a hundred and twenty days across those thirteen, fifteen years, whatever. Yeah. We didn't meet until 2019. So it was already at that point. [00:03:55] S1: So you met when you started it. [00:03:57] S0: Right? So we met when we founded North Flank. Yeah. [00:04:00] S1: But you'd already decided to [00:04:02] S0: We'd already been building and working together for many many years. It's because we like we were kids, we couldn't afford to, you know, get on a flight and meet each other. So originally, you know, were on TeamSpeak. We were working on TeamSpeak. We were working on Skype. Like, literally, there are old Skype conversations of us collaborating, trying to figure out how to build build shit, and and then we obviously graduated to to WhatsApp and Discord and then and then eventually Slack. So so yeah, I think it was in 2019 we decided, okay, if we're gonna do this properly, we need to go and learn how to code. We're gonna have to do this properly rather than just be script kiddies. So we both went off to university. Fred went and did his masters in computer science.
00:04:02 · Will Stewart, Jack
[00:04:02] S0: We'd already been building and working together for many many years. It's because we like we were kids, we couldn't afford to, you know, get on a flight and meet each other. So originally, you know, were on TeamSpeak. We were working on TeamSpeak. We were working on Skype. Like, literally, there are old Skype conversations of us collaborating, trying to figure out how to build build shit, and and then we obviously graduated to to WhatsApp and Discord and then and then eventually Slack. So so yeah, I think it was in 2019 we decided, okay, if we're gonna do this properly, we need to go and learn how to code. We're gonna have to do this properly rather than just be script kiddies. So we both went off to university. Fred went and did his masters in computer science. [00:04:48] S1: When you'd already when you say like, if we're gonna build this, like, we need to learn how to code, like, as in you'd already had like this, like, specific North Flank idea?
00:04:58 · Will Stewart
[00:04:58] S0: So that in like twenty thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, we were manually deploying game servers on bare metal on like OVH and Hetzner back in the day. Obviously, now Hetzner's now the hottest thing and everyone wants to deploy Well, you were deploying Yeah. We were then, we were like using our pocket money to spawn bare metal machines using, you know, SSH in and then try and run some game servers. And we were doing that in No thirteen, fourteen, whatever it was. And this is when public cloud just wasn't very available or couldn't even run game servers because the CPUs weren't fast enough or or whatever. And also the network was really expensive. So we we we were provisioning these these bare metal servers, we're like, this is crazy, this this needs to change. And of course, every new game came out, and the multiplayer was always offline because game developers didn't know how to build an infrastructure platform. So we thought, okay, well, why don't we try and build this? Why don't we try and build an automation system for these game servers? And then as time went on, we're like, okay, well, we need to deploy a back end. So we needed to go and deploy a database and a microservice. We looked around and the only thing at the time, you know, was Heroku. I had been acquired by Salesforce and it hadn't evolved. Like, I think at the time, you can even deploy a Docker image. So we we thought we needed something more accessible. And of course, at that time, we'd learn containers, we'd learn Docker. And then Ben, sorry.
00:06:22 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:06:22] S1: Just to get a reminder, how old are you at this point? [00:06:24] S0: Oh, I think it's like a levels in The UK. It's a levels. Think [00:06:26] S1: it's 16, like 17. Scaling DevTools is sponsored by WorkOS. If things start going well, some of your customers are gonna start asking for enterprise features. Things like SSO, SCIM provisioning, role based access control. You could spend ages tearing your hair out building these things yourself, or you could use WorkOS. Will, what do you guys do? [00:06:48] S0: My name is Will Stewart, co founder and CEO of Northlink. We're a self-service developer platform, and we help teams deploy their most critical workloads into their VPC. And you guys use WorkOS? We use WorkOS for our SAML and OIDC integrations. It's a pretty exceptional product. It makes everything regarding authentication pretty seamless, and it's been instrumental for us to onboard our enterprise customers much faster. Building integrations with lots of different SAML providers is really challenging. We can do that for cloud providers, that's our job. But we don't wanna do that for the other type of IDP. This is quite interesting because internal developer portal platform and then there's the identity provider. So IDP has three different meanings and we're internal developer platform and WorkOS is IDP for authentication. But yeah, it's a great product. [00:07:35] S1: Thanks WorkOS. Back to the episode.
00:07:35 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:07:35] S1: Thanks WorkOS. Back to the episode. [00:07:38] S0: So we started building a game server hosting platform on top of Mesos. It was open sourced during our our I think we roughly went to school at the same time. Mesos is Mesos was a open source container orchestrator for for Twitter and and a few other folks. And D2IQ, Mesosphere at the time, they open sourced something called DCOS, data center operating system. I was like, oh my god, this is so cool. Remind us. 1918. Yeah. I I took that and then I was trying to make it, you know, brute force it into a game server hosting platform. And then from there, we learned, okay, well, I need to deploy my database, I to deploy my microservice, I need CICD, I need logs, I need metrics. And then suddenly all of the component parts we were like brute forcing and building ourselves to run on top of Mesos. This is like early twenty nineteen and at this point, Fred, who's studying to get his masters at computer science at ETH, I'm in my second For [00:08:42] S1: anyone One of university. University.