#5 Matt Butcher (CEO, Fermyon) & Steve Manuel (CEO, Dylibso) - Why WebAssembly is the Future of Computing, Current Use Cases for Wasm, What to Expect in the Future

Steve Manuel is the Co-Founder & CEO of Dylibso, which is creating developer tools to take WebAssembly to production. Matt Butcher is the Co-Founder & CEO of Fermyon which is building a cloud product to deploy & manage WebAssembly apps faster than existing cloud solutions. In this talk, both founders talk about why they are excited to build in the WebAssembly ecosystem, why Wasm is going to enable developers to have superpowers as the Wasm standards mature, and current companies & use cases that WebAssembly enables today. This episode strikes a great balance of giving a high level overview of why the technology is so compelling while also going deeper for developers interested in using Wasm in the near term.

Where to Find Steve:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevemanuel/

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/nilslice

• Blog: https://dylibso.com/blog/

• Github: https://github.com/extism/extism

• Company Website: https://dylibso.com/

Where to Find Matt:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbutcher/

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/technosophos

• Blog: https://www.fermyon.com/blog/index

• Github: https://github.com/fermyon/spin

• Company Website: https://www.fermyon.com/

Where to Find Shomik:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/shomikghosh21

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shomik-ghosh-a5a71319/

• Software Snack Bites Newsletter: https://www.shomik.substack.com

• Software Snack Bites Podcast: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google.

In this episode, we cover:

(00:47) - Matt & Fermyon’s Background

(03:13) - Steve & Dylibso’s Background

(05:26) - Primer on What WebAssembly Actually Is

(10:20) - How Wasm Bundles Benefits of Security, Observability, and Startup Speed

(12:33) - How Standards are Rapidly Improving to Improve Wasm Use

(14:00) - What Use Cases Wasm is Not a Fit For

(16:22) - Companies Using Wasm in Production for Various Use Cases (Shopify, Disney+)

(29:49) - Containers & WebAssembly (Friends or Foe?)

(34:50) - WebAssembly & Kubernetes (Friends or Foe?)

(40:00) - How Can Companies Start to Use Wasm Within Legacy Systems

(44:44) - Why Adoption is Rapidly Accelerating

(52:29) - What Could Prevent the Wasm Ecosystem from Realizing It’s Vision

(56:05) - Favorite Technology/App

(58:00) - Favorite Snack

Additional Show Notes:

• Postgres Wasm by Snaplet and Supabase

• Fermyon’s Language Support Tracker for Wasm

• Dylibso’s Launch Blog Post

• Solomon’s (Co-Founder of Docker) Infamous Tweet on Wasm

• Kelsey Hightower’s Tweet on Wasm Interoperating with Kubernetes

• How ZigLang Used Wasm to Eliminate 80k Lines of Legacy Code

How to Subscribe:

Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google or any podcast player.