meet the beeple: josef erben

The team here at beeps has come a long way in reimagining on-call. Our goal of creating a modern on-call platform wouldn’t be possible without the amazing engineers that are working behind the scenes to perfect our product.  While our mission is underway, we wanted to take some time to highlight the individuals that are building beeps from the ground up.

Introducing Josef:

I’m an engineer at beeps and a builder at heart with a couple of my own companies under my belt. I am based in Switzerland and I finally managed to exit emacs (currently recovering in VSCode).

Why beeps?

Back then, it was just our founder Joey, working without a team but with a solid vision: beeps was going to build tools for engineers to make on-call suck less. 

What sealed the deal was Joey’s emphasis on developer experience, as this is something that I push hard as well.

How did you get started in your field?

I tinkered with BASIC when I was a boy, drawing things in MS-DOS. One day I had the great idea to develop a game in Java 1. I bought an intro book, and a few days later, after realizing I didn’t understand anything at all, I shelved the entire game dev venture.

I wrote my first real programs a few years later. I started by writing bots that could play a MMORPG (RuneScape) for me. Other players started using my bots and I was hooked: people were using stuff that I coded!

Describe your coding style/personality using only one word

I try to be simple.

Simplicity is good for customers, teams, productivity, products and for companies! Everyone benefits from it, but it’s incredibly hard to achieve, and even harder to maintain.

Simple is not the same as easy. Learning the rules of chess is simple, beating Magnus is hard. Printing out “Hello world” is easy, launching Starship is complex. When things are complex, things are intertwined. There are many moving parts depending on each other. Simplicity comes after complexity. One has to work through complexity to learn which parts can be left out, keeping only what matters most.

What’s your all-time favorite meme?

Probably the “How often do you think about the Roman Empire” meme:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a80lHKIbLIY&t=79s

What’s one technology trend that excites you?

I’ve been truly amazed by how well large language models (LLMs) have been performing. I’m excited about the prospect of on-device inference with phones, watches and laptops within a connected mesh. I’m also thrilled about the rise of “open source” models. It looks like training large models is not giving companies as much of a competitive edge, especially with the strength of open source models. So who is going to capture the added value if not model providers like OpenAI or Anthropic? I think companies with awesome products—more so than before the advent of LLMs—are the ones likely to capture the added value.

Another area of excitement for me is Apple Silicon. It’s truly mind-blowing that Apple has held the lead for so long. The release of M1 made me give up Ryzen, NixOS, i3wm and emacs!