Eric Allam

Eric Allam is co-founder and chief technology officer of Trigger.dev, a London, England, company whose open-source platform runs long background jobs and AI agents written in TypeScript, with retries, queues and monitoring built in. He started it in 2022 with Matt Aitken and two other co-founders.

Teaching Code in the Browser at Code School

Allam co-founded Code School, an early site that taught programming in the browser, and served as its CTO; it was acquired in 2015, according to Y Combinator. In an interview published by Creative Bloq while he was a Ruby developer at Envy Labs, he explained the idea: "Most people know how to open up their browser and type into a text field. We think learning to program should be that easy." Each course ran as its own Rails app on Heroku, and because Rails code could not run in an ordinary sandbox, the team analyzed students' code for malicious activity.

Building JSON Hero With Matt Aitken

Before Trigger.dev, Allam and Aitken built JSON Hero, an open-source viewer for browsing and searching JSON files that Y Combinator says more than 35,000 developers use each month.

Rewriting Trigger.dev Twice

Trigger.dev first launched on Hacker News as an open-source alternative to Zapier for developers. Allam told the Scaling DevTools podcast that this version needed a long-running Node process while most developers with the problem were on serverless platforms, so it was live for only about two months before the team changed course. A second version split workflows into cached steps across serverless functions, but support channels filled with variations of "it isn't working." When he asked users where they thought a job ran, about 55% assumed it ran on Trigger.dev's own cloud.

The third version took over running developers' code itself. It snapshots a paused Linux process with a tool called CRIU and restores it later, so a task can wait for an approval or another job without paying for idle computing time. After usage-based billing launched, revenue grew about 50% a month on average, Allam said.