43 korrents from this recording · 1 of them a turn
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Their wordsIt's a monument to good intentions leading straight to hell. And the Europe is actually world class in good intentions leading straight to hell.
Their wordsPython, to me, I hope I don't offend people too much. I've said this before, it's ugly. And it's ugly in its space, because it's full of superfluous instructions that are necessary for legacy reasons of when Guido made Python back in '87 that are still here in 2025.
Their wordsMatz went the completely opposite direction. He believes in humanity. He believes in the unlimited capacity of programmers to learn and become better. So much so that he's willing to put the stranger at his own level.
Their wordsI make sure that when I release the first version of any new thing I work on, it's a little broken. It's a little busted in ways that invite people to come in and help me. Because there's no easier way to get the collaboration of other programmers than to put something out that they know how to fix and improve.
Their wordsIt's the essence of what makes Ruby Ruby. This is why I don't fully understand when people call for Ruby to add static typing. 'Cause to me, it's the bedrock of what this is.
Their wordsThey're still stuck in, essentially, I like static typing. Therefore, static typing is the only way to create reliable correct systems, which is just such a mind blowing, to be blunt, idiotic thing to say in the face of evidence, mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Their wordsThey end up then I think writing it in some other language, which by the way I think is the best advertisement ever for Ruby on Rails, because nothing fucking happened for 10 years after they switched over, right?
Their wordsRuby is a luxury language. It's a luxury, the highest luxury in my opinion. It is the Coco Chanel of programming languages. Something that not everyone can afford. And I mean this in the best possible way.
Their wordsI love chiseling my code and the way I use AI is in a separate window. I don't let it drive my code. I've tried that. I've tried the cursors and the wind surfaces and I don't enjoy that way of writing. And one of the reasons I don't enjoy that way of writing is I can literally feel competence draining out of my fingers.
Their wordsThe joy of a programmer, of me as a programmer, is to type the code myself. If I elevate myself, if I promote myself out of programming, I turn myself into a project manager. A project manager of a murder of AI crows as I wrote the other day.
Their wordsThe Anthropic CEO seems to think that 90% of all code by the end of the year is gonna be written by AI. I am more than a little bit skeptical about that, but I'm open-minded about the prospect that programming potentially will turn into a horse when done manually.
Their wordsYou're gonna learn in this superficial way that feels like learning, but is completely empty calories. And secondly, if you can just vibe code it, you're not a programmer.
Their wordsEditing, in my opinion, is the reward, the capacity to be a good editor is the reward you get from being a good doer. You have to be a doer first.
Their wordsWhen you're at Netflix scale, when you apply that pattern to a team of 20 programmers working on a code base of half a million lines of code, you're an idiot. You just don't need to turn method invocations into network calls. It is the first rule of distributed programming. Do not distribute your programming.
Their wordsThis is why I have fiercely fought splitting front end and back end apart. That, in my opinion, this was one of the great crimes against web development. That we are still atoning for.
Their wordsWhere I get fired up, and this ties back to the AI discussion, is when that's turned into this meme, that programmers no longer have to be competent. I mean the AI is gonna figure it out. The generators is gonna figure it out. I don't need to know SQL, active record is gonna abstract it away from me. No, no, no dude, hold up. The path here is competence.
Recalls holdingI used to think it required more churn to get progress to stay on the leading edge of new stuff. And I wrote this before I experienced the indignity of the 2010s in the JavaScript community.
Their words nowAnd if I was gonna write the doctrine today, I'd write that differently. I wouldn't say progress over stability.
Their wordsAnd after that I thought like, no, no, I was right. This was correct. We should not have had managers. Not every programmer needs a therapy session with an engineering manager every week.
Their wordsYou cannot produce the kind of software that Basecamp is with a team of a thousand people. You will build the kind of software that a thousand people builds. And that's not the same thing at all.
Their wordsour default team size is two. One programmer, one designer, one feature. When you're operating at that level of scale, you don't need sophistication. You don't need advanced methodologies.
Their wordsBecause the problem isn't just venture capital, it's other people's money. Once you take other people's money, completely understandably, they want a return and they would prefer to have the largest return possible.
Their wordsIf you are creating something of value that a lot of people love, you must create an equal and opposite force of haters. You cannot have people who love what you do without also having people who hate what you do. The only escape from that is mediocrity.
Their wordsMojito Island is a mirage. It always was. There is no retirement for ambitious people. There is no just sitting back on the beach and sipping a mojito for what? For two weeks before you go damn crazy and wanna get back into the action?
Their wordsI know this from experience because I've been trying to build a lot of other businesses since. And some of them have been moderate successes, even good successes, none of them have been Basecamp. It's really difficult to do that twice.
Their wordsBut if I'm content just being in the top 5%, I can be in the top 5% on like five things at once. I can get really good at writing. I can get decent at driving a race car. I can become pretty good at programming. I can run a company. I can have a family.
Their wordsIt's not easier to use AWS than it is to run your own machines, which we learned when we pulled out the cloud and didn't hire a single extra person. Even though we operate all our own hardware, the team stayed exactly the same.
Their wordsNow my next kind of tingle is that if you could move out of the cloud, can you also move out of the data center? Personal servers have gotten really scarily quick and efficient and personal internet connections rival what we connected data centers with just a decade or two ago.
Their wordsI think part of the secret there is that Elon actually knows things. And when you know things, you can evaluate the quality of work products. And when you can evaluate the quality of work products, you can very quickly tell who's full of shit and who will actually take you to Mars.
Their wordsthe main pivot point for getting hired was not your resume, was not the schooling you've had, it was not your grades, was not your pedigree, it was how well you did on two things. A, your cover letter. Because I can only work with people remotely if they're good writers.
Their wordsBut as Apple discovered the gold mine, it is to operate a toll booth where you don't have to innovate, where you don't actually even have to make anything, where you can just take 30% of other people's business. There was a rot that crept into the foundation of Apple and that started all the way back from the initial launch of the app store.
Their wordsI think it is incredible and the entire developer ecosystem. Not just on iOS but on Android as well, owe Epic, Tim Sweeney and Mark Rein, an enormous debt of gratitude for taking on the only battle that has ever inflicted a series wound on Apple in this entire sorted campaign of monopoly enforcement.
Their wordsApple could absolutely stumble and I think they have more reason to stumble now than ever. They're behind on AI, terribly behind. Their software quality is faltering in a bunch of ways.
Their wordsthere's something broken at the moment about how people pair up in the western world. And it's at the source of why we're not having enough children because there's not enough couples, there's not enough marriage.
Their wordsthose of us who've chosen to do the traditional thing to get married and to have children have an obligation to kind of talk it up a little bit, which would've seen ridiculous again 50 years ago that you'd have to talk up something so fundamental of that.
Their wordsReligion is one of those things I've struggled with a lot because I'm not religious. I sort of wish I was. I can now fully appreciate the enormous value having an operating system like that brings not just at the individual level, but rather at a societal level.
Their wordsBut there's something that's just not right in the analysis that children are a burden and that if woman chooses to stay at home with the kids, that that some sort of failure mode of feminist ambition. I think that's actually a complete dead end.
Their words40 hours a week is actually a ton if you don't piss it away. Most people do piss it away. They piss it away in meetings. They piss it away on just stuff that doesn't matter when even three hours, four hours of concentrated uninterrupted time every day would move to goals they truly care about way down the field.
Their wordsBut I have come to realize that as a web developer, Linux is just better. Linux is just better. It's closer to what I deploy on. The tooling is actually phenomenal.
Their wordsAnd I reject that label. I'm not an engineer. Occasionally I dabble in some engineering, but the vast majority of the time, I'm a software writer. I write software for human consumption and for my own delight.
Their wordsThis is also why I reject this notion that open source is in some sort of crisis. That there's a funding crisis that we have to spend more. No, we don't. Open source has never been doing better. Open source has never controlled more domains in software than it has right now.
Their wordsyou can't show up after you've given the gift of free software to the world and then say, now that you've used that gift, you actually owe me a huge slide of your business because you got too successful using the thing I gave you for free. You don't get to take a gift back.
Their wordsI happen to believe that it's probably correct that the planet is getting too hot and that CO2 has something to do with it. Whether we have the right measures to fix it in time, if that's even possible or not, is completely up in the air and we don't know.