The following is a conversation with Jeff Atwood.
He is the cofounder of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange,
websites that are visited by millions of people
every single day.
Much like with Wikipedia, it is difficult to understate
the impact on global knowledge and productivity
that these networks of sites have created.
Jeff is also the author of the famed blog, Coding Horror,
and the founder of Discourse, an open source software project
that seeks to improve the quality of our online community
discussions.
This conversation is part of the MIT course
on artificial journal intelligence
and the artificial intelligence podcast.
If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes,
or your podcast provider of choice,
or simply connect with me on Twitter
at Lex Friedman, spelled FRID.
And now, here's my conversation with Jeff Atwood.
Having cocreated and managed for a few years the world's
largest community of programmers in Stack Overflow
10 years ago, what do you think motivates most programmers?
Is it fame, fortune, glory, process of programming itself,
or is it the sense of belonging to a community?
It's puzzles, really.
I think it's this idea of working on puzzles
independently of other people and just solving a problem,
sort of on your own, almost, although nobody really
works alone in programming anymore.
But I will say there's an aspect of hiding yourself away
and just beating on a problem until you solve it.
Like, brute force, basically, to me,
is what a lot of programming is.
It's like, the computer's so fast that you can do things
that would take forever for a human,
but you can just do them so many times and so often
that you get the answer.
You're saying just the pure act of tinkering with the code
is the thing that drives most probably the joy, the struggle
balance within the joy of overcoming the brute force
process of pain and suffering that eventually leads
to something that actually works?
Well, data's fun, too.
Like, there's this thing called the shuffling problem.
Like, the naive shuffle that most programmers write
has a huge flaw.
And there's a lot of articles online about this
because it can be really bad if you're like a casino
and you have an unsophisticated programmer writing
your shuffle algorithm.
There's surprising ways to get this wrong.
But the neat thing is, the way to figure that out
is just to run your shuffle a bunch of times
and see how many orientations of cards you get.
You should get an equal distribution of all the cards.
And with the naive method of shuffling,
if you just look at the data, if you just brute force it
and say, OK, I don't know what's going to happen.
You just write a program that does it a billion times
and then see what the buckets look like of the data.
And the money haul problem is another example of that,
where you have three doors and somebody gives you
information about another door.
So the correct answer is you should always switch.
The money haul problem, which is not intuitive.
It freaks people out all the time.
But you can solve it with data.
If you write a program that does the money haul game
and then never switches, then always switches, just compare,
you would immediately see that you don't have to be smart.
You don't have to figure out the answer algorithmically.
You can just brute force it out with data
and say, well, I know the answer is this
because I ran the program a billion times
and these are the data buckets that I got from it.
So empirically, you find it.
But what's the joy of that?
So for you, for you personally, outside of family,
what motivates you in this process?
Well, to be honest, I don't really
write a lot of code anymore.
What I do at discourse is like, managerry stuff, which
I always kind of despise as a programmer.
You think of managers as people who don't really
do anything themselves.
But the weird thing about code is you
realize that language is code.
The ability to direct other people
lets you get more stuff done than you could by yourself
anyway.
You said language is code?
Language is code.
Meaning communication with other humans?
Yes, it is.
You can think of it as a systematic.
So what does it like to be?
What makes, before we get into programming,
what makes a good manager?
What makes a good leader?
Well, I think a leader, it's all about leading by example,
first of all, like sort of doing and being the things
that you want to be.
Now, this can be kind of exhausting.
Particularly if you have kids because you realize
that your kids are watching you all the time,
like even in ways that you've stopped seeing yourself.
Like the hardest person to see on the planet
is really yourself.
It's a lot of you see other people and make judgments
about them, but yourself, like you're super biased.
You don't actually see yourself the way other people see you.
Often, you're very, very hard on yourself in a way
that other people really aren't going to be.
So that's one of the insights is you've
got to be really diligent about thinking,
like, am I behaving in a way that
represents how I want other people to behave?
Like leading through example.
There's a lot of examples of leaders
that really mess this up.
Like they make decisions that are like, wow, that's why.
It's just it's a bad example for other people.
So I think leading by example is one.
The other one, I believe it is working really hard.
I don't mean like working exhaustively,
but like showing a real passion for the problem.
Like not necessarily your solution to the problem,
but the problem itself is just one that you really believe in.
With discourse, for example, the problem
that we're looking at, which is my current project,
is how do you get people in groups
to communicate in a way that doesn't like break down
into the howling of wolves, right?
Like how do you deal with trolling?
Not like technical problems of how
do I get people to post paragraphs?
How do I get people to use bold?
How do I get people to use complete sentences?
Although those are problems as well.
But how do I get people to get along with each other, right?
And then solve whatever problem it is they set out to solve,
or reach some consensus on discussion,
or just not hurt each other, even, right?
Like maybe it's a discussion that doesn't really matter,
but are people yelling at each other, right?
And why, right?
Like that's not the purpose of this kind of communication.
So I would say leadership is about setting an example,
doing the things that represent what you want to be,
and making sure that you're actually doing those things.
And there's a trick to that too, because the things you don't
do also say a lot about what you are.
Yeah, so let's pause on that one.
So those two things are fascinating.
So how do you have as a leader that self awareness?
So you just said it's really hard to be self aware.
So for you personally, or maybe for other leaders
you've seen or look up to, how do you
know both that the things you're doing
are the wrong things to be doing, the way you speak
to others, the way you behave, and the things you're not doing?
How do you get that signal?
There's two aspects to that.
One is like processing feedback that you're getting.
So how do you get feedback?
Well, right.
So are you getting feedback, right?
Like so one way we do it, for example,
at discourse we have three cofounders,
and we periodically talk about decisions before we make them.
So it's not like one person can make a mistake, or like,
wow, they're going to be misunderstanding things.
So it's part of group consensus of leadership
is like it's good to have, I think, systems
where there's one leader, and that leader has the rule
of absolute law, are just really dangerous in my experience.
For communities, for example, if you have a community that's
run by one person, that one person makes all decisions,
that person's going to have a bad day.
Something can happen to that person.
There's a lot of variables.
So first, when you think about leadership,
have multiple people doing leadership,
and have them talk amongst each other.
So you're giving each other feedback about the decisions
that they're making.
And then when you do get feedback,
I think there's that little voice in your head, right?
Or your gut, or wherever you want to put it in your body.
I think that voice is really important.
I think most people who have any kind of moral compass
or want to do, most people want to do the right thing.
I do believe that.
I mean, there might be a handful of sociopaths out there
that don't, but most people, they
want other people to think of them as a good person.
Why wouldn't you, right?
Do you want people to despise you?
I mean, that's just weird, right?
So you have that little voice that the angel and devil
on your shoulder talking to you about what you're doing,
how you're doing, how does it make you feel
to make these decisions, right?
And I think having some attunement to that voice
is important.
But you said that voice also for,
I think it's a programmer situation, too,
where sometimes the devil on the shoulder
is a little too loud.
So you're a little too self critical for a lot of developers,
especially when you have introverted personality.
How do you struggle with the self criticism
or the criticism of others?
One of the things of leadership is
to do something that's potentially unpopular
or what people doubt you and you still
go through with the decision.
So what's that balance like?
I think you have to walk people through your decision
making, right?
This is where blogging is really important in communication.
It's so important.
Again, code language is just another kind of code.
It's like, here is the program by which
I arrived at the conclusion that I'm going to reach, right?
It's one thing to say, this is a decision.
It's final.
Deal with it, right?
That's not usually satisfying to people.
But if you say, look, we've been thinking
on this problem for a while.
Here's some stuff that's happened.
Here's what we think is right.
Here's our goals.
Here's what we want to achieve.
And we've looked at these options.
And we think this of the available options is the best option.
People will be like, oh, OK.
Maybe I don't totally agree with you,
but I can kind of see where you're coming from.
And I see it's not just arbitrary decision delivered
from a cloud of flames in the sky.
It's like a human trying to reach some kind of consensus
about goals.
And their goals might be different than yours.
That's completely legit, right?
But if you're making that clear, it's like, oh, well,
the reason we don't agree is because we have totally
different goals, right?
How could we agree?
It's not that you're a bad person.
It's that we have radically different goals in mind
when we started looking at this problem.
And the other one you said is passion or hard work, sorry.
Well, those are tied together in my mind.
Let's say hard work and passion.
For me, I just really love the problem discourse
is setting out to solve because, in a way,
it's like there's a vision of the world where it all devolves
into Facebook basically owning everything
in every aspect of human communication, right?
And this has always been kind of a scary world for me.
First, because I think Facebook is really good at execution.
I got to compliment them.
They're very competent in terms of what they're doing.
But Facebook has not much of a moral compass
in terms of Facebook cares about Facebook, really.
They don't really care about you and your problems.
What they care about is how big they can make Facebook, right?
Is that you talking about the company or just the mechanism
of how Facebook works?
Kind of both, really, right?
And the idea with discourse, the reason I'm so passionate
about it is because I believe every community should have
the right to own themselves, right?
Like they should have their own software that they can run
that belongs to them.
That's their space where they can set the rules.
And if they don't like it, they can move to different hosting
or whatever they need to happen can happen.
But this idea of a company town where all human communication
is implicitly owned by WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.
And it's really disturbing, too, because Facebook
is really smart.
Like I said, they're great at execution.
Buying in WhatsApp and buying Instagram
were incredibly smart decisions.
And they also do this thing on, if you know,
but they have this VPN software that they give away
for free on smartphones.
And it indirectly feeds all the data about the traffic
back to Facebook.
So they can see what's actually getting popular
through the VPNs, right?
They have low level access to the network data
because users have let them have that.
So let's take a small pause here.
First of all, discourse, can you talk about,
can you lay out the land of all the different ways
you can have communities?
So there's Stack Overflow that you've built.
There's discourse.
So Stack Overflow is kind of like a Wiki.
Wikipedia you talk about.
And it's a very specific scalpel, very focused.
So what is the purpose of discourse?
And maybe contrast that with Facebook.
First of all, say what is discourse?
Yeah.
Start from the beginning.
Well, let me start from the very beginning.
So Stack Overflow is very structured,
Wiki style Q&A for programmers, right?
And that was the problem we first worked on.
And when we started, we thought it was discussions
because we looked at like programming forums and other things,
but we quickly realized we were doing Q&A,
which is a very narrow subset of human communication, right?
So when you started Stack Overflow,
you thought you didn't even know the Q&A.
You didn't know it would be Q&A.
Well, we didn't know.
We had an idea of like, okay,
these are things that we see working online.
We had a goal, right?
Our goal was there was this site,
Experts Exchange with a very unfortunate name.
Thank you for killing that site.
Yeah, I know, right?
Like a lot of people don't remember it anymore,
which is great.
Like that's the measure of success.
If people don't remember the thing
that you were trying to replace, then you've totally won.
So it was a place to get answers to programming questions,
but it wasn't clear if it was like focused Q&A,
if it was a discussion,
there were plenty of programming forums.
So we weren't really sure.
We were like, okay, we'll take aspects of dig and Reddit,
like voting were very important,
reordering answers based on votes,
Wiki style stuff of like being able to edit posts,
not just your posts, but other people's posts
to make them better and keep them more up to date.
Ownership of blogging of like, okay, this is me.
I'm saying this in my voice, you know,
this is the stuff that I know.
And you know, you get your reputation accrues to you
and it's pure recognition.
So you asked earlier, like what motivates programmers?
I think pure recognition motivates them a lot.
That was one of the key insights of Stack Overflow
was like recognition from your peers
is why things get done.
Initially money, not necessarily your boss,
but like your peers saying, wow,
this person really knows their stuff has a lot of value.
So the reputation system came from that.
So we were sort of Frankensteining a bunch of stuff together
in Stack Overflow, like stuff we had seen working
and we knew worked and that became Stack Overflow.
And over time we realized it wasn't really discussion.
It was very focused questions and answers.
There wasn't a lot of room on the page for,
let me talk about this tangential thing.
It was more like, okay, is it answering the question?
Is it clarifying the question
or could it be an alternative answer to the same question?
Cause there's usually more than one way to do it in program.
There's like, say five to 10 ways.
And one of the patterns we got into early on
in Stack Overflow was there were questions
where there would be like hundreds of answers.
And we're like, well,
how can there be a programming question
with 100, 200, 500 answers?
And we looked at those and we realized
those were not really questions in the traditional sense.
They were discussions.
It was stuff that we allowed early on
that we eventually decided wasn't allowed,
such as what's your favorite programming food?
What's the funniest programming cartoon you've seen?
And we had to sort of backfill a bunch of rules
about like, why isn't this allowed?
Such as, is this a real problem you're facing?
Like nobody goes to work
and says, wow, I can't work
cause I don't know what the funniest programming cartoon is.
So sorry, can't compile this code now, right?
It's not a real problem you're facing in your job.
So that was Run Rule.
And the second, like, what can you really learn from that?
It's like what I call accidental learning
or Reddit style learning
where you're just like, oh, I'll just browse some things
and oh, wow, you know,
did you know tree frogs only live three years?
I mean, I just made that up.
I don't know if that's true,
but I didn't really set out to learn that.
I don't need to know that, right?
It's accidental learning.
It was more intentional learning
where you're like, okay, I have a problem
and I wanna learn about stuff around this problem having,
right?
And it could be theory, it could be compiler theory,
it could be other stuff,
but I'm having a compiler problem,
hence I need to know the compiler theory,
that aspect of it that gets me to my answer, right?
So kind of a directed learning.
So we had to backfill all these rules
as we sort of figured out what the heck it was we were doing.
And the system came very strict over time
and a lot of people still complain about that.
And I wrote my latest blog entry,
what does Stack Overflow want to be?
What does it want to be when it grows up?
Celebrating the 10 year anniversary, yeah.
Yeah, so 10 years and the system
has trended towards strictness.
There's a variety of reasons for this.
One is people don't like to see other people
get reputation for stuff as they view as frivolous,
which I can actually understand
because if you saw a programmer got like 500 upvotes
for funniest programming cartoon
or funniest comment they had seen in code.
It's like, well, why do they have that reputation?
Is it because they wrote the joke?
Probably not.
I mean, if they did, maybe, or the cartoon, right?
They're getting a bunch of reputation
based on someone else's work.
It's not even like programming.
It's just a joke, right?
It's a related program.
So you begin to resent that.
You're like, well, that's not fair.
And it isn't.
At some level, they're correct.
I empathize because it's not correct
to get reputation for that.
Versus here's a really gnarly, regular expression problem.
And here's a really clever, insightful, detailed answer
laying out, oh, here's why you're seeing the behavior
that you're seeing.
And here, let me teach you some things
about how to avoid that in the future.
That's great, that's gold, right?
You want people to get reputation for that,
not so much for, wow, look at this funny thing I saw, right?
Great, so there's this very specific Q&A format,
and then take me through the journey
towards discourse in Facebook and Twitter.
So you start at the beginning,
that Stack Overflow evolved to have a purpose.
So what is discourse, this passion you have
for creating community for discussion?
What is that, when was that born?
Well, part of it is based on the realization
that Stack Overflow is only good
for very specific subjects where there's sort of,
it's based on data, facts, and science,
where answers can be kind of verified to be true.
Another form of that is there's the book of knowledge,
like the tome of knowledge that defines like whatever it is,
you can refer to that book and it'll give you the answer.
There has to be, it only works on subjects
where there's like semi clear answers to things
that can be verified in some form.
Now again, there's always more than one way to do it.
There's complete flexibility and system around that.
But where it falls down is stuff like poker and Lego.
Like we had, if you go to stackexchange.com,
we have an engine that tries to launch
different Q&A topics, right?
And people can propose Q&A topics, sample questions,
and if it gets enough support within the network,
we launch that Q&A site.
So some of the ones we launched were poker and Lego,
and they did horribly, right?
Because, I mean, they might still be there
lingering on in some form, but it was an experiment.
This is like a test, right?
And some subjects work super well in the stack engine,
and some don't.
But the reason Lego and poker don't work
is because they're so social, really.
It's not about what's the rule here in poker.
It's like, well, what kind of cigars
do we like to smoke while playing poker?
Or what's a cool set of cards to use when I'm playing poker?
Or what's some strategies?
Like say I have this hand come up,
what's some strategies I could use?
It's more of a discussion around what's happening.
Like with Lego, same thing, like here's
this cool Lego set I found.
Look how awesome this is.
And I'm like, yeah, that's freaking awesome, right?
It's not a question, right?
There's all these social components to the discussions
that don't fit at all.
Like we literally have to disallow those in Stack Overflow
because it's not about being social.
It's about problems that you're facing in your work
that you need concrete answers for, right?
Like you have a real demonstrated problem
that's sort of blocking you and something.
Nobody's blocked by what should I do
when I have a straight flush, right?
Like it's not a blocking problem in the world.
It's just an opportunity to hang out and discuss.
So discourse was a way to address that and say, look,
you know, discussion form software was very, very bad.
And when I came out of Stack Overflow in late 20,
early 20, early 2013, early 2012,
it was still very, very bad.
I expected it improved in the four years
since I last looked, but it had not improved at all.
And I was like, well, that's kind of terrible
because I love these communities of people
talking about things that they love, you know,
that there's just communities of interest, right?
And there's no good software for them.
Like startups would come to me and say, hey, Jeff,
I wanna, you know, I have this startup.
Here's my idea.
And the first thing I would say to them is like, well,
first, why are you asking me?
Like I don't really know your field, right?
Linus, sincerely, like, why aren't you asking
like the community, like the people
that are interested in this problem,
the people that are using your product,
why aren't you talking to them?
And then they'd say, oh, great idea.
Like how do I do that?
And then that's when I started playing sad trombone
because I realized all the software involving
talking to your users, customers, audience, patrons,
whatever it is, it was all really bad.
You know, it was like stuff that I would be embarrassed
to recommend to other people.
And yet that's where I felt they could get
the biggest and strongest, most effective input
for what they should be doing with their product, right?
It's from their users, from their community, right?
That's what we did on Stack Overflow.
So what we're talking about with forums,
the, what is it, the dark matter of the internet,
it's still, I don't know if it's still,
but for the longest time, it has some of the most
passionate and fascinating discussions.
And what's the usual structure?
There's usually what, it's linear.
So it's sequential, so you're posting one after the other
and there's Paging Nation, so it's every,
there's a 10 posts and you go to the next page
and that format still is used by, like I'm,
we're doing a lot of research with Tesla of vehicles
and there's a Tesla Motors Club forum,
which is extremely,
We really wanted to run that actually.
They pinged us about it, I don't think we got it,
but I really would have liked to gotten that one.
But they've started before even 2012, I believe.
I mean, they've been running for a long time.
It's still an extremely rich source of information.
So what's broken about that system
and how are you trying to fix it?
I think there's a lot of power in connecting people
that love the same stuff around that specific topic,
meaning Facebook's idea of connection is just any human
that's related to another human, right?
Like through friendship or any other reason.
Facebook's idea of the world is sort of the status update,
right?
Like a friend of yours did something at a restaurant, right?
Whereas discussion forums were traditionally
around the interest graph.
Like I love electric cars, specifically I love Tesla, right?
Like I love the way they approach the problem.
I love the style of the founder.
I just love the design ethic.
There's a lot to like about Tesla.
I don't know if you saw the oatmeal,
he did a whole love comic to Tesla.
And it was actually kind of cool
because I learned some stuff.
He was talking about how great Tesla cars were specifically,
like how they were built differently.
And he went into a lot of great detail
that was really interesting.
And to me, that oatmeal post, if you read it,
is the genesis of pretty much all interest communities.
I just really love this stuff.
So for me, for example, there's yoyos, right?
Like I'm into the yoyo communities
and these interest communities are just really fascinating
to me and I feel more connected to the yoyo communities
than I do to friends that I don't see that often, right?
Like to me, the powerful thing is the interest graph
and Facebook kind of dabbles in the interest graph.
I mean, they have groups, you can sign up for groups
and stuff, but it's really about the relationship graph.
Like this is my coworker, this is my relative,
this is my friend, but not so much about the interest.
So I think that's the linchpin
of which forums and communities are built on
that I personally love.
Like I said, leadership is about passion, right?
And being passionate about stuff
is a really valid way to look at the world.
And I think it's a way,
a lot of stuff in the world gets done.
Like I once had someone describe me as,
he's like, Jeff, you're a guy who,
you just get super passionate about a few things at a time
and you just go super deep in those things.
And I was like, oh, that's kind of right.
That's kind of what I do.
I get into something and just be super into that
for a couple of years or whatever
and just learn all I can about it
and go super deep in it.
And that's how I enjoy experiencing the world, right?
Like not being shallow on a bunch of things,
but being really deep on a few things that I'm interested in.
So forums kind of unlock that, right?
And you don't want a world where everything belongs
to Facebook, at least I don't.
I want a world where communities can kind of own themselves,
set their own norms, set their own rules,
control the experience.
Because community is also about ownership, right?
Like if you're meeting at the Barnes & Noble
every Thursday and Barnes & Noble says,
get out of here, you guys don't buy enough books,
well, you're kind of hoes, right?
Barnes & Noble owns you, right?
Like you can't.
But if you have your own meeting space,
you know, your own clubhouse,
you can set your own rules,
decide what you want to talk about there
and just really generate a lot better information
than you could like hanging out at Barnes & Noble
every Thursday at 3 p.m., right?
So that's kind of the vision of Discourse,
is a place where it's fully open source.
You can take the software, you can install it anywhere.
And you know, you and a group of people
can go deep on whatever it is that you're into.
And this works for startups, right?
Startups are a group of people
who go super deep on a specific problem, right?
And they want to talk to their communities
like, well, install Discourse, right?
That's what we do at Discourse.
That's what I did at Stack Overflow.
I spent a lot of time on MetaStack Overflow,
which is our internal, well,
public community feedback site.
And just experiencing what the users were experiencing, right?
Because they're the ones doing all the work in the system.
And they had a lot of interesting feedback.
And there's that 90, 10 rule of like 90% of the feedback
you get is not really actionable for a variety of reasons.
It might be bad feedback.
It might be crazy feedback.
It might be feedback you just can't act on right now.
But there's 10% of it that's like gold.
It's like literally gold and diamonds,
where it's like feedback of really good improvements
to your core product that are not super hard to get to
and actually make a lot of sense.
And my favorite is about 5% of those stuff
I didn't even see coming.
It's like, oh my God, I never even thought of that.
But that's a brilliant idea, right?
And I can point to so many features of Stack Overflow
that we drive from MetaStack Overflow feedback
and MetaDiscourse, right, same exact principle of discourse.
You know, we're getting ideas from the community.
I was like, oh my God, I never thought of that.
But that's fantastic, right?
Like I love that relationship with the community.
From having built these communities, what have you,
what have you learned about?
What's the process of getting a critical mass
of members in a community?
Is it luck, skill, timing, persistence?
What is, is it the tools, like discourse
that empower that community?
What's the key aspect of starting for one guy or gal
and then building it to two, one and 10
and a hundred and a thousand and so on?
I think we're starting with an end of one.
I mean, I think it's persistence
and also you have to be interesting.
Like somebody I really admire
once said something that I always liked about blogging.
He's like, here's how you blog.
You have to have something interesting to say
and have an interesting way of saying it, right?
And then do that for like 10 years.
So that's the genesis is like you have to have
sort of something interesting to say
that's not exactly what everybody else is saying.
And an interesting way of saying it,
which is another way of saying kind of entertaining
way of saying it.
And then as far as growing it, it's like ritual, you know,
like you have to like say you're starting a blog,
you have to say, look, I'm gonna blog every week,
three times a week and you have to stick to that schedule,
right?
Because until you do that for like several years,
you're never gonna get anywhere.
Like it just takes years to get to where you need to get to.
And part of that is having the discipline
to stick with the schedule.
And it helps again, if it's something you're passionate about,
this won't feel like work.
Like, I love this.
I can talk about this all day, every day, right?
You just have to do it in a way that's interesting
to other people.
And then as you're growing the community,
that pattern of participation within the community
of like generating these artifacts
and inviting other people to help you
like collaborate on these artifacts.
Like even in the case of blogging,
like I felt in the early days of my blog,
which I started in 2004,
which is really the genesis of Stack Overflow.
If you look at all my blog, it leads up to Stack Overflow,
which was, I have all this energy in my blog,
but I don't like 40,000 people were subscribing to me.
And I was like, I wanna do something.
And then I met Joel and said, hey, Joel,
I wanna do something, take this ball of energy
from my blog and do something.
And all the people who read my blog saw that,
it's like, oh, cool, you're involving us.
You're saying, look, you're part of this community,
let's build this thing together.
Like they pick the name.
Like we voted on the name for Stack Overflow on my blog.
Like we came up and naming is super hard.
First of all, the hardest problem in computer science
is coming with a good name for stuff, right?
But you can go back to my blog.
There's the poll where we voted
and Stack Overflow became the name of the site.
And all the early beta users of Stack Overflow
were audience of my blog plus Joel's blog, right?
So we started from like, if you look at the Genesis,
okay, I was just a programmer who said,
hey, I love programming, but I have no outlet
to talk about it.
So I'm just gonna blog about it
because I don't have enough people to work
to talk to about it.
Cause at the time I worked place where,
you know, programming wasn't the core output of the company.
It was a pharmaceutical company.
And I just love this stuff, you know, to an absurd degree.
So I was like, I'll just blog about it
and then I'll find an audience
and eventually found an audience,
eventually found Joel and eventually built Stack Overflow
from that one core of activity, right?
But it was that repetition of feeding back in,
feedback from my blog comments, feedback from Joel,
feedback from the early Stack Overflow community.
When people see that you're doing that,
they will follow along with you, right?
They say, cool, you're here in good faith.
You're actually, you know, not listening to everything
because that's impossible, that's impossible,
but you're actually, you know, waiting our feedback
in what you're doing because, and why wouldn't I?
Because who does all the work on Stack Overflow?
Me, Joel?
No, it's the other programmers
that are doing all the work.
So you gotta have some respect for that.
And then, you know, discipline around, look,
you know, we're trying to do a very specific thing
here on Stack Overflow.
We're not trying to solve all the world's problems.
We're trying to solve this very specific Q&A problem
in a very specific way.
Not because we're jerks about it,
but because these strict set of rules
help us get really good results, right?
And programmers, that's an easy sell for the most part
because programmers are used to dealing
with ridiculous systems of rules like constantly.
That's basically their job.
So they're very, oh yeah, super strict system of rules
that lets me get what I want.
That's programming, right?
That's what Stack Overflow is, so.
So you're making it sound easy,
but in 2004, let's go back there.
In 2004, you started the blog, Coding Horror.
Was it called that at the very beginning?
It was.
One of the smart things I did,
it's from a book by Steve McConnell, Code Complete,
which is one of my favorite programming books,
still probably my number one programming book
for anyone to read.
One of the smart things I did back then,
I don't always do smart things when I start stuff.
I contacted Steve and said, hey, I really like this.
It was a sidebar illustration,
indicating danger in code, right?
Coding Horror was like, watch out.
And I love that illustration because it spoke to me.
Because I saw that illustration go, oh my God,
that's me, like I'm always my own worst enemy.
Like that's the key insight in programming is,
every time you write something,
think how am I gonna screw myself?
Because you will, constantly, right?
So that icon was like, oh yeah,
I need to constantly hold that mirror up and look
and say, look, you're very fallible.
You're gonna screw this up.
Like how can you build this in such a way
that you're not gonna screw it up later?
Like how can you get that discipline around
making sure at every step,
I'm thinking through all the things that I could do wrong
or that other people could do wrong.
Cause that is actually how you get to be a better programmer
a lot of times, right?
So that sidebar illustration, I loved it so much.
And I wrote Steve before I started my blog,
and said, hey, can I have permission to use this?
Cause I just really like this illustration.
And Steve was kind enough to let me permission to do that
and just continues to give me permission.
So yeah.
Really, that's awesome.
But in 2004, you started this blog.
You know, you look at Stephen King's book on writing
or Stephen Pressfield's War of Art book.
I mean, it seems like writers suffer.
I mean, it's a hard process of writing, right?
There's a lot of, there's gonna be suffering.
I mean, I won't kid you like,
well, the work is suffering, right?
Like doing the work, like even when you're every week,
you're like, okay, that blog post wasn't very good
or you know, people didn't like it
or people said disparaging things about it.
You have to like have the attitude is like, you know,
no matter what happens, I want to do this for me, right?
It's not about you, it's about me.
I mean, in the end, it is about everyone
because this is how good work gets out into the world.
But you have to be pretty strict about saying like,
you know, I'm selfish in the sense
that I have to do this for me.
You know, you mentioned Stephen King,
like his book on writing,
but like one of the things I do, for example,
when writing is like, I read it out loud,
one of the best pieces of advice for writing anything
is read it out loud, like multiple times.
And make it sound like you're talking
because that is the goal of good writing.
It should sound like you said it with,
with slightly better phrasing
because you have more time to think about what you're saying,
but like, it should sound natural when you say it.
And I think that's probably the single best writing advice
I can give anyone.
It's just, just read it over and over out loud,
make sure it sounds like something you would normally say
and it sounds good.
And what's your process of writing?
So there's usually a pretty good idea behind the blog post.
So ideas, right.
So I think you gotta have the concept that
there's so many interesting things in the world.
Like, I mean, my God, the world is amazing, right?
Like you could never write about everything that's going on
because it's so incredible.
But if you can't come up with like,
let's say one interesting thing per day to talk about,
then you're not trying hard enough
because the world is full of just super interesting stuff.
And one great way to like mine stuff
is go back to old books
because they bring up old stuff that's still super relevant.
And I did that a lot
because I was like reading classic programming books
and a lot of the early blog posts were like,
oh, I was reading this programming book
and they brought this really cool concept
and I want to talk about it some more.
And you get the, I mean, you're not claiming credit
for the idea, but it gives you something interesting
to talk about that's kind of evergreen, right?
Like you don't have to go, what should I talk about?
So we'll just go dig up some old classic programming books
and find something that, oh, wow, that's interesting.
Or how does that apply today?
Or what about X and Y or compare these two concepts?
So pull a couple of sentences from that book
and then sort of play off of it, almost agree or disagree.
That so in 2007, you wrote that you were offered
a significant amount of money to sell the blog.
You chose not to.
What were all the elements you were thinking about?
Because I'd like to take you back.
It seems like there's a lot of nonlinear decisions
you made through life.
So what was that decision like?
Right, so one of the things I love
is the Choose Your Own Adventure books,
which I loved as a kid.
And I feel like they're early programmer books
because they're all about if then statements, right?
If this then this, and they're also very, very unforgiving.
Like there's all these sites that map
the classic Choose Your Own Adventure books
and how many outcomes are bad, a lot of bad outcomes.
So part of the game is like, oh, I got an outcome.
Go back one step, go back one further step.
It's like, how did I get here, right?
It's a sequence of decisions.
And this is true of life, right?
Like every decision is a sequence, right?
Individually, any individual decision
is not actually right or wrong,
but they lead you down a path, right?
So I do think there's some truth there.
So this particular decision,
the blogging I'm fairly popular.
There's a lot of RSS readers that I discovered.
And this guy contacted me out of the blue
from this like bug tracking company.
He's like, oh, I really want to buy your blog for like,
I think it was around, it was $100,000,
might've been like 80,000, but it was a lot, right?
Like, and that's, you know, at the time,
like I would have a year's worth of salary all at once.
So I really think about like, well, you know,
and I remember talking to people at the time,
I was like, wow, that's a lot of money.
But then the other thing, like I really like my blog, right?
Like, do I want to sell my blog?
Because it wouldn't really belong to me anymore
at that point.
And one of the guidelines that I like to,
I don't like to give advice to people a lot,
but one of the pieces of advice I do give,
because I do think it's really true
and it's generally helpful,
is whenever you're looking at a set of decisions,
like, oh gosh, should I do A, B or C?
You got to pick the thing that's a little scarier
in that list, because not, you know,
not like jump off a cliff scary,
but the thing that makes you nervous.
Because if you pick the safe choice,
it's usually you're not really pushing.
You're not pushing yourself.
You're not choosing the thing that's going to help you grow.
So for me, the scarier choice was to say no.
I was like, well, no, let's just see where this is going, right?
Because then I own it.
I mean, it belongs to me.
It's my thing.
And I can just take it
and tell some other logical conclusion, right?
Because imagine how different the world would have been
had I said yes and sold the blog.
It's like there probably wouldn't be Stack Overflow.
You know, a lot of other stuff would have changed.
So for that particular decision,
I think it was that same rule,
like what scares me a little bit more?
Do the thing that scares you.
Yeah.
Which startups?
I think there's a specific,
some more general questions
that a lot of people would be interested in.
You've started Stack Overflow.
You've started Discourse.
So what's the, you know, one, two, three guys,
whatever it is in the beginning.
What was that process like?
Do you start talking about it?
Do you start programming?
Do you start, like where is the birth
and the catalyst that actually exists?
Well, I can talk about it in the context
of both Stack Overflow and Discourse.
So I think the key thing initially is there is a problem.
Something, there's some state of the world
that's unsatisfactory to the point
that like you're upset about it, right?
Like in that case, it was experts exchange.
I mean, Joel's original idea,
cause I approached Joel's like, look, Joel,
I have all this energy behind my blog.
I want to do something.
I want to build something, but I don't know what it is.
Cause I'm not, I'm honestly not a good idea person.
I'm really not.
I'm like the execution guy.
I'm really good at execution,
but I'm not good at like blue skying ideas.
Not my forte.
Which is another reason why I like the community feedback.
Cause they blue sky all day long for you, right?
So when I can just go in and cherry pick a blue sky idea
from community, even if I have to spend three hours reading
to get one good idea, it's worth it, man.
But anyway, so the idea from Joel was,
hey, experts exchange, it's got great data,
but the experience is hideous, right?
It's, it's trying to trick you.
It feels like you use car sales, but it's just bad.
So I was like, oh, that's awesome.
It feeds into community.
It feeds into like, you know,
we can make a creative commons.
So I think the core is to have a really good idea
that you feel very strongly about in the beginning,
that like there's a wrong in the world that we will,
an injustice that we will write
through the process of building this thing.
For discourse, it was like, look,
there's no good software for communities
to just hang out and like do stuff, right?
Like whether it's problem solving, startup, whatever.
Forms are such a great building block of online community
and they're hideous.
They were so bad, right?
It was embarrassing.
Like I literally was embarrassed to be associated
with this software, right?
I was like, we have to have software that you can be proud of.
It's like, this is competitive with Reddit.
This is competitive with Twitter.
This is competitive with Facebook, right?
I would be proud to have the software on my site.
So that was the genesis of discourse,
was feeling very strongly about their needs to be
a good solution for communities.
So that's step one, genesis funny idea
you feel super strongly about, right?
And then people galvanize around the idea.
Like Joel was already super excited about the idea.
I was excited about the idea.
So with the forum software, I was posting on Twitter,
I had researched, as part of my research,
I start researching the problem, right?
And I found a game called forum wars,
which was a parody of forum.
It's still very, very funny of like forum behavior
a circle, like I would say 2003.
It's age some, right?
Like the behavior is a little different
in the air of Twitter, but it was awesome.
It was very funny and it was like a game,
it was like an RPG and it had a forum attached to it.
So it was like a game about forums with a forum attached.
It was like, this is awesome, right?
This is so cool.
And the founder of that company or that project,
it wasn't really a company,
contacted me, this guy Robin Ward from Toronto.
It's like, hey, you know, I saw you've been talking
about forums and like, I really love that problem space.
It's like, I'd still love to build really good forum software
because I don't think anything out there is any good.
And I was like, awesome.
At that point, I was like, we're starting a company
because like, I couldn't have wished for a better person
to walk through the door and say,
I'm excited about this too.
Same thing with Joel, right?
I mean, Joel is a legend in the industry, right?
So when he walked through and said,
I'm excited about this problem,
I was like, me too, man, we can do this, right?
So that to me is the most important step.
It's like having an idea you're super excited about
and another person, a co founder, right?
Cause again, you get that dual leadership, right?
Of like, am I making a bad decision?
Sometimes it's nice to have checks of like,
is this a good idea?
I don't know, right?
So those are the crucial seeds,
but then starting to build stuff,
whether it's you programming or somebody else.
There is prototyping.
So there's tons of research.
There's tons of research, like what's out there that failed?
Cause a lot of people look at it with successes.
Oh, look at how successful X is.
Everybody looks at the successes.
Those are boring.
Show me the failures.
Cause that is what's interesting.
That's where people were experimenting.
That's where people were pushing,
but they failed, but they probably failed for reasons
that weren't directly about the quality of their idea, right?
So look at all the failures.
Don't just look what everybody looks at,
which is like, oh gosh,
look at all these successful people.
Look at the failures.
Look at the things that didn't work.
Research the entire field.
And so that's the research that I was doing
that led me to Robin, right?
Was that.
And then when we, for example,
when we did Stack Overflow,
we're like, okay, well I really like elements
of voting and digging Reddit.
I like the Wikipedia, everything's up to date.
Nothing is like an old tombstone
that like has horrible out of date information.
We know that works.
Wikipedia is an amazing resource.
Blogging the idea of ownership is so powerful, right?
Like, oh, I Joe wrote this
and look how good Joe's answer is, right?
Like all these concepts were rolling together,
researching all the things that were out there
that were working and why they were working
and trying to like fold them into that.
Again, that Frankenstein's monster
of what Stack Overflow is.
And by the way, that wasn't a free decision
because there's still a ton of tension
in the Stack Overflow system.
There's reasons people complain about Stack Overflow
because it's so strict, right?
Why is it so strict?
Why are you guys always closing my questions?
It's because there's so much tension
that we built into the system
around like trying to get good, good results
out of the system and, you know, it's not a free.
That stuff doesn't come for free, right?
It's not like we all have perfect answers
and nobody will have to get their feelings heard
or nobody will have to get downvoted.
Like it doesn't work that way, right?
Like, so this is an interesting point
and a small tangent.
Yeah, you're right about anxiety.
So I've posted a lot of questions
and written answers on Stack Overflow.
On the question side, usually go to something very specific
to something I'm working on.
This is something you talk about
that really the goal of Stack Overflow
isn't about, is to write a question not,
that's not about you, it's about the question
that will help the community in the future.
Right, that's a tough sell, right?
Because people are like, well, you know,
I don't really care about the community.
What I care about is my problem.
My problem.
And that's fair, right?
It's sort of that, again, that tension,
that balancing act.
I want to help you,
but we also want to help everybody that comes behind you.
Right, the long line of people are gonna come up and say,
oh, I kind of have that problem too, right?
And if nobody's ever gonna come up
and say I have this problem too,
then that question shouldn't exist on Stack Overflow
because the question is too specific.
And even that's tension, right?
How do you judge that?
How do you know that nobody's ever gonna have
this particular question again?
So there's a lot of tension in the system.
Do you think that anxiety of asking the question,
the anxiety of answering that tension
is inherent to programmers,
is inherent to this kind of process?
Or can it be improved?
Can it be happy land where that tension
is not quite so harsh?
I don't think Stack Overflow
can totally change the way it works.
One thing they are working on, finally,
is the ask page had not changed since 2011.
I'm still kind of bitter about this
because I feel like you have a Q&A system
and one of the core pages in a Q&A system.
Well, first of all, the question,
all the answers and also the ask page,
particularly when you're a new user
or someone trying to ask a question,
that's the point at which you need the most help.
And we just didn't adapt with the times.
But the good news is they're working on this
from what I understand,
and it's gonna be a more wizard based format.
And you could envision a world
where as part of this wizard based program,
when you're asking a question,
so okay, come up with a good title.
What are good words to put in the title?
One word that's not good to put in the title
is problem, for example.
I have a problem.
Oh, you have a problem.
Okay, a problem, that's great, right?
Like, you need specifics, right?
Like, so it's trying to help you
make a good question title, for example.
That step will be broken out, all that stuff.
But one of those steps in that wizard of asking
could say, hey, I'm a little nervous.
You know, I've never done this before.
Can you put me in a queue for like special mentoring, right?
You could opt in to a special mentor.
I think that would be fantastic.
Like, I don't have any objection to that at all
in terms of being an opt in system.
Cause there are people that are like, you know,
I just wanna help them.
I wanna help a person no matter what.
I wanna go above and beyond.
I wanna spend like hours with this person.
It depends what their goals are, right?
It's a great idea.
Who am I to judge, right?
So that's fine.
It's not precluded from happening.
But there's a certain big city ethos
that we started with of like, look, we're of New York City.
You don't come to New York City and expect them to be,
oh, welcome to the city, Joe.
How's it going?
Come on in.
Let me show you around.
That's not how New York City works, right?
I mean, and you know, again, New York City
is a reputation for being rude,
which I actually don't think it is
having been there fairly recently.
It's not rude.
People are just like going about their business, right?
Like, look, I have things to do.
I'm busy, I'm a busy professional, as are you.
And since you're a busy professional,
certainly when you ask a question,
you're gonna ask the best possible question, right?
Because you're a busy professional
and you would not accept anything less
than a very well went in question
with a lot of detail about why you're doing it,
what you're doing, what you researched,
what you found, right?
Cause you're a professional like me, right?
And this rubs people sometimes the wrong way.
And I don't think it's wrong to say,
look, I don't want that experience.
I want just a more chill place for beginners.
And I still think Stack Overflow
is not, was never designed for beginners, right?
There's this misconception that, you know,
even Joel says sometimes, oh yes,
Stack Overflow for beginners.
And I think if you're a prodigy, it can be.
But that's not really representative, right?
Like, I think as a beginner,
you want a totally different set of tools.
You want like live screen sharing, live chat.
You want access to resources.
You want a playground, like a playground
you can experiment in and like test
and all the stuff that we just don't give people
because that was never really the audience
that we were designing Stack Overflow for.
That doesn't mean it's wrong.
And I think it would be awesome
if there was a site like that on the internet
or if Stack Overflow said,
hey, you know, we're going to start doing this.
That's fine too.
You know, I'm not there.
I'm not making those decisions.
But I do think the pressure or the tension
that you described is there for people to be, look,
I'm a little nervous
cause I know I got to do my best work, right?
The other one is something you talk about
which is also really interesting to me
is duplicate questions.
Or it's a really difficult problem that you highlight.
It's super hard.
Like you could take one little topic
and you could probably write 10, 20, 30 ways
of asking about that topic and there will be all different.
I don't know if there should be one page
that answers all of it.
Is there a way that Stack Overflow can help
disambiguate, like separate these duplicate questions
or connect them together?
Or is it a totally hopeless, difficult, impossible task?
I think it's a very, very hard computer science problem.
And partly cause people are very good
at using completely different words.
It always amazed me on Stack Overflow,
you'd have two questions that were functionally identical.
And one question had like zero words in common
with the other question.
Like, oh my God, from a computer science perspective,
how do you even begin to solve that?
And it happens all the time.
People are super good at this, right?
Accidentally at asking the same thing
in like 10, 20 different ways.
And the other complexities,
we want some of those duplicates to exist
because if there's five versions with different words,
have those five versions point
to the one centralized answer, right?
It's like, okay, this is duplicate, no worries.
Here's the answer that you wanted over here
on this, the prime example that we wanna have,
rather than having 10 copies of the question
and the answer.
Because if you have 10 copies of the question answer,
this also devalues the reputation system,
which programmers hate, as I previously mentioned.
You're getting reputation for an answer
that somebody else already gave.
It's like, well, it's an answer,
but somebody else already gave that answer.
So why are you getting reputation for the same answer
as the other guy who gave it four years ago?
People get offended by that, right?
So the reputation system itself adds tension to the system.
In that the people who have a lot of reputation
become very incentivized to enforce the reputation system.
And for the most part, this good.
I know it sounds weird, but for most parts like,
look, strict systems, I think to use Stack Overflow,
you have to have the idea that, okay,
strict systems ultimately work better.
And I do think in programming, you're familiar
with loose typing versus strict typing, right?
The idea that you can declare a variable,
not declare a variable, rather,
just start using a variable and, okay,
I see it's implicitly an integer, bam, awesome.
Duck equals five.
Well, duck is now an integer of five, right?
And you're like, cool, awesome, simpler, right?
Why would I want to worry about typing?
And for a long time, like in the Ruby community,
they're like, yeah, this is awesome.
Like you just do a bunch of unit testing,
which is testing your program's validity after the fact
to catch any bugs that strict typing of variables
would have caught.
And now you have this thing called TypeScript
from Microsoft, from the guy who built C Sharp Anders,
who's one of the greatest minds in software development,
right, like in terms of language design,
and says, no, no, no, we want to bolt on
a strict type system to JavaScript
because it makes things better.
And now everybody's like, oh my God,
we deployed TypeScript and found 50 lane bugs
that we didn't know about, right?
Like this is super common.
So I think there is a truth in programming
that strictness, it's not the goal.
We're not saying be super strict
because strictness is correct.
No, it's no, no, strictness produces better results.
That's what I'm saying, right?
So strict typing of variables,
I would say you almost universally have consensus now
is basically correct.
Should be that way in every language, right?
Duck equals five should generate an error
because no, you didn't declare,
you didn't tell me that duck was an integer, right?
That's a bug, right?
Or maybe you mistyped, you typed duck, right?
Instead of duck, right?
You never know, this happens all the time, right?
So with that in mind, I will say that the strictness
of the system is correct.
Now, that doesn't mean cruel, that doesn't mean mean,
that doesn't mean angry, it just means strict, okay?
So I think where there's misunderstanding
is in people get cranky, right?
Like another question you asked is like,
why are programmers kind of mean sometimes?
Well, who do programmers work with all day long?
So I have a theory that if you're at a job
and you work with assholes all day long,
what do you eventually become?
An asshole.
An asshole, and what is the computer
except the world's biggest asshole?
Because the computer has no time for your bullshit.
The computer, the minute you make a mistake,
everything is crashing down, right?
One semicolon has crashed space missions, right?
So that's normal.
So you begin to internalize that.
You begin to think, oh, my coworker, the computer,
is super strict and kind of a jerk about everything.
So that's kind of how I'm gonna be
because I work with this computer
and I have to exceed to its terms on everything.
So therefore, you start to absorb that
and you start to think, oh, well, being really strict
arbitrarily is really good.
An error code 56249 is a completely good error message
because that's what the computer gave me, right?
So you kind of forget to be a person at some level.
And you know how they say great detectives
internalize criminals and kind of arc criminals themselves
like this trope of the master detective is good
because you can think like the criminal.
Well, I do think that's true of programmers.
Really good programmers think like the computer
because that's their job.
But if you internalize it too much, you become the computer
and you kind of become a jerk to everybody
because that's what you've internalized.
You're almost not a jerk,
but you have no patience for lack of strictness,
as you said.
It's not out of a sense of meanness.
It's accidental,
but I do believe it's an occupational hazard
or being a programmer is you start to behave
like the computer.
You're very unforgiving, you're very terse,
you're very, oh, wrong, incorrect, move on.
It's like, well, can you help me?
Like what could I do to fix?
No, wrong, next question, right?
Like that's normal for the computer, right?
Just fail next, right?
Like, I don't know if you remember in Saturday Night Live,
like in the nineties, they had this character
who was an IT guy, the move guy, move.
Was that Jimmy Fallon?
No, no, who played him?
Okay, yeah, I remember move.
Right, he had no patience for him.
Might have been mad TV actually.
Oh, was it mad TV?
Might have been, might have been.
But anyway, that's always been the perception, right?
You start to behave like the computer.
It's like, oh, you're wrong out of the way, you know?
You've written so many blog posts about programming,
about programs, programming, programmers.
What do you think makes a good,
let's start with, what makes a good solo programmer?
Well, I don't think you should be a solo programmer.
I think to be a good solo programmer,
it's kind of like what I talked about, well, not on mic,
but one of the things, John Carmack,
one of the best points he makes in the book,
Masters of Doom, which is a fantastic book,
and anybody listening to this who hasn't read it,
please read it, it's such a great book,
is that at the time they were working on stuff
like Wolfenstein and Doom,
like they didn't have the resources that we have today.
They didn't have Stack Overflow,
they didn't have Wikipedia,
they didn't have like discourse forums,
they didn't have places to go
to get people to help them, right?
They had to work on their own,
and that's why it took a genius like Carmack to do this stuff,
because you had to be a genius
to invent from First Pensibles,
a lot of the stuff he was like,
the hacks he was coming up with were genius, right?
Genius level stuff, but you don't need
to be a genius anymore,
and that means not working by yourself.
You have to be good at researching stuff online,
you have to be good at asking questions,
really good questions that are really well researched,
which implies, oh, I went out and researched
for three hours before I wrote these questions,
like that's what you should be doing,
because that's what's gonna make you good, right?
To me, this is the big difference between programming
in like the 80s versus programming today,
is like you kind of had to be by yourself back then,
like where would you go for answers?
I remember in the early days
when I was learning Visual Basic for Windows,
like I would call the Microsoft Helpline on the phone
when I had like program,
because I was like, I don't know what to do.
So I would like go and call,
and they had these huge phone banks,
and like, can you imagine how alien that is now?
Like who would do that, right?
Like that's crazy.
So there was just nowhere else to go when you got stuck,
right?
Like I had the books that came with it,
I read those, studied those religiously.
I just saw a post from Steve Sinovsky that said,
this C++ version seven came with like 10,000 pages
of written material,
because where else were you gonna figure that stuff out?
You didn't go to the library?
I mean, you didn't have Wikipedia,
you didn't have Reddit,
you didn't have anywhere to go to answer these questions.
So you've talked about through the years,
basically not having an ego
and not thinking that you're the best programmer
in the world,
and so always kind of just looking to improve,
to become a better programmer than you were yesterday.
So how have you changed as a programmer
and as a thinker designer around programming
over the past 15 years,
really of being a public figure?
I would say the big insight that I had
is eventually as a programmer,
you have to kind of stop writing code to be effective,
which is kind of disturbing,
because you really love it.
But you realize like being effective at programming
in the general sense doesn't mean writing code.
And a lot of times you can be much more successful
by not writing code and writing code
in terms of just solving the problems you have,
essentially hiring people that are really good
and like setting them free
and like giving them basic direction, right?
Like on strategy and stuff,
because a lot of the problems you encounter
aren't necessarily solved to like really gnarly code,
they're solved by conceptual solutions,
which can then be turned into code,
but are you even solving the right problem?
I mean, so I would say for me,
the main insight I have is to succeed as a programmer,
you eventually kind of stop writing code.
That's gonna sound discouraging,
probably to people hearing, but I don't mean it that way.
What I mean is that you're coding in a higher level language.
Eventually like, okay,
so we're coding in assembly language, right?
That's the beginning, right?
You're hard coded to the architecture.
Then you have stuff like C,
where it's like, wow, we can abstract
across the architecture, you can write code.
I can then compile that code for ARM or whatever,
XA6 or whatever else is out there.
And then even higher level NAT, right?
Like you're looking at like Python, Ruby,
interpreted languages.
And then to me as a programmer, like, okay,
I wanna go even higher.
I wanna go higher than that.
How do I abstract higher than language?
It's like, well, you abstract in spoken language
and written language, right?
Like you're sort of inspiring people to get things done,
giving them guidance, like, what if we did this?
What if we did this?
You're writing in the highest level language that there is,
which is for me English, right?
Whatever your spoken language is.
So it's all about being effective, right?
And I think Patrick McKenzie,
patio 11 on Hacker News and Works at Stripe,
has a great post about this,
of how calling yourself a programmer
is a career limiting move at some level.
Once you get far enough from your career.
And I really believe that.
And again, I apologize, this is sound discouraging.
I don't mean it to be, but he's so right.
Because all the stuff that goes on around the code,
like the people, like that's another thing.
If you look at my early blog interviews, it was about,
wow, programming is about people more than it's about code,
which doesn't really make sense, right?
But it's about, can these people even get along together?
Can they understand each other?
Can you even explain to me what it is you're working on?
Are you solving the right problem?
People wear it, right? Another classic programming book,
which again, up there with code complete,
please read people wear.
It's that software is people, right?
People are the software first and foremost.
So a lot of the skills that I was working on
early in the blog were about
figuring out the people parts of programming,
which was the harder parts.
The hard part of programming,
once you get to certain skill level programming,
you can pretty much solve any reasonable problem
that's put in front of you.
You're not writing algorithms from scratch, right?
That just doesn't happen.
So any sort of reasonable problem
put in front of you, you're gonna be able to solve.
But what you can't solve is,
our manager is a total jerk.
You cannot solve that with code.
That is not a code solvable problem.
And yet that will cripple you way more than,
oh, we had to use this stupid framework I don't like,
or Sam keeps writing bad code that I hate,
or Dave is off there in the wilderness,
writing God knows what, right?
These are not your problems.
Your problem is your manager or a coworker
is so toxic to everybody else in your team
that nobody can get anything done
because everybody's so stressed out and freaked out, right?
These are the problems that you have to attack.
Absolutely.
And so as you go to these higher level abstractions
as you've developed as a programmer
to higher, higher level abstractions
and go into natural language,
you're also the guy who kind of preached,
building it, diving in and doing it,
and like learn by doing.
Yes.
Do you worry that as you get to higher,
higher level abstractions,
that you lose track of the lower level of just building
is like, do you worry about that?
Not maybe now, but 10 years from now, 20 years from now?
Well, no.
I mean, there is always that paranoia
and oh gosh, I don't feel it's valuable
since I'm not writing code.
But for me, when we started the discourse project,
it was Ruby, which I didn't really know Ruby.
I mean, as you pointed out,
and this is another valuable abstract from Stack Overflow,
you can be super proficient at, for example, C Sharp,
which I was working in,
that's what we built Stack Overflow
and then still is written in.
And then switched to Ruby and you're a newbie again, right?
But you have the framework.
I know what a for loop is.
I know what recursion is.
I know what a stack trace is, right?
Like I have all the fundamental concepts
to be a programmer, I just don't know Ruby.
So I'm still on a higher level.
I'm not like a beginner beginner, like you're saying.
I'm just like, I need to apply my programming concepts
I already know to Ruby.
Well, so there's a question that's really interesting.
So looking at Ruby, how do you go about learning enough
that your intuition can be applied?
Well, that's the thing, that's what I was trying to get to
is like what I realized,
particularly when I started with just me and Robin,
I realized if I bother Robin,
I am now costing us productivity, right?
Every time I go to Robin, rather than building
the our first alpha version of discourse,
he's now answering my stupid questions about Ruby.
Is that a good use of his time?
Is that a good use of my time?
The answer to both of those was resoundingly no, right?
Like we were getting to an alpha
and it was pretty much like, okay,
we'll hire more programmers, right?
Like we eventually hired Neil
and then eventually Sam, who came in as a cofounder.
Actually it was Sam first, then Neil later.
But the answer to the problem
is just hire other competent programmers.
It's not like teach, now I shall pull myself up
by my bootstraps and learn Ruby.
But at some point writing code becomes a liability to you
in terms of getting things done.
There's so many other things that go on in the project,
like building the prototype.
Like you mentioned like, well, how do you,
if you're not writing code,
how does everybody keep focus on like what are we building?
Well, first basic mockups and research, right?
Like what do we even want to build?
There's a little bit of that that goes on.
But then very quickly you get to the prototype stage.
Like build a prototype,
let's iterate on the prototype really, really rapidly.
And that's what we do with discourse.
And that's what we demoed to get our seed funding
for discourse was the alpha version of discourse
that we had running and ready to go.
And it was very, it was bad.
I mean, it was, I'll just tell you it was bad.
I have, we have screenshots of it
and I'm just like embarrassed to look at it now.
But it was the prototype.
We were figuring out like what's working,
what's not working.
Cause there's such a broad gap between,
between the way you think things will work in your mind
or even on paper and the way they work
once you sit and live in the software,
like actually spend time living and breathing on software
so different.
So my philosophy is get to a prototype
and then what you're really optimizing
for a speed of iteration,
like how you can turn the crank,
how quickly can we iterate?
That's the absolutely critical metric
of any software project.
And I had a tweet recently that people liked
and I totally, this is so fundamental to what I do,
is like, if you want to measure the core competency
of any software tech company,
it's the speed at which somebody can say,
hey, we really need this word
and the product changed to this word, right?
Because it will be more clear to the users,
like what, like instead of respond, it's reply or something.
But there's some, from the conception of that idea
to how quickly that single word can be changed
in your software and rolled out to users,
that is your life cycle.
That's your health, your, your heartbeat.
If your heartbeat is like super slow,
you're basically dead.
No, seriously, like if it takes two weeks
or even a month to get that single word changed,
that was like, oh my God, this is a great idea.
That word is so much clearer.
I'm talking about like a super,
like everybody's on board for this change.
It's not like let's just change a word because we're bored.
It's like, this is an awesome change.
And then it takes a month to roll out.
It's like, well, you're dead.
Like you can't iterate.
You can't, how you can do anything, right?
Like, so anyway, about the heartbeat,
it's like get the prototype and then iterate on it.
That's what I view as like the central tenet
of some modern software development.
That's fascinating that you put it that way.
It's actually, so I work in, I build autonomous vehicles
and when you look at what maybe compare Tesla
to most other automakers, the psych,
the whatever the heartbeat for Tesla is literally days.
Now, in terms of they can over the air
deploy software updates to all their vehicles,
which is markedly different than every other automaker,
which takes years to update a piece of software.
And so, and that's reflected in everything
that's the final product that's reflected
in really how slowly they adapt to the times.
And to be clear, I'm not saying being a hummingbird
is the goal either.
It's like, you don't want a heartbeat that's like so fast.
It's like, you're just freaking out.
But like, it is a measure of health.
You should have a healthy heartbeat.
It's up to, for people listening to decide what that means,
but it has to be healthy.
It has to be reasonable
because otherwise you're just gonna be frustrated
because like that's how you build software.
You make mistakes, you roll it out, you live with it.
You see what it feels like and say,
oh God, that was a terrible idea.
Oh my gosh, this could be even better if we did why, right?
You turn the crank and then the more you do that,
the faster you get ahead of your competitors ultimately
because it's rate of change, right?
Delta V, right?
How fast are you moving?
Well, within a year, you're gonna be miles away
by the time they catch up with you, right?
Like that's the way it works.
And plus users, like as a software developer,
I love software that's constantly changing
because I don't understand people who get super pissed off
when like, oh, they changed the software on me.
How dare they?
Yes, change the software, change it all the time, man.
That's what makes this stuff great
is that it can be changed so rapidly
and become something that is greater than it is now.
Now granted, there's some changes that suck, I admit.
I've seen it many times.
But in general, it's like, that's what makes software cool,
right, is that it is so malleable.
Like fighting that is like weird to me
because it's like, well, you're fighting
the essence of the thing that you're building.
Like that doesn't make sense.
You wanna really embrace that, not to be a hummingbird,
but like embrace it to a healthy cycle of your heartbeat, right?
So you talk about that people really don't change.
It's true, that's why probably a lot of the stuff
you write about in your blog probably will remain true.
Well, there's a flip side of the coin, people don't change.
So investing and understanding people
is like learning Unix in 1970
because nothing has changed, right?
Like all those things you've learned about people
will still be valid 34 years from now.
Whereas if you learn the latest JavaScript framework,
that's gonna be good for like two years, right?
Exactly.
So, but if you look at the future of programming,
so there's a people component,
but there's also the technology itself.
Do you, what do you see as the future of programming?
Will it change significantly?
Or as far as you can tell,
people are ultimately programming and so it will not,
it's not something that you foresee changing
in any fundamental way.
Well, you gotta go look back on sort of the basics of programming.
And one of the things that always shocked me
is like source control.
Like I didn't learn anything about source control.
And I graduated from college in 1992,
but I remember hearing from people
like as late as like 1998, 1999,
like even maybe today they're not learning source control.
And to me it's like, well, how can you not learn source control?
That is so fundamental to working with other programmers,
working in a way that you don't lose your work.
Like just basic soft, the bed,
literal bedrock software development is source control.
Now you compare today like GitHub, right?
Like Microsoft brought GitHub, which I think was
an incredibly smart acquisition move on their part.
Now they have anybody who wants like reasonable source controls
and go sign up on GitHub, it's all set up for you, right?
There's tons of walkthroughs, tons of tutorials.
So from the concept of like has programming advanced
from say 1999, it's like, well, hell, we have GitHub.
I mean, my God, yes, right?
Like it's massively advanced over what it was.
Now as to whether programming is significantly different,
I'm gonna say no, but I think the baseline of like
what we view as like fundamentals
will continue to go up and actually get better.
Like source control, for example,
that's one of the fundamentals that has gotten,
I mean, hundreds of orders of magnitude better
than it was 10, 20 years ago, right?
So those are the fundamentals.
Let me introduce two things that maybe you can comment on.
So one is mobile phones.
So that could fundamentally transform what programming is,
or maybe not, maybe you can comment on that.
And the other one is artificial intelligence.
Which promises to in some ways
to do some of the programming for you
is one way to think about it.
So it's really what a programmer is,
is using the intelligence that's inside your skull
to do something useful.
The hope with artificial intelligence is that
it does some of the useful parts for you
the way you don't have to think about it.
So do you see smartphones,
the fact that everybody has one
and they're getting more and more powerful
as potentially changing programming?
And do you see AI as potentially changing programming?
Oh, okay, so that's good.
So smartphones have definitely changed.
I mean, since, you know, I guess 2010
is when they really started getting super popular.
I mean, in the last eight years,
the world has literally changed, right?
Like everybody carries a computer around and that's normal.
I mean, that is such a huge change in society.
I think we're still dealing
with a lot of the positive negative ramifications of that,
right?
Like everybody's connected all the time.
Everybody's on the computer all the time.
That was my dream world as a geek, right?
But it's like, be careful what you ask for, right?
Like, wow, now everybody has a computer
and it's not quite the utopia that we thought it would be,
right?
Computers can be used for a lot of stuff
that's not necessarily great.
So to me, that's the central focus of the smartphone
is just that it puts a computer in front of everyone,
granted a small touch screen,
smallish touch screen computer.
But as for programming, like, I don't know,
I don't think that I've kind of over time come to subscribe
to the UNIX view of the world when it comes to programming.
It's like, you wanna teach these basic command line things
and that is just what programming is gonna be for,
I think a long, long time.
I don't think there's any magical, like visual programming
that's gonna happen.
I just, I don't know.
I've over time have become a believer
in that UNIX philosophy of just, you know,
they kind of had a right with UNIX.
That's gonna be the way it is for a long, long time.
And we'll continue to, like I said, raise the baseline.
The tools will get better, it'll get simpler,
but it's still fundamentally gonna be command line tools,
you know, fancy IDEs.
That's kind of it for the foreseeable future.
I'm not seeing any visual programming stuff on the horizon.
Cause you kind of think like,
what do you do on a smartphone
that will be directly analogous to programming?
Like I'm trying to think, right?
Like, and there's really not much.
So not necessarily analogous to programming,
but the kind of things that,
the kind of programs you need to write
might need to be very different.
Yeah.
And the kind of languages, I mean,
but I probably also subscribed to the same,
just because everything in this world
might be written in JavaScript.
Oh yeah, that's definitely, that's already happening.
I mean, discourse is a bet on,
discourse is itself, JavaScript is another bet
on that side of the table.
And I still try and believe in that.
So I would say smartphones have mostly a cultural shift,
more than a programming shift.
Now your other question was about artificial intelligence
and like, sort of advice is predicting
what you're gonna do.
And I do think there's some strength to that.
I think artificial intelligence
kind of overselling it in terms of what it's doing.
It's more like, people are predictable, right?
People do the same things.
Like, let me give you an example.
One check we put into a discourse
that's in a lot of big commercial websites is,
say you log in from New York City now,
and then an hour later, you log in from San Francisco.
It's like, well, hmm, that's interesting.
How did you get from New York to San Francisco in one hour?
So at that point, you're like, okay,
this is a suspicious login at that point.
So we would alert you.
It's like, okay, but that's not AI, right?
That's just heuristic of like,
how did you in one hour get 2,000 miles, right?
That doesn't mean, maybe you're on a VPN,
there's other ways to happen.
But that's just a basic prediction based on the idea
that people pretty much don't move around that much.
Like they may travel occasionally,
but like nobody, I mean, unless you're a traveling salesman
that's literally traveling the world every day,
like there's so much repetition and predictability
in terms of things you're going to do.
And I think good software anticipates your needs.
Like for example, Google, I think it's called Google Now
or whatever that Google thing is that predicts your commute
and predicts based on your phone location,
like where are you every day?
Well, that's probably where you work, that kind of stuff.
I do think computers can get a lot better at that,
but I hesitate to call it like full blown AI.
It's just computers getting better at like,
first of all, they have a ton of data
because everybody has a smartphone.
Now, all of a sudden we have all this data
that we didn't have before about location,
about like, you know, communication
and feeding that into some basic heuristics
and maybe some fancy algorithms
that turn it into predictions of anticipating your needs
like a friend would, right?
Like, oh, hey, I see your home,
would you like some dinner, right?
Like, let's go get some food
because that's usually what we do this time of day, right?
In the context of actually the active programming,
do you see IDEs improving
and making the life of programming is better?
I do think that is possible
because there's a lot of repetition in programming, right?
Oh, you know, Clippy would be the bad example of,
oh, I see, it looks like you're writing a for loop,
but there are patterns in code, right?
Like, and actually libraries are kind of like that, right?
Like, rather than go, you know,
code up your own HTTP request library,
it's like, well, you'd use one of the existing ones
that we have that's already a trouble shot, right?
Like, it's not AI per se,
it's just, you know, building better Lego bricks,
bigger Lego bricks that have more functionality in them
so people don't have to worry
about the low level stuff as much anymore.
Like WordPress, for example, to me is like,
a tool for somebody who isn't a programmer to do something,
I mean, you can turn WordPress into anything.
It's kind of crazy actually through plugins, right?
And that's not programming per se,
it's just Lego bricks stacking WordPress elements, right?
And a little bit of configuration glue.
So I would say maybe in a broader sense,
what I'm seeing like, there'll be more gluing
and less like actual programming.
And that's a good thing, right?
Cause most of the stuff you need is kind of out there already.
You said 1970s, Unix,
do you see PHP and these kind of old remnants of, of the early birth
of programming remaining with us for a long time?
Like you said, Unix in itself, do you see ultimately,
you know, this stuff's just being there out of momentum?
I kind of do.
I mean, I was a big believer in Windows early on
and I was a big, you know, I was like,
Unix, what a waste of time.
But over time, I've completely flipped on that
where I was like, okay, the Unix guys were right
and pretty much Microsoft and Windows were kind of wrong,
at least on the server side.
And on the desktop, right, you need a GUI,
you need a lot of stuff.
And you have the two philosophies,
like Apple built on Unix, effectively Darwin.
And on the desktop, it's a slightly different story,
but on the server side where you're going to be programming.
Now it's a question of where the programming is going to be.
There's going to be a lot more like client side programming
cause technically discourse is client side programming.
The way you get discourse,
we deliver a big ball of JavaScript,
which is then executed locally.
So we're really using a lot more local computing power.
We'll still retrieve the data.
Obviously, we have to display the posts
on the screen and so forth,
but in terms of like sorting and a lot of the basic stuff,
we're using the host processor.
But to the extent that a lot of programming
is still going to be server side,
I would say, yeah, the Unix philosophy definitely won.
And there'll be different veneers over the Unix,
but it's still, if you peel away one or two layers,
it's going to be Unix for a long, I think, Unix one,
I mean, so definitively.
It's interesting to hear you say that
because you've done so much excellent work
on the Microsoft side in terms of backend development.
Cool.
So what's the future hold for Jeff Atwood?
I mean, the discourse,
continuing the discourse in trying to improve
conversation on the web?
Well, discourse is what I believe is a,
and originally I called a five year project,
but then really quickly revised that to a 10 year project.
So we started in early 2013,
that's when we launched the first version.
So we're still, you know, five years in.
This is the part where it starts getting good,
like we have a good product on discourse.
There's any project you built in software,
it takes three years to build what you wanted to build anyway.
Like V1 is going to be terrible, which it was,
but you ship it anyway,
because that's how you get better at stuff.
It's about turning the crank.
It's not about V1 being perfect,
because that's ridiculous.
It's about V1, then let's get really good at V1.1,
1.2, 1.3, like how fast can we iterate?
And I think we're iterating like crazy on discourse,
the point that like it's a really good product now,
we have serious momentum.
And my original vision was,
I want to be the WordPress of discussion,
meaning if someone came to you and said,
I want to start a blog,
although the very question is kind of archaic now,
it's like who actually blogs anymore.
But I wanted the answer to that to be,
it would be WordPress normally,
because that's the obvious choice for blogging most of the time.
But if someone said, hey, I want to,
I need a group of people to get together and do something,
the answer should be discourse, right?
That should be the default answer for people.
Cause it's open source, it's free,
doesn't cost you anything, you control it, you can run it.
Your minimum server cost for discourse
is five bucks a month at this point.
They actually got the VPS prices down,
it used to be $10 a month for one gigabyte of RAM,
which we are dependent,
we have a kind of heavy stack,
like there's a lot of stuff in discourse.
You need Postgres, you need Redis,
you need Ruby on Rails,
you need a sidekick for scheduling.
It's not a trivial amount of stuff,
cause we were architected for like,
look, we're building for the next 10 years.
I don't care about shared PHP hosting,
that's not my model.
My idea is like, hey, you know,
eventually this is going to be very cheap for everybody.
And I want to build it right,
using again, you know,
higher, bigger building block levels, right?
That have more requirements.
And there's a WordPress model of WordPress.org,
WordPress.com.
Is there a central hosting for discourse or no?
There is, we're not strictly segmenting
into the open source versus the commercial side.
We have a hosting business,
that's how discourse makes money,
as we host discourse instances,
and we have really close relationship
with our customers of the symbiosis
of them giving us feedback on the product.
We definitely weight feedback from customers,
a lot heavier than feedback from somebody
who just wanders by and gives feedback.
But that's where we make all our money,
but we don't have a strict division.
We encourage people to use discourse,
like the whole point is that it's free, right?
Anybody can set it up.
I don't want to be the only person that hosts discourse,
that's absolutely not the goal,
but it is a primary way for us to build a business.
And it's actually kind of a great business.
I mean, the business is going really, really well
in terms of hosting.
So I used to work at Google Research,
as a company that's basically funded on advertisements,
so it's Facebook, let me ask if you can comment on it.
I think advertisement at its best.
So you'd be extremely critical on what ads are,
but at its best, it's actually serving you,
in a sense, it's giving you,
it's connecting you to what you would want to explore.
So it's like related posts or related content,
it's the same, that's the best of advertisement.
So discourse is connecting people based on their interests.
It seems like a place where advertisement at its best
could actually serve the users.
Is that something that you're considering thinking about
as a way to bring, to financially support the platform?
That's interesting because I actually have
a contrarian view of advertising,
which I kind of agree with you.
I recently installed Ad Blocker reluctantly
because I don't like to do that,
but the performance of the ads, man,
they're so heavy now and it's just crazy.
So it's almost like a performance argument
more than I actually am pro ads,
and I have a contrarian view point, I agree with you.
If you do ads right, it's serving you stuff
you would be interested in anyway.
I don't mind that, that actually is kind of a good thing.
So plus, I think it's rational to want to support
the people that are doing this work,
through seeing their ads,
but that said, I run Ad Block now,
which I didn't want to do,
but I was convinced by all these articles,
like 30, 40 megabytes of stuff just to serve you ads.
Yeah, it feels like ads now are like the experts exchange
of whenever you start to stack overflows.
It's a little bit, it's overwhelming.
Oh, there's so many companies in Adtech
that what's embarrassing, like you can do that.
Have you seen those logo charts of like just the whole page?
It's like, you can't even see them, they're so small.
There's so many companies in the space,
but since you brought it up, I do want to point out
that very, very few Discord sites actually run
using an ad supported model.
It's not effective.
Like it's too diluted, it's too weird,
it doesn't pay well, and like users hate it.
So it's a combination of like users hate it,
it doesn't actually work that well in practice.
Like in theory, yes, I agree with you.
Clean, fast ads that were exactly the stuff
you would be interested in, awesome.
We're so far from that though, right?
Like, and Google does an okay job,
they do retargeting and stuff like that,
but in the real world,
Discord sites rarely can make ads work.
It just doesn't work for so many reasons.
But you know what does work is subscriptions,
Patreon, affiliate codes for like Amazon,
of like just, oh, here's a cool YoYo click,
and then you click and go to Amazon,
they get a small percentage of that,
which is fair, I think.
I mean, because you saw the YoYo on that site,
and you click through and you bought it, right?
That's fair for them to get 5% of that
or 2% of that, whatever it is.
Those things definitely work.
In fact, a site that I used to participate on a lot,
I helped the owner.
One of the things, I got them switched to Discord,
I basically paid them to switch to Discord,
because I was like, look, you guys gotta switch,
I can't come here anymore on this terrible software.
But I was like, look, and on top of that,
like you're serving people ads that they hate,
like you should just go full on Patreon,
because he had a little bit of Patreon,
go full on Patreon, do the Amazon affiliates thing
for any Amazon links that get posted,
and just do that, and just triple down on that stuff.
And that's worked really well for them,
and this creator in particular.
So that stuff works, but traditional ads,
I mean, definitely not working, at least on Discord.
So last question, you've created the code keyboard.
I've programmed most of my adult life
in a Kinesis keyboard.
I have one upstairs now.
Can you describe what a mechanical keyboard is,
and why is it something that makes you happy?
Well, you know, this is another fetish item, really.
Like, it's not required.
You can do programming on any kind of keyboard, right?
Even like an onscreen keyboard, oh God,
that's terrifying, right?
But you could, I mean, if you look back at the early days
of computing, there were chiclet keyboards,
which are, I mean, those are awful, right?
But what's a chiclet keyboard?
Oh God, okay, well, it's just like
thin rubber membranes.
Oh, the rubber ones, oh no.
Super bad, right?
Yeah.
So it's a fetish item.
All that really says is, look,
I care really about keyboards,
because the keyboard is the primary method
of communication with the computer, right?
So it's just like having a nice mic for this podcast.
You want a nice keyboard, right?
Because it has very tactile feel.
I can tell exactly when I press the key.
I get that little click, so oh, and it feels good.
And it's also kind of a fetish item.
It's like, wow, I care enough about programming
that I care about the tool, the primary tool,
that I use to communicate with the computer
and make sure it's as good as it feels good to use for me.
And like, I can be very productive with it.
So to be honest, it's a little bit of a fetish item,
but a good one.
It indicates that you're serious,
it indicates you're interested.
It indicates that you care about the fundamentals,
because you know what makes you a good programmer?
Being able to type really fast, right?
Like, this is true, right?
So a core skill is just being able to type fast enough
to get your ideas out of your head into the code base.
So just practicing your typing can make you a better programmer.
It is also something that makes you,
well, makes you enjoy typing, correct?
The actual act, something about the process,
like I play piano.
It's tactile.
There's a tactile feel that ultimately feeds the passion,
makes you happy.
Right, no, totally, that's it.
I mean, and it's funny,
because artisanal keyboards have exploded,
like Mastrop has gone ballistic with this stuff.
There's probably like 500 keyboard projects on Mastrop alone.
And there's some other guy I follow on Twitter.
I used to write for this, the site, the tech report,
way back in the day.
And he's like, every week he's just posting like,
what I call keyboard porn of like, just cool keyboards.
Oh my God, those look really cool, right?
Like, that's like, how many keyboards this guy have, right?
It's got like me with yoyos.
How many yoyos do you have?
How many do you need?
Well, technically one, but I like a lot.
I don't know why.
So same thing with keyboards.
So yeah, they're awesome.
Like I highly recommend anybody who doesn't have a mechanical
to research it, look into it,
and see what you like.
And you know, it's ultimately a fetish item,
but I think these sort of items,
these religious artifacts that we have
are part of what make us human.
Like that part's important, right?
It's kind of what makes life worth living.
Yeah, it's not necessary in the strictest sense,
but ain't nothing necessary if you think about it, right?
Like, so yeah, why not?
So sure.
Jeff, thank you so much for talking today.
Yeah, you're welcome.
Thanks for having me.