Transcript for Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror

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 like on your own almost although you don't nobody really works alone in programming anymore. But I will say there's there's an aspect of sort of hiding yourself away and just sort of beating on a problem till you solve it like root force basically to me is what a lot of programming is is like the computer so fast right you can do things that would take forever for human but you just do them like so many times and so often that you get the answer right.

Well, data is fun too. Like there's this thing called the 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 unsfisticated program 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 like 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 and say, okay, I don't know what's gonna 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 in the money haul problem, which is not intuitive and it freaks people out all the time, right? But you can solve it with data. If you write a program that does the money haul, You know, game and then never switch as then always which is just compare you would immediately see that you don't have to be smart right you don't 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 right

Well, to be honest, like, I don't really write a lot of code anymore. Like, what I do at this course is like, managery stuff, which I always kind of despised, right? Like, as a programmer, you think of managers as people who don't really do anything themselves. But the weird thing about code is, like, you realize that, like, language is code, like, the ability to direct other people lets you get more stuff than you, done than you could by yourself anyway.

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 kids, because you realize that your kids are watching you like 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, right? 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. No way that other people really aren't going to be. So, you know, that's one of the insights is, you know, you gotta be really diligent about thinking like am I behaving in a way that represents how I want other people to behave, right? Like leading through example. There's a lot of examples of leaders that really messed this up, right? Like they make decisions that are like, wow, that's why would, you know, it's a bad example for other people. So I think leading by example is one. The other one I believe is working really hard. I don't mean like working exhaustively, but like showing a real passion for the problem. Like, you know, not necessarily your solution to the problem, but the problem itself is just one that you really believe in. Like, with this course, 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 break down into the howling of wolves, right? Like, how do you deal with trolling? Not like technical problems. How do people to post paragraphs? How do people use bold? How do people to use complete sentences, although those are problems as well? But like, how do I get people to get along with each other, right? Like, and then solve whatever problem is they set up to solve or, you know, reach some consensus on discussion or just like not hurt each other, even, right? Like, maybe it's a discussion that doesn't really matter, but there are people like yelling at each other, right? And why, right? That's not the purpose of this kind of communication. So I would say, you know, leadership is about, you know, setting an example, you know, 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.

There's two aspects that one is like processing feedback that you're getting. So How do you get feedback? Well, right. Are you getting feedback, right? Like, so one way we do it, for example, at this course, we have three co-founders and we periodically talk about decisions before we make them. So it's not like one person can make a mistake or like, wow, that's, you know, there can be misunderstandings. So it's part of like 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, like if you have a community that's run by one person that one person makes all decisions, that person's gonna have a bad day. Something can happen to that person, you know, something, you know, there's a lot of variables. So like, first, when you think about leadership, have multiple people doing leadership and have them talk amongst each other. So they'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. Like 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 and why wouldn't you, right? Like do you want people to despise you? I mean, that's just weird, right? So you have that little voice that's sort of the angel in devil on your shoulder sort of talking to you about like 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.

I think you have to walk people through your decision-making. This is where blogging is really important in communication. It's so important. Again, code language is just another kind of code. Here is the program by which I arrived at the conclusion that I'm going to reach. It's one thing to say, this is a decision. It's final deal with it. That's not usually satisfying people. But if you say, look, we've been thinking about 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 is the best option. People will be like, oh, OK. Maybe I don't totally agree with you. But I can't 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. 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? Like, 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 this problem.

Well, those are tied together to my mind. Let's say hardware compassion. For me, I just really love the problem discourse to setting up to solve because in a way, there's a vision of the world where it all evolves into Facebook basically owning everything in every aspect of human communication. This has always been kind of a scary world for me. First, because I don't, 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?

Kind of both really, right? And the idea with this course, 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 like 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, and WhatsApp, and buying Instagram were incredibly smart decisions. And they also do this thing out 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.

Well, let me start from the very being. So Stack Overflow is very structured, Wikisau 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 programming forums and other things. But we could really realize we were doing Q&A, which is very narrow subset of human communication, right?

Not really, we would be Q&A. Well, we didn't know. We had an idea of like, OK, 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 when people don't remember the thing that you're 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 read it like voting. We're very important re-ordering answers based on votes wiki style stuff 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, 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 Frankensteinining 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 question? Is it clarifying question or could it be an alternative answer to the same question? Because there's usually more than one way to do it in programming. There's like, say, five to ten ways. And one of the patterns we got into early on was Stack Overflow was there are questions where there would be like hundreds of answers. We're like, Wow, how can there be a programming question with 500, 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 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 because 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 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 just like, 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 an accidental learning. It was more intentional learning where you're like, okay, I have a problem. And I want to 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 gives me the, gets me to my answer, right? So kind of a directed learning. So we had a backfill of 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 in our route. My latest blog entry, what to stack overflow want to be and want to be when it goes out, celebrating the 10 year anniversary. Yeah, so 10 years, and the system has trended towards trickness. 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 up votes 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 person. So you begin to resent that. You're like, well, that's not fair. And it isn't. That's some level they're correct. I mean, I empathize because like, it's not correct to get reputation for that versus here's a really gnarly regular expression problem. And here's a really, you know, clever, insightful, you know, detail and answer laying out, oh, here's why you're seeing the behavior that you're seeing here. Let me teach you some things about how to avoid that in the future. That's, that's great. Like, 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?

Well, part of it is based on the realization. The 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 tone of of knowledge that defines like whatever it is. You can refer to that book and I'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. 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 you get enough support within the network, we launch the Q&A site, so some of the ones we launched were poker and LEGO and they did horribly, right? Because I mean, there might still be their 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, you know, what's the rule here in poker? It's like, well, you know, what kind of cigars do we like to smoke while playing poker? Or, you know, what's a cool set of cards to use when playing poker? Or, you know, what's some strategies? Like, say I have this hand come up with some strategies I could use. It's more of a discussion around like, what's happening? Like with Lego, you know, same thing like, here's this cool Lego set I found. Look how awesome this is. And like, yeah, that's freaking awesome, right? It's not a question. There's all these social components, the discussions that don't fit in all. We literally have to just allow 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. You have a real demonstrated problem that's sort of blocking you. Nobody's blocked by what should I do when I have a straight flush. It's not a blocking problem in the world. It's just an opportunity to hang out and discuss. Discourse was a way to address that and say, look, discussion forum software had was very very bad and when I came out of Stack Overflow in late early 2013, early early 2012. It was still very very bad. I've 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 want to, you know, I have this startup. Here's my idea. And the first thing I would say of them is like, well, first, why are you asking me, like, I don't really know your field, right? Then it's just here, 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 say, oh, great idea, like, how do I do that? And then that's what 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?

Which is extremely really wanted to run that actually. They pinged us about I don't think we got it, but I really would like to got that one.

I think there's a lot of power in connecting people that love this 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 eight 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 the problem. I love the style of the founder. I just love the design ethic. And there's a lot to like about Tesla. I don't 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 something 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 yo-yo's, right, like I'm into the yo-yo communities. And there's these interest communities are just really fascinating to me. And I feel more connected to the yo-yo communities than I do to you know friends that I don't see that often right like to me that 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 I 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 the lynch pen of which forums and communities are built on that I personally love like I I Like I said, leadership is about passion, right? Being passionate about stuff is, 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 said someone described 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'll get into something and just be super into that for a couple years or whatever. I 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 and a bunch of things, but being really deep on a few things that I'm interested in. So forums kind of unlock that, right? You know, you don't want to world where everything belongs to Facebook, at least. I don't. I want to 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 and Noble every Thursday, Barnes and Noble says, get out of here. You guys don't buy enough books. Well, You know, you're kind of, oh, it's right. Barnes and Noble owns you, right? Like you can get. 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, it's like hanging out at Barnes and Noble every Thursday at 3pm, 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 solve 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 the convenience like, well, install this course, right? That's what we do. It is course. That's what I did to stack overflow. I spent a lot of time on meta stack 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 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 act on right now but there's 10% of it that's like gold it's like literally golden 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 meta discourse, right? Same exact principle of discourse. You know, we're getting ideas from the community. It's like, oh my god, I never thought of that. But that's fantastic, right? Like I love that relationship with the community.

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 everyone else is saying and an interesting way of saying 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 could talk about this all day every day right you just have to do the way that's interesting to other people And then as you're growing in 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 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 want to do something. And then I met Joel and said, hey, Joel, I want to do something. Take this ball of energy from my blog and do something. And all the people read my blog. So I was like, oh, cool. You're involving us. You're saying, look, you're part of this community. Let's build this thing together. They pick the name. We voted on the name for Stack Overflow on my blog. Like we came up and naming a super hard first slide. The hardest problem can be decided. It's coming with a good name for stuff, right? Yeah. 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 user 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 going to blog about it because I don't have enough people to work to talk to about it because at the time I worked a place where, you know, programming wasn't the core output of the company 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. 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 and what you're doing. 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've got to have some respect for that. You know, discipline around look, you know, we're trying to do a very specific thing here in 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 let's me go to want. That's programming, right? That's what Stack Overflow is.

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 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 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 going to screw this up. How can you build this in such a way that you're not going to screw it up later? How can you get that discipline around making sure it every step? I'm thinking through all the things that I could do wrong or the other people could do wrong. Because that is actually how you get to be a better programmer a lot of times. So that sidebar illustration, I loved it so much. I wrote Steve before I started my blog and said, hey, can I have permission to use this because I just really like the illustration? and Steve was kind enough to let me push to do that and just continue to give me permission. Really, that's awesome.

There's a lot of, there's going to 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 or 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 set it with with slightly better phrasing because you have to 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 everyone. Just read it over and over out loud. Make sure it sounds like something you would normally say.

So ideas. Right. So I think you got to 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 can 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 mind stuff is go back to old books because they bring up old stuff that's still super relevant. And I did that lot because I was reading classic programming books and a lot of the early blog books 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 that. You have to give you something interesting and talk about that's kind of evergreen, right? Like you don't have to go watch what 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?

Right so I one of the things I love is the choose your own adventure books, which I loved is a kid and I feel like they're early programmer books because they're they're all about if and statements right if this then this and they're also very very unforgiving like there's all these sites that map the the classic choose your own better books and how many outcomes are bad a lot of bad outcomes so part of the game is like oh I got a battle come go back one step go back one further steps like how did I get here right like 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 that. So this particular decision, the blogging got fairly popular. There's a lot of RSS readers that I discovered, and this guy contacted me at the blue from this bug tracking company. He's like, oh, I really want to buy your blog for like, I think it was around $100,000, I've been like 80,000, but it was a lot, right? And that's, you know, at the time, like, I 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, like, wow, that's a lot of money. But then I'm 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. 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, I do A, B, or C, you've 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 it's like well now 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 to some other logical conclusion right because imagine how different the world would have been and had I said yes and so the blog it's like they're probably wouldn't be stuck overflow Yeah, 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

Well, I can talk about it in context of a stack up flow in discourse. So if I think the key thing initially is there is a problem. Something the some state of the world that's unsatisfactory to the point that like you're upset about it, right? In that case, it was experts exchange. I mean, Joel's original idea, because I approach Joel as 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, because 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 fourth day, which is another reason why I like the community feedback, because they blues sky all day long for you, right? So when I can just go in and cherry pick a blues sky idea from community, even if I've just been 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 trying to trick you. It feels like you use car salesmen. 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 creative comments. 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 and 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 a 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 the software, right? We have to have software that can be proud of. It's like this is competitive with Reddit. This is competitive with Twitter. This is competitive with Facebook, right? Mm-hmm. I would be proud to have this software on my site. So that was the genesis of discourse, was feeling very strongly about there needs to be a good solution for communities. So that's step one, Dennis is funny, you feel super strongly about, right? And then people galvanize around the idea, like Joel was already super excited about that idea. I was excited about the idea. So with the forum software, I was posting on Twitter, I had research, 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, form behavior circle like I would say 2003. It's age some, right? Like the behavioral difference 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 was a really company. Contact me this guy Robin Ward from Toronto. It's 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 form software because I don't think anything else. There's any good and I was like awesome at that point. I was like we're starting the 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 walks through, I'm excited about this problem. It's like me too, man. We can do this, right? So that to me is the most important step. It's like having your super excited about and another person a co-founder, right? Because 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 there's tons of research. There's tons of research. What's out there that failed? Because a lot of people look at how successful it is. Everybody looks at the successes. Those are boring. Show me the failures. Because 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. 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, we did stack overflow, we're like, okay, well, I really like elements of voting and digging Reddit. I like the, the, the, We compete everything up to date. Nothing is like an old tombstone that has horrible out of date information. We know that works. We compete as an amazing resource. Blogging the idea of ownership is so powerful. I Joe wrote this and look how good Joe's answer is. all these concepts were going to be 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 trying to get 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 we'll have perfect answers and nobody will have to get their feelings heard or nobody will have to get downvoted like that. It doesn't work that way, right?

But 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. If we want to help you, but we also want to help everybody comes behind you, right? The long line of people are going to come to, oh, I kind of have that problem too, right? And if nobody's ever going to 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 going to have this particular question in? So there's a lot of tension in the system.

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 QA system and where are the core pages in a QA 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 question, that's the point at what 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 going to be a more wizard-based format and you could In vision a world where as part of this wizard based program, when you're asking questions, okay, come 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? You need specifics, right? 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 into 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. Because there are people that are like, you know, I just want to help them. I want to help a person no matter what. I want to go above and beyond. I want to spend like hours with this person. It depends what their goals are, right?

Oh my, a judge, right? So that's fine. It's not precluded from happening, but there's a certain big city ethos that we started with. Like, look, we're New York City. You don't come to New York City and expect them to be, oh, welcome to the city, Joe has 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's a reputation 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? Look, 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-written question with a lot of detail about why you're doing it, what you're doing, what you researched, what you found, right? Because you're a professional like me, right? And this rubbs people sometimes the wrong way. 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 sacrifice is not was never designed for beginners, right? There's this misconception that even Joel says something, oh yes, that's over 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 to play ground, like a playground, you can experiment in and like test. all the stuff that we just don't give people because that was never really the the audience that we were designing stack up before 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 up like hey you know we're going to start doing this that's fine to you know I'm not there I'm not making those decisions but I do think the pressure of the tension that you described is there for people to be look. I'm a little nervous because I know I got to do my best work right.

I think it's a very, very hard computer science problem, and partly because people are very good at using completely different words. It always amazed me on PsychoFlo, 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 in 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, so okay, this is duplicate. No worries. This here's the answer that you wanted over here on this this this you know the prime example that we want to 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 a reputation for an answer that somebody else already gave. It's like, well, it's an answer, but somebody else already gave an answer. So why are you getting a reputation for the same answer as the other guy 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 tech 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 declarer 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 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 programs validity after the fact to catch any bugs that that strict typing of variables would have caught. And now you have this thing called TypeScript, for Microsoft, from the guy who built C-Sharpanders, 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. I think there is a truth in programming that strictness, it's not the goal. We're not saying, be super strict as 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 you know you didn't declare, you didn't tell me the duck was an integer, right? That's a bug, right? Or maybe you missed time, you type deck, right? Instead of duck, right? You never know this happens all the time, right? So with that in mind, I will say that the strickness 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, and 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 in a job, and you work with assholes all day long. What do you eventually become? And asshole. And asshole. And what is the computer except the world's biggest asshole? Because the computer has no time for your bullshit. The computer, the many you make a mistake, everything else crashing down, right? One semicolon has crash space missions, right? So that's normal. So you begin to internalize that. You begin to think, oh, my co-worker, the computer, is super strict and kind of a jerk about everything. So that's kind of how I'm going to 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. And error of error code 5 6 2 4 9 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 internalized criminals and kind of arc criminals themselves like this trope of the master detectives 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 come kind of become a jerk to everybody because that's what you've internalized

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 tors, you're very out wrong, incorrect. Move on. It's like, well, can you help me? Like, what could I do to fix that wrong? Say, 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 90s, they had this character, it was an IT guy. Yeah.

What was mad TV? 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.

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 Mike, but one of the things, uh, John Carmack, one of the best points he makes in the book Masters of Doom, which is a fantastic book. Anybody listening 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 pencils a lot of stuff he was 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 this questions like that's what you should be doing because that's what's going to make you good right To me, this is a big difference between programming in like the 80s versus programming today is like you 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 a 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 it 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, study those religiously. I just saw a post from Steve Sinoffsky that said this C++ version 7 came with like 10,000 pages of written material. because we're else where you're going to figure that stuff out. Go to the library. When you didn't have Wikipedia, you didn't have, you know, read it. You know, I mean, where to go to answer these questions.

I would say the big insight that I had is eventually as a programmer and 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 to have is to succeed is a programmer. You eventually kind of stop writing code. That's going to sound discouraging, probably to people hearing, but I don't mean it that way. What I mean is that you're coding at 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, wow, we can abstract across the architecture through the right code. I can then compile that code for armor, you know, whatever, you know, X86 or whatever else is out there. And then even higher level net, right? Like you're looking like Python, Ruby, interpreted languages. And then to me as a programmer, like, okay, I want to go even higher. I want to 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. 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, 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 this stuff that goes on around the code, like the people, like that's another thing if you look at my early blogging is 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 where right another classic programming book which again up there with code complete please read people where 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 a harder part. The hard part of programming, when you get to certain skill of 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 from front of you, you're going to 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 solve a problem and yet that will cripple you way more than oh we had to use this stupid framework I don't like or or you know Sam keeps writing bad code that I hate or you know you know 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 like nobody can get anything done somebody's so stressed out and freaked out right these are the problems that you have to attack

Well, no, I mean, there is always that paranoia and oh gosh, I don't feel as valuable since I'm not writing code. But for me, like 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 observation stack overflow, you can be super proficient, for example, C sharp, which I was working in. That's what we built stack overflow and still is written in. And then switch to Ruby and you're a newbie again, right? Like I'm, but you have the framework. I know what a for loop is. I don't know what recursion is. I know, you know, what a, what a, what a, what a stack trace is, right? Like, I have all the fundamental concepts to be a program where 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 program concepts already know to Ruby.

That's what I was trying to get to. It's like, what I realized, really when I started with just me in 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 the both of those was, is how neatly know, right? Like we were getting to an alpha and I was a pretty much this, okay, we'll hire more programmers, right? Like we eventually hired Neil and then I'm actually Sam who came in as a co-founder. Actually, it was Sam first, then Neil later. But the answer to the problem is just hire other comedic programmers. It's not like teach, no, I have shelter. pull myself up by my bootstraps and and and or 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 has a repeat focus on like what what what are we building well first basic mock-ups and research right like what what do we even want to build there's a little bit of that goes on but then very quickly you get to the prototype stage like build a prototype let's get around on the prototype really really rapidly That's what we did with this course and that's what we demoed to get our seed funding for this course was the 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 a prototype we were figuring out like what's working what's not working because 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 prototype. And then what you're really optimizing for 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 it fleet 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 change of 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 rolled out to users. That is your lifecycle. That's your health, 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 change, that was, oh my god, this great idea that word is so much clearer. I'm telling me 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. Um, and then it takes a, you know, month to roll out. It's like what 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, that's what I view is like the central tenant of some modern software development.

And to be clear, I'm not saying being a hummingbird is the goal either. It's like, you don't want to hurt me. It's like so fast. It's like, you're, you know, you're just freaking out. But like, it is a measure of health. You should have a healthy heartbeat, right? And you're up to for people to listen to this side with that means, but it has to be healthy. It has to be reasonable because otherwise you're just going to 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 your it's rate of change right Delta V right how fast are you moving well within a year you're going to be miles away by the time they catch up you're right like that's the way works in plus users like I as a software developer and he's I love software that's constantly changing because I know they're saying people get super pissed off when like, oh, they changed the software on me. How dare them? Like, 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. And I've read it. 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? It's 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 want to really embrace that not 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 this true the that's why probably a lot of the stuff you write about in your blog probably will remain true there's a flip side of the coin people don't change so investing in understanding people is is like learning unix and nineteen seventy 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 going to 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

Well, you're going to 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 like Granite, I graduated from college in 1992. But I remember hearing from people like in ladies like 1998, 1998, 1999, and 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, just basic software, the bed, literal bedrock software development is source control. Now, you compare it today, like GitHub, right? Like my software GitHub, which I think was incredibly smart and acquisition move on their part. Now they have anybody who wants like reasonable source controls to go send them one 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 over what it was. Now as to whether programming is significantly different, I'm going to say no, but I think the baseline of like what we view is like, Fundamentals will continue to go up and actually get better like source control because that's one of the fundamentals that has gotten I mean Hundreds of orders of magnitude better than it was 10 20 years ago, so those are the fundamentals.

Okay, so smartphones 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. And 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. 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 to sit, it puts a computer in front of everyone, granted a small touchscreen, small-ish touchscreen computer. But as for programming, 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 want to teach these basic command line things, and that is just what programming is going to be for, I think, a long, long time. I don't think there's any magical, like visual programming that's going to happen. Um, 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 it right with Unix. That's going to be the way it is for a long, long time. And we'll continue to, like I said, raise the baseline. The tools get better. It'll get simpler, but it's still fundamentally going to be command line tools. you know, fancy ideas. That's kind of it for the foreseeable future. I'm not seeing any visual programming stuff on the horizon. Because 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.

Oh, yeah. That's already happening. I mean, just courses of bet on discourses itself, JavaScript is another bet on that side of the table. And I still try to believe in that. So I would say smartphones have been 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 going to do. And I do think there's some strengths 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. And then an hour later, you log in from San Francisco. 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 log in at that point. So we would alert you, it's like, okay, but that's an AI, right? That's just a heuristic of like, How did you in one hour get 2,000 miles, right? That doesn't. I mean, you grant 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 traveling salesmen that's literally, we're 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 the Google thing is a prediction commute and prediction 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 tonity, because everybody has a smartphone. Now, I'm saying we have all this data that we didn't have before about location, about communication, and feeding that into some basic statistics, 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?

I do think that is possible, because there's a lot of repetition in programming. Clippy would be the bad example of, oh, I see it. It looks like you're writing a for loop. But there are patterns in code, right? And actually libraries are kind of like that, right? Rather than go 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 troubleshot, right? 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 little 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 the WordPress into anything. It's kind of crazy actually through product 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, they'll be more gluing. unless like actual programming. And that's a good thing, right? Because most of the stuff you need is kind of out there already.

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 a Unix for the 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 on Windows were kind of wrong, at least on the server side. And on the desktop, right, you need a GUI, you know, a lot of stuff. And yeah, the two philosophy is like Apple built on Unix, effectively Darwin. And on the desktop is a slightly different story, but on the server side where you're going to be programming. Now, it's a question where the programming's going to be. I was going to be a lot more like client side programming because technically discourse is client side programming. The way you get discourse, we deliver a big ball of JavaScript, which is the next queue 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. that we different veneers over Unix, but it's still, if you peel away one or two layers, it's going to be Unix safe. For a long, I think Unix won. I mean, so definitively.

Well, this course is what I believe is an originally called a five year project. They're really quickly revised that to attend your project. So where we started in early to the 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 now 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. 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, 1.2, 1.3, like how fast can we iterate? And I think we're iterating like crazy on discourse, the point that 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 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. Because the open source free doesn't cost you anything. You control, you can run it. Your minimum server cost for discourse is five bucks a month at this point. They actually got the VPS price. It's down. It used to be $10 a month for one gigabyte of RAM, which we, We have a kind of heavy stack. There's a lot of stuff in discourse. Any post-grash, you need redists, you need ruby, unrails, any sidekick for scheduling. It's not a trivial amount of stuff because 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, eventually this is going to be very cheap for everybody, and I want to build it right, using, again, higher bigger building block levels, right, that have more quiet.

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. We host discourse, since it says we have really close relationship with our customers of the symbiosis of them giving us feedback on the product. We definitely wait feedback from customers a lot heavier than feedback from somebody who just wanders by and gets 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.

That's interesting because I actually have a contrarian view of advertising which I kind of agree with you. I recently installed that blocker like reluctantly because I don't like to do that but like the performance of the ads man. They're so heavy now and like it's just crazy. So like it's almost like a performance argument more than like I actually am pro ads and I contrarian I have a contrarian viewpoint. I agree with you. If you do ads right it's showing you stuff you would be interested in anyway. Like I don't. mine that actually is kind of a good thing. 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.

It's all there's so many companies in the ad tech that what's embarrassing like you can do that if you see those logo charts of like just a whole page is like you can't even see them there's 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 discourse 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. If you had clean, fast ads that were exactly the stuff you would be interested in, awesome. We're so far from that though, right? Like Google doesn't okay, John, they do retargeting and stuff like that. But in the real world discourse 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 here's a cool yo-yo click and then you click and go to Amazon they get a small percentage of that which is fair I think because you saw the yo-yo on that site and you click through and you bought it right and that's fair for them to get five percent of that or two percent of that whenever it is those things definitely work in fact site that I used to participate on a lot I helped the owner one of the things I I got them switched to discourse I basically paid them to switch to discourse because I was like look you guys gonna switch I can't come here anymore of the 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 they 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 discourse.

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 on screen keyboard. Oh, God, that's terrifying, right? Like, but you got touch. I mean, if you look back to the early days of being there were Chick-let keyboards, which are, I mean, those are awful, right? But what's a Chick-let keyboard? Oh, God. Okay. Well, it's just like thin rubber membranes.

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 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 he's committing to computer, 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 and 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 and making a better programmer.

Right. No, totally. That's it. I mean, and it's funny because Artisanal keyboards have exploded. Like, mass drop is gone ballistic with this stuff. There's probably like 500 keyboard projects on mass drop alone. And there's some other guy I've fallen 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. Come on, God, that's really cool, right? Like, that's like, how many keyboards this guy have? It's got me with yo-yo. It's how many yo-yo 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 keyboard. So yeah, they're awesome. Like I highly recommend. Anyway, it doesn't have mechanical to research it. Look into it and see what you like. 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. That part's important, right?

Yeah. It's not necessary in the strictest sense, but ain't nothing necessary if you think of it, right? Like so. Yeah, why not? So sure.

Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for having me.