WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:02.400 The following is a conversation with Jeff Atwood. 00:02.400 --> 00:05.840 He is the cofounder of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, 00:05.840 --> 00:08.240 websites that are visited by millions of people 00:08.240 --> 00:09.560 every single day. 00:09.560 --> 00:13.880 Much like with Wikipedia, it is difficult to understate 00:13.880 --> 00:16.680 the impact on global knowledge and productivity 00:16.680 --> 00:19.520 that these networks of sites have created. 00:19.520 --> 00:24.000 Jeff is also the author of the famed blog, Coding Horror, 00:24.000 --> 00:27.640 and the founder of Discourse, an open source software project 00:27.640 --> 00:31.600 that seeks to improve the quality of our online community 00:31.600 --> 00:33.440 discussions. 00:33.440 --> 00:36.640 This conversation is part of the MIT course 00:36.640 --> 00:38.480 on artificial journal intelligence 00:38.480 --> 00:40.840 and the artificial intelligence podcast. 00:40.840 --> 00:43.680 If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, 00:43.680 --> 00:45.640 or your podcast provider of choice, 00:45.640 --> 00:47.480 or simply connect with me on Twitter 00:47.480 --> 00:51.000 at Lex Friedman, spelled FRID. 00:51.000 --> 00:56.200 And now, here's my conversation with Jeff Atwood. 00:56.200 --> 00:59.560 Having cocreated and managed for a few years the world's 00:59.560 --> 01:02.960 largest community of programmers in Stack Overflow 01:02.960 --> 01:08.600 10 years ago, what do you think motivates most programmers? 01:08.600 --> 01:13.320 Is it fame, fortune, glory, process of programming itself, 01:13.320 --> 01:16.360 or is it the sense of belonging to a community? 01:16.360 --> 01:18.000 It's puzzles, really. 01:18.000 --> 01:22.280 I think it's this idea of working on puzzles 01:22.280 --> 01:25.800 independently of other people and just solving a problem, 01:25.800 --> 01:29.720 sort of on your own, almost, although nobody really 01:29.720 --> 01:32.240 works alone in programming anymore. 01:32.240 --> 01:36.520 But I will say there's an aspect of hiding yourself away 01:36.520 --> 01:39.600 and just beating on a problem until you solve it. 01:39.600 --> 01:41.040 Like, brute force, basically, to me, 01:41.040 --> 01:42.200 is what a lot of programming is. 01:42.200 --> 01:45.040 It's like, the computer's so fast that you can do things 01:45.040 --> 01:46.560 that would take forever for a human, 01:46.560 --> 01:49.240 but you can just do them so many times and so often 01:49.240 --> 01:52.000 that you get the answer. 01:52.000 --> 01:55.520 You're saying just the pure act of tinkering with the code 01:55.520 --> 01:59.600 is the thing that drives most probably the joy, the struggle 01:59.600 --> 02:03.880 balance within the joy of overcoming the brute force 02:03.880 --> 02:06.760 process of pain and suffering that eventually leads 02:06.760 --> 02:09.040 to something that actually works? 02:09.040 --> 02:10.080 Well, data's fun, too. 02:10.080 --> 02:12.240 Like, there's this thing called the shuffling problem. 02:12.240 --> 02:14.960 Like, the naive shuffle that most programmers write 02:14.960 --> 02:15.800 has a huge flaw. 02:15.800 --> 02:17.520 And there's a lot of articles online about this 02:17.520 --> 02:20.040 because it can be really bad if you're like a casino 02:20.040 --> 02:22.240 and you have an unsophisticated programmer writing 02:22.240 --> 02:23.480 your shuffle algorithm. 02:23.480 --> 02:25.120 There's surprising ways to get this wrong. 02:25.120 --> 02:27.240 But the neat thing is, the way to figure that out 02:27.240 --> 02:29.040 is just to run your shuffle a bunch of times 02:29.040 --> 02:32.200 and see how many orientations of cards you get. 02:32.200 --> 02:34.680 You should get an equal distribution of all the cards. 02:34.680 --> 02:36.480 And with the naive method of shuffling, 02:36.480 --> 02:38.400 if you just look at the data, if you just brute force it 02:38.400 --> 02:40.880 and say, OK, I don't know what's going to happen. 02:40.880 --> 02:43.320 You just write a program that does it a billion times 02:43.320 --> 02:46.080 and then see what the buckets look like of the data. 02:46.080 --> 02:48.200 And the money haul problem is another example of that, 02:48.200 --> 02:50.640 where you have three doors and somebody gives you 02:50.640 --> 02:52.720 information about another door. 02:52.720 --> 02:55.000 So the correct answer is you should always switch. 02:55.000 --> 02:56.720 The money haul problem, which is not intuitive. 02:56.720 --> 02:58.080 It freaks people out all the time. 02:58.080 --> 02:59.800 But you can solve it with data. 02:59.800 --> 03:04.400 If you write a program that does the money haul game 03:04.400 --> 03:06.880 and then never switches, then always switches, just compare, 03:06.880 --> 03:09.680 you would immediately see that you don't have to be smart. 03:09.680 --> 03:11.600 You don't have to figure out the answer algorithmically. 03:11.600 --> 03:13.000 You can just brute force it out with data 03:13.000 --> 03:14.400 and say, well, I know the answer is this 03:14.400 --> 03:16.160 because I ran the program a billion times 03:16.160 --> 03:18.960 and these are the data buckets that I got from it. 03:18.960 --> 03:20.280 So empirically, you find it. 03:20.280 --> 03:22.320 But what's the joy of that? 03:22.320 --> 03:26.320 So for you, for you personally, outside of family, 03:26.320 --> 03:29.440 what motivates you in this process? 03:29.440 --> 03:31.000 Well, to be honest, I don't really 03:31.000 --> 03:32.520 write a lot of code anymore. 03:32.520 --> 03:35.240 What I do at discourse is like, managerry stuff, which 03:35.240 --> 03:38.240 I always kind of despise as a programmer. 03:38.240 --> 03:40.000 You think of managers as people who don't really 03:40.000 --> 03:42.320 do anything themselves. 03:42.320 --> 03:44.000 But the weird thing about code is you 03:44.000 --> 03:45.880 realize that language is code. 03:45.880 --> 03:48.320 The ability to direct other people 03:48.320 --> 03:51.480 lets you get more stuff done than you could by yourself 03:51.480 --> 03:52.280 anyway. 03:52.280 --> 03:53.680 You said language is code? 03:53.680 --> 03:54.200 Language is code. 03:54.200 --> 03:56.040 Meaning communication with other humans? 03:56.040 --> 03:56.640 Yes, it is. 03:56.640 --> 03:58.480 You can think of it as a systematic. 03:58.480 --> 04:01.320 So what does it like to be? 04:01.320 --> 04:03.160 What makes, before we get into programming, 04:03.160 --> 04:04.320 what makes a good manager? 04:04.320 --> 04:05.800 What makes a good leader? 04:05.800 --> 04:08.320 Well, I think a leader, it's all about leading by example, 04:08.320 --> 04:11.440 first of all, like sort of doing and being the things 04:11.440 --> 04:12.480 that you want to be. 04:12.480 --> 04:13.640 Now, this can be kind of exhausting. 04:13.640 --> 04:15.120 Particularly if you have kids because you realize 04:15.120 --> 04:17.600 that your kids are watching you all the time, 04:17.600 --> 04:20.600 like even in ways that you've stopped seeing yourself. 04:20.600 --> 04:22.160 Like the hardest person to see on the planet 04:22.160 --> 04:23.640 is really yourself. 04:23.640 --> 04:25.960 It's a lot of you see other people and make judgments 04:25.960 --> 04:28.520 about them, but yourself, like you're super biased. 04:28.520 --> 04:30.840 You don't actually see yourself the way other people see you. 04:30.840 --> 04:33.040 Often, you're very, very hard on yourself in a way 04:33.040 --> 04:34.760 that other people really aren't going to be. 04:34.760 --> 04:37.880 So that's one of the insights is you've 04:37.880 --> 04:39.560 got to be really diligent about thinking, 04:39.560 --> 04:41.480 like, am I behaving in a way that 04:41.480 --> 04:44.720 represents how I want other people to behave? 04:44.720 --> 04:46.120 Like leading through example. 04:46.120 --> 04:47.960 There's a lot of examples of leaders 04:47.960 --> 04:49.320 that really mess this up. 04:49.320 --> 04:52.080 Like they make decisions that are like, wow, that's why. 04:52.080 --> 04:55.000 It's just it's a bad example for other people. 04:55.000 --> 04:57.440 So I think leading by example is one. 04:57.440 --> 04:59.680 The other one, I believe it is working really hard. 04:59.680 --> 05:01.560 I don't mean like working exhaustively, 05:01.560 --> 05:06.760 but like showing a real passion for the problem. 05:06.760 --> 05:09.040 Like not necessarily your solution to the problem, 05:09.040 --> 05:11.240 but the problem itself is just one that you really believe in. 05:11.240 --> 05:13.120 With discourse, for example, the problem 05:13.120 --> 05:15.040 that we're looking at, which is my current project, 05:15.040 --> 05:17.920 is how do you get people in groups 05:17.920 --> 05:20.080 to communicate in a way that doesn't like break down 05:20.080 --> 05:21.800 into the howling of wolves, right? 05:21.800 --> 05:23.600 Like how do you deal with trolling? 05:23.600 --> 05:25.080 Not like technical problems of how 05:25.080 --> 05:26.440 do I get people to post paragraphs? 05:26.440 --> 05:27.520 How do I get people to use bold? 05:27.520 --> 05:29.520 How do I get people to use complete sentences? 05:29.520 --> 05:30.920 Although those are problems as well. 05:30.920 --> 05:33.560 But how do I get people to get along with each other, right? 05:33.560 --> 05:35.920 And then solve whatever problem it is they set out to solve, 05:35.920 --> 05:38.280 or reach some consensus on discussion, 05:38.280 --> 05:40.080 or just not hurt each other, even, right? 05:40.080 --> 05:41.960 Like maybe it's a discussion that doesn't really matter, 05:41.960 --> 05:43.600 but are people yelling at each other, right? 05:43.600 --> 05:44.280 And why, right? 05:44.280 --> 05:46.760 Like that's not the purpose of this kind of communication. 05:46.760 --> 05:52.960 So I would say leadership is about setting an example, 05:52.960 --> 05:54.920 doing the things that represent what you want to be, 05:54.920 --> 05:57.000 and making sure that you're actually doing those things. 05:57.000 --> 05:59.360 And there's a trick to that too, because the things you don't 05:59.360 --> 06:02.400 do also say a lot about what you are. 06:02.400 --> 06:03.960 Yeah, so let's pause on that one. 06:03.960 --> 06:05.360 So those two things are fascinating. 06:05.360 --> 06:08.080 So how do you have as a leader that self awareness? 06:08.080 --> 06:10.280 So you just said it's really hard to be self aware. 06:10.280 --> 06:12.920 So for you personally, or maybe for other leaders 06:12.920 --> 06:14.760 you've seen or look up to, how do you 06:14.760 --> 06:18.680 know both that the things you're doing 06:18.680 --> 06:20.920 are the wrong things to be doing, the way you speak 06:20.920 --> 06:23.640 to others, the way you behave, and the things you're not doing? 06:23.640 --> 06:25.200 How do you get that signal? 06:25.200 --> 06:26.440 There's two aspects to that. 06:26.440 --> 06:28.760 One is like processing feedback that you're getting. 06:28.760 --> 06:30.240 So how do you get feedback? 06:30.240 --> 06:30.640 Well, right. 06:30.640 --> 06:32.280 So are you getting feedback, right? 06:32.280 --> 06:33.480 Like so one way we do it, for example, 06:33.480 --> 06:34.840 at discourse we have three cofounders, 06:34.840 --> 06:38.160 and we periodically talk about decisions before we make them. 06:38.160 --> 06:41.080 So it's not like one person can make a mistake, or like, 06:41.080 --> 06:43.240 wow, they're going to be misunderstanding things. 06:43.240 --> 06:45.560 So it's part of group consensus of leadership 06:45.560 --> 06:47.800 is like it's good to have, I think, systems 06:47.800 --> 06:50.320 where there's one leader, and that leader has the rule 06:50.320 --> 06:53.240 of absolute law, are just really dangerous in my experience. 06:53.240 --> 06:55.400 For communities, for example, if you have a community that's 06:55.400 --> 06:57.560 run by one person, that one person makes all decisions, 06:57.560 --> 06:59.400 that person's going to have a bad day. 06:59.400 --> 07:02.360 Something can happen to that person. 07:02.360 --> 07:03.280 There's a lot of variables. 07:03.280 --> 07:05.080 So first, when you think about leadership, 07:05.080 --> 07:07.080 have multiple people doing leadership, 07:07.080 --> 07:08.920 and have them talk amongst each other. 07:08.920 --> 07:11.360 So you're giving each other feedback about the decisions 07:11.360 --> 07:12.200 that they're making. 07:12.200 --> 07:13.720 And then when you do get feedback, 07:13.720 --> 07:16.320 I think there's that little voice in your head, right? 07:16.320 --> 07:19.120 Or your gut, or wherever you want to put it in your body. 07:19.120 --> 07:22.600 I think that voice is really important. 07:22.600 --> 07:25.200 I think most people who have any kind of moral compass 07:25.200 --> 07:27.360 or want to do, most people want to do the right thing. 07:27.360 --> 07:28.440 I do believe that. 07:28.440 --> 07:30.920 I mean, there might be a handful of sociopaths out there 07:30.920 --> 07:32.760 that don't, but most people, they 07:32.760 --> 07:34.960 want other people to think of them as a good person. 07:34.960 --> 07:35.720 Why wouldn't you, right? 07:35.720 --> 07:36.920 Do you want people to despise you? 07:36.920 --> 07:38.120 I mean, that's just weird, right? 07:38.120 --> 07:40.520 So you have that little voice that the angel and devil 07:40.520 --> 07:43.040 on your shoulder talking to you about what you're doing, 07:43.040 --> 07:44.600 how you're doing, how does it make you feel 07:44.600 --> 07:46.320 to make these decisions, right? 07:46.320 --> 07:49.280 And I think having some attunement to that voice 07:49.280 --> 07:50.240 is important. 07:50.240 --> 07:52.400 But you said that voice also for, 07:52.400 --> 07:55.160 I think it's a programmer situation, too, 07:55.160 --> 07:57.120 where sometimes the devil on the shoulder 07:57.120 --> 07:59.800 is a little too loud. 07:59.800 --> 08:03.480 So you're a little too self critical for a lot of developers, 08:03.480 --> 08:05.600 especially when you have introverted personality. 08:05.600 --> 08:07.600 How do you struggle with the self criticism 08:07.600 --> 08:10.680 or the criticism of others? 08:10.680 --> 08:11.920 One of the things of leadership is 08:11.920 --> 08:14.480 to do something that's potentially unpopular 08:14.480 --> 08:16.240 or what people doubt you and you still 08:16.240 --> 08:18.320 go through with the decision. 08:18.320 --> 08:20.720 So what's that balance like? 08:20.720 --> 08:22.760 I think you have to walk people through your decision 08:22.760 --> 08:23.640 making, right? 08:23.640 --> 08:25.600 This is where blogging is really important in communication. 08:25.600 --> 08:26.080 It's so important. 08:26.080 --> 08:27.960 Again, code language is just another kind of code. 08:27.960 --> 08:30.240 It's like, here is the program by which 08:30.240 --> 08:32.960 I arrived at the conclusion that I'm going to reach, right? 08:32.960 --> 08:34.720 It's one thing to say, this is a decision. 08:34.720 --> 08:35.680 It's final. 08:35.680 --> 08:36.760 Deal with it, right? 08:36.760 --> 08:38.760 That's not usually satisfying to people. 08:38.760 --> 08:40.360 But if you say, look, we've been thinking 08:40.360 --> 08:41.360 on this problem for a while. 08:41.360 --> 08:42.720 Here's some stuff that's happened. 08:42.720 --> 08:44.080 Here's what we think is right. 08:44.080 --> 08:44.920 Here's our goals. 08:44.920 --> 08:46.120 Here's what we want to achieve. 08:46.120 --> 08:47.920 And we've looked at these options. 08:47.920 --> 08:50.560 And we think this of the available options is the best option. 08:50.560 --> 08:51.800 People will be like, oh, OK. 08:51.800 --> 08:53.080 Maybe I don't totally agree with you, 08:53.080 --> 08:54.840 but I can kind of see where you're coming from. 08:54.840 --> 08:57.320 And I see it's not just arbitrary decision delivered 08:57.320 --> 09:00.240 from a cloud of flames in the sky. 09:00.240 --> 09:03.400 It's like a human trying to reach some kind of consensus 09:03.400 --> 09:04.320 about goals. 09:04.320 --> 09:05.760 And their goals might be different than yours. 09:05.760 --> 09:06.840 That's completely legit, right? 09:06.840 --> 09:09.200 But if you're making that clear, it's like, oh, well, 09:09.200 --> 09:11.080 the reason we don't agree is because we have totally 09:11.080 --> 09:11.840 different goals, right? 09:11.840 --> 09:12.840 How could we agree? 09:12.840 --> 09:14.240 It's not that you're a bad person. 09:14.240 --> 09:16.640 It's that we have radically different goals in mind 09:16.640 --> 09:18.240 when we started looking at this problem. 09:18.240 --> 09:22.040 And the other one you said is passion or hard work, sorry. 09:22.040 --> 09:23.920 Well, those are tied together in my mind. 09:23.920 --> 09:25.240 Let's say hard work and passion. 09:25.240 --> 09:27.520 For me, I just really love the problem discourse 09:27.520 --> 09:29.720 is setting out to solve because, in a way, 09:29.720 --> 09:33.000 it's like there's a vision of the world where it all devolves 09:33.000 --> 09:35.160 into Facebook basically owning everything 09:35.160 --> 09:37.040 in every aspect of human communication, right? 09:37.040 --> 09:39.920 And this has always been kind of a scary world for me. 09:39.920 --> 09:42.400 First, because I think Facebook is really good at execution. 09:42.400 --> 09:43.280 I got to compliment them. 09:43.280 --> 09:45.400 They're very competent in terms of what they're doing. 09:45.400 --> 09:48.160 But Facebook has not much of a moral compass 09:48.160 --> 09:51.040 in terms of Facebook cares about Facebook, really. 09:51.040 --> 09:53.560 They don't really care about you and your problems. 09:53.560 --> 09:56.520 What they care about is how big they can make Facebook, right? 09:56.520 --> 09:58.760 Is that you talking about the company or just the mechanism 09:58.760 --> 09:59.960 of how Facebook works? 09:59.960 --> 10:01.320 Kind of both, really, right? 10:01.320 --> 10:03.640 And the idea with discourse, the reason I'm so passionate 10:03.640 --> 10:05.600 about it is because I believe every community should have 10:05.600 --> 10:07.120 the right to own themselves, right? 10:07.120 --> 10:09.680 Like they should have their own software that they can run 10:09.680 --> 10:11.080 that belongs to them. 10:11.080 --> 10:12.920 That's their space where they can set the rules. 10:12.920 --> 10:15.200 And if they don't like it, they can move to different hosting 10:15.200 --> 10:18.120 or whatever they need to happen can happen. 10:18.120 --> 10:21.880 But this idea of a company town where all human communication 10:21.880 --> 10:25.000 is implicitly owned by WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. 10:25.000 --> 10:27.120 And it's really disturbing, too, because Facebook 10:27.120 --> 10:27.840 is really smart. 10:27.840 --> 10:29.360 Like I said, they're great at execution. 10:29.360 --> 10:30.720 Buying in WhatsApp and buying Instagram 10:30.720 --> 10:33.600 were incredibly smart decisions. 10:33.600 --> 10:35.080 And they also do this thing on, if you know, 10:35.080 --> 10:37.480 but they have this VPN software that they give away 10:37.480 --> 10:38.840 for free on smartphones. 10:38.840 --> 10:42.000 And it indirectly feeds all the data about the traffic 10:42.000 --> 10:42.880 back to Facebook. 10:42.880 --> 10:44.640 So they can see what's actually getting popular 10:44.640 --> 10:46.000 through the VPNs, right? 10:46.000 --> 10:48.400 They have low level access to the network data 10:48.400 --> 10:50.480 because users have let them have that. 10:50.480 --> 10:54.160 So let's take a small pause here. 10:54.160 --> 10:56.760 First of all, discourse, can you talk about, 10:56.760 --> 11:00.920 can you lay out the land of all the different ways 11:00.920 --> 11:01.880 you can have communities? 11:01.880 --> 11:03.880 So there's Stack Overflow that you've built. 11:03.880 --> 11:05.320 There's discourse. 11:05.320 --> 11:07.320 So Stack Overflow is kind of like a Wiki. 11:07.320 --> 11:09.240 Wikipedia you talk about. 11:09.240 --> 11:12.000 And it's a very specific scalpel, very focused. 11:12.000 --> 11:13.560 So what is the purpose of discourse? 11:13.560 --> 11:16.120 And maybe contrast that with Facebook. 11:16.120 --> 11:18.120 First of all, say what is discourse? 11:18.120 --> 11:18.960 Yeah. 11:18.960 --> 11:19.800 Start from the beginning. 11:19.800 --> 11:20.620 Well, let me start from the very beginning. 11:20.620 --> 11:22.040 So Stack Overflow is very structured, 11:22.040 --> 11:24.720 Wiki style Q&A for programmers, right? 11:24.720 --> 11:26.800 And that was the problem we first worked on. 11:26.800 --> 11:29.080 And when we started, we thought it was discussions 11:29.080 --> 11:32.080 because we looked at like programming forums and other things, 11:32.080 --> 11:33.520 but we quickly realized we were doing Q&A, 11:33.520 --> 11:37.040 which is a very narrow subset of human communication, right? 11:37.040 --> 11:38.920 So when you started Stack Overflow, 11:38.920 --> 11:41.920 you thought you didn't even know the Q&A. 11:41.920 --> 11:43.400 You didn't know it would be Q&A. 11:43.400 --> 11:44.320 Well, we didn't know. 11:44.320 --> 11:45.280 We had an idea of like, okay, 11:45.280 --> 11:47.000 these are things that we see working online. 11:47.000 --> 11:47.840 We had a goal, right? 11:47.840 --> 11:50.120 Our goal was there was this site, 11:50.120 --> 11:52.680 Experts Exchange with a very unfortunate name. 11:52.680 --> 11:53.960 Thank you for killing that site. 11:53.960 --> 11:54.840 Yeah, I know, right? 11:54.840 --> 11:56.520 Like a lot of people don't remember it anymore, 11:56.520 --> 11:57.360 which is great. 11:57.360 --> 11:58.200 Like that's the measure of success. 11:58.200 --> 11:59.360 If people don't remember the thing 11:59.360 --> 12:02.680 that you were trying to replace, then you've totally won. 12:02.680 --> 12:05.680 So it was a place to get answers to programming questions, 12:05.680 --> 12:07.520 but it wasn't clear if it was like focused Q&A, 12:07.520 --> 12:08.840 if it was a discussion, 12:08.840 --> 12:10.400 there were plenty of programming forums. 12:10.400 --> 12:11.400 So we weren't really sure. 12:11.400 --> 12:13.520 We were like, okay, we'll take aspects of dig and Reddit, 12:13.520 --> 12:15.800 like voting were very important, 12:15.800 --> 12:17.480 reordering answers based on votes, 12:17.480 --> 12:19.640 Wiki style stuff of like being able to edit posts, 12:19.640 --> 12:21.320 not just your posts, but other people's posts 12:21.320 --> 12:23.920 to make them better and keep them more up to date. 12:23.920 --> 12:26.240 Ownership of blogging of like, okay, this is me. 12:26.240 --> 12:28.120 I'm saying this in my voice, you know, 12:28.120 --> 12:29.840 this is the stuff that I know. 12:29.840 --> 12:33.360 And you know, you get your reputation accrues to you 12:33.360 --> 12:34.880 and it's pure recognition. 12:34.880 --> 12:37.080 So you asked earlier, like what motivates programmers? 12:37.080 --> 12:40.080 I think pure recognition motivates them a lot. 12:40.080 --> 12:41.880 That was one of the key insights of Stack Overflow 12:41.880 --> 12:43.720 was like recognition from your peers 12:43.720 --> 12:44.960 is why things get done. 12:44.960 --> 12:46.400 Initially money, not necessarily your boss, 12:46.400 --> 12:47.880 but like your peers saying, wow, 12:47.880 --> 12:50.400 this person really knows their stuff has a lot of value. 12:50.400 --> 12:53.280 So the reputation system came from that. 12:53.280 --> 12:56.320 So we were sort of Frankensteining a bunch of stuff together 12:56.320 --> 12:58.680 in Stack Overflow, like stuff we had seen working 12:58.680 --> 13:03.680 and we knew worked and that became Stack Overflow. 13:03.760 --> 13:06.520 And over time we realized it wasn't really discussion. 13:06.520 --> 13:08.760 It was very focused questions and answers. 13:08.760 --> 13:10.840 There wasn't a lot of room on the page for, 13:10.840 --> 13:12.560 let me talk about this tangential thing. 13:12.560 --> 13:14.800 It was more like, okay, is it answering the question? 13:14.800 --> 13:16.160 Is it clarifying the question 13:16.160 --> 13:18.720 or could it be an alternative answer to the same question? 13:18.720 --> 13:21.040 Cause there's usually more than one way to do it in program. 13:21.040 --> 13:22.680 There's like, say five to 10 ways. 13:22.680 --> 13:24.360 And one of the patterns we got into early on 13:24.360 --> 13:26.440 in Stack Overflow was there were questions 13:26.440 --> 13:28.440 where there would be like hundreds of answers. 13:28.440 --> 13:30.160 And we're like, well, 13:30.160 --> 13:31.840 how can there be a programming question 13:31.840 --> 13:34.760 with 100, 200, 500 answers? 13:34.760 --> 13:36.160 And we looked at those and we realized 13:36.160 --> 13:38.840 those were not really questions in the traditional sense. 13:38.840 --> 13:39.800 They were discussions. 13:39.800 --> 13:42.280 It was stuff that we allowed early on 13:42.280 --> 13:43.840 that we eventually decided wasn't allowed, 13:43.840 --> 13:46.760 such as what's your favorite programming food? 13:46.760 --> 13:49.280 What's the funniest programming cartoon you've seen? 13:49.280 --> 13:51.320 And we had to sort of backfill a bunch of rules 13:51.320 --> 13:53.080 about like, why isn't this allowed? 13:53.080 --> 13:55.160 Such as, is this a real problem you're facing? 13:55.160 --> 13:56.000 Like nobody goes to work 13:56.000 --> 13:57.200 and says, wow, I can't work 13:57.200 --> 13:59.080 cause I don't know what the funniest programming cartoon is. 13:59.080 --> 14:02.040 So sorry, can't compile this code now, right? 14:02.040 --> 14:04.600 It's not a real problem you're facing in your job. 14:04.600 --> 14:05.440 So that was Run Rule. 14:05.440 --> 14:07.320 And the second, like, what can you really learn from that? 14:07.320 --> 14:08.760 It's like what I call accidental learning 14:08.760 --> 14:10.200 or Reddit style learning 14:10.200 --> 14:11.640 where you're just like, oh, I'll just browse some things 14:11.640 --> 14:12.720 and oh, wow, you know, 14:12.720 --> 14:14.920 did you know tree frogs only live three years? 14:14.920 --> 14:16.000 I mean, I just made that up. 14:16.000 --> 14:16.920 I don't know if that's true, 14:16.920 --> 14:18.920 but I didn't really set out to learn that. 14:18.920 --> 14:20.280 I don't need to know that, right? 14:20.280 --> 14:21.720 It's accidental learning. 14:21.720 --> 14:23.440 It was more intentional learning 14:23.440 --> 14:24.600 where you're like, okay, I have a problem 14:24.600 --> 14:26.880 and I wanna learn about stuff around this problem having, 14:26.880 --> 14:27.720 right? 14:27.720 --> 14:29.160 And it could be theory, it could be compiler theory, 14:29.160 --> 14:29.960 it could be other stuff, 14:29.960 --> 14:31.800 but I'm having a compiler problem, 14:31.800 --> 14:34.280 hence I need to know the compiler theory, 14:34.280 --> 14:38.120 that aspect of it that gets me to my answer, right? 14:38.120 --> 14:39.360 So kind of a directed learning. 14:39.360 --> 14:40.920 So we had to backfill all these rules 14:40.920 --> 14:43.640 as we sort of figured out what the heck it was we were doing. 14:43.640 --> 14:45.360 And the system came very strict over time 14:45.360 --> 14:46.840 and a lot of people still complain about that. 14:46.840 --> 14:49.080 And I wrote my latest blog entry, 14:49.080 --> 14:51.000 what does Stack Overflow want to be? 14:51.000 --> 14:52.400 What does it want to be when it grows up? 14:52.400 --> 14:54.240 Celebrating the 10 year anniversary, yeah. 14:54.240 --> 14:56.320 Yeah, so 10 years and the system 14:56.320 --> 14:57.760 has trended towards strictness. 14:57.760 --> 14:58.960 There's a variety of reasons for this. 14:58.960 --> 15:01.400 One is people don't like to see other people 15:01.400 --> 15:04.040 get reputation for stuff as they view as frivolous, 15:04.040 --> 15:05.160 which I can actually understand 15:05.160 --> 15:07.920 because if you saw a programmer got like 500 upvotes 15:07.920 --> 15:10.440 for funniest programming cartoon 15:10.440 --> 15:11.840 or funniest comment they had seen in code. 15:11.840 --> 15:13.880 It's like, well, why do they have that reputation? 15:13.880 --> 15:15.120 Is it because they wrote the joke? 15:15.120 --> 15:15.960 Probably not. 15:15.960 --> 15:18.320 I mean, if they did, maybe, or the cartoon, right? 15:18.320 --> 15:19.520 They're getting a bunch of reputation 15:19.520 --> 15:20.800 based on someone else's work. 15:20.800 --> 15:22.720 It's not even like programming. 15:22.720 --> 15:23.640 It's just a joke, right? 15:23.640 --> 15:24.840 It's a related program. 15:24.840 --> 15:26.480 So you begin to resent that. 15:26.480 --> 15:27.560 You're like, well, that's not fair. 15:27.560 --> 15:28.400 And it isn't. 15:28.400 --> 15:29.240 At some level, they're correct. 15:29.240 --> 15:31.280 I empathize because it's not correct 15:31.280 --> 15:32.120 to get reputation for that. 15:32.120 --> 15:36.080 Versus here's a really gnarly, regular expression problem. 15:36.080 --> 15:40.520 And here's a really clever, insightful, detailed answer 15:40.520 --> 15:42.240 laying out, oh, here's why you're seeing the behavior 15:42.240 --> 15:43.080 that you're seeing. 15:43.080 --> 15:43.920 And here, let me teach you some things 15:43.920 --> 15:44.760 about how to avoid that in the future. 15:44.760 --> 15:46.560 That's great, that's gold, right? 15:46.560 --> 15:48.000 You want people to get reputation for that, 15:48.000 --> 15:51.040 not so much for, wow, look at this funny thing I saw, right? 15:51.040 --> 15:54.400 Great, so there's this very specific Q&A format, 15:54.400 --> 15:56.680 and then take me through the journey 15:56.680 --> 15:58.680 towards discourse in Facebook and Twitter. 15:58.680 --> 16:00.520 So you start at the beginning, 16:00.520 --> 16:03.040 that Stack Overflow evolved to have a purpose. 16:03.040 --> 16:06.800 So what is discourse, this passion you have 16:06.800 --> 16:09.840 for creating community for discussion? 16:09.840 --> 16:12.200 What is that, when was that born? 16:12.200 --> 16:13.680 Well, part of it is based on the realization 16:13.680 --> 16:15.040 that Stack Overflow is only good 16:15.040 --> 16:17.680 for very specific subjects where there's sort of, 16:17.680 --> 16:19.760 it's based on data, facts, and science, 16:19.760 --> 16:22.560 where answers can be kind of verified to be true. 16:22.560 --> 16:24.920 Another form of that is there's the book of knowledge, 16:24.920 --> 16:28.760 like the tome of knowledge that defines like whatever it is, 16:28.760 --> 16:30.920 you can refer to that book and it'll give you the answer. 16:30.920 --> 16:33.160 There has to be, it only works on subjects 16:33.160 --> 16:35.400 where there's like semi clear answers to things 16:35.400 --> 16:37.880 that can be verified in some form. 16:37.880 --> 16:39.840 Now again, there's always more than one way to do it. 16:39.840 --> 16:42.000 There's complete flexibility and system around that. 16:42.000 --> 16:45.360 But where it falls down is stuff like poker and Lego. 16:45.360 --> 16:48.800 Like we had, if you go to stackexchange.com, 16:48.800 --> 16:50.480 we have an engine that tries to launch 16:50.480 --> 16:52.360 different Q&A topics, right? 16:52.360 --> 16:57.040 And people can propose Q&A topics, sample questions, 16:57.040 --> 16:59.120 and if it gets enough support within the network, 16:59.120 --> 17:00.160 we launch that Q&A site. 17:00.160 --> 17:02.360 So some of the ones we launched were poker and Lego, 17:02.360 --> 17:03.440 and they did horribly, right? 17:03.440 --> 17:05.720 Because, I mean, they might still be there 17:05.720 --> 17:07.880 lingering on in some form, but it was an experiment. 17:07.880 --> 17:09.080 This is like a test, right? 17:09.080 --> 17:11.720 And some subjects work super well in the stack engine, 17:11.720 --> 17:12.840 and some don't. 17:12.840 --> 17:14.680 But the reason Lego and poker don't work 17:14.680 --> 17:16.080 is because they're so social, really. 17:16.080 --> 17:19.120 It's not about what's the rule here in poker. 17:19.120 --> 17:21.480 It's like, well, what kind of cigars 17:21.480 --> 17:23.520 do we like to smoke while playing poker? 17:23.520 --> 17:26.960 Or what's a cool set of cards to use when I'm playing poker? 17:26.960 --> 17:28.760 Or what's some strategies? 17:28.760 --> 17:30.120 Like say I have this hand come up, 17:30.120 --> 17:31.280 what's some strategies I could use? 17:31.280 --> 17:33.120 It's more of a discussion around what's happening. 17:33.120 --> 17:34.960 Like with Lego, same thing, like here's 17:34.960 --> 17:36.040 this cool Lego set I found. 17:36.040 --> 17:36.920 Look how awesome this is. 17:36.920 --> 17:38.600 And I'm like, yeah, that's freaking awesome, right? 17:38.600 --> 17:39.920 It's not a question, right? 17:39.920 --> 17:41.840 There's all these social components to the discussions 17:41.840 --> 17:43.080 that don't fit at all. 17:43.080 --> 17:45.400 Like we literally have to disallow those in Stack Overflow 17:45.400 --> 17:46.560 because it's not about being social. 17:46.560 --> 17:49.440 It's about problems that you're facing in your work 17:49.440 --> 17:51.400 that you need concrete answers for, right? 17:51.400 --> 17:52.840 Like you have a real demonstrated problem 17:52.840 --> 17:54.000 that's sort of blocking you and something. 17:54.000 --> 17:56.520 Nobody's blocked by what should I do 17:56.520 --> 17:58.040 when I have a straight flush, right? 17:58.040 --> 18:00.520 Like it's not a blocking problem in the world. 18:00.520 --> 18:02.400 It's just an opportunity to hang out and discuss. 18:02.400 --> 18:05.920 So discourse was a way to address that and say, look, 18:05.920 --> 18:10.800 you know, discussion form software was very, very bad. 18:10.800 --> 18:13.560 And when I came out of Stack Overflow in late 20, 18:13.560 --> 18:18.480 early 20, early 2013, early 2012, 18:18.480 --> 18:19.880 it was still very, very bad. 18:19.880 --> 18:22.120 I expected it improved in the four years 18:22.120 --> 18:24.600 since I last looked, but it had not improved at all. 18:24.600 --> 18:26.000 And I was like, well, that's kind of terrible 18:26.000 --> 18:29.040 because I love these communities of people 18:29.040 --> 18:30.920 talking about things that they love, you know, 18:30.920 --> 18:32.920 that there's just communities of interest, right? 18:32.920 --> 18:34.600 And there's no good software for them. 18:34.600 --> 18:37.440 Like startups would come to me and say, hey, Jeff, 18:37.440 --> 18:39.760 I wanna, you know, I have this startup. 18:39.760 --> 18:41.080 Here's my idea. 18:41.080 --> 18:42.960 And the first thing I would say to them is like, well, 18:42.960 --> 18:44.000 first, why are you asking me? 18:44.000 --> 18:46.440 Like I don't really know your field, right? 18:46.440 --> 18:48.320 Linus, sincerely, like, why aren't you asking 18:48.320 --> 18:49.760 like the community, like the people 18:49.760 --> 18:51.280 that are interested in this problem, 18:51.280 --> 18:52.480 the people that are using your product, 18:52.480 --> 18:53.840 why aren't you talking to them? 18:53.840 --> 18:55.200 And then they'd say, oh, great idea. 18:55.200 --> 18:56.120 Like how do I do that? 18:56.120 --> 18:58.120 And then that's when I started playing sad trombone 18:58.120 --> 19:00.080 because I realized all the software involving 19:00.080 --> 19:03.320 talking to your users, customers, audience, patrons, 19:03.320 --> 19:05.200 whatever it is, it was all really bad. 19:05.200 --> 19:06.680 You know, it was like stuff that I would be embarrassed 19:06.680 --> 19:08.240 to recommend to other people. 19:08.240 --> 19:09.960 And yet that's where I felt they could get 19:09.960 --> 19:12.800 the biggest and strongest, most effective input 19:12.800 --> 19:15.600 for what they should be doing with their product, right? 19:15.600 --> 19:17.520 It's from their users, from their community, right? 19:17.520 --> 19:18.880 That's what we did on Stack Overflow. 19:18.880 --> 19:21.360 So what we're talking about with forums, 19:21.360 --> 19:25.480 the, what is it, the dark matter of the internet, 19:25.480 --> 19:26.840 it's still, I don't know if it's still, 19:26.840 --> 19:30.920 but for the longest time, it has some of the most 19:30.920 --> 19:32.800 passionate and fascinating discussions. 19:32.800 --> 19:34.640 And what's the usual structure? 19:34.640 --> 19:37.000 There's usually what, it's linear. 19:37.000 --> 19:39.640 So it's sequential, so you're posting one after the other 19:39.640 --> 19:42.800 and there's Paging Nation, so it's every, 19:42.800 --> 19:45.040 there's a 10 posts and you go to the next page 19:45.040 --> 19:49.080 and that format still is used by, like I'm, 19:49.080 --> 19:51.480 we're doing a lot of research with Tesla of vehicles 19:51.480 --> 19:53.600 and there's a Tesla Motors Club forum, 19:53.600 --> 19:54.440 which is extremely, 19:54.440 --> 19:56.280 We really wanted to run that actually. 19:56.280 --> 19:57.720 They pinged us about it, I don't think we got it, 19:57.720 --> 19:59.240 but I really would have liked to gotten that one. 19:59.240 --> 20:02.640 But they've started before even 2012, I believe. 20:02.640 --> 20:04.200 I mean, they've been running for a long time. 20:04.200 --> 20:06.840 It's still an extremely rich source of information. 20:06.840 --> 20:09.760 So what's broken about that system 20:09.760 --> 20:12.160 and how are you trying to fix it? 20:12.160 --> 20:15.920 I think there's a lot of power in connecting people 20:15.920 --> 20:19.240 that love the same stuff around that specific topic, 20:19.240 --> 20:22.800 meaning Facebook's idea of connection is just any human 20:22.800 --> 20:24.560 that's related to another human, right? 20:24.560 --> 20:27.520 Like through friendship or any other reason. 20:27.520 --> 20:30.280 Facebook's idea of the world is sort of the status update, 20:30.280 --> 20:31.120 right? 20:31.120 --> 20:35.040 Like a friend of yours did something at a restaurant, right? 20:35.040 --> 20:37.280 Whereas discussion forums were traditionally 20:37.280 --> 20:38.320 around the interest graph. 20:38.320 --> 20:42.000 Like I love electric cars, specifically I love Tesla, right? 20:42.000 --> 20:44.320 Like I love the way they approach the problem. 20:44.320 --> 20:45.920 I love the style of the founder. 20:45.920 --> 20:48.200 I just love the design ethic. 20:48.200 --> 20:49.280 There's a lot to like about Tesla. 20:49.280 --> 20:50.280 I don't know if you saw the oatmeal, 20:50.280 --> 20:53.120 he did a whole love comic to Tesla. 20:53.120 --> 20:53.960 And it was actually kind of cool 20:53.960 --> 20:54.800 because I learned some stuff. 20:54.800 --> 20:57.000 He was talking about how great Tesla cars were specifically, 20:57.000 --> 20:58.360 like how they were built differently. 20:58.360 --> 20:59.880 And he went into a lot of great detail 20:59.880 --> 21:00.720 that was really interesting. 21:00.720 --> 21:02.640 And to me, that oatmeal post, if you read it, 21:02.640 --> 21:05.760 is the genesis of pretty much all interest communities. 21:05.760 --> 21:07.000 I just really love this stuff. 21:07.000 --> 21:08.400 So for me, for example, there's yoyos, right? 21:08.400 --> 21:09.720 Like I'm into the yoyo communities 21:09.720 --> 21:12.800 and these interest communities are just really fascinating 21:12.800 --> 21:15.240 to me and I feel more connected to the yoyo communities 21:15.240 --> 21:18.640 than I do to friends that I don't see that often, right? 21:18.640 --> 21:21.760 Like to me, the powerful thing is the interest graph 21:21.760 --> 21:25.040 and Facebook kind of dabbles in the interest graph. 21:25.040 --> 21:26.720 I mean, they have groups, you can sign up for groups 21:26.720 --> 21:29.480 and stuff, but it's really about the relationship graph. 21:29.480 --> 21:32.080 Like this is my coworker, this is my relative, 21:32.080 --> 21:35.280 this is my friend, but not so much about the interest. 21:35.280 --> 21:36.920 So I think that's the linchpin 21:36.920 --> 21:39.200 of which forums and communities are built on 21:39.200 --> 21:40.320 that I personally love. 21:40.320 --> 21:44.240 Like I said, leadership is about passion, right? 21:44.240 --> 21:45.520 And being passionate about stuff 21:45.520 --> 21:47.520 is a really valid way to look at the world. 21:47.520 --> 21:48.680 And I think it's a way, 21:49.800 --> 21:51.240 a lot of stuff in the world gets done. 21:51.240 --> 21:52.960 Like I once had someone describe me as, 21:52.960 --> 21:54.640 he's like, Jeff, you're a guy who, 21:54.640 --> 21:57.560 you just get super passionate about a few things at a time 21:57.560 --> 21:59.760 and you just go super deep in those things. 21:59.760 --> 22:00.720 And I was like, oh, that's kind of right. 22:00.720 --> 22:01.560 That's kind of what I do. 22:01.560 --> 22:03.400 I get into something and just be super into that 22:03.400 --> 22:04.560 for a couple of years or whatever 22:04.560 --> 22:05.960 and just learn all I can about it 22:05.960 --> 22:07.800 and go super deep in it. 22:07.800 --> 22:11.000 And that's how I enjoy experiencing the world, right? 22:11.000 --> 22:12.400 Like not being shallow on a bunch of things, 22:12.400 --> 22:15.360 but being really deep on a few things that I'm interested in. 22:15.360 --> 22:17.200 So forums kind of unlock that, right? 22:17.200 --> 22:19.680 And you don't want a world where everything belongs 22:19.680 --> 22:20.920 to Facebook, at least I don't. 22:20.920 --> 22:22.760 I want a world where communities can kind of own themselves, 22:22.760 --> 22:25.120 set their own norms, set their own rules, 22:25.120 --> 22:26.320 control the experience. 22:26.320 --> 22:28.720 Because community is also about ownership, right? 22:28.720 --> 22:31.520 Like if you're meeting at the Barnes & Noble 22:31.520 --> 22:33.000 every Thursday and Barnes & Noble says, 22:33.000 --> 22:34.600 get out of here, you guys don't buy enough books, 22:34.600 --> 22:36.640 well, you're kind of hoes, right? 22:36.640 --> 22:37.880 Barnes & Noble owns you, right? 22:37.880 --> 22:38.880 Like you can't. 22:38.880 --> 22:40.320 But if you have your own meeting space, 22:40.320 --> 22:41.440 you know, your own clubhouse, 22:41.440 --> 22:43.040 you can set your own rules, 22:43.040 --> 22:44.520 decide what you want to talk about there 22:44.520 --> 22:47.800 and just really generate a lot better information 22:47.800 --> 22:49.520 than you could like hanging out at Barnes & Noble 22:49.520 --> 22:51.880 every Thursday at 3 p.m., right? 22:51.880 --> 22:53.840 So that's kind of the vision of Discourse, 22:53.840 --> 22:57.160 is a place where it's fully open source. 22:57.160 --> 22:59.160 You can take the software, you can install it anywhere. 22:59.160 --> 23:00.880 And you know, you and a group of people 23:00.880 --> 23:02.840 can go deep on whatever it is that you're into. 23:02.840 --> 23:04.440 And this works for startups, right? 23:04.440 --> 23:05.920 Startups are a group of people 23:05.920 --> 23:08.400 who go super deep on a specific problem, right? 23:08.400 --> 23:09.600 And they want to talk to their communities 23:09.600 --> 23:11.040 like, well, install Discourse, right? 23:11.040 --> 23:12.040 That's what we do at Discourse. 23:12.040 --> 23:13.560 That's what I did at Stack Overflow. 23:13.560 --> 23:15.520 I spent a lot of time on MetaStack Overflow, 23:15.520 --> 23:17.920 which is our internal, well, 23:17.920 --> 23:20.200 public community feedback site. 23:20.200 --> 23:24.160 And just experiencing what the users were experiencing, right? 23:24.160 --> 23:26.040 Because they're the ones doing all the work in the system. 23:26.040 --> 23:27.600 And they had a lot of interesting feedback. 23:27.600 --> 23:30.200 And there's that 90, 10 rule of like 90% of the feedback 23:30.200 --> 23:32.360 you get is not really actionable for a variety of reasons. 23:32.360 --> 23:33.560 It might be bad feedback. 23:33.560 --> 23:34.600 It might be crazy feedback. 23:34.600 --> 23:36.400 It might be feedback you just can't act on right now. 23:36.400 --> 23:38.320 But there's 10% of it that's like gold. 23:38.320 --> 23:39.760 It's like literally gold and diamonds, 23:39.760 --> 23:42.440 where it's like feedback of really good improvements 23:42.440 --> 23:44.800 to your core product that are not super hard to get to 23:44.800 --> 23:45.800 and actually make a lot of sense. 23:45.800 --> 23:47.800 And my favorite is about 5% of those stuff 23:47.800 --> 23:48.720 I didn't even see coming. 23:48.720 --> 23:50.480 It's like, oh my God, I never even thought of that. 23:50.480 --> 23:52.560 But that's a brilliant idea, right? 23:52.560 --> 23:54.560 And I can point to so many features of Stack Overflow 23:54.560 --> 23:56.720 that we drive from MetaStack Overflow feedback 23:56.720 --> 24:00.280 and MetaDiscourse, right, same exact principle of discourse. 24:00.280 --> 24:02.280 You know, we're getting ideas from the community. 24:02.280 --> 24:03.480 I was like, oh my God, I never thought of that. 24:03.480 --> 24:04.680 But that's fantastic, right? 24:04.680 --> 24:06.920 Like I love that relationship with the community. 24:06.920 --> 24:10.200 From having built these communities, what have you, 24:10.200 --> 24:11.120 what have you learned about? 24:11.120 --> 24:12.880 What's the process of getting a critical mass 24:12.880 --> 24:14.160 of members in a community? 24:14.160 --> 24:17.040 Is it luck, skill, timing, persistence? 24:17.040 --> 24:20.400 What is, is it the tools, like discourse 24:20.400 --> 24:21.880 that empower that community? 24:21.880 --> 24:25.880 What's the key aspect of starting for one guy or gal 24:25.880 --> 24:27.760 and then building it to two, one and 10 24:27.760 --> 24:30.000 and a hundred and a thousand and so on? 24:30.000 --> 24:32.320 I think we're starting with an end of one. 24:32.320 --> 24:33.920 I mean, I think it's persistence 24:33.920 --> 24:37.040 and also you have to be interesting. 24:37.040 --> 24:38.520 Like somebody I really admire 24:38.520 --> 24:40.200 once said something that I always liked about blogging. 24:40.200 --> 24:41.880 He's like, here's how you blog. 24:41.880 --> 24:44.440 You have to have something interesting to say 24:44.440 --> 24:46.960 and have an interesting way of saying it, right? 24:46.960 --> 24:49.000 And then do that for like 10 years. 24:49.920 --> 24:52.360 So that's the genesis is like you have to have 24:52.360 --> 24:53.560 sort of something interesting to say 24:53.560 --> 24:55.280 that's not exactly what everybody else is saying. 24:55.280 --> 24:56.440 And an interesting way of saying it, 24:56.440 --> 24:57.920 which is another way of saying kind of entertaining 24:57.920 --> 24:59.280 way of saying it. 24:59.280 --> 25:02.200 And then as far as growing it, it's like ritual, you know, 25:02.200 --> 25:04.280 like you have to like say you're starting a blog, 25:04.280 --> 25:06.720 you have to say, look, I'm gonna blog every week, 25:06.720 --> 25:09.320 three times a week and you have to stick to that schedule, 25:09.320 --> 25:10.160 right? 25:10.160 --> 25:12.880 Because until you do that for like several years, 25:12.880 --> 25:14.400 you're never gonna get anywhere. 25:14.400 --> 25:16.720 Like it just takes years to get to where you need to get to. 25:16.720 --> 25:18.720 And part of that is having the discipline 25:18.720 --> 25:19.760 to stick with the schedule. 25:19.760 --> 25:21.720 And it helps again, if it's something you're passionate about, 25:21.720 --> 25:22.760 this won't feel like work. 25:22.760 --> 25:23.600 Like, I love this. 25:23.600 --> 25:25.640 I can talk about this all day, every day, right? 25:26.840 --> 25:28.000 You just have to do it in a way that's interesting 25:28.000 --> 25:28.840 to other people. 25:28.840 --> 25:30.640 And then as you're growing the community, 25:30.640 --> 25:32.480 that pattern of participation within the community 25:32.480 --> 25:34.320 of like generating these artifacts 25:34.320 --> 25:35.720 and inviting other people to help you 25:35.720 --> 25:36.960 like collaborate on these artifacts. 25:36.960 --> 25:38.280 Like even in the case of blogging, 25:38.280 --> 25:40.880 like I felt in the early days of my blog, 25:40.880 --> 25:41.960 which I started in 2004, 25:41.960 --> 25:43.760 which is really the genesis of Stack Overflow. 25:43.760 --> 25:46.280 If you look at all my blog, it leads up to Stack Overflow, 25:46.280 --> 25:48.440 which was, I have all this energy in my blog, 25:48.440 --> 25:51.320 but I don't like 40,000 people were subscribing to me. 25:51.320 --> 25:52.440 And I was like, I wanna do something. 25:52.440 --> 25:54.160 And then I met Joel and said, hey, Joel, 25:54.160 --> 25:56.240 I wanna do something, take this ball of energy 25:56.240 --> 25:57.360 from my blog and do something. 25:57.360 --> 25:58.800 And all the people who read my blog saw that, 25:58.800 --> 26:00.560 it's like, oh, cool, you're involving us. 26:00.560 --> 26:03.360 You're saying, look, you're part of this community, 26:03.360 --> 26:04.520 let's build this thing together. 26:04.520 --> 26:05.520 Like they pick the name. 26:05.520 --> 26:08.040 Like we voted on the name for Stack Overflow on my blog. 26:08.040 --> 26:09.960 Like we came up and naming is super hard. 26:09.960 --> 26:12.240 First of all, the hardest problem in computer science 26:12.240 --> 26:14.480 is coming with a good name for stuff, right? 26:14.480 --> 26:15.880 But you can go back to my blog. 26:15.880 --> 26:17.600 There's the poll where we voted 26:17.600 --> 26:19.240 and Stack Overflow became the name of the site. 26:19.240 --> 26:21.160 And all the early beta users of Stack Overflow 26:21.160 --> 26:24.560 were audience of my blog plus Joel's blog, right? 26:24.560 --> 26:26.480 So we started from like, if you look at the Genesis, 26:26.480 --> 26:28.120 okay, I was just a programmer who said, 26:28.120 --> 26:30.400 hey, I love programming, but I have no outlet 26:30.400 --> 26:31.240 to talk about it. 26:31.240 --> 26:32.080 So I'm just gonna blog about it 26:32.080 --> 26:33.320 because I don't have enough people to work 26:33.320 --> 26:34.320 to talk to about it. 26:34.320 --> 26:36.480 Cause at the time I worked place where, 26:36.480 --> 26:38.880 you know, programming wasn't the core output of the company. 26:38.880 --> 26:40.800 It was a pharmaceutical company. 26:40.800 --> 26:43.520 And I just love this stuff, you know, to an absurd degree. 26:43.520 --> 26:44.920 So I was like, I'll just blog about it 26:44.920 --> 26:45.920 and then I'll find an audience 26:45.920 --> 26:47.680 and eventually found an audience, 26:47.680 --> 26:50.440 eventually found Joel and eventually built Stack Overflow 26:50.440 --> 26:52.840 from that one core of activity, right? 26:52.840 --> 26:55.400 But it was that repetition of feeding back in, 26:55.400 --> 26:58.040 feedback from my blog comments, feedback from Joel, 26:58.040 --> 27:01.440 feedback from the early Stack Overflow community. 27:01.440 --> 27:02.840 When people see that you're doing that, 27:02.840 --> 27:04.120 they will follow along with you, right? 27:04.120 --> 27:05.480 They say, cool, you're here in good faith. 27:05.480 --> 27:07.240 You're actually, you know, not listening to everything 27:07.240 --> 27:09.280 because that's impossible, that's impossible, 27:09.280 --> 27:13.000 but you're actually, you know, waiting our feedback 27:13.000 --> 27:14.720 in what you're doing because, and why wouldn't I? 27:14.720 --> 27:16.680 Because who does all the work on Stack Overflow? 27:16.680 --> 27:17.920 Me, Joel? 27:17.920 --> 27:19.600 No, it's the other programmers 27:19.600 --> 27:20.480 that are doing all the work. 27:20.480 --> 27:22.480 So you gotta have some respect for that. 27:22.480 --> 27:25.080 And then, you know, discipline around, look, 27:25.080 --> 27:26.400 you know, we're trying to do a very specific thing 27:26.400 --> 27:27.240 here on Stack Overflow. 27:27.240 --> 27:29.080 We're not trying to solve all the world's problems. 27:29.080 --> 27:30.920 We're trying to solve this very specific Q&A problem 27:30.920 --> 27:32.320 in a very specific way. 27:32.320 --> 27:33.560 Not because we're jerks about it, 27:33.560 --> 27:35.960 but because these strict set of rules 27:35.960 --> 27:39.360 help us get really good results, right? 27:39.360 --> 27:41.440 And programmers, that's an easy sell for the most part 27:41.440 --> 27:42.520 because programmers are used to dealing 27:42.520 --> 27:45.080 with ridiculous systems of rules like constantly. 27:45.080 --> 27:46.760 That's basically their job. 27:46.760 --> 27:49.480 So they're very, oh yeah, super strict system of rules 27:49.480 --> 27:50.400 that lets me get what I want. 27:50.400 --> 27:51.560 That's programming, right? 27:51.560 --> 27:53.640 That's what Stack Overflow is, so. 27:53.640 --> 27:54.880 So you're making it sound easy, 27:54.880 --> 27:58.000 but in 2004, let's go back there. 27:58.000 --> 28:01.520 In 2004, you started the blog, Coding Horror. 28:01.520 --> 28:03.520 Was it called that at the very beginning? 28:03.520 --> 28:04.360 It was. 28:04.360 --> 28:05.200 One of the smart things I did, 28:05.200 --> 28:06.680 it's from a book by Steve McConnell, Code Complete, 28:06.680 --> 28:08.200 which is one of my favorite programming books, 28:08.200 --> 28:09.760 still probably my number one programming book 28:09.760 --> 28:10.760 for anyone to read. 28:12.080 --> 28:13.800 One of the smart things I did back then, 28:13.800 --> 28:16.040 I don't always do smart things when I start stuff. 28:16.040 --> 28:18.360 I contacted Steve and said, hey, I really like this. 28:18.360 --> 28:19.600 It was a sidebar illustration, 28:19.600 --> 28:21.800 indicating danger in code, right? 28:21.800 --> 28:23.880 Coding Horror was like, watch out. 28:25.280 --> 28:27.400 And I love that illustration because it spoke to me. 28:27.400 --> 28:28.840 Because I saw that illustration go, oh my God, 28:28.840 --> 28:31.040 that's me, like I'm always my own worst enemy. 28:31.040 --> 28:33.320 Like that's the key insight in programming is, 28:33.320 --> 28:34.280 every time you write something, 28:34.280 --> 28:36.560 think how am I gonna screw myself? 28:36.560 --> 28:39.240 Because you will, constantly, right? 28:39.240 --> 28:41.240 So that icon was like, oh yeah, 28:41.240 --> 28:43.160 I need to constantly hold that mirror up and look 28:43.160 --> 28:45.400 and say, look, you're very fallible. 28:45.400 --> 28:46.360 You're gonna screw this up. 28:46.360 --> 28:48.000 Like how can you build this in such a way 28:48.000 --> 28:50.320 that you're not gonna screw it up later? 28:50.320 --> 28:52.960 Like how can you get that discipline around 28:52.960 --> 28:54.280 making sure at every step, 28:54.280 --> 28:56.160 I'm thinking through all the things that I could do wrong 28:56.160 --> 28:57.200 or that other people could do wrong. 28:57.200 --> 28:59.520 Cause that is actually how you get to be a better programmer 28:59.520 --> 29:00.560 a lot of times, right? 29:00.560 --> 29:03.360 So that sidebar illustration, I loved it so much. 29:03.360 --> 29:05.440 And I wrote Steve before I started my blog, 29:05.440 --> 29:06.760 and said, hey, can I have permission to use this? 29:06.760 --> 29:08.400 Cause I just really like this illustration. 29:08.400 --> 29:11.240 And Steve was kind enough to let me permission to do that 29:11.240 --> 29:12.640 and just continues to give me permission. 29:12.640 --> 29:13.480 So yeah. 29:13.480 --> 29:15.040 Really, that's awesome. 29:15.040 --> 29:18.840 But in 2004, you started this blog. 29:18.840 --> 29:22.560 You know, you look at Stephen King's book on writing 29:22.560 --> 29:26.400 or Stephen Pressfield's War of Art book. 29:26.400 --> 29:30.000 I mean, it seems like writers suffer. 29:30.000 --> 29:32.480 I mean, it's a hard process of writing, right? 29:32.480 --> 29:34.160 There's a lot of, there's gonna be suffering. 29:34.160 --> 29:35.160 I mean, I won't kid you like, 29:35.160 --> 29:36.360 well, the work is suffering, right? 29:36.360 --> 29:38.680 Like doing the work, like even when you're every week, 29:38.680 --> 29:40.240 you're like, okay, that blog post wasn't very good 29:40.240 --> 29:41.440 or you know, people didn't like it 29:41.440 --> 29:44.040 or people said disparaging things about it. 29:44.040 --> 29:47.400 You have to like have the attitude is like, you know, 29:47.400 --> 29:49.440 no matter what happens, I want to do this for me, right? 29:49.440 --> 29:51.200 It's not about you, it's about me. 29:51.200 --> 29:53.280 I mean, in the end, it is about everyone 29:53.280 --> 29:55.800 because this is how good work gets out into the world. 29:55.800 --> 29:59.760 But you have to be pretty strict about saying like, 29:59.760 --> 30:01.600 you know, I'm selfish in the sense 30:01.600 --> 30:03.240 that I have to do this for me. 30:03.240 --> 30:04.320 You know, you mentioned Stephen King, 30:04.320 --> 30:05.440 like his book on writing, 30:05.440 --> 30:06.800 but like one of the things I do, for example, 30:06.800 --> 30:08.640 when writing is like, I read it out loud, 30:08.640 --> 30:10.600 one of the best pieces of advice for writing anything 30:10.600 --> 30:13.840 is read it out loud, like multiple times. 30:13.840 --> 30:15.800 And make it sound like you're talking 30:15.800 --> 30:17.840 because that is the goal of good writing. 30:17.840 --> 30:19.520 It should sound like you said it with, 30:19.520 --> 30:20.840 with slightly better phrasing 30:20.840 --> 30:22.080 because you have more time to think about what you're saying, 30:22.080 --> 30:24.360 but like, it should sound natural when you say it. 30:24.360 --> 30:27.120 And I think that's probably the single best writing advice 30:27.120 --> 30:27.960 I can give anyone. 30:27.960 --> 30:29.760 It's just, just read it over and over out loud, 30:29.760 --> 30:32.600 make sure it sounds like something you would normally say 30:32.600 --> 30:33.680 and it sounds good. 30:33.680 --> 30:35.600 And what's your process of writing? 30:35.600 --> 30:39.360 So there's usually a pretty good idea behind the blog post. 30:39.360 --> 30:40.200 So ideas, right. 30:40.200 --> 30:44.480 So I think you gotta have the concept that 30:44.480 --> 30:46.160 there's so many interesting things in the world. 30:46.160 --> 30:48.760 Like, I mean, my God, the world is amazing, right? 30:48.760 --> 30:51.920 Like you could never write about everything that's going on 30:51.920 --> 30:52.760 because it's so incredible. 30:52.760 --> 30:54.160 But if you can't come up with like, 30:54.160 --> 30:57.080 let's say one interesting thing per day to talk about, 30:57.080 --> 30:58.320 then you're not trying hard enough 30:58.320 --> 31:00.600 because the world is full of just super interesting stuff. 31:00.600 --> 31:03.080 And one great way to like mine stuff 31:03.080 --> 31:04.240 is go back to old books 31:04.240 --> 31:07.160 because they bring up old stuff that's still super relevant. 31:07.160 --> 31:08.120 And I did that a lot 31:08.120 --> 31:09.840 because I was like reading classic programming books 31:09.840 --> 31:11.240 and a lot of the early blog posts were like, 31:11.240 --> 31:12.240 oh, I was reading this programming book 31:12.240 --> 31:13.720 and they brought this really cool concept 31:13.720 --> 31:14.960 and I want to talk about it some more. 31:14.960 --> 31:16.960 And you get the, I mean, you're not claiming credit 31:16.960 --> 31:18.080 for the idea, but it gives you something interesting 31:18.080 --> 31:19.840 to talk about that's kind of evergreen, right? 31:19.840 --> 31:21.920 Like you don't have to go, what should I talk about? 31:21.920 --> 31:24.560 So we'll just go dig up some old classic programming books 31:24.560 --> 31:26.960 and find something that, oh, wow, that's interesting. 31:26.960 --> 31:28.120 Or how does that apply today? 31:28.120 --> 31:30.920 Or what about X and Y or compare these two concepts? 31:30.920 --> 31:32.720 So pull a couple of sentences from that book 31:32.720 --> 31:35.960 and then sort of play off of it, almost agree or disagree. 31:35.960 --> 31:40.960 That so in 2007, you wrote that you were offered 31:41.880 --> 31:44.480 a significant amount of money to sell the blog. 31:44.480 --> 31:46.000 You chose not to. 31:46.000 --> 31:49.000 What were all the elements you were thinking about? 31:49.000 --> 31:50.560 Because I'd like to take you back. 31:50.560 --> 31:52.560 It seems like there's a lot of nonlinear decisions 31:52.560 --> 31:54.600 you made through life. 31:54.600 --> 31:56.080 So what was that decision like? 31:56.080 --> 31:57.880 Right, so one of the things I love 31:57.880 --> 31:59.400 is the Choose Your Own Adventure books, 31:59.400 --> 32:00.320 which I loved as a kid. 32:00.320 --> 32:01.760 And I feel like they're early programmer books 32:01.760 --> 32:04.080 because they're all about if then statements, right? 32:04.080 --> 32:07.280 If this then this, and they're also very, very unforgiving. 32:07.280 --> 32:08.960 Like there's all these sites that map 32:08.960 --> 32:11.080 the classic Choose Your Own Adventure books 32:11.080 --> 32:13.960 and how many outcomes are bad, a lot of bad outcomes. 32:13.960 --> 32:16.120 So part of the game is like, oh, I got an outcome. 32:16.120 --> 32:17.840 Go back one step, go back one further step. 32:17.840 --> 32:19.640 It's like, how did I get here, right? 32:19.640 --> 32:21.920 It's a sequence of decisions. 32:21.920 --> 32:23.200 And this is true of life, right? 32:23.200 --> 32:25.600 Like every decision is a sequence, right? 32:25.600 --> 32:28.360 Individually, any individual decision 32:28.360 --> 32:29.280 is not actually right or wrong, 32:29.280 --> 32:31.080 but they lead you down a path, right? 32:31.080 --> 32:32.800 So I do think there's some truth there. 32:32.800 --> 32:34.800 So this particular decision, 32:34.800 --> 32:36.360 the blogging I'm fairly popular. 32:36.360 --> 32:39.120 There's a lot of RSS readers that I discovered. 32:39.120 --> 32:41.040 And this guy contacted me out of the blue 32:41.040 --> 32:42.480 from this like bug tracking company. 32:42.480 --> 32:44.480 He's like, oh, I really want to buy your blog for like, 32:44.480 --> 32:47.040 I think it was around, it was $100,000, 32:47.040 --> 32:49.280 might've been like 80,000, but it was a lot, right? 32:49.280 --> 32:51.160 Like, and that's, you know, at the time, 32:51.160 --> 32:54.480 like I would have a year's worth of salary all at once. 32:54.480 --> 32:57.760 So I really think about like, well, you know, 32:57.760 --> 32:58.920 and I remember talking to people at the time, 32:58.920 --> 32:59.880 I was like, wow, that's a lot of money. 32:59.880 --> 33:02.040 But then the other thing, like I really like my blog, right? 33:02.040 --> 33:03.760 Like, do I want to sell my blog? 33:03.760 --> 33:05.320 Because it wouldn't really belong to me anymore 33:05.320 --> 33:06.160 at that point. 33:06.160 --> 33:09.400 And one of the guidelines that I like to, 33:09.400 --> 33:11.080 I don't like to give advice to people a lot, 33:11.080 --> 33:12.560 but one of the pieces of advice I do give, 33:12.560 --> 33:13.760 because I do think it's really true 33:13.760 --> 33:15.600 and it's generally helpful, 33:15.600 --> 33:17.640 is whenever you're looking at a set of decisions, 33:17.640 --> 33:19.920 like, oh gosh, should I do A, B or C? 33:19.920 --> 33:22.560 You got to pick the thing that's a little scarier 33:22.560 --> 33:24.560 in that list, because not, you know, 33:24.560 --> 33:25.720 not like jump off a cliff scary, 33:25.720 --> 33:27.040 but the thing that makes you nervous. 33:27.040 --> 33:29.000 Because if you pick the safe choice, 33:29.000 --> 33:30.360 it's usually you're not really pushing. 33:30.360 --> 33:31.400 You're not pushing yourself. 33:31.400 --> 33:33.960 You're not choosing the thing that's going to help you grow. 33:33.960 --> 33:36.160 So for me, the scarier choice was to say no. 33:36.160 --> 33:38.360 I was like, well, no, let's just see where this is going, right? 33:38.360 --> 33:39.520 Because then I own it. 33:39.520 --> 33:40.520 I mean, it belongs to me. 33:40.520 --> 33:41.760 It's my thing. 33:41.760 --> 33:43.160 And I can just take it 33:43.160 --> 33:45.360 and tell some other logical conclusion, right? 33:45.360 --> 33:46.840 Because imagine how different the world would have been 33:46.840 --> 33:49.080 had I said yes and sold the blog. 33:49.080 --> 33:51.560 It's like there probably wouldn't be Stack Overflow. 33:51.560 --> 33:53.640 You know, a lot of other stuff would have changed. 33:53.640 --> 33:55.360 So for that particular decision, 33:55.360 --> 33:56.320 I think it was that same rule, 33:56.320 --> 33:57.960 like what scares me a little bit more? 33:57.960 --> 33:59.240 Do the thing that scares you. 33:59.240 --> 34:00.080 Yeah. 34:00.080 --> 34:01.760 Which startups? 34:01.760 --> 34:03.280 I think there's a specific, 34:03.280 --> 34:05.000 some more general questions 34:05.000 --> 34:07.560 that a lot of people would be interested in. 34:07.560 --> 34:10.320 You've started Stack Overflow. 34:10.320 --> 34:12.080 You've started Discourse. 34:12.080 --> 34:15.320 So what's the, you know, one, two, three guys, 34:15.320 --> 34:17.200 whatever it is in the beginning. 34:17.200 --> 34:19.360 What was that process like? 34:19.360 --> 34:20.720 Do you start talking about it? 34:20.720 --> 34:21.800 Do you start programming? 34:21.800 --> 34:24.520 Do you start, like where is the birth 34:24.520 --> 34:25.840 and the catalyst that actually exists? 34:25.840 --> 34:27.000 Well, I can talk about it in the context 34:27.000 --> 34:28.080 of both Stack Overflow and Discourse. 34:28.080 --> 34:31.040 So I think the key thing initially is there is a problem. 34:31.040 --> 34:32.400 Something, there's some state of the world 34:32.400 --> 34:33.920 that's unsatisfactory to the point 34:33.920 --> 34:35.960 that like you're upset about it, right? 34:35.960 --> 34:37.800 Like in that case, it was experts exchange. 34:37.800 --> 34:38.920 I mean, Joel's original idea, 34:38.920 --> 34:40.560 cause I approached Joel's like, look, Joel, 34:40.560 --> 34:41.720 I have all this energy behind my blog. 34:41.720 --> 34:42.560 I want to do something. 34:42.560 --> 34:43.880 I want to build something, but I don't know what it is. 34:43.880 --> 34:45.680 Cause I'm not, I'm honestly not a good idea person. 34:45.680 --> 34:46.520 I'm really not. 34:46.520 --> 34:47.720 I'm like the execution guy. 34:47.720 --> 34:48.640 I'm really good at execution, 34:48.640 --> 34:51.000 but I'm not good at like blue skying ideas. 34:51.000 --> 34:52.040 Not my forte. 34:52.040 --> 34:54.040 Which is another reason why I like the community feedback. 34:54.040 --> 34:56.320 Cause they blue sky all day long for you, right? 34:56.320 --> 34:58.400 So when I can just go in and cherry pick a blue sky idea 34:58.400 --> 35:00.800 from community, even if I have to spend three hours reading 35:00.800 --> 35:02.720 to get one good idea, it's worth it, man. 35:02.720 --> 35:04.680 But anyway, so the idea from Joel was, 35:04.680 --> 35:07.400 hey, experts exchange, it's got great data, 35:07.400 --> 35:08.880 but the experience is hideous, right? 35:08.880 --> 35:09.920 It's, it's trying to trick you. 35:09.920 --> 35:12.040 It feels like you use car sales, but it's just bad. 35:12.040 --> 35:13.080 So I was like, oh, that's awesome. 35:13.080 --> 35:14.280 It feeds into community. 35:14.280 --> 35:15.120 It feeds into like, you know, 35:15.120 --> 35:16.680 we can make a creative commons. 35:16.680 --> 35:18.520 So I think the core is to have a really good idea 35:18.520 --> 35:20.280 that you feel very strongly about in the beginning, 35:20.280 --> 35:22.680 that like there's a wrong in the world that we will, 35:22.680 --> 35:24.280 an injustice that we will write 35:24.280 --> 35:26.120 through the process of building this thing. 35:26.120 --> 35:27.520 For discourse, it was like, look, 35:27.520 --> 35:30.200 there's no good software for communities 35:30.200 --> 35:32.960 to just hang out and like do stuff, right? 35:32.960 --> 35:35.480 Like whether it's problem solving, startup, whatever. 35:35.480 --> 35:37.640 Forms are such a great building block of online community 35:37.640 --> 35:38.600 and they're hideous. 35:38.600 --> 35:39.760 They were so bad, right? 35:39.760 --> 35:40.760 It was embarrassing. 35:40.760 --> 35:43.000 Like I literally was embarrassed to be associated 35:43.000 --> 35:43.960 with this software, right? 35:43.960 --> 35:45.720 I was like, we have to have software that you can be proud of. 35:45.720 --> 35:47.120 It's like, this is competitive with Reddit. 35:47.120 --> 35:48.360 This is competitive with Twitter. 35:48.360 --> 35:50.360 This is competitive with Facebook, right? 35:50.360 --> 35:53.520 I would be proud to have the software on my site. 35:53.520 --> 35:54.920 So that was the genesis of discourse, 35:54.920 --> 35:59.920 was feeling very strongly about their needs to be 35:59.920 --> 36:01.760 a good solution for communities. 36:01.760 --> 36:03.280 So that's step one, genesis funny idea 36:03.280 --> 36:04.600 you feel super strongly about, right? 36:04.600 --> 36:06.680 And then people galvanize around the idea. 36:06.680 --> 36:08.520 Like Joel was already super excited about the idea. 36:08.520 --> 36:10.000 I was excited about the idea. 36:10.000 --> 36:13.280 So with the forum software, I was posting on Twitter, 36:13.280 --> 36:15.040 I had researched, as part of my research, 36:15.040 --> 36:16.640 I start researching the problem, right? 36:16.640 --> 36:19.520 And I found a game called forum wars, 36:19.520 --> 36:21.480 which was a parody of forum. 36:21.480 --> 36:23.640 It's still very, very funny of like forum behavior 36:23.640 --> 36:26.120 a circle, like I would say 2003. 36:26.120 --> 36:27.720 It's age some, right? 36:27.720 --> 36:29.200 Like the behavior is a little different 36:29.200 --> 36:30.880 in the air of Twitter, but it was awesome. 36:30.880 --> 36:32.760 It was very funny and it was like a game, 36:32.760 --> 36:34.840 it was like an RPG and it had a forum attached to it. 36:34.840 --> 36:37.520 So it was like a game about forums with a forum attached. 36:37.520 --> 36:38.520 It was like, this is awesome, right? 36:38.520 --> 36:39.520 This is so cool. 36:39.520 --> 36:41.920 And the founder of that company or that project, 36:41.920 --> 36:43.040 it wasn't really a company, 36:43.040 --> 36:45.680 contacted me, this guy Robin Ward from Toronto. 36:45.680 --> 36:46.880 It's like, hey, you know, I saw you've been talking 36:46.880 --> 36:49.320 about forums and like, I really love that problem space. 36:49.320 --> 36:51.600 It's like, I'd still love to build really good forum software 36:51.600 --> 36:53.360 because I don't think anything out there is any good. 36:53.360 --> 36:54.200 And I was like, awesome. 36:54.200 --> 36:55.880 At that point, I was like, we're starting a company 36:55.880 --> 36:58.560 because like, I couldn't have wished for a better person 36:58.560 --> 37:00.080 to walk through the door and say, 37:00.080 --> 37:01.480 I'm excited about this too. 37:01.480 --> 37:02.360 Same thing with Joel, right? 37:02.360 --> 37:03.960 I mean, Joel is a legend in the industry, right? 37:03.960 --> 37:04.800 So when he walked through and said, 37:04.800 --> 37:05.640 I'm excited about this problem, 37:05.640 --> 37:08.160 I was like, me too, man, we can do this, right? 37:08.160 --> 37:10.600 So that to me is the most important step. 37:10.600 --> 37:12.040 It's like having an idea you're super excited about 37:12.040 --> 37:14.600 and another person, a co founder, right? 37:14.600 --> 37:16.200 Cause again, you get that dual leadership, right? 37:16.200 --> 37:18.080 Of like, am I making a bad decision? 37:19.080 --> 37:21.480 Sometimes it's nice to have checks of like, 37:21.480 --> 37:22.440 is this a good idea? 37:22.440 --> 37:23.680 I don't know, right? 37:23.680 --> 37:25.600 So those are the crucial seeds, 37:25.600 --> 37:27.520 but then starting to build stuff, 37:27.520 --> 37:28.360 whether it's you programming or somebody else. 37:28.360 --> 37:29.360 There is prototyping. 37:29.360 --> 37:30.600 So there's tons of research. 37:30.600 --> 37:32.920 There's tons of research, like what's out there that failed? 37:32.920 --> 37:34.360 Cause a lot of people look at it with successes. 37:34.360 --> 37:36.040 Oh, look at how successful X is. 37:36.040 --> 37:37.360 Everybody looks at the successes. 37:37.360 --> 37:38.360 Those are boring. 37:38.360 --> 37:39.560 Show me the failures. 37:39.560 --> 37:40.880 Cause that is what's interesting. 37:40.880 --> 37:42.080 That's where people were experimenting. 37:42.080 --> 37:43.520 That's where people were pushing, 37:43.520 --> 37:46.640 but they failed, but they probably failed for reasons 37:46.640 --> 37:50.080 that weren't directly about the quality of their idea, right? 37:50.080 --> 37:51.440 So look at all the failures. 37:51.440 --> 37:52.720 Don't just look what everybody looks at, 37:52.720 --> 37:53.560 which is like, oh gosh, 37:53.560 --> 37:54.680 look at all these successful people. 37:54.680 --> 37:55.960 Look at the failures. 37:55.960 --> 37:57.280 Look at the things that didn't work. 37:57.280 --> 37:59.080 Research the entire field. 37:59.080 --> 38:01.480 And so that's the research that I was doing 38:01.480 --> 38:02.760 that led me to Robin, right? 38:02.760 --> 38:03.600 Was that. 38:03.600 --> 38:04.800 And then when we, for example, 38:04.800 --> 38:07.560 when we did Stack Overflow, 38:07.560 --> 38:09.000 we're like, okay, well I really like elements 38:09.000 --> 38:10.040 of voting and digging Reddit. 38:10.040 --> 38:12.800 I like the Wikipedia, everything's up to date. 38:12.800 --> 38:14.320 Nothing is like an old tombstone 38:14.320 --> 38:16.980 that like has horrible out of date information. 38:16.980 --> 38:17.820 We know that works. 38:17.820 --> 38:19.400 Wikipedia is an amazing resource. 38:19.400 --> 38:22.400 Blogging the idea of ownership is so powerful, right? 38:22.400 --> 38:24.000 Like, oh, I Joe wrote this 38:24.000 --> 38:25.520 and look how good Joe's answer is, right? 38:25.520 --> 38:27.760 Like all these concepts were rolling together, 38:27.760 --> 38:29.080 researching all the things that were out there 38:29.080 --> 38:30.640 that were working and why they were working 38:30.640 --> 38:32.240 and trying to like fold them into that. 38:32.240 --> 38:34.040 Again, that Frankenstein's monster 38:34.040 --> 38:35.280 of what Stack Overflow is. 38:35.280 --> 38:37.080 And by the way, that wasn't a free decision 38:37.080 --> 38:38.760 because there's still a ton of tension 38:38.760 --> 38:40.040 in the Stack Overflow system. 38:40.040 --> 38:42.600 There's reasons people complain about Stack Overflow 38:42.600 --> 38:43.680 because it's so strict, right? 38:43.680 --> 38:44.640 Why is it so strict? 38:44.640 --> 38:46.480 Why are you guys always closing my questions? 38:46.480 --> 38:47.880 It's because there's so much tension 38:47.880 --> 38:49.120 that we built into the system 38:49.120 --> 38:51.240 around like trying to get good, good results 38:51.240 --> 38:56.000 out of the system and, you know, it's not a free. 38:56.000 --> 38:57.480 That stuff doesn't come for free, right? 38:57.480 --> 38:59.800 It's not like we all have perfect answers 38:59.800 --> 39:02.280 and nobody will have to get their feelings heard 39:02.280 --> 39:04.160 or nobody will have to get downvoted. 39:04.160 --> 39:05.800 Like it doesn't work that way, right? 39:05.800 --> 39:07.960 Like, so this is an interesting point 39:07.960 --> 39:09.400 and a small tangent. 39:09.400 --> 39:12.000 Yeah, you're right about anxiety. 39:12.000 --> 39:14.040 So I've posted a lot of questions 39:14.040 --> 39:16.040 and written answers on Stack Overflow. 39:16.040 --> 39:19.800 On the question side, usually go to something very specific 39:19.800 --> 39:21.200 to something I'm working on. 39:21.200 --> 39:22.280 This is something you talk about 39:22.280 --> 39:25.000 that really the goal of Stack Overflow 39:25.000 --> 39:27.840 isn't about, is to write a question not, 39:27.840 --> 39:31.800 that's not about you, it's about the question 39:31.800 --> 39:35.800 that will help the community in the future. 39:35.800 --> 39:37.520 Right, that's a tough sell, right? 39:37.520 --> 39:39.160 Because people are like, well, you know, 39:39.160 --> 39:40.280 I don't really care about the community. 39:40.280 --> 39:41.520 What I care about is my problem. 39:41.520 --> 39:42.400 My problem. 39:42.400 --> 39:43.480 And that's fair, right? 39:43.480 --> 39:44.960 It's sort of that, again, that tension, 39:44.960 --> 39:45.800 that balancing act. 39:45.800 --> 39:46.760 I want to help you, 39:46.760 --> 39:48.480 but we also want to help everybody that comes behind you. 39:48.480 --> 39:49.960 Right, the long line of people are gonna come up and say, 39:49.960 --> 39:52.320 oh, I kind of have that problem too, right? 39:52.320 --> 39:53.680 And if nobody's ever gonna come up 39:53.680 --> 39:54.880 and say I have this problem too, 39:54.880 --> 39:57.040 then that question shouldn't exist on Stack Overflow 39:57.040 --> 39:58.920 because the question is too specific. 39:58.920 --> 40:00.120 And even that's tension, right? 40:00.120 --> 40:00.960 How do you judge that? 40:00.960 --> 40:02.640 How do you know that nobody's ever gonna have 40:02.640 --> 40:04.720 this particular question again? 40:04.720 --> 40:06.840 So there's a lot of tension in the system. 40:06.840 --> 40:09.640 Do you think that anxiety of asking the question, 40:09.640 --> 40:12.680 the anxiety of answering that tension 40:12.680 --> 40:14.240 is inherent to programmers, 40:14.240 --> 40:16.920 is inherent to this kind of process? 40:16.920 --> 40:20.320 Or can it be improved? 40:20.320 --> 40:24.040 Can it be happy land where that tension 40:24.040 --> 40:26.320 is not quite so harsh? 40:26.320 --> 40:28.120 I don't think Stack Overflow 40:28.120 --> 40:30.040 can totally change the way it works. 40:30.040 --> 40:31.800 One thing they are working on, finally, 40:31.800 --> 40:35.200 is the ask page had not changed since 2011. 40:35.200 --> 40:36.760 I'm still kind of bitter about this 40:36.760 --> 40:39.360 because I feel like you have a Q&A system 40:39.360 --> 40:41.400 and one of the core pages in a Q&A system. 40:41.400 --> 40:42.240 Well, first of all, the question, 40:42.240 --> 40:43.760 all the answers and also the ask page, 40:43.760 --> 40:45.160 particularly when you're a new user 40:45.160 --> 40:46.520 or someone trying to ask a question, 40:46.520 --> 40:48.440 that's the point at which you need the most help. 40:48.440 --> 40:50.760 And we just didn't adapt with the times. 40:50.760 --> 40:52.360 But the good news is they're working on this 40:52.360 --> 40:53.240 from what I understand, 40:53.240 --> 40:55.200 and it's gonna be a more wizard based format. 40:55.200 --> 40:56.840 And you could envision a world 40:56.840 --> 40:58.440 where as part of this wizard based program, 40:58.440 --> 40:59.360 when you're asking a question, 40:59.360 --> 41:01.120 so okay, come up with a good title. 41:01.120 --> 41:02.560 What are good words to put in the title? 41:02.560 --> 41:04.280 One word that's not good to put in the title 41:04.280 --> 41:05.880 is problem, for example. 41:05.880 --> 41:06.720 I have a problem. 41:06.720 --> 41:07.800 Oh, you have a problem. 41:07.800 --> 41:10.000 Okay, a problem, that's great, right? 41:10.000 --> 41:11.240 Like, you need specifics, right? 41:11.240 --> 41:12.200 Like, so it's trying to help you 41:12.200 --> 41:14.240 make a good question title, for example. 41:14.240 --> 41:17.280 That step will be broken out, all that stuff. 41:17.280 --> 41:19.560 But one of those steps in that wizard of asking 41:19.560 --> 41:21.480 could say, hey, I'm a little nervous. 41:21.480 --> 41:22.680 You know, I've never done this before. 41:22.680 --> 41:26.080 Can you put me in a queue for like special mentoring, right? 41:26.080 --> 41:27.560 You could opt in to a special mentor. 41:27.560 --> 41:28.800 I think that would be fantastic. 41:28.800 --> 41:31.360 Like, I don't have any objection to that at all 41:31.360 --> 41:32.600 in terms of being an opt in system. 41:32.600 --> 41:33.880 Cause there are people that are like, you know, 41:33.880 --> 41:35.480 I just wanna help them. 41:35.480 --> 41:36.720 I wanna help a person no matter what. 41:36.720 --> 41:37.920 I wanna go above and beyond. 41:37.920 --> 41:40.160 I wanna spend like hours with this person. 41:40.160 --> 41:42.920 It depends what their goals are, right? 41:42.920 --> 41:43.760 It's a great idea. 41:43.760 --> 41:44.600 Who am I to judge, right? 41:44.600 --> 41:45.440 So that's fine. 41:45.440 --> 41:47.320 It's not precluded from happening. 41:47.320 --> 41:49.000 But there's a certain big city ethos 41:49.000 --> 41:51.080 that we started with of like, look, we're of New York City. 41:51.080 --> 41:52.800 You don't come to New York City and expect them to be, 41:52.800 --> 41:54.360 oh, welcome to the city, Joe. 41:54.360 --> 41:55.200 How's it going? 41:55.200 --> 41:56.040 Come on in. 41:56.040 --> 41:57.120 Let me show you around. 41:57.120 --> 41:59.360 That's not how New York City works, right? 41:59.360 --> 42:02.160 I mean, and you know, again, New York City 42:02.160 --> 42:03.080 is a reputation for being rude, 42:03.080 --> 42:04.080 which I actually don't think it is 42:04.080 --> 42:05.240 having been there fairly recently. 42:05.240 --> 42:06.080 It's not rude. 42:06.080 --> 42:07.200 People are just like going about their business, right? 42:07.200 --> 42:08.960 Like, look, I have things to do. 42:08.960 --> 42:11.800 I'm busy, I'm a busy professional, as are you. 42:11.800 --> 42:13.400 And since you're a busy professional, 42:13.400 --> 42:14.640 certainly when you ask a question, 42:14.640 --> 42:16.400 you're gonna ask the best possible question, right? 42:16.400 --> 42:18.200 Because you're a busy professional 42:18.200 --> 42:20.120 and you would not accept anything less 42:20.120 --> 42:21.400 than a very well went in question 42:21.400 --> 42:23.240 with a lot of detail about why you're doing it, 42:23.240 --> 42:25.040 what you're doing, what you researched, 42:25.040 --> 42:26.160 what you found, right? 42:26.160 --> 42:28.560 Cause you're a professional like me, right? 42:28.560 --> 42:30.960 And this rubs people sometimes the wrong way. 42:30.960 --> 42:32.280 And I don't think it's wrong to say, 42:32.280 --> 42:33.640 look, I don't want that experience. 42:33.640 --> 42:37.600 I want just a more chill place for beginners. 42:37.600 --> 42:39.160 And I still think Stack Overflow 42:39.160 --> 42:41.960 is not, was never designed for beginners, right? 42:41.960 --> 42:43.840 There's this misconception that, you know, 42:43.840 --> 42:45.160 even Joel says sometimes, oh yes, 42:45.160 --> 42:46.120 Stack Overflow for beginners. 42:46.120 --> 42:48.840 And I think if you're a prodigy, it can be. 42:48.840 --> 42:51.720 But that's not really representative, right? 42:51.720 --> 42:53.080 Like, I think as a beginner, 42:53.080 --> 42:55.120 you want a totally different set of tools. 42:55.120 --> 42:58.040 You want like live screen sharing, live chat. 42:58.040 --> 42:59.240 You want access to resources. 42:59.240 --> 43:01.360 You want a playground, like a playground 43:01.360 --> 43:03.280 you can experiment in and like test 43:03.280 --> 43:05.640 and all the stuff that we just don't give people 43:05.640 --> 43:07.760 because that was never really the audience 43:07.760 --> 43:09.280 that we were designing Stack Overflow for. 43:09.280 --> 43:10.680 That doesn't mean it's wrong. 43:10.680 --> 43:11.760 And I think it would be awesome 43:11.760 --> 43:13.240 if there was a site like that on the internet 43:13.240 --> 43:14.280 or if Stack Overflow said, 43:14.280 --> 43:15.800 hey, you know, we're going to start doing this. 43:15.800 --> 43:16.960 That's fine too. 43:16.960 --> 43:17.800 You know, I'm not there. 43:17.800 --> 43:18.640 I'm not making those decisions. 43:18.640 --> 43:21.040 But I do think the pressure or the tension 43:21.040 --> 43:23.560 that you described is there for people to be, look, 43:23.560 --> 43:24.440 I'm a little nervous 43:24.440 --> 43:26.360 cause I know I got to do my best work, right? 43:26.360 --> 43:28.000 The other one is something you talk about 43:28.000 --> 43:30.280 which is also really interesting to me 43:30.280 --> 43:32.040 is duplicate questions. 43:32.040 --> 43:37.040 Or it's a really difficult problem that you highlight. 43:38.080 --> 43:39.440 It's super hard. 43:39.440 --> 43:41.680 Like you could take one little topic 43:41.680 --> 43:44.920 and you could probably write 10, 20, 30 ways 43:44.920 --> 43:48.160 of asking about that topic and there will be all different. 43:48.160 --> 43:50.160 I don't know if there should be one page 43:50.160 --> 43:51.840 that answers all of it. 43:51.840 --> 43:56.680 Is there a way that Stack Overflow can help 43:57.840 --> 44:01.120 disambiguate, like separate these duplicate questions 44:01.120 --> 44:02.800 or connect them together? 44:02.800 --> 44:06.200 Or is it a totally hopeless, difficult, impossible task? 44:06.200 --> 44:08.440 I think it's a very, very hard computer science problem. 44:08.440 --> 44:10.280 And partly cause people are very good 44:10.280 --> 44:11.760 at using completely different words. 44:11.760 --> 44:13.160 It always amazed me on Stack Overflow, 44:13.160 --> 44:15.440 you'd have two questions that were functionally identical. 44:15.440 --> 44:17.520 And one question had like zero words in common 44:17.520 --> 44:18.360 with the other question. 44:18.360 --> 44:20.920 Like, oh my God, from a computer science perspective, 44:20.920 --> 44:22.880 how do you even begin to solve that? 44:22.880 --> 44:24.480 And it happens all the time. 44:24.480 --> 44:26.240 People are super good at this, right? 44:26.240 --> 44:28.320 Accidentally at asking the same thing 44:28.320 --> 44:31.200 in like 10, 20 different ways. 44:31.200 --> 44:32.280 And the other complexities, 44:32.280 --> 44:33.880 we want some of those duplicates to exist 44:33.880 --> 44:35.960 because if there's five versions with different words, 44:35.960 --> 44:37.280 have those five versions point 44:37.280 --> 44:39.560 to the one centralized answer, right? 44:39.560 --> 44:41.840 It's like, okay, this is duplicate, no worries. 44:41.840 --> 44:43.440 Here's the answer that you wanted over here 44:43.440 --> 44:47.960 on this, the prime example that we wanna have, 44:47.960 --> 44:50.120 rather than having 10 copies of the question 44:50.120 --> 44:50.960 and the answer. 44:50.960 --> 44:52.360 Because if you have 10 copies of the question answer, 44:52.360 --> 44:54.080 this also devalues the reputation system, 44:54.080 --> 44:56.840 which programmers hate, as I previously mentioned. 44:56.840 --> 44:58.280 You're getting reputation for an answer 44:58.280 --> 44:59.280 that somebody else already gave. 44:59.280 --> 45:00.400 It's like, well, it's an answer, 45:00.400 --> 45:02.160 but somebody else already gave that answer. 45:02.160 --> 45:04.520 So why are you getting reputation for the same answer 45:04.520 --> 45:06.440 as the other guy who gave it four years ago? 45:06.440 --> 45:07.720 People get offended by that, right? 45:07.720 --> 45:11.880 So the reputation system itself adds tension to the system. 45:11.880 --> 45:14.000 In that the people who have a lot of reputation 45:14.000 --> 45:17.560 become very incentivized to enforce the reputation system. 45:17.560 --> 45:18.880 And for the most part, this good. 45:18.880 --> 45:20.640 I know it sounds weird, but for most parts like, 45:20.640 --> 45:23.840 look, strict systems, I think to use Stack Overflow, 45:23.840 --> 45:24.800 you have to have the idea that, okay, 45:24.800 --> 45:26.600 strict systems ultimately work better. 45:26.600 --> 45:28.880 And I do think in programming, you're familiar 45:28.880 --> 45:31.280 with loose typing versus strict typing, right? 45:31.280 --> 45:32.960 The idea that you can declare a variable, 45:32.960 --> 45:34.000 not declare a variable, rather, 45:34.000 --> 45:35.080 just start using a variable and, okay, 45:35.080 --> 45:37.160 I see it's implicitly an integer, bam, awesome. 45:37.160 --> 45:38.120 Duck equals five. 45:38.120 --> 45:40.760 Well, duck is now an integer of five, right? 45:40.760 --> 45:42.320 And you're like, cool, awesome, simpler, right? 45:42.320 --> 45:43.800 Why would I want to worry about typing? 45:43.800 --> 45:45.800 And for a long time, like in the Ruby community, 45:45.800 --> 45:46.760 they're like, yeah, this is awesome. 45:46.760 --> 45:48.160 Like you just do a bunch of unit testing, 45:48.160 --> 45:50.920 which is testing your program's validity after the fact 45:50.920 --> 45:54.160 to catch any bugs that strict typing of variables 45:54.160 --> 45:55.000 would have caught. 45:55.000 --> 45:56.680 And now you have this thing called TypeScript 45:56.680 --> 45:59.560 from Microsoft, from the guy who built C Sharp Anders, 45:59.560 --> 46:02.680 who's one of the greatest minds in software development, 46:02.680 --> 46:04.200 right, like in terms of language design, 46:04.200 --> 46:06.080 and says, no, no, no, we want to bolt on 46:06.080 --> 46:07.320 a strict type system to JavaScript 46:07.320 --> 46:08.160 because it makes things better. 46:08.160 --> 46:10.000 And now everybody's like, oh my God, 46:10.000 --> 46:13.200 we deployed TypeScript and found 50 lane bugs 46:13.200 --> 46:14.480 that we didn't know about, right? 46:14.480 --> 46:15.800 Like this is super common. 46:15.800 --> 46:19.880 So I think there is a truth in programming 46:19.880 --> 46:22.200 that strictness, it's not the goal. 46:22.200 --> 46:23.480 We're not saying be super strict 46:23.480 --> 46:25.680 because strictness is correct. 46:25.680 --> 46:28.600 No, it's no, no, strictness produces better results. 46:28.600 --> 46:29.840 That's what I'm saying, right? 46:29.840 --> 46:31.720 So strict typing of variables, 46:31.720 --> 46:33.880 I would say you almost universally have consensus now 46:33.880 --> 46:35.400 is basically correct. 46:35.400 --> 46:37.680 Should be that way in every language, right? 46:37.680 --> 46:39.480 Duck equals five should generate an error 46:39.480 --> 46:40.680 because no, you didn't declare, 46:40.680 --> 46:42.920 you didn't tell me that duck was an integer, right? 46:42.920 --> 46:43.840 That's a bug, right? 46:43.840 --> 46:45.720 Or maybe you mistyped, you typed duck, right? 46:45.720 --> 46:46.560 Instead of duck, right? 46:46.560 --> 46:48.800 You never know, this happens all the time, right? 46:48.800 --> 46:51.600 So with that in mind, I will say that the strictness 46:51.600 --> 46:52.680 of the system is correct. 46:52.680 --> 46:55.040 Now, that doesn't mean cruel, that doesn't mean mean, 46:55.040 --> 46:57.800 that doesn't mean angry, it just means strict, okay? 46:57.800 --> 46:59.280 So I think where there's misunderstanding 46:59.280 --> 47:00.720 is in people get cranky, right? 47:00.720 --> 47:02.280 Like another question you asked is like, 47:02.280 --> 47:05.120 why are programmers kind of mean sometimes? 47:05.120 --> 47:07.360 Well, who do programmers work with all day long? 47:07.360 --> 47:10.040 So I have a theory that if you're at a job 47:10.040 --> 47:12.400 and you work with assholes all day long, 47:12.400 --> 47:14.320 what do you eventually become? 47:14.320 --> 47:15.160 An asshole. 47:15.160 --> 47:17.040 An asshole, and what is the computer 47:17.040 --> 47:19.240 except the world's biggest asshole? 47:19.240 --> 47:21.800 Because the computer has no time for your bullshit. 47:21.800 --> 47:24.000 The computer, the minute you make a mistake, 47:24.000 --> 47:25.240 everything is crashing down, right? 47:25.240 --> 47:28.080 One semicolon has crashed space missions, right? 47:28.080 --> 47:29.000 So that's normal. 47:29.000 --> 47:30.600 So you begin to internalize that. 47:30.600 --> 47:34.560 You begin to think, oh, my coworker, the computer, 47:34.560 --> 47:37.440 is super strict and kind of a jerk about everything. 47:37.440 --> 47:39.960 So that's kind of how I'm gonna be 47:39.960 --> 47:41.800 because I work with this computer 47:41.800 --> 47:44.520 and I have to exceed to its terms on everything. 47:44.520 --> 47:46.360 So therefore, you start to absorb that 47:46.360 --> 47:48.520 and you start to think, oh, well, being really strict 47:48.520 --> 47:50.360 arbitrarily is really good. 47:50.360 --> 47:54.120 An error code 56249 is a completely good error message 47:54.120 --> 47:56.080 because that's what the computer gave me, right? 47:56.080 --> 47:59.320 So you kind of forget to be a person at some level. 47:59.320 --> 48:01.400 And you know how they say great detectives 48:01.400 --> 48:04.200 internalize criminals and kind of arc criminals themselves 48:04.200 --> 48:07.080 like this trope of the master detective is good 48:07.080 --> 48:08.680 because you can think like the criminal. 48:08.680 --> 48:10.400 Well, I do think that's true of programmers. 48:10.400 --> 48:12.640 Really good programmers think like the computer 48:12.640 --> 48:14.200 because that's their job. 48:14.200 --> 48:17.080 But if you internalize it too much, you become the computer 48:17.080 --> 48:19.480 and you kind of become a jerk to everybody 48:19.480 --> 48:21.680 because that's what you've internalized. 48:21.680 --> 48:22.640 You're almost not a jerk, 48:22.640 --> 48:25.600 but you have no patience for lack of strictness, 48:25.600 --> 48:26.440 as you said. 48:26.440 --> 48:27.800 It's not out of a sense of meanness. 48:27.800 --> 48:28.640 It's accidental, 48:28.640 --> 48:30.360 but I do believe it's an occupational hazard 48:30.360 --> 48:32.440 or being a programmer is you start to behave 48:32.440 --> 48:33.680 like the computer. 48:33.680 --> 48:35.840 You're very unforgiving, you're very terse, 48:35.840 --> 48:38.400 you're very, oh, wrong, incorrect, move on. 48:38.400 --> 48:39.720 It's like, well, can you help me? 48:39.720 --> 48:41.200 Like what could I do to fix? 48:41.200 --> 48:43.960 No, wrong, next question, right? 48:43.960 --> 48:46.400 Like that's normal for the computer, right? 48:46.400 --> 48:47.760 Just fail next, right? 48:47.760 --> 48:51.240 Like, I don't know if you remember in Saturday Night Live, 48:51.240 --> 48:53.080 like in the nineties, they had this character 48:53.080 --> 48:56.720 who was an IT guy, the move guy, move. 48:56.720 --> 48:58.120 Was that Jimmy Fallon? 48:58.120 --> 49:01.160 No, no, who played him? 49:01.160 --> 49:02.640 Okay, yeah, I remember move. 49:02.640 --> 49:04.200 Right, he had no patience for him. 49:04.200 --> 49:05.720 Might have been mad TV actually. 49:05.720 --> 49:06.680 Oh, was it mad TV? 49:06.680 --> 49:07.600 Might have been, might have been. 49:07.600 --> 49:10.960 But anyway, that's always been the perception, right? 49:10.960 --> 49:12.560 You start to behave like the computer. 49:12.560 --> 49:14.920 It's like, oh, you're wrong out of the way, you know? 49:14.920 --> 49:17.560 You've written so many blog posts about programming, 49:17.560 --> 49:22.000 about programs, programming, programmers. 49:22.640 --> 49:25.640 What do you think makes a good, 49:25.640 --> 49:29.320 let's start with, what makes a good solo programmer? 49:29.320 --> 49:31.560 Well, I don't think you should be a solo programmer. 49:31.560 --> 49:33.320 I think to be a good solo programmer, 49:33.320 --> 49:35.560 it's kind of like what I talked about, well, not on mic, 49:35.560 --> 49:38.000 but one of the things, John Carmack, 49:38.000 --> 49:40.080 one of the best points he makes in the book, 49:40.080 --> 49:42.120 Masters of Doom, which is a fantastic book, 49:42.120 --> 49:43.680 and anybody listening to this who hasn't read it, 49:43.680 --> 49:45.800 please read it, it's such a great book, 49:45.800 --> 49:48.520 is that at the time they were working on stuff 49:48.520 --> 49:50.400 like Wolfenstein and Doom, 49:50.400 --> 49:52.800 like they didn't have the resources that we have today. 49:52.800 --> 49:53.960 They didn't have Stack Overflow, 49:53.960 --> 49:54.880 they didn't have Wikipedia, 49:54.880 --> 49:56.680 they didn't have like discourse forums, 49:56.680 --> 49:58.720 they didn't have places to go 49:58.720 --> 50:00.200 to get people to help them, right? 50:00.200 --> 50:01.920 They had to work on their own, 50:01.920 --> 50:04.720 and that's why it took a genius like Carmack to do this stuff, 50:04.720 --> 50:05.560 because you had to be a genius 50:05.560 --> 50:07.160 to invent from First Pensibles, 50:07.160 --> 50:08.560 a lot of the stuff he was like, 50:08.560 --> 50:11.040 the hacks he was coming up with were genius, right? 50:11.040 --> 50:12.520 Genius level stuff, but you don't need 50:12.520 --> 50:13.840 to be a genius anymore, 50:13.840 --> 50:15.560 and that means not working by yourself. 50:15.560 --> 50:17.400 You have to be good at researching stuff online, 50:17.400 --> 50:19.240 you have to be good at asking questions, 50:19.240 --> 50:21.040 really good questions that are really well researched, 50:21.040 --> 50:22.400 which implies, oh, I went out and researched 50:22.400 --> 50:24.120 for three hours before I wrote these questions, 50:24.120 --> 50:25.680 like that's what you should be doing, 50:25.680 --> 50:28.160 because that's what's gonna make you good, right? 50:28.160 --> 50:29.920 To me, this is the big difference between programming 50:29.920 --> 50:32.160 in like the 80s versus programming today, 50:32.160 --> 50:34.920 is like you kind of had to be by yourself back then, 50:34.920 --> 50:36.520 like where would you go for answers? 50:36.520 --> 50:37.920 I remember in the early days 50:37.920 --> 50:41.120 when I was learning Visual Basic for Windows, 50:41.120 --> 50:44.600 like I would call the Microsoft Helpline on the phone 50:44.600 --> 50:45.680 when I had like program, 50:45.680 --> 50:47.040 because I was like, I don't know what to do. 50:47.040 --> 50:48.560 So I would like go and call, 50:48.560 --> 50:49.640 and they had these huge phone banks, 50:49.640 --> 50:51.280 and like, can you imagine how alien that is now? 50:51.280 --> 50:52.360 Like who would do that, right? 50:52.360 --> 50:53.520 Like that's crazy. 50:53.520 --> 50:57.000 So there was just nowhere else to go when you got stuck, 50:57.000 --> 50:57.840 right? 50:57.840 --> 50:59.520 Like I had the books that came with it, 50:59.520 --> 51:01.320 I read those, studied those religiously. 51:01.320 --> 51:03.680 I just saw a post from Steve Sinovsky that said, 51:03.680 --> 51:08.680 this C++ version seven came with like 10,000 pages 51:08.880 --> 51:10.600 of written material, 51:10.600 --> 51:13.600 because where else were you gonna figure that stuff out? 51:13.600 --> 51:14.880 You didn't go to the library? 51:14.880 --> 51:15.800 I mean, you didn't have Wikipedia, 51:15.800 --> 51:17.880 you didn't have Reddit, 51:17.880 --> 51:20.760 you didn't have anywhere to go to answer these questions. 51:20.760 --> 51:24.200 So you've talked about through the years, 51:24.200 --> 51:25.560 basically not having an ego 51:25.560 --> 51:28.840 and not thinking that you're the best programmer 51:28.840 --> 51:29.840 in the world, 51:29.840 --> 51:34.120 and so always kind of just looking to improve, 51:34.120 --> 51:36.520 to become a better programmer than you were yesterday. 51:36.520 --> 51:39.240 So how have you changed as a programmer 51:39.240 --> 51:43.320 and as a thinker designer around programming 51:43.320 --> 51:47.360 over the past 15 years, 51:47.360 --> 51:49.000 really of being a public figure? 51:49.000 --> 51:50.880 I would say the big insight that I had 51:50.880 --> 51:52.680 is eventually as a programmer, 51:52.680 --> 51:54.760 you have to kind of stop writing code to be effective, 51:54.760 --> 51:57.000 which is kind of disturbing, 51:57.000 --> 51:58.280 because you really love it. 51:58.280 --> 52:02.160 But you realize like being effective at programming 52:02.160 --> 52:05.160 in the general sense doesn't mean writing code. 52:05.160 --> 52:06.620 And a lot of times you can be much more successful 52:06.620 --> 52:08.840 by not writing code and writing code 52:08.840 --> 52:10.400 in terms of just solving the problems you have, 52:10.400 --> 52:12.400 essentially hiring people that are really good 52:12.400 --> 52:13.800 and like setting them free 52:13.800 --> 52:16.240 and like giving them basic direction, right? 52:16.240 --> 52:18.040 Like on strategy and stuff, 52:18.040 --> 52:19.680 because a lot of the problems you encounter 52:19.680 --> 52:22.400 aren't necessarily solved to like really gnarly code, 52:22.400 --> 52:25.080 they're solved by conceptual solutions, 52:25.080 --> 52:26.560 which can then be turned into code, 52:26.560 --> 52:28.680 but are you even solving the right problem? 52:28.680 --> 52:31.920 I mean, so I would say for me, 52:31.920 --> 52:35.320 the main insight I have is to succeed as a programmer, 52:35.320 --> 52:37.560 you eventually kind of stop writing code. 52:37.560 --> 52:38.720 That's gonna sound discouraging, 52:38.720 --> 52:40.760 probably to people hearing, but I don't mean it that way. 52:40.760 --> 52:43.320 What I mean is that you're coding in a higher level language. 52:43.320 --> 52:44.280 Eventually like, okay, 52:44.280 --> 52:45.600 so we're coding in assembly language, right? 52:45.600 --> 52:46.640 That's the beginning, right? 52:46.640 --> 52:48.960 You're hard coded to the architecture. 52:48.960 --> 52:49.800 Then you have stuff like C, 52:49.800 --> 52:51.000 where it's like, wow, we can abstract 52:51.000 --> 52:52.600 across the architecture, you can write code. 52:52.600 --> 52:56.320 I can then compile that code for ARM or whatever, 52:56.320 --> 52:58.280 XA6 or whatever else is out there. 52:58.280 --> 53:00.120 And then even higher level NAT, right? 53:00.120 --> 53:01.920 Like you're looking at like Python, Ruby, 53:01.920 --> 53:03.000 interpreted languages. 53:03.000 --> 53:05.000 And then to me as a programmer, like, okay, 53:05.000 --> 53:06.000 I wanna go even higher. 53:06.000 --> 53:07.160 I wanna go higher than that. 53:07.160 --> 53:08.560 How do I abstract higher than language? 53:08.560 --> 53:11.120 It's like, well, you abstract in spoken language 53:11.120 --> 53:12.120 and written language, right? 53:12.120 --> 53:14.600 Like you're sort of inspiring people to get things done, 53:14.600 --> 53:16.080 giving them guidance, like, what if we did this? 53:16.080 --> 53:17.480 What if we did this? 53:17.480 --> 53:19.800 You're writing in the highest level language that there is, 53:19.800 --> 53:21.360 which is for me English, right? 53:21.360 --> 53:23.040 Whatever your spoken language is. 53:23.040 --> 53:25.840 So it's all about being effective, right? 53:25.840 --> 53:29.360 And I think Patrick McKenzie, 53:29.360 --> 53:32.000 patio 11 on Hacker News and Works at Stripe, 53:32.000 --> 53:33.600 has a great post about this, 53:33.600 --> 53:35.880 of how calling yourself a programmer 53:35.880 --> 53:38.600 is a career limiting move at some level. 53:38.600 --> 53:39.760 Once you get far enough from your career. 53:39.760 --> 53:40.800 And I really believe that. 53:40.800 --> 53:43.080 And again, I apologize, this is sound discouraging. 53:43.080 --> 53:45.280 I don't mean it to be, but he's so right. 53:45.280 --> 53:47.760 Because all the stuff that goes on around the code, 53:47.760 --> 53:49.800 like the people, like that's another thing. 53:49.800 --> 53:51.400 If you look at my early blog interviews, it was about, 53:51.400 --> 53:55.280 wow, programming is about people more than it's about code, 53:55.280 --> 53:56.720 which doesn't really make sense, right? 53:56.720 --> 53:59.200 But it's about, can these people even get along together? 53:59.200 --> 54:00.880 Can they understand each other? 54:00.880 --> 54:03.000 Can you even explain to me what it is you're working on? 54:03.000 --> 54:04.560 Are you solving the right problem? 54:04.560 --> 54:06.600 People wear it, right? Another classic programming book, 54:06.600 --> 54:08.520 which again, up there with code complete, 54:08.520 --> 54:09.960 please read people wear. 54:09.960 --> 54:11.600 It's that software is people, right? 54:11.600 --> 54:13.520 People are the software first and foremost. 54:13.520 --> 54:15.680 So a lot of the skills that I was working on 54:15.680 --> 54:17.600 early in the blog were about 54:17.600 --> 54:19.400 figuring out the people parts of programming, 54:19.400 --> 54:20.680 which was the harder parts. 54:20.680 --> 54:21.680 The hard part of programming, 54:21.680 --> 54:23.080 once you get to certain skill level programming, 54:23.080 --> 54:25.240 you can pretty much solve any reasonable problem 54:25.240 --> 54:26.320 that's put in front of you. 54:26.320 --> 54:28.120 You're not writing algorithms from scratch, right? 54:28.120 --> 54:29.280 That just doesn't happen. 54:29.280 --> 54:30.560 So any sort of reasonable problem 54:30.560 --> 54:32.280 put in front of you, you're gonna be able to solve. 54:32.280 --> 54:33.600 But what you can't solve is, 54:33.600 --> 54:36.920 our manager is a total jerk. 54:36.920 --> 54:38.600 You cannot solve that with code. 54:38.600 --> 54:40.640 That is not a code solvable problem. 54:40.640 --> 54:43.680 And yet that will cripple you way more than, 54:43.680 --> 54:45.800 oh, we had to use this stupid framework I don't like, 54:45.800 --> 54:49.320 or Sam keeps writing bad code that I hate, 54:49.320 --> 54:52.160 or Dave is off there in the wilderness, 54:52.160 --> 54:53.280 writing God knows what, right? 54:53.280 --> 54:54.120 These are not your problems. 54:54.120 --> 54:56.800 Your problem is your manager or a coworker 54:56.800 --> 54:58.760 is so toxic to everybody else in your team 54:58.760 --> 55:00.160 that nobody can get anything done 55:00.160 --> 55:02.320 because everybody's so stressed out and freaked out, right? 55:02.320 --> 55:04.480 These are the problems that you have to attack. 55:04.480 --> 55:05.320 Absolutely. 55:05.320 --> 55:07.360 And so as you go to these higher level abstractions 55:07.360 --> 55:09.080 as you've developed as a programmer 55:09.080 --> 55:10.600 to higher, higher level abstractions 55:10.600 --> 55:12.240 and go into natural language, 55:12.240 --> 55:15.680 you're also the guy who kind of preached, 55:15.680 --> 55:18.640 building it, diving in and doing it, 55:18.640 --> 55:21.760 and like learn by doing. 55:21.760 --> 55:22.840 Yes. 55:22.840 --> 55:27.840 Do you worry that as you get to higher, 55:28.480 --> 55:30.040 higher level abstractions, 55:30.040 --> 55:35.040 that you lose track of the lower level of just building 55:35.440 --> 55:37.200 is like, do you worry about that? 55:37.200 --> 55:41.600 Not maybe now, but 10 years from now, 20 years from now? 55:41.600 --> 55:42.520 Well, no. 55:42.520 --> 55:43.840 I mean, there is always that paranoia 55:43.840 --> 55:45.400 and oh gosh, I don't feel it's valuable 55:45.400 --> 55:46.240 since I'm not writing code. 55:46.240 --> 55:48.280 But for me, when we started the discourse project, 55:48.280 --> 55:50.280 it was Ruby, which I didn't really know Ruby. 55:50.280 --> 55:51.600 I mean, as you pointed out, 55:51.600 --> 55:53.840 and this is another valuable abstract from Stack Overflow, 55:53.840 --> 55:56.040 you can be super proficient at, for example, C Sharp, 55:56.040 --> 55:56.880 which I was working in, 55:56.880 --> 55:57.880 that's what we built Stack Overflow 55:57.880 --> 55:59.240 and then still is written in. 55:59.240 --> 56:01.480 And then switched to Ruby and you're a newbie again, right? 56:01.480 --> 56:03.200 But you have the framework. 56:03.200 --> 56:04.400 I know what a for loop is. 56:04.400 --> 56:05.760 I know what recursion is. 56:05.760 --> 56:09.600 I know what a stack trace is, right? 56:09.600 --> 56:11.360 Like I have all the fundamental concepts 56:11.360 --> 56:12.760 to be a programmer, I just don't know Ruby. 56:12.760 --> 56:14.760 So I'm still on a higher level. 56:14.760 --> 56:16.560 I'm not like a beginner beginner, like you're saying. 56:16.560 --> 56:18.560 I'm just like, I need to apply my programming concepts 56:18.560 --> 56:20.280 I already know to Ruby. 56:20.280 --> 56:23.160 Well, so there's a question that's really interesting. 56:23.160 --> 56:26.840 So looking at Ruby, how do you go about learning enough 56:26.840 --> 56:28.560 that your intuition can be applied? 56:28.560 --> 56:30.320 Well, that's the thing, that's what I was trying to get to 56:30.320 --> 56:31.160 is like what I realized, 56:31.160 --> 56:32.360 particularly when I started with just me and Robin, 56:32.360 --> 56:34.800 I realized if I bother Robin, 56:34.800 --> 56:37.080 I am now costing us productivity, right? 56:37.080 --> 56:39.640 Every time I go to Robin, rather than building 56:39.640 --> 56:43.760 the our first alpha version of discourse, 56:43.760 --> 56:46.040 he's now answering my stupid questions about Ruby. 56:46.040 --> 56:47.600 Is that a good use of his time? 56:47.600 --> 56:49.160 Is that a good use of my time? 56:49.160 --> 56:52.320 The answer to both of those was resoundingly no, right? 56:52.320 --> 56:54.320 Like we were getting to an alpha 56:54.320 --> 56:55.320 and it was pretty much like, okay, 56:55.320 --> 56:56.720 we'll hire more programmers, right? 56:56.720 --> 56:59.000 Like we eventually hired Neil 56:59.000 --> 57:01.760 and then eventually Sam, who came in as a cofounder. 57:02.880 --> 57:05.040 Actually it was Sam first, then Neil later. 57:05.040 --> 57:06.280 But the answer to the problem 57:06.280 --> 57:07.560 is just hire other competent programmers. 57:07.560 --> 57:10.360 It's not like teach, now I shall pull myself up 57:10.360 --> 57:12.360 by my bootstraps and learn Ruby. 57:12.360 --> 57:16.080 But at some point writing code becomes a liability to you 57:16.080 --> 57:17.400 in terms of getting things done. 57:17.400 --> 57:19.400 There's so many other things that go on in the project, 57:19.400 --> 57:20.440 like building the prototype. 57:20.440 --> 57:22.400 Like you mentioned like, well, how do you, 57:22.400 --> 57:23.240 if you're not writing code, 57:23.240 --> 57:25.720 how does everybody keep focus on like what are we building? 57:25.720 --> 57:28.160 Well, first basic mockups and research, right? 57:28.160 --> 57:30.160 Like what do we even want to build? 57:30.160 --> 57:31.240 There's a little bit of that that goes on. 57:31.240 --> 57:32.800 But then very quickly you get to the prototype stage. 57:32.800 --> 57:33.800 Like build a prototype, 57:33.800 --> 57:35.960 let's iterate on the prototype really, really rapidly. 57:35.960 --> 57:36.880 And that's what we do with discourse. 57:36.880 --> 57:38.960 And that's what we demoed to get our seed funding 57:38.960 --> 57:42.360 for discourse was the alpha version of discourse 57:42.360 --> 57:43.840 that we had running and ready to go. 57:43.840 --> 57:45.160 And it was very, it was bad. 57:45.160 --> 57:47.400 I mean, it was, I'll just tell you it was bad. 57:47.400 --> 57:48.440 I have, we have screenshots of it 57:48.440 --> 57:50.560 and I'm just like embarrassed to look at it now. 57:50.560 --> 57:51.400 But it was the prototype. 57:51.400 --> 57:52.640 We were figuring out like what's working, 57:52.640 --> 57:53.560 what's not working. 57:53.560 --> 57:56.360 Cause there's such a broad gap between, 57:56.360 --> 57:59.440 between the way you think things will work in your mind 57:59.440 --> 58:01.160 or even on paper and the way they work 58:01.160 --> 58:03.080 once you sit and live in the software, 58:03.080 --> 58:05.600 like actually spend time living and breathing on software 58:05.600 --> 58:06.720 so different. 58:06.720 --> 58:10.800 So my philosophy is get to a prototype 58:10.800 --> 58:12.360 and then what you're really optimizing 58:12.360 --> 58:13.240 for a speed of iteration, 58:13.240 --> 58:14.800 like how you can turn the crank, 58:14.800 --> 58:16.120 how quickly can we iterate? 58:16.120 --> 58:18.000 That's the absolutely critical metric 58:18.000 --> 58:19.000 of any software project. 58:19.000 --> 58:20.920 And I had a tweet recently that people liked 58:20.920 --> 58:23.120 and I totally, this is so fundamental to what I do, 58:23.120 --> 58:25.960 is like, if you want to measure the core competency 58:25.960 --> 58:27.600 of any software tech company, 58:27.600 --> 58:29.120 it's the speed at which somebody can say, 58:29.120 --> 58:30.760 hey, we really need this word 58:30.760 --> 58:32.240 and the product changed to this word, right? 58:32.240 --> 58:34.240 Because it will be more clear to the users, 58:34.240 --> 58:36.400 like what, like instead of respond, it's reply or something. 58:36.400 --> 58:39.760 But there's some, from the conception of that idea 58:39.760 --> 58:42.160 to how quickly that single word can be changed 58:42.160 --> 58:43.400 in your software and rolled out to users, 58:43.400 --> 58:44.880 that is your life cycle. 58:44.880 --> 58:47.240 That's your health, your, your heartbeat. 58:47.240 --> 58:50.000 If your heartbeat is like super slow, 58:50.000 --> 58:51.600 you're basically dead. 58:51.600 --> 58:54.160 No, seriously, like if it takes two weeks 58:54.160 --> 58:56.240 or even a month to get that single word changed, 58:56.240 --> 58:57.720 that was like, oh my God, this is a great idea. 58:57.720 --> 58:59.000 That word is so much clearer. 58:59.000 --> 59:00.040 I'm talking about like a super, 59:00.040 --> 59:01.640 like everybody's on board for this change. 59:01.640 --> 59:03.440 It's not like let's just change a word because we're bored. 59:03.440 --> 59:05.120 It's like, this is an awesome change. 59:05.120 --> 59:07.000 And then it takes a month to roll out. 59:07.000 --> 59:07.880 It's like, well, you're dead. 59:07.880 --> 59:09.160 Like you can't iterate. 59:09.160 --> 59:11.640 You can't, how you can do anything, right? 59:11.640 --> 59:13.680 Like, so anyway, about the heartbeat, 59:13.680 --> 59:15.960 it's like get the prototype and then iterate on it. 59:15.960 --> 59:18.960 That's what I view as like the central tenet 59:18.960 --> 59:20.440 of some modern software development. 59:20.440 --> 59:22.000 That's fascinating that you put it that way. 59:22.000 --> 59:24.440 It's actually, so I work in, I build autonomous vehicles 59:24.440 --> 59:28.160 and when you look at what maybe compare Tesla 59:28.160 --> 59:31.400 to most other automakers, the psych, 59:31.400 --> 59:35.680 the whatever the heartbeat for Tesla is literally days. 59:35.680 --> 59:38.120 Now, in terms of they can over the air 59:38.120 --> 59:41.160 deploy software updates to all their vehicles, 59:41.160 --> 59:44.760 which is markedly different than every other automaker, 59:44.760 --> 59:49.080 which takes years to update a piece of software. 59:49.080 --> 59:52.120 And so, and that's reflected in everything 59:52.120 --> 59:55.520 that's the final product that's reflected 59:55.520 --> 59:58.200 in really how slowly they adapt to the times. 59:58.200 --> 59:59.920 And to be clear, I'm not saying being a hummingbird 59:59.920 --> 1:00:00.760 is the goal either. 1:00:00.760 --> 1:00:02.400 It's like, you don't want a heartbeat that's like so fast. 1:00:02.400 --> 1:00:04.560 It's like, you're just freaking out. 1:00:04.560 --> 1:00:05.680 But like, it is a measure of health. 1:00:05.680 --> 1:00:07.280 You should have a healthy heartbeat. 1:00:07.280 --> 1:00:09.560 It's up to, for people listening to decide what that means, 1:00:09.560 --> 1:00:10.840 but it has to be healthy. 1:00:10.840 --> 1:00:11.680 It has to be reasonable 1:00:11.680 --> 1:00:13.360 because otherwise you're just gonna be frustrated 1:00:13.360 --> 1:00:15.120 because like that's how you build software. 1:00:15.120 --> 1:00:17.720 You make mistakes, you roll it out, you live with it. 1:00:17.720 --> 1:00:18.760 You see what it feels like and say, 1:00:18.760 --> 1:00:19.920 oh God, that was a terrible idea. 1:00:19.920 --> 1:00:22.720 Oh my gosh, this could be even better if we did why, right? 1:00:22.720 --> 1:00:25.000 You turn the crank and then the more you do that, 1:00:25.000 --> 1:00:27.520 the faster you get ahead of your competitors ultimately 1:00:27.520 --> 1:00:29.720 because it's rate of change, right? 1:00:29.720 --> 1:00:30.920 Delta V, right? 1:00:30.920 --> 1:00:32.680 How fast are you moving? 1:00:32.680 --> 1:00:34.760 Well, within a year, you're gonna be miles away 1:00:34.760 --> 1:00:36.560 by the time they catch up with you, right? 1:00:36.560 --> 1:00:37.920 Like that's the way it works. 1:00:37.920 --> 1:00:40.760 And plus users, like as a software developer, 1:00:40.760 --> 1:00:42.800 I love software that's constantly changing 1:00:42.800 --> 1:00:45.600 because I don't understand people who get super pissed off 1:00:45.600 --> 1:00:47.200 when like, oh, they changed the software on me. 1:00:47.200 --> 1:00:48.040 How dare they? 1:00:48.040 --> 1:00:50.600 Yes, change the software, change it all the time, man. 1:00:50.600 --> 1:00:52.520 That's what makes this stuff great 1:00:52.520 --> 1:00:55.160 is that it can be changed so rapidly 1:00:55.160 --> 1:00:58.240 and become something that is greater than it is now. 1:00:58.240 --> 1:01:00.960 Now granted, there's some changes that suck, I admit. 1:01:00.960 --> 1:01:02.040 I've seen it many times. 1:01:02.040 --> 1:01:04.640 But in general, it's like, that's what makes software cool, 1:01:04.640 --> 1:01:06.280 right, is that it is so malleable. 1:01:06.280 --> 1:01:08.240 Like fighting that is like weird to me 1:01:08.240 --> 1:01:09.880 because it's like, well, you're fighting 1:01:09.880 --> 1:01:11.840 the essence of the thing that you're building. 1:01:11.840 --> 1:01:12.800 Like that doesn't make sense. 1:01:12.800 --> 1:01:15.240 You wanna really embrace that, not to be a hummingbird, 1:01:15.240 --> 1:01:18.120 but like embrace it to a healthy cycle of your heartbeat, right? 1:01:18.120 --> 1:01:20.880 So you talk about that people really don't change. 1:01:20.880 --> 1:01:23.840 It's true, that's why probably a lot of the stuff 1:01:23.840 --> 1:01:27.440 you write about in your blog probably will remain true. 1:01:27.440 --> 1:01:29.200 Well, there's a flip side of the coin, people don't change. 1:01:29.200 --> 1:01:31.440 So investing and understanding people 1:01:31.440 --> 1:01:34.640 is like learning Unix in 1970 1:01:34.640 --> 1:01:36.840 because nothing has changed, right? 1:01:36.840 --> 1:01:38.680 Like all those things you've learned about people 1:01:38.680 --> 1:01:40.480 will still be valid 34 years from now. 1:01:40.480 --> 1:01:43.000 Whereas if you learn the latest JavaScript framework, 1:01:43.000 --> 1:01:45.040 that's gonna be good for like two years, right? 1:01:45.040 --> 1:01:46.200 Exactly. 1:01:46.200 --> 1:01:49.640 So, but if you look at the future of programming, 1:01:49.640 --> 1:01:51.000 so there's a people component, 1:01:51.000 --> 1:01:54.200 but there's also the technology itself. 1:01:54.200 --> 1:01:57.160 Do you, what do you see as the future of programming? 1:01:57.160 --> 1:01:59.160 Will it change significantly? 1:01:59.160 --> 1:02:00.760 Or as far as you can tell, 1:02:01.680 --> 1:02:05.800 people are ultimately programming and so it will not, 1:02:05.800 --> 1:02:08.520 it's not something that you foresee changing 1:02:08.520 --> 1:02:09.840 in any fundamental way. 1:02:09.840 --> 1:02:14.240 Well, you gotta go look back on sort of the basics of programming. 1:02:14.240 --> 1:02:15.480 And one of the things that always shocked me 1:02:15.480 --> 1:02:16.320 is like source control. 1:02:16.320 --> 1:02:18.480 Like I didn't learn anything about source control. 1:02:18.480 --> 1:02:22.360 And I graduated from college in 1992, 1:02:22.360 --> 1:02:24.160 but I remember hearing from people 1:02:24.160 --> 1:02:26.560 like as late as like 1998, 1999, 1:02:26.560 --> 1:02:28.880 like even maybe today they're not learning source control. 1:02:28.880 --> 1:02:31.520 And to me it's like, well, how can you not learn source control? 1:02:31.520 --> 1:02:34.560 That is so fundamental to working with other programmers, 1:02:34.560 --> 1:02:35.920 working in a way that you don't lose your work. 1:02:35.920 --> 1:02:38.120 Like just basic soft, the bed, 1:02:38.120 --> 1:02:41.160 literal bedrock software development is source control. 1:02:41.160 --> 1:02:42.760 Now you compare today like GitHub, right? 1:02:42.760 --> 1:02:44.320 Like Microsoft brought GitHub, which I think was 1:02:44.320 --> 1:02:46.920 an incredibly smart acquisition move on their part. 1:02:46.920 --> 1:02:50.040 Now they have anybody who wants like reasonable source controls 1:02:50.040 --> 1:02:52.360 and go sign up on GitHub, it's all set up for you, right? 1:02:52.360 --> 1:02:55.280 There's tons of walkthroughs, tons of tutorials. 1:02:55.280 --> 1:02:57.680 So from the concept of like has programming advanced 1:02:57.680 --> 1:03:00.280 from say 1999, it's like, well, hell, we have GitHub. 1:03:00.280 --> 1:03:01.560 I mean, my God, yes, right? 1:03:01.560 --> 1:03:04.800 Like it's massively advanced over what it was. 1:03:04.800 --> 1:03:08.840 Now as to whether programming is significantly different, 1:03:08.840 --> 1:03:11.560 I'm gonna say no, but I think the baseline of like 1:03:11.560 --> 1:03:14.480 what we view as like fundamentals 1:03:14.480 --> 1:03:16.480 will continue to go up and actually get better. 1:03:16.480 --> 1:03:17.480 Like source control, for example, 1:03:17.480 --> 1:03:19.040 that's one of the fundamentals that has gotten, 1:03:19.040 --> 1:03:22.000 I mean, hundreds of orders of magnitude better 1:03:22.000 --> 1:03:23.760 than it was 10, 20 years ago, right? 1:03:23.760 --> 1:03:24.920 So those are the fundamentals. 1:03:24.920 --> 1:03:28.240 Let me introduce two things that maybe you can comment on. 1:03:28.240 --> 1:03:31.000 So one is mobile phones. 1:03:31.000 --> 1:03:36.000 So that could fundamentally transform what programming is, 1:03:37.080 --> 1:03:39.080 or maybe not, maybe you can comment on that. 1:03:39.080 --> 1:03:41.480 And the other one is artificial intelligence. 1:03:41.480 --> 1:03:45.120 Which promises to in some ways 1:03:45.120 --> 1:03:48.040 to do some of the programming for you 1:03:48.040 --> 1:03:49.440 is one way to think about it. 1:03:49.440 --> 1:03:52.280 So it's really what a programmer is, 1:03:52.280 --> 1:03:55.680 is using the intelligence that's inside your skull 1:03:55.680 --> 1:03:58.040 to do something useful. 1:03:58.040 --> 1:03:59.920 The hope with artificial intelligence is that 1:03:59.920 --> 1:04:02.040 it does some of the useful parts for you 1:04:02.040 --> 1:04:03.560 the way you don't have to think about it. 1:04:03.560 --> 1:04:06.000 So do you see smartphones, 1:04:06.000 --> 1:04:07.680 the fact that everybody has one 1:04:07.680 --> 1:04:09.320 and they're getting more and more powerful 1:04:09.320 --> 1:04:11.600 as potentially changing programming? 1:04:11.600 --> 1:04:14.280 And do you see AI as potentially changing programming? 1:04:14.280 --> 1:04:15.600 Oh, okay, so that's good. 1:04:15.600 --> 1:04:17.520 So smartphones have definitely changed. 1:04:17.520 --> 1:04:19.360 I mean, since, you know, I guess 2010 1:04:19.360 --> 1:04:21.800 is when they really started getting super popular. 1:04:21.800 --> 1:04:24.120 I mean, in the last eight years, 1:04:24.120 --> 1:04:25.680 the world has literally changed, right? 1:04:25.680 --> 1:04:28.480 Like everybody carries a computer around and that's normal. 1:04:28.480 --> 1:04:31.280 I mean, that is such a huge change in society. 1:04:31.280 --> 1:04:32.120 I think we're still dealing 1:04:32.120 --> 1:04:34.960 with a lot of the positive negative ramifications of that, 1:04:34.960 --> 1:04:35.800 right? 1:04:35.800 --> 1:04:36.620 Like everybody's connected all the time. 1:04:36.620 --> 1:04:37.800 Everybody's on the computer all the time. 1:04:37.800 --> 1:04:40.360 That was my dream world as a geek, right? 1:04:40.360 --> 1:04:42.040 But it's like, be careful what you ask for, right? 1:04:42.040 --> 1:04:44.120 Like, wow, now everybody has a computer 1:04:44.120 --> 1:04:46.320 and it's not quite the utopia that we thought it would be, 1:04:46.320 --> 1:04:47.160 right? 1:04:47.160 --> 1:04:48.520 Computers can be used for a lot of stuff 1:04:48.520 --> 1:04:51.200 that's not necessarily great. 1:04:51.200 --> 1:04:53.160 So to me, that's the central focus of the smartphone 1:04:53.160 --> 1:04:55.720 is just that it puts a computer in front of everyone, 1:04:55.720 --> 1:04:57.200 granted a small touch screen, 1:04:57.200 --> 1:04:59.120 smallish touch screen computer. 1:04:59.120 --> 1:05:00.560 But as for programming, like, I don't know, 1:05:00.560 --> 1:05:03.800 I don't think that I've kind of over time come to subscribe 1:05:03.800 --> 1:05:06.120 to the UNIX view of the world when it comes to programming. 1:05:06.120 --> 1:05:10.000 It's like, you wanna teach these basic command line things 1:05:10.000 --> 1:05:12.160 and that is just what programming is gonna be for, 1:05:12.160 --> 1:05:14.400 I think a long, long time. 1:05:14.400 --> 1:05:17.080 I don't think there's any magical, like visual programming 1:05:17.080 --> 1:05:18.160 that's gonna happen. 1:05:19.480 --> 1:05:20.600 I just, I don't know. 1:05:20.600 --> 1:05:22.720 I've over time have become a believer 1:05:22.720 --> 1:05:24.280 in that UNIX philosophy of just, you know, 1:05:24.280 --> 1:05:26.400 they kind of had a right with UNIX. 1:05:26.400 --> 1:05:28.920 That's gonna be the way it is for a long, long time. 1:05:28.920 --> 1:05:31.560 And we'll continue to, like I said, raise the baseline. 1:05:31.560 --> 1:05:33.000 The tools will get better, it'll get simpler, 1:05:33.000 --> 1:05:35.600 but it's still fundamentally gonna be command line tools, 1:05:35.600 --> 1:05:37.160 you know, fancy IDEs. 1:05:37.160 --> 1:05:39.200 That's kind of it for the foreseeable future. 1:05:39.200 --> 1:05:42.240 I'm not seeing any visual programming stuff on the horizon. 1:05:42.240 --> 1:05:43.080 Cause you kind of think like, 1:05:43.080 --> 1:05:44.080 what do you do on a smartphone 1:05:44.080 --> 1:05:46.400 that will be directly analogous to programming? 1:05:46.400 --> 1:05:47.480 Like I'm trying to think, right? 1:05:47.480 --> 1:05:49.600 Like, and there's really not much. 1:05:52.160 --> 1:05:55.160 So not necessarily analogous to programming, 1:05:55.160 --> 1:06:00.160 but the kind of things that, 1:06:00.840 --> 1:06:02.680 the kind of programs you need to write 1:06:02.680 --> 1:06:06.360 might need to be very different. 1:06:07.360 --> 1:06:08.200 Yeah. 1:06:08.200 --> 1:06:09.760 And the kind of languages, I mean, 1:06:09.760 --> 1:06:12.400 but I probably also subscribed to the same, 1:06:12.400 --> 1:06:14.280 just because everything in this world 1:06:14.280 --> 1:06:16.520 might be written in JavaScript. 1:06:16.520 --> 1:06:17.760 Oh yeah, that's definitely, that's already happening. 1:06:17.760 --> 1:06:19.000 I mean, discourse is a bet on, 1:06:19.000 --> 1:06:20.840 discourse is itself, JavaScript is another bet 1:06:20.840 --> 1:06:21.680 on that side of the table. 1:06:21.680 --> 1:06:23.680 And I still try and believe in that. 1:06:23.680 --> 1:06:25.840 So I would say smartphones have mostly a cultural shift, 1:06:25.840 --> 1:06:28.000 more than a programming shift. 1:06:28.000 --> 1:06:30.080 Now your other question was about artificial intelligence 1:06:30.080 --> 1:06:32.480 and like, sort of advice is predicting 1:06:32.480 --> 1:06:33.320 what you're gonna do. 1:06:33.320 --> 1:06:34.640 And I do think there's some strength to that. 1:06:34.640 --> 1:06:36.040 I think artificial intelligence 1:06:36.040 --> 1:06:37.680 kind of overselling it in terms of what it's doing. 1:06:37.680 --> 1:06:39.240 It's more like, people are predictable, right? 1:06:39.240 --> 1:06:40.760 People do the same things. 1:06:40.760 --> 1:06:42.240 Like, let me give you an example. 1:06:42.240 --> 1:06:44.600 One check we put into a discourse 1:06:44.600 --> 1:06:48.280 that's in a lot of big commercial websites is, 1:06:48.280 --> 1:06:51.160 say you log in from New York City now, 1:06:51.160 --> 1:06:54.240 and then an hour later, you log in from San Francisco. 1:06:54.240 --> 1:06:56.600 It's like, well, hmm, that's interesting. 1:06:56.600 --> 1:06:59.840 How did you get from New York to San Francisco in one hour? 1:06:59.840 --> 1:07:01.040 So at that point, you're like, okay, 1:07:01.040 --> 1:07:02.640 this is a suspicious login at that point. 1:07:02.640 --> 1:07:03.480 So we would alert you. 1:07:03.480 --> 1:07:05.360 It's like, okay, but that's not AI, right? 1:07:05.360 --> 1:07:07.280 That's just heuristic of like, 1:07:07.280 --> 1:07:11.080 how did you in one hour get 2,000 miles, right? 1:07:11.080 --> 1:07:12.680 That doesn't mean, maybe you're on a VPN, 1:07:12.680 --> 1:07:13.520 there's other ways to happen. 1:07:13.520 --> 1:07:16.000 But that's just a basic prediction based on the idea 1:07:16.000 --> 1:07:19.280 that people pretty much don't move around that much. 1:07:19.280 --> 1:07:20.920 Like they may travel occasionally, 1:07:20.920 --> 1:07:22.960 but like nobody, I mean, unless you're a traveling salesman 1:07:22.960 --> 1:07:25.520 that's literally traveling the world every day, 1:07:25.520 --> 1:07:28.240 like there's so much repetition and predictability 1:07:28.240 --> 1:07:29.600 in terms of things you're going to do. 1:07:29.600 --> 1:07:31.880 And I think good software anticipates your needs. 1:07:31.880 --> 1:07:34.160 Like for example, Google, I think it's called Google Now 1:07:34.160 --> 1:07:36.160 or whatever that Google thing is that predicts your commute 1:07:36.160 --> 1:07:37.720 and predicts based on your phone location, 1:07:37.720 --> 1:07:39.160 like where are you every day? 1:07:39.160 --> 1:07:42.080 Well, that's probably where you work, that kind of stuff. 1:07:42.080 --> 1:07:43.760 I do think computers can get a lot better at that, 1:07:43.760 --> 1:07:46.280 but I hesitate to call it like full blown AI. 1:07:46.280 --> 1:07:48.480 It's just computers getting better at like, 1:07:48.480 --> 1:07:49.480 first of all, they have a ton of data 1:07:49.480 --> 1:07:50.520 because everybody has a smartphone. 1:07:50.520 --> 1:07:52.000 Now, all of a sudden we have all this data 1:07:52.000 --> 1:07:53.840 that we didn't have before about location, 1:07:53.840 --> 1:07:56.160 about like, you know, communication 1:07:56.160 --> 1:07:59.200 and feeding that into some basic heuristics 1:07:59.200 --> 1:08:00.480 and maybe some fancy algorithms 1:08:00.480 --> 1:08:03.120 that turn it into predictions of anticipating your needs 1:08:03.120 --> 1:08:04.520 like a friend would, right? 1:08:04.520 --> 1:08:06.560 Like, oh, hey, I see your home, 1:08:06.560 --> 1:08:07.520 would you like some dinner, right? 1:08:07.520 --> 1:08:08.640 Like, let's go get some food 1:08:08.640 --> 1:08:10.760 because that's usually what we do this time of day, right? 1:08:10.760 --> 1:08:13.640 In the context of actually the active programming, 1:08:13.640 --> 1:08:15.360 do you see IDEs improving 1:08:15.360 --> 1:08:17.480 and making the life of programming is better? 1:08:17.480 --> 1:08:18.840 I do think that is possible 1:08:18.840 --> 1:08:20.720 because there's a lot of repetition in programming, right? 1:08:20.720 --> 1:08:23.200 Oh, you know, Clippy would be the bad example of, 1:08:23.200 --> 1:08:25.960 oh, I see, it looks like you're writing a for loop, 1:08:25.960 --> 1:08:27.840 but there are patterns in code, right? 1:08:27.840 --> 1:08:30.360 Like, and actually libraries are kind of like that, right? 1:08:30.360 --> 1:08:33.200 Like, rather than go, you know, 1:08:33.200 --> 1:08:35.440 code up your own HTTP request library, 1:08:35.440 --> 1:08:37.560 it's like, well, you'd use one of the existing ones 1:08:37.560 --> 1:08:39.720 that we have that's already a trouble shot, right? 1:08:39.720 --> 1:08:41.400 Like, it's not AI per se, 1:08:41.400 --> 1:08:44.800 it's just, you know, building better Lego bricks, 1:08:44.800 --> 1:08:47.720 bigger Lego bricks that have more functionality in them 1:08:47.720 --> 1:08:48.880 so people don't have to worry 1:08:48.880 --> 1:08:50.520 about the low level stuff as much anymore. 1:08:50.520 --> 1:08:52.880 Like WordPress, for example, to me is like, 1:08:52.880 --> 1:08:55.880 a tool for somebody who isn't a programmer to do something, 1:08:55.880 --> 1:08:57.640 I mean, you can turn WordPress into anything. 1:08:57.640 --> 1:08:59.480 It's kind of crazy actually through plugins, right? 1:08:59.480 --> 1:09:01.320 And that's not programming per se, 1:09:01.320 --> 1:09:04.520 it's just Lego bricks stacking WordPress elements, right? 1:09:04.520 --> 1:09:06.560 And a little bit of configuration glue. 1:09:06.560 --> 1:09:08.480 So I would say maybe in a broader sense, 1:09:08.480 --> 1:09:11.320 what I'm seeing like, there'll be more gluing 1:09:11.320 --> 1:09:14.120 and less like actual programming. 1:09:14.120 --> 1:09:15.560 And that's a good thing, right? 1:09:15.560 --> 1:09:17.920 Cause most of the stuff you need is kind of out there already. 1:09:17.920 --> 1:09:20.040 You said 1970s, Unix, 1:09:20.040 --> 1:09:30.680 do you see PHP and these kind of old remnants of, of the early birth 1:09:30.680 --> 1:09:33.720 of programming remaining with us for a long time? 1:09:33.720 --> 1:09:37.320 Like you said, Unix in itself, do you see ultimately, 1:09:37.320 --> 1:09:42.840 you know, this stuff's just being there out of momentum? 1:09:42.840 --> 1:09:44.080 I kind of do. 1:09:44.080 --> 1:09:46.120 I mean, I was a big believer in Windows early on 1:09:46.120 --> 1:09:47.320 and I was a big, you know, I was like, 1:09:47.320 --> 1:09:48.720 Unix, what a waste of time. 1:09:48.720 --> 1:09:50.080 But over time, I've completely flipped on that 1:09:50.080 --> 1:09:51.680 where I was like, okay, the Unix guys were right 1:09:51.680 --> 1:09:54.600 and pretty much Microsoft and Windows were kind of wrong, 1:09:54.600 --> 1:09:55.720 at least on the server side. 1:09:55.720 --> 1:09:57.400 And on the desktop, right, you need a GUI, 1:09:57.400 --> 1:09:58.240 you need a lot of stuff. 1:09:58.240 --> 1:09:59.160 And you have the two philosophies, 1:09:59.160 --> 1:10:02.640 like Apple built on Unix, effectively Darwin. 1:10:02.640 --> 1:10:04.560 And on the desktop, it's a slightly different story, 1:10:04.560 --> 1:10:06.960 but on the server side where you're going to be programming. 1:10:06.960 --> 1:10:08.440 Now it's a question of where the programming is going to be. 1:10:08.440 --> 1:10:10.720 There's going to be a lot more like client side programming 1:10:10.720 --> 1:10:13.600 cause technically discourse is client side programming. 1:10:13.600 --> 1:10:14.480 The way you get discourse, 1:10:14.480 --> 1:10:16.160 we deliver a big ball of JavaScript, 1:10:16.160 --> 1:10:18.240 which is then executed locally. 1:10:18.240 --> 1:10:20.960 So we're really using a lot more local computing power. 1:10:20.960 --> 1:10:21.960 We'll still retrieve the data. 1:10:21.960 --> 1:10:23.360 Obviously, we have to display the posts 1:10:23.360 --> 1:10:24.280 on the screen and so forth, 1:10:24.280 --> 1:10:27.000 but in terms of like sorting and a lot of the basic stuff, 1:10:27.000 --> 1:10:29.400 we're using the host processor. 1:10:29.400 --> 1:10:31.240 But to the extent that a lot of programming 1:10:31.240 --> 1:10:33.000 is still going to be server side, 1:10:33.000 --> 1:10:35.280 I would say, yeah, the Unix philosophy definitely won. 1:10:35.280 --> 1:10:38.640 And there'll be different veneers over the Unix, 1:10:38.640 --> 1:10:40.800 but it's still, if you peel away one or two layers, 1:10:40.800 --> 1:10:44.320 it's going to be Unix for a long, I think, Unix one, 1:10:44.320 --> 1:10:45.520 I mean, so definitively. 1:10:45.520 --> 1:10:47.440 It's interesting to hear you say that 1:10:47.440 --> 1:10:49.080 because you've done so much excellent work 1:10:49.080 --> 1:10:52.840 on the Microsoft side in terms of backend development. 1:10:52.840 --> 1:10:53.680 Cool. 1:10:53.680 --> 1:10:56.960 So what's the future hold for Jeff Atwood? 1:10:56.960 --> 1:10:59.120 I mean, the discourse, 1:10:59.120 --> 1:11:02.560 continuing the discourse in trying to improve 1:11:02.560 --> 1:11:03.840 conversation on the web? 1:11:03.840 --> 1:11:05.640 Well, discourse is what I believe is a, 1:11:05.640 --> 1:11:07.040 and originally I called a five year project, 1:11:07.040 --> 1:11:08.800 but then really quickly revised that to a 10 year project. 1:11:08.800 --> 1:11:12.280 So we started in early 2013, 1:11:12.280 --> 1:11:13.640 that's when we launched the first version. 1:11:13.640 --> 1:11:16.120 So we're still, you know, five years in. 1:11:16.120 --> 1:11:17.400 This is the part where it starts getting good, 1:11:17.400 --> 1:11:19.640 like we have a good product on discourse. 1:11:19.640 --> 1:11:21.800 There's any project you built in software, 1:11:21.800 --> 1:11:24.120 it takes three years to build what you wanted to build anyway. 1:11:24.120 --> 1:11:26.600 Like V1 is going to be terrible, which it was, 1:11:26.600 --> 1:11:27.440 but you ship it anyway, 1:11:27.440 --> 1:11:28.920 because that's how you get better at stuff. 1:11:28.920 --> 1:11:29.960 It's about turning the crank. 1:11:29.960 --> 1:11:31.440 It's not about V1 being perfect, 1:11:31.440 --> 1:11:32.840 because that's ridiculous. 1:11:32.840 --> 1:11:35.600 It's about V1, then let's get really good at V1.1, 1:11:35.600 --> 1:11:38.040 1.2, 1.3, like how fast can we iterate? 1:11:38.040 --> 1:11:40.160 And I think we're iterating like crazy on discourse, 1:11:40.160 --> 1:11:41.960 the point that like it's a really good product now, 1:11:41.960 --> 1:11:43.620 we have serious momentum. 1:11:43.620 --> 1:11:46.300 And my original vision was, 1:11:46.300 --> 1:11:48.180 I want to be the WordPress of discussion, 1:11:48.180 --> 1:11:49.900 meaning if someone came to you and said, 1:11:49.900 --> 1:11:50.820 I want to start a blog, 1:11:50.820 --> 1:11:53.020 although the very question is kind of archaic now, 1:11:53.020 --> 1:11:55.340 it's like who actually blogs anymore. 1:11:55.340 --> 1:11:59.060 But I wanted the answer to that to be, 1:11:59.060 --> 1:12:01.420 it would be WordPress normally, 1:12:01.420 --> 1:12:04.220 because that's the obvious choice for blogging most of the time. 1:12:04.220 --> 1:12:05.980 But if someone said, hey, I want to, 1:12:05.980 --> 1:12:08.780 I need a group of people to get together and do something, 1:12:08.780 --> 1:12:10.460 the answer should be discourse, right? 1:12:10.460 --> 1:12:11.820 That should be the default answer for people. 1:12:11.820 --> 1:12:13.420 Cause it's open source, it's free, 1:12:13.420 --> 1:12:16.020 doesn't cost you anything, you control it, you can run it. 1:12:16.020 --> 1:12:17.420 Your minimum server cost for discourse 1:12:17.420 --> 1:12:19.620 is five bucks a month at this point. 1:12:19.620 --> 1:12:21.580 They actually got the VPS prices down, 1:12:21.580 --> 1:12:23.900 it used to be $10 a month for one gigabyte of RAM, 1:12:23.900 --> 1:12:26.700 which we are dependent, 1:12:26.700 --> 1:12:28.460 we have a kind of heavy stack, 1:12:28.460 --> 1:12:30.340 like there's a lot of stuff in discourse. 1:12:30.340 --> 1:12:31.820 You need Postgres, you need Redis, 1:12:31.820 --> 1:12:33.900 you need Ruby on Rails, 1:12:33.900 --> 1:12:35.800 you need a sidekick for scheduling. 1:12:35.800 --> 1:12:36.980 It's not a trivial amount of stuff, 1:12:36.980 --> 1:12:38.060 cause we were architected for like, 1:12:38.060 --> 1:12:39.500 look, we're building for the next 10 years. 1:12:39.500 --> 1:12:41.980 I don't care about shared PHP hosting, 1:12:41.980 --> 1:12:44.180 that's not my model. 1:12:44.180 --> 1:12:45.340 My idea is like, hey, you know, 1:12:45.340 --> 1:12:47.540 eventually this is going to be very cheap for everybody. 1:12:47.540 --> 1:12:49.140 And I want to build it right, 1:12:49.140 --> 1:12:50.580 using again, you know, 1:12:50.580 --> 1:12:53.500 higher, bigger building block levels, right? 1:12:53.500 --> 1:12:54.460 That have more requirements. 1:12:54.460 --> 1:12:56.620 And there's a WordPress model of WordPress.org, 1:12:56.620 --> 1:12:57.700 WordPress.com. 1:12:57.700 --> 1:13:01.020 Is there a central hosting for discourse or no? 1:13:01.020 --> 1:13:02.740 There is, we're not strictly segmenting 1:13:02.740 --> 1:13:05.140 into the open source versus the commercial side. 1:13:05.140 --> 1:13:06.060 We have a hosting business, 1:13:06.060 --> 1:13:07.140 that's how discourse makes money, 1:13:07.140 --> 1:13:08.900 as we host discourse instances, 1:13:08.900 --> 1:13:09.980 and we have really close relationship 1:13:09.980 --> 1:13:12.860 with our customers of the symbiosis 1:13:12.860 --> 1:13:14.700 of them giving us feedback on the product. 1:13:14.700 --> 1:13:16.500 We definitely weight feedback from customers, 1:13:16.500 --> 1:13:18.420 a lot heavier than feedback from somebody 1:13:18.420 --> 1:13:20.940 who just wanders by and gives feedback. 1:13:20.940 --> 1:13:22.500 But that's where we make all our money, 1:13:22.500 --> 1:13:24.660 but we don't have a strict division. 1:13:24.660 --> 1:13:26.660 We encourage people to use discourse, 1:13:26.660 --> 1:13:29.060 like the whole point is that it's free, right? 1:13:29.060 --> 1:13:29.980 Anybody can set it up. 1:13:29.980 --> 1:13:32.620 I don't want to be the only person that hosts discourse, 1:13:32.620 --> 1:13:34.220 that's absolutely not the goal, 1:13:34.220 --> 1:13:36.300 but it is a primary way for us to build a business. 1:13:36.300 --> 1:13:37.620 And it's actually kind of a great business. 1:13:37.620 --> 1:13:40.300 I mean, the business is going really, really well 1:13:40.300 --> 1:13:41.380 in terms of hosting. 1:13:41.380 --> 1:13:44.340 So I used to work at Google Research, 1:13:44.340 --> 1:13:47.060 as a company that's basically funded on advertisements, 1:13:47.060 --> 1:13:50.420 so it's Facebook, let me ask if you can comment on it. 1:13:50.420 --> 1:13:53.540 I think advertisement at its best. 1:13:53.540 --> 1:13:56.620 So you'd be extremely critical on what ads are, 1:13:56.620 --> 1:13:59.740 but at its best, it's actually serving you, 1:13:59.740 --> 1:14:01.220 in a sense, it's giving you, 1:14:01.220 --> 1:14:05.700 it's connecting you to what you would want to explore. 1:14:05.700 --> 1:14:08.060 So it's like related posts or related content, 1:14:08.060 --> 1:14:10.220 it's the same, that's the best of advertisement. 1:14:10.220 --> 1:14:15.220 So discourse is connecting people based on their interests. 1:14:16.100 --> 1:14:20.100 It seems like a place where advertisement at its best 1:14:20.100 --> 1:14:21.780 could actually serve the users. 1:14:21.780 --> 1:14:24.940 Is that something that you're considering thinking about 1:14:24.940 --> 1:14:29.460 as a way to bring, to financially support the platform? 1:14:29.460 --> 1:14:31.380 That's interesting because I actually have 1:14:31.380 --> 1:14:32.620 a contrarian view of advertising, 1:14:32.620 --> 1:14:33.820 which I kind of agree with you. 1:14:33.820 --> 1:14:36.820 I recently installed Ad Blocker reluctantly 1:14:36.820 --> 1:14:38.300 because I don't like to do that, 1:14:38.300 --> 1:14:40.620 but the performance of the ads, man, 1:14:40.620 --> 1:14:43.340 they're so heavy now and it's just crazy. 1:14:43.340 --> 1:14:45.100 So it's almost like a performance argument 1:14:45.100 --> 1:14:47.220 more than I actually am pro ads, 1:14:47.220 --> 1:14:50.380 and I have a contrarian view point, I agree with you. 1:14:50.380 --> 1:14:51.980 If you do ads right, it's serving you stuff 1:14:51.980 --> 1:14:53.300 you would be interested in anyway. 1:14:53.300 --> 1:14:56.540 I don't mind that, that actually is kind of a good thing. 1:14:56.540 --> 1:15:00.020 So plus, I think it's rational to want to support 1:15:00.020 --> 1:15:01.700 the people that are doing this work, 1:15:01.700 --> 1:15:02.620 through seeing their ads, 1:15:02.620 --> 1:15:04.060 but that said, I run Ad Block now, 1:15:04.060 --> 1:15:06.220 which I didn't want to do, 1:15:06.220 --> 1:15:08.220 but I was convinced by all these articles, 1:15:08.220 --> 1:15:11.620 like 30, 40 megabytes of stuff just to serve you ads. 1:15:12.500 --> 1:15:16.020 Yeah, it feels like ads now are like the experts exchange 1:15:16.020 --> 1:15:18.260 of whenever you start to stack overflows. 1:15:18.260 --> 1:15:19.540 It's a little bit, it's overwhelming. 1:15:19.540 --> 1:15:21.060 Oh, there's so many companies in Adtech 1:15:21.060 --> 1:15:22.340 that what's embarrassing, like you can do that. 1:15:22.340 --> 1:15:24.300 Have you seen those logo charts of like just the whole page? 1:15:24.300 --> 1:15:26.260 It's like, you can't even see them, they're so small. 1:15:26.260 --> 1:15:27.820 There's so many companies in the space, 1:15:27.820 --> 1:15:29.660 but since you brought it up, I do want to point out 1:15:29.660 --> 1:15:31.900 that very, very few Discord sites actually run 1:15:31.900 --> 1:15:33.100 using an ad supported model. 1:15:33.100 --> 1:15:34.700 It's not effective. 1:15:34.700 --> 1:15:37.620 Like it's too diluted, it's too weird, 1:15:37.620 --> 1:15:40.540 it doesn't pay well, and like users hate it. 1:15:40.540 --> 1:15:42.820 So it's a combination of like users hate it, 1:15:42.820 --> 1:15:44.460 it doesn't actually work that well in practice. 1:15:44.460 --> 1:15:46.260 Like in theory, yes, I agree with you. 1:15:46.260 --> 1:15:48.740 Clean, fast ads that were exactly the stuff 1:15:48.740 --> 1:15:50.300 you would be interested in, awesome. 1:15:50.300 --> 1:15:52.460 We're so far from that though, right? 1:15:52.460 --> 1:15:53.780 Like, and Google does an okay job, 1:15:53.780 --> 1:15:55.380 they do retargeting and stuff like that, 1:15:55.380 --> 1:15:58.060 but in the real world, 1:15:58.060 --> 1:16:01.020 Discord sites rarely can make ads work. 1:16:01.020 --> 1:16:03.060 It just doesn't work for so many reasons. 1:16:03.060 --> 1:16:05.620 But you know what does work is subscriptions, 1:16:05.620 --> 1:16:10.620 Patreon, affiliate codes for like Amazon, 1:16:10.700 --> 1:16:13.140 of like just, oh, here's a cool YoYo click, 1:16:13.140 --> 1:16:14.420 and then you click and go to Amazon, 1:16:14.420 --> 1:16:15.700 they get a small percentage of that, 1:16:15.700 --> 1:16:17.180 which is fair, I think. 1:16:17.180 --> 1:16:19.140 I mean, because you saw the YoYo on that site, 1:16:19.140 --> 1:16:21.140 and you click through and you bought it, right? 1:16:21.140 --> 1:16:22.580 That's fair for them to get 5% of that 1:16:22.580 --> 1:16:24.220 or 2% of that, whatever it is. 1:16:24.220 --> 1:16:26.020 Those things definitely work. 1:16:26.020 --> 1:16:28.620 In fact, a site that I used to participate on a lot, 1:16:28.620 --> 1:16:29.900 I helped the owner. 1:16:29.900 --> 1:16:32.460 One of the things, I got them switched to Discord, 1:16:32.460 --> 1:16:34.220 I basically paid them to switch to Discord, 1:16:34.220 --> 1:16:35.380 because I was like, look, you guys gotta switch, 1:16:35.380 --> 1:16:38.540 I can't come here anymore on this terrible software. 1:16:38.540 --> 1:16:40.180 But I was like, look, and on top of that, 1:16:40.180 --> 1:16:42.300 like you're serving people ads that they hate, 1:16:42.300 --> 1:16:43.980 like you should just go full on Patreon, 1:16:43.980 --> 1:16:45.340 because he had a little bit of Patreon, 1:16:45.340 --> 1:16:49.740 go full on Patreon, do the Amazon affiliates thing 1:16:49.740 --> 1:16:51.140 for any Amazon links that get posted, 1:16:51.140 --> 1:16:53.700 and just do that, and just triple down on that stuff. 1:16:53.700 --> 1:16:55.340 And that's worked really well for them, 1:16:55.340 --> 1:16:56.820 and this creator in particular. 1:16:56.820 --> 1:16:59.500 So that stuff works, but traditional ads, 1:16:59.500 --> 1:17:01.700 I mean, definitely not working, at least on Discord. 1:17:01.700 --> 1:17:05.940 So last question, you've created the code keyboard. 1:17:05.940 --> 1:17:07.820 I've programmed most of my adult life 1:17:07.820 --> 1:17:09.860 in a Kinesis keyboard. 1:17:09.860 --> 1:17:12.100 I have one upstairs now. 1:17:12.100 --> 1:17:14.540 Can you describe what a mechanical keyboard is, 1:17:14.540 --> 1:17:16.740 and why is it something that makes you happy? 1:17:16.740 --> 1:17:18.780 Well, you know, this is another fetish item, really. 1:17:18.780 --> 1:17:20.140 Like, it's not required. 1:17:20.140 --> 1:17:22.260 You can do programming on any kind of keyboard, right? 1:17:22.260 --> 1:17:24.420 Even like an onscreen keyboard, oh God, 1:17:24.420 --> 1:17:25.940 that's terrifying, right? 1:17:25.940 --> 1:17:28.500 But you could, I mean, if you look back at the early days 1:17:28.500 --> 1:17:29.780 of computing, there were chiclet keyboards, 1:17:29.780 --> 1:17:31.460 which are, I mean, those are awful, right? 1:17:31.460 --> 1:17:32.540 But what's a chiclet keyboard? 1:17:32.540 --> 1:17:34.180 Oh God, okay, well, it's just like 1:17:34.180 --> 1:17:36.220 thin rubber membranes. 1:17:36.220 --> 1:17:37.700 Oh, the rubber ones, oh no. 1:17:37.700 --> 1:17:38.540 Super bad, right? 1:17:38.540 --> 1:17:39.380 Yeah. 1:17:39.380 --> 1:17:40.380 So it's a fetish item. 1:17:40.380 --> 1:17:41.940 All that really says is, look, 1:17:41.940 --> 1:17:43.340 I care really about keyboards, 1:17:43.340 --> 1:17:44.620 because the keyboard is the primary method 1:17:44.620 --> 1:17:46.260 of communication with the computer, right? 1:17:46.260 --> 1:17:49.340 So it's just like having a nice mic for this podcast. 1:17:49.340 --> 1:17:50.620 You want a nice keyboard, right? 1:17:50.620 --> 1:17:52.180 Because it has very tactile feel. 1:17:52.180 --> 1:17:53.980 I can tell exactly when I press the key. 1:17:53.980 --> 1:17:56.900 I get that little click, so oh, and it feels good. 1:17:56.900 --> 1:17:57.980 And it's also kind of a fetish item. 1:17:57.980 --> 1:18:00.260 It's like, wow, I care enough about programming 1:18:00.260 --> 1:18:02.380 that I care about the tool, the primary tool, 1:18:02.380 --> 1:18:03.300 that I use to communicate with the computer 1:18:03.300 --> 1:18:06.380 and make sure it's as good as it feels good to use for me. 1:18:06.380 --> 1:18:08.300 And like, I can be very productive with it. 1:18:08.300 --> 1:18:10.700 So to be honest, it's a little bit of a fetish item, 1:18:10.700 --> 1:18:11.540 but a good one. 1:18:11.540 --> 1:18:12.540 It indicates that you're serious, 1:18:12.540 --> 1:18:13.580 it indicates you're interested. 1:18:13.580 --> 1:18:15.260 It indicates that you care about the fundamentals, 1:18:15.260 --> 1:18:17.500 because you know what makes you a good programmer? 1:18:17.500 --> 1:18:18.900 Being able to type really fast, right? 1:18:18.900 --> 1:18:20.580 Like, this is true, right? 1:18:20.580 --> 1:18:23.500 So a core skill is just being able to type fast enough 1:18:23.500 --> 1:18:26.140 to get your ideas out of your head into the code base. 1:18:26.140 --> 1:18:29.740 So just practicing your typing can make you a better programmer. 1:18:29.740 --> 1:18:33.740 It is also something that makes you, 1:18:33.740 --> 1:18:36.660 well, makes you enjoy typing, correct? 1:18:36.660 --> 1:18:39.940 The actual act, something about the process, 1:18:39.940 --> 1:18:41.220 like I play piano. 1:18:41.220 --> 1:18:42.060 It's tactile. 1:18:42.060 --> 1:18:46.260 There's a tactile feel that ultimately feeds the passion, 1:18:46.260 --> 1:18:47.100 makes you happy. 1:18:47.100 --> 1:18:48.220 Right, no, totally, that's it. 1:18:48.220 --> 1:18:49.060 I mean, and it's funny, 1:18:49.060 --> 1:18:50.700 because artisanal keyboards have exploded, 1:18:50.700 --> 1:18:53.460 like Mastrop has gone ballistic with this stuff. 1:18:53.460 --> 1:18:56.900 There's probably like 500 keyboard projects on Mastrop alone. 1:18:56.900 --> 1:18:58.180 And there's some other guy I follow on Twitter. 1:18:58.180 --> 1:19:00.300 I used to write for this, the site, the tech report, 1:19:00.300 --> 1:19:01.420 way back in the day. 1:19:01.420 --> 1:19:02.940 And he's like, every week he's just posting like, 1:19:02.940 --> 1:19:05.460 what I call keyboard porn of like, just cool keyboards. 1:19:05.460 --> 1:19:06.620 Oh my God, those look really cool, right? 1:19:06.620 --> 1:19:09.820 Like, that's like, how many keyboards this guy have, right? 1:19:09.820 --> 1:19:10.740 It's got like me with yoyos. 1:19:10.740 --> 1:19:11.580 How many yoyos do you have? 1:19:11.580 --> 1:19:12.420 How many do you need? 1:19:12.420 --> 1:19:14.900 Well, technically one, but I like a lot. 1:19:14.900 --> 1:19:15.820 I don't know why. 1:19:15.820 --> 1:19:17.260 So same thing with keyboards. 1:19:17.260 --> 1:19:18.940 So yeah, they're awesome. 1:19:18.940 --> 1:19:21.580 Like I highly recommend anybody who doesn't have a mechanical 1:19:21.580 --> 1:19:23.100 to research it, look into it, 1:19:23.100 --> 1:19:24.420 and see what you like. 1:19:24.420 --> 1:19:26.300 And you know, it's ultimately a fetish item, 1:19:26.300 --> 1:19:28.860 but I think these sort of items, 1:19:28.860 --> 1:19:31.020 these religious artifacts that we have 1:19:31.020 --> 1:19:32.220 are part of what make us human. 1:19:32.220 --> 1:19:33.940 Like that part's important, right? 1:19:33.940 --> 1:19:35.780 It's kind of what makes life worth living. 1:19:35.780 --> 1:19:38.900 Yeah, it's not necessary in the strictest sense, 1:19:38.900 --> 1:19:42.340 but ain't nothing necessary if you think about it, right? 1:19:42.340 --> 1:19:44.300 Like, so yeah, why not? 1:19:44.300 --> 1:19:45.420 So sure. 1:19:45.420 --> 1:19:47.500 Jeff, thank you so much for talking today. 1:19:47.500 --> 1:19:48.340 Yeah, you're welcome. 1:19:48.340 --> 1:19:53.340 Thanks for having me.