Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They did and they didn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So this was the funny thing is that when investing have these two dual meanings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Normally, when people think about investing, they think you're putting in growth capital because you want the business to hire more people, to do more R&D so they can grow bigger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Bezos didn't do that, actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He bought an ownership stake directly from Jason and I, and 100% of the proceeds of that purchase went into my and Jason's bank account.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Personal bank account.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not a single cent went into the account of the company because we didn't need the money to grow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They knew I had the phone lines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What we needed, or what we certainly enjoyed, was to some extent maybe the vote of confidence, but more so...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They knew I had the computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
the security of taking a little bit off the table is that we dare turn down the big bucks from venture capitals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't think they really understood that I was trading pirated software that was both illegal and whatever else was going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was essentially a vaccine against wanting to take a larger check from people who then wanted to take the company to something enormous that we didn't want to go with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So Jeff
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
gave Jason and I just enough money that we were comfortable turning all these people down in a way where if it had turned belly up like six months later, we wouldn't have been kicking ourselves and going, we had something here that was worth millions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And now we have nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I have to worry about rent and groceries again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
his private office that runs these investments, who did the calculus on the investment pitch we gave him, which was so ridiculous that Jason and I were laughing our asses off when we were writing down our metrics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I was like, no one's going to pay this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No one is going to give us this multiple of this amount of revenue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, we took the call essentially out of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
kind of an awe that Jeff Bezos even wanted to look at us and like, do you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We don't want venture capital.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We don't need other people's money, but like, let's just give him a bullshit number.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The no sane person would actually say yes to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then, I mean, we can, we can each go our own way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And his investment team said like, Jeff, no way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This makes no economic sense at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're asking for way too much money with way too little revenue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And Jeff just went like, I don't care.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I want to invest in this guy because to him at the time it was chump change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like Jason and I each got a few million dollars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, whatever the currency swing between the yen and the dollar that day probably moved 10x that for his network than our investment did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Jeff seemed genuinely interested in being around interesting people, interesting companies, helping someone go to distance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I actually look back on that relationship with some degree of regret because I took that vote of confidence for granted in ways that I'm a little bit ashamed of over the years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've been more critical about some of the things that Amazon had done that I feel now is sort of justified.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So that's just sort of part of that processing of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But on the economic sense...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He gave us that confidence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He gave us the economic confidence, but then he also gave us the confidence of a CEO running, perhaps at the time, the most important internet business in the US, showing up to our calls, which we would have with him like once a year, and basically just going like, yeah, you guys are doing awesome stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You should just keep doing awesome stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I read your book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You launched this thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You should just do more of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't actually know how to run your business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You guys know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He certainly saw it very early.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think this is something that Jeff does better than almost anyone else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
he spots that opportunity so far in advance of anyone else even opened their eyes to it, or certainly is willing to bet on it far early and far harder than anyone else is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And he's just right time and again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, we were not the only investment that he made.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And certainly Amazon...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
had a extremely long-term vision.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Even that conversation wasn't present.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So far longer than I have ever had the gumption to keep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like I think of myself as a long-term thinker.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm playing a child's game compared to the game that Jeff is playing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like when I looked at
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Amazon's economics around the dot-com boom and bust, they looked ridiculous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like they were losing so much money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They were so hated by the market.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I never spoke to anyone growing up in Denmark who had any moral qualms whatsoever about piracy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They were... No one believed that it was going to turn into what it is, but Jeff did in a way that that level of conviction, I really aspire to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think that's...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
One of the main things I've taken away from that relationship is that you can just believe in yourself to that degree against those odds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's ridiculous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He did that at so many times our level that it's pathetic if I'm doubting myself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's exactly it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Sure, I think it's an easy case to make.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What I also think is that the price you pay to be one of the greatest companies in the last hundred years is a lot of detractors, a lot of pushback, a lot of criticism, that this is actually order restored in the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was just completely accepted that you're a kid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
One of my favorite teachers in all the time I've been on the internet is Kathy Sierra.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't know if you know her work, but she was active for only a few short years before the cruel internet ran her off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But she wrote a blog called Creating Passionate Users.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And she carved into my brain this notion of balance in the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you're creating something of value that a lot of people love...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You want a lot of games.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You must create an equal and opposite force of haters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You cannot have people who love what you do without also having people who hate what you do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You don't have a lot of money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The only escape from that is mediocrity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you are so boring and so uninteresting that no one gives a damn whether you exist or not, yeah, you don't get the haters, but you also don't get the impact of people who really enjoy your work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think Amazon is that just at the massive scale, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They've brought so much value and change to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What do you do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
technology to commerce, that they must simply have a black hole size of haters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Otherwise, the universe is simply going to tip over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You trade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Some people would occasionally buy a game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, I once bought a Sega Master System.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
First, I'll say we have tried to murder each other several times over the years, but far less, I think, in the last decade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In the early days, our product
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
discussions were so fierce that when we were having them in the office and there were other employees around,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Some of them were legitimately worried that the company was about to fall apart because the volume coming out of the room would be so high and sound so acrimonious that they were legitimately worried the whole thing was going to fall apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But you know what's funny is that it never felt like that in the moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I bought one game because that was what I could afford.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It always felt like just a peak vigorous search for something better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that we were able to stomach that level of adversity on the merits of an idea because it was about the idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It wasn't about the person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it never really got personal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not even never really.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It didn't get personal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It wasn't like, Jason, you're an asshole.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I got Afterburner 2.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was like, Jason, you're an idiot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you're an idiot because you're looking at this problem the wrong way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And let me tell you the right way to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't know if you've ever played that game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's pretty bad implementation on the Sega Master System, but it was like 600 crowners.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's exactly what I like to think of it as.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It doesn't always come across as that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I can see why spectators in particular sometimes would see something that looks like I'm going after the man rather than the ball.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I do think I've tried to get better at that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But in my relationship with Jason, I think it's worked so well because we have our own distinct areas of competence where we fully trust each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Jason trusts me to make the correct technical decisions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I trust him to make the correct design and product direction decisions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then we can overlap and share on the business, on marketing, on writing, on other aspects of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So that's one thing, is that if you're starting a business with someone where you do exactly the same as they do, and you're constantly contesting who's the more competent person, I think that's far more difficult and far more volatile.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So if you're starting a business and you're both programmers and you both work on the same kind of programming,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Ah, good luck.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think that's hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I tried to pick an easier path working with a designer where I knew that at least half of the time I could just delegate to his experience and competence and say, like, you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I may have an opinion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I have an opinion all the time on design, but I don't have to win the argument because I trust you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I was making money at that time doing newspaper delivery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, occasionally we would have overlaps on business or direction where we'd both feel like we had a strong stake in the game and we both had a claim to competence in that area.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But then for whatever reason, we also both had a long-term vision where I would go, do you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think we're wrong here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But as I learned from Jeff Bezos, by the way, I'm going to disagree and commit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was one of those early lessons he gave us that was absolutely crucial and perhaps even instrumental in ensuring that Jason and I have been working together for a quarter of a century.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Disagree and commit is one of the all-time Jeff Bezos greats.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I had to do that for a month to afford one game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It might have happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If not, in part...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because we don't sit on each other's lap all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Most of our careers, we haven't even lived in the same city.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like I lived in Chicago for a couple of years while we were getting going after I'd moved to the U.S.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
in 2005.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But then I moved to Malibu and then I lived in Spain and then I lived in Copenhagen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And Jason Rye, from the foundation of our relationship, learned how to work together well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I like video games way too much to wait a month just to get one game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
in a remarkably efficient way where we didn't have to actually talk that much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
On any given week, I'd be surprised if Jason and I spent more than two hours of direct exchange and communication.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes, I think if you rub up against another person,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That person damn well better be your spouse if it's too much for too long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It has.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I do think that having some separation, which is kind of counterintuitive, because I think a lot of people think the more collaboration you can have, the better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The more ideas that can bounce back and forth, the better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And both Jason and I, for whatever reason, came to the conclusion early on in careers, absolutely not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So piracy was just the way you did it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's complete baloney.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is why we were huge proponents of remote work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is why I enjoy working in my home office where I can close the door and not see another human for like six hours at the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't want to bounce ideas off you all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I want to bounce ideas off you occasionally, and then I want to go off and implement those ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that was how I got into running this bulletin board system, being part of the demo scene, being part of the piracy scene to some extent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's way too much bouncing going on and not enough scoring, not enough dunking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think this is one of the great traps of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
executive rule.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Once a founder elevates themselves all the way up to an executive, where what they're doing is just telling other people what to do, that's the realm they live in 24-7.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They just live in the idea realm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, I can just tell more people more things what to do, and we can just see it happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you actually have to be part of implementing that, you slow your horse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You think like, you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I had a good idea last week.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm going to save the rest of my good ideas until next month.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So that's why you say... Their job is telling other people what to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Meetings are toxic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And this really, I think, ties into this with Jason Rye.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If I had to count out the total number of meetings we've had in 24 years of collaborations where we in person sat in front of each other and discussed a topic, I probably, it'd be less than whatever, three months at a fan company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We just haven't done that that much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We haven't worn it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
One of this funny metaphors that Trump came up with at one point was a human has like a limited number of steps in their life, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then also at some point realizing, oh, you can actually also make money on this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like that's the longevity argument here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can do so much activity and then you run out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's some kernel in that idea that can be applied to a relationship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's some amount of exchange we can have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's some amount of time we can spend together where you can wear it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Jason and I were diligent about not wearing each other out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think that is absolutely key to the longevity of the relationship combined with that level of trust and then just combining with the level that we really like the work itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We don't just like the brainstorming, the says where we just come up with good ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No, we like to do the ideas and we like to be part of that process directly ourselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I like to program.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He likes to do design.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We could go off and do our little things for long stretches of time in case you come together and go like, hey, let's launch a great product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And this can fund buying more phone lines and buying more modems and buying more Amigas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Let me give you a tip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Uh-huh.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Get a wife.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
God damn it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Get a couple of kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Family really is the great antidote to loneliness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I mean that as sincerely as I can possibly say it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I certainly had exactly that feeling you described early in my career when I was working remotely and I was just like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
me living in an apartment, a total stereotype where for the longest time, when I first moved to Chicago, all I had on the floor was a mattress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh yeah, that was one of the demo parties.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then I bought this big TV and I didn't even mount it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then I had a stack of DVDs and I was basically, I was working a lot of time and then I would just go home and I'd do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It wasn't great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It really wasn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I do think that humans need humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And if you can't get them at work, and I actually sort of kind of don't want them at work, at least I don't want them 40 hours a week.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
These were amazing things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not what I prefer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You need something else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You need other relationships in your life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And there's no greater depth of relationship if you can find someone that you actually just want to spend a lot of time with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's key to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think it's key for both Jason and I that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We've had families for quite a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it grounds you to in a way where the sprint of a startup can get traded in for the marathon of an enduring company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you get settled in a way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We talked briefly about sometimes I get fired up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, a lot of times, maybe even most of the times I get fired up about topics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I don't get fired up in the same way now as I used to when I was 24.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm still extremely passionate about ideas and trying to find the right things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But having a family, meeting my wife, building a life around that has just mellowed everything out in a completely cliche way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
All these CRT monitors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I think it's actually key.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think if we could get more people
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
even younger people not to wait until they were in their late goddamn 30s or early 40s to hitch up with someone, we'd be better off and we'd have more stable business relationships as well because folks would get that nurturing human relation somewhere else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Again, when I was 14, I don't understand fully why my parents allowed this, but I traveled from Copenhagen
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, when I say all of that, I also accept that there are plenty of great businesses that's been built over the years that have not been built remote, that have been built by people
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
a gang of hooligans sitting in an office for immense hours of time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, both John Carmack and Tim Sweeney talked about that in the 90s with their careers, that that was just basically work, sleep, hang out with the guys at the office, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Totally fair.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That never appealed to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Both Jason and I saw eye to eye on the idea that 40 hours a week dedicated to work was enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That if we were going to go to distance for not just the five to seven years it takes to build a VC case up to an exit, but for potentially 10 years, 20 years or further, we needed to become whole humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because only that whole humanness was going to go to distance, which included building up friendships outside of work, having hobbies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Finding a mate and having a family.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that entire existence, those legs of the stool, that work is not the only thing in life, is completely related to the fact that we've been around for 25 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
the capital of Denmark, to Aas, this tiny little town in Jutland, on the train with a bunch of dudes who were like late teens and their 20s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's way too much, especially in America, of false trade-offs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, you want to build a successful business?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Well, you can either have money, enjoyment, family, or health.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Pick one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why do we have to give up all of this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Again, I'm not saying there aren't moments in life where you can sprint.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I am saying if that sprint turns into a decade, you're going to pay for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you're going to pay for it in ways I've seen time and again seem like a very bad trade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That even if it works, and by the way, most of the time it does not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Most of the time startups go bust.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Most of the time people spend five, seven years on something that does not pan out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And they don't get the payout.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then they just sit with regret of like, what the fuck happened to my 20s?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Early on, Jason and I basically made the pact that working together was not going to lead to that kind of regret.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That we were going to allow ourselves and each other to build a whole life outside of work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the fact that that worked is something I feel...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
is almost like forbidden knowledge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Certainly in technology circles in the US, it's something that we've tried to champion for 20 years and we still get slacked for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Just two days ago, I had another Twitter beef with someone saying like, oh, well, okay, maybe it worked, but you didn't turn into Atlassian, so you're a failure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Basecamp isn't Jira, so why are you even bothering?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm 14 years old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's such a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
fascinating winner-takes-all mentality that unless you dominate everyone else in all the ways you've lost, when so much of life is far more open to multiple winners, where we can end up with a business that have made hundreds of millions of dollars over the years, and we've kept much of that to do whatever we want, and that that's enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm lugging my 14-inch CRT monitor with my computer in the back to go to the party.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's actually...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Something worth aspiring to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Certainly it should be a path for someone to consider choosing rather than the VC unicorn and bust mentality that dominates everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was what it was called.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was the biggest demo scene party at that time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Mojito Island is a mirage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It always was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There is no retirement for ambitious people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it was exactly as you see in that picture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There is no just sitting back on the beach and sipping a mojito for what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
For two weeks before you go damn crazy and want to get back into the action?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's exactly what happens to most people who have the capacity to build those kinds of exits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've never seen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I shouldn't say never.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've almost never seen anyone be able to pull that off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Thousands of people just lining up with their computers, programming demos all day long, and trading these things back and forth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yet so many think that that's why they're doing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's why they're sacrificing everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because once I get to the finish line, I'm golden.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've won.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can retire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can sit back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can just relax.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you find out that that kind of relaxation is actually hell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's hell for creative people to squander time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
their God-given creative juices and capacities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I was really lucky to read the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi early on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I had to practice that with AI over the last few days because I knew I was going to cite him, and I butchered his name several times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So AI taught me how to pronounce that, at least somewhat correctly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But his...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Main work over his career was essentially the concept of flow that came out of a search for understanding happiness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why are some people happy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When are they happy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And what he learned was quite illuminating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He learned that people aren't happy when they sit on Mojito Island.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're not happy when they're free of all obligations and responsibilities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No, they're happy in these moments where they're reaching and stretching their capacities just beyond what they can currently do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's kind of awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In those moments of flow, they can forget time and space.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They can sit in front of the keyboard, program a hard problem, think 20 minutes have passed, and suddenly it's been three hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not going to lie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They look back upon those moments with the greatest amount of joy, and that is what peak happiness is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you take away the pursuit,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a little ridiculous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
of those kinds of problems, if you eliminate all the problems from your plate, you're gonna get depressed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're not gonna have a good time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, there are people who can do that, but they're not the same kind of people who built these kinds of companies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you have to accept the kind of individual you are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you are on this path,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Don't bullshit yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's totally awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Don't bullshit yourself into thinking, I'm just going to sacrifice everything, my health, my family, my hobbies, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But in 10 years, I'm going to make it all up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because in 10 years, I can do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I miss it in ways where the internet has connected people in some ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It never works out like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It doesn't work out on both ends of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It does not work out if you're successful and you sell your company, because you'll
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
get bored out of your mind after two weeks on retirement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It doesn't work out if the company is a failure and you regret the last 10 years spent for nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It doesn't work out if it all works and you stay in the business because it never gets any easier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you're going to fail on all metrics if you just go, there's only work and nothing else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I didn't want that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I wanted the happiness of flow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I understood that insight was true, but I wanted to do it in a way where I could sustain the journey for 40 or 50 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But the connection you get from sitting right next to someone else who has their own CRT monitor, who's lugged it halfway around the country to get there, is truly special.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can't do it again, or most people can't do it again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
A, because their second idea is not going to be as good as the first one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It is so rare to capture lightning in the bottle like we have, for example, with Basecamp.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I know this from experience because I've been trying to build a lot of other businesses since, and some of them have been moderate successes, even good successes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
None of them have been Basecamp.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's really difficult to do that twice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But founders are arrogant pricks, including myself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we like to think that, do you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We succeeded in large part because we're just awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're just so much better than everyone else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And in some ways that's true some of the time, but you can also be really good at something that matters for a hot moment, that door is open, the door closes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now you're still good at the thing, but it doesn't matter, no one cares.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's that part of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then there's the part of it that,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Going back to experience things for the first time only happens the first time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can't do it again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't know if I have it in me to go through the bullshit of the early days again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I say bullshit in the sense of the most endearing sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's all great to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I know too much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is one of the reasons why whenever I'm asked a question, if you could tell your younger self something that would really... What would you say to your younger self?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I would fucking not say a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I would not rob my younger self of all the life experiences that I've been blessed with due to the ignorance of how the world works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Building up the wisdom about how the world works is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because it was also just this burst of creativity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
A joy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you've got to build it one brick at a time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you just handed all the results, it's like, oh, should we watch a movie?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Here's how it ends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't want to watch the movie now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You spoiled it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't want you to spoil my business experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't want to spoil any of my ignorance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The greatest blessing half the time when you're starting something new is, A, you don't know how hard it's going to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
B, you don't know what you don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The adventure is the payoff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're constantly running around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The responsibility is to pay off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is something Jordan Peterson has really taught me to articulate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This notion that responsibility is actually key to meaning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're constantly surrounded by people who are really good at what they could do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, talks about this as well, that we can endure any hardship if there's a reason why.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, he talked about it in truly life-altering, concentration camp ways, but you can also apply it at a smaller scale with less criticality of even just your daily life, that all that hardship in building the original business, that is responsibility you take upon yourself,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The appeal, the reason you take that on you is in part because you don't know fully what it entails.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're really good at programming computers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you had known up front, if I had known up front how hard it would be, how much frustration there'd be along the way, if you just told me that in a narrative before I got started, I would have been like, eh, maybe I should just go get a job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's infectious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was part of that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Pang, I felt then going like, oh man, why can't I figure this out?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think you should stretch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Should you have to stretch for a decade?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not so sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
A lot to trade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You don't get your 20s back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You don't get your 30s back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You don't get your 40s back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You really... I would have regretted, personally, if I hadn't done the other things I did in my 20s, if I hadn't had the fun I had, if I hadn't had the friends I had, if I hadn't built up the hobbies that I did, if I hadn't started driving race cars at an early enough age to actually get really good at it, if I had just gone all in on business...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, why can't I even figure out Easy Amos?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because I would have got the same out in the end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is something Derek Sivers really taught me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He has this great essay about how when he went for a bike ride, he could go really hard all out and he could do the ride, I think, in whatever, 19 minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Or he could enjoy the ride, go 5% slower, do the ride in 21 minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
and realize there's only two minutes apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Either I go all in all the time, there's nothing else, I'm completely exhausted at the end, or I travel the same distance and I arrive maybe two minutes later, but I got to enjoy the scenery, listen to the birds, smell the flowers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, it's kind of frustrating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That journey is also valuable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I say that while accepting and celebrating that if you want to be the best at one thing in the world, no, you have to sacrifice everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You have to be obsessed with just that thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There is no instant of someone who's the best in the world at something who's not completely obsessed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I didn't need to be the best at anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This was a blessing, a rare blessing of humility I had early on is like, you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I am not that smart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not that good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not that talented.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can do interesting things by combining different aspects and elements that I know, but I'm not going to be the best at anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So third attempt is when I start getting it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that released me from this singular obsession with just going, I'm going to be the best programmer in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I know I'm not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I fucking failed at it twice before I even got how conditionals work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not smart enough to be the best at anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not dedicated enough to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's a bit of a blessing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think as a society, we have to straddle both celebrating peak excellence, which we do all the time, and celebrating the peak intensity of mission it takes to become that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is when I start helping out, let's say, building things for the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then also going like, you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We don't all need to be Michael Jordan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's only going to be one of those.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you want to be Senna, you got to be a maniac.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So around 95, I think it is, or 96, I discovered the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The way I think about this sometimes is I want a good bargain on learning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can become in the top 5% of whatever I defined as good at something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
much, much easier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Perhaps it's 20 times easier, 100 times easier to get into the top 5% than it is to get into the top 0.1%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's almost impossibly hard to get into that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But if I'm content just being in the top 5%, I could be in the top 5% on like five things at once.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can get really good at writing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can get decent at driving a race car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can become pretty good at programming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can run a company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can have a family.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
do a lot of things at the same time that gives me sort of that variety that almost that was idealized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Actually, ninth grade, that was my first experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Karl Marx has this idea, I'm going to fish in the morning and hammer in the evening and paint on the weekends, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That there's a sense for me, at least, where his diagnosis of alienation was true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That just that tunnel vision, there's just this one thing, I'm just going to focus on that, gives me a sense of alienation I can't stomach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I went to some university in Denmark and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When I'm really deep on programming, and sometimes I go deep for weeks,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Maybe even in a few cases, months, I have to come up for air and I have to go do something else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like, all right, that was programming for this year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've done my part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm going to go off riding or annoy people on the internet or drive some race cars to do something else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then I can do the programming thing with full intensity again next year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
decision can you talk to the full saga of jj leaves the cloud yes leaving aws um saving money and i guess the case this person is making now is that we wasted our time optimizing a business that could have been 100 times bigger if we'd just gone for the moon and and for the moon includes venture capital but also other things includes not caring about cost
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And in ninth grade, we had this excursion and they sat us down in front of a computer and the computer had Netscape navigator, the first version, or maybe it was even the precursor to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think it's a bit of a muddy argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But if we just take it at its peak ideal, which I actually think is a reasonable point, is that you can get myopically focused on counting pennies when you should be focused on getting pounds, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've optimized our spend on infrastructure by getting out of the cloud.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that took some time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I could have taken that time and spend it on making more features that would attract more customers or spend even more time with AI or done other things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Opportunity cost is real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not denying that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm pushing back on the idea that for a company of our size,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Saving $2 million a year on our infrastructure bill, which is about somewhere between half to two thirds, goes directly to the bottom line, which means it's returned to Jason or I as owners and our employees, part of our profit sharing plan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's totally worth doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This idea that costs don't matter is a very Silicon Valley way of thinking that I, again, understand at the scale of something maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I also actually think it's
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's aesthetically unpleasing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I find an inefficient business, as I find an inefficient program full of line noise, to just be a splinter in my brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And they had a text editor and us kids just got like, hey, build something on the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I hate looking at an expense report and just seeing disproportionate waste.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And when I was looking at our spend at 37 Signals a while back, a few years back, I saw bills that did not pass my smell test.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I remembered how much we used to spend on infrastructure before the cloud.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I saw numbers I could not recognize in proportion to what we needed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The fact that computers have gotten so much faster over time shouldn't
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
things be getting cheaper?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why are we spending more and more money servicing more customers?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes, but with much faster computers, Moore's law should be lowering the cost.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it was just HTML.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the opposite is happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why is that happening?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that started a journey of unwinding why the cloud isn't as great as the deal as people like to think that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the first thing you do is like, oh, I can make the text blink by just putting in this tag and saving it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We were using AWS for everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Hey.com launched as an entirely cloud app.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was completely on AWS for compute, for databases, for all of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're using all the systems as they're best prescribed that we should.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Our total cloud bill for...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Basecamp, our total spend with AWS was I think 3.2 million or 3.4 million at its peak.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's kind of a lot of money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
3.4 million.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, we have a ton of users and customers, but still, that just struck me as unreasonable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the reason why it was so unreasonable was because I had the pitch for the cloud ringing in my ears.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Hey, this is going to be faster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was that moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is going to be easier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is going to be cheaper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why are you trying to produce your own power?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Do you have your own power plant?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why would you do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Leave...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
the computers to the hyperscalers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're much better at it anyway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I actually thought that was a compelling pitch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I bought in on that pitch for several years and thought, do you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm done ever owning a server again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're just going to rend our capacity and Amazon is going to be able to offer us services much cheaper than we could buy them themselves because they're going to have these economies of scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was actually when I reawakened the urge to want to learn the program because I got a positive experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I was thinking,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Jeff's word, my competitor's margin is my opportunity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was something he used to drive Amazon.com with, that if he could just make 2% when the other guy was trying to make 4%, he would end up with all the money and on volume, he would still win.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I thought that was the operating ethos for AWS.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It turns out that's not true at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
AWS, by the way, operates at almost 40% margin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So just in that, there's a clue that competitors are not able to do the competitive thing we like about capitalism, which is to lower costs and so forth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So the cloud pitch in my optics is fundamentally false.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It did not
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
get easier, first of all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't know if you've used AWS recently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It is hella complicated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you think Linux is hard, you've never tried to set up IAM rules or access parameters or whatever for AWS.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
All the other experiences I had with programming was I'd spend hours typing something in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Well, I think it's gotten even more difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, some of that is it's difficult because it's very capable and you have a bunch of capacity on tap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And there are reasons...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't think they're good enough to justify how complicated the whole zhing and majing has become.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But what's certainly true is that it's no longer easier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not easier to use AWS than it is to run your own machines, which we learned when we pulled out of the cloud and didn't hire a single extra person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Even though we operate all our own hardware, the team stayed exactly the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you have this three-way pitch, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's going to be easier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's going to be cheaper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It certainly wasn't cheaper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We've just proved that by cutting our spend on infrastructure by half to two thirds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's going to be faster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The last bit was true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But way too many people overestimated the value of that speed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'd click run and it wouldn't work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you need a thousand computers online in the next 15 minutes, nothing beats the cloud.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How would you even procure that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If we just need another 20 servers, it's going to take a week or two to get boxes shipped on pallets, delivered to a data center and unwrapped and racked and all that stuff, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But how often do we need to do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I'd get an error message that made no sense to me as a kid, either at six or seven or at 12.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And how often do we need to do that if buying those servers is way, way cheaper?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So we get vastly more compute for the same amount of money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Could we just buy more servers and not even care about the fact that we're not hyper-optimized on the compute utility?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That we don't have to use things like automatic scaling to figure things out because we have to reduce costs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes, we can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So we went through this journey over...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
A realization in early 2023, when I had finally had enough with our bills, I wanted to get rid of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I wanted to spend less money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I wanted to keep more of the money ourselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And in just over six months, we moved seven major applications out of the cloud in terms of compute, caching, databases, the works onto our own servers, a glorious, beautiful new fleet bought from the king of servers, Michael Dell, who...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Really, by the way, he's another icon of mine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I saw he just celebrated 41 years in business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And here I am sitting in front of a computer connected to the internet and I'm making text blink.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
41 years this man has been selling awesome servers that we've been using for our entire existence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But anyway, these palettes arrive in a couple of weeks and we rack them up and get everything going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we were out, at least with the compute part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We then had a long multi-year commitment to S3 because the only way to get decent pricing in the cloud, by the way, is not to buy...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
on a day-to-day basis, not to rent on a database basis, but to bind yourself up to multi-year contracts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
With compute, it's often a year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was in our case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And with storage, it was four years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We signed a four-year contract to store our petabytes of customer files in the cloud to be able to get something just halfway decent affordable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So, all of these projects came together to the sense that we're now saving literally millions of dollars projected about 10 million over five years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm making it larger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's always hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How do you do the accounting exactly and TOC this, that, and the other thing, but it's millions of dollars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm turning it into an H1 or an H2.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it's not just that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's also the fact that getting out of the cloud meant returning to more of an original idea of the Internet, that the Internet was not designed such that three computers should run everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was a distributed network such that the individual nodes could disappear and the whole thing would still carry on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
DARPA designed this such that the Russians could take out Washington and they could still fight back from New York.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
that the entire communication infrastructure wouldn't disappear because there was no hub and spoke.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was a network.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I always found that an immensely beautiful vision, that you could have this glorious internet and no single node was in control of everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And these guys out here, we just did it for like an hour and a half.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we've returned to much more of a single node controlling everything idea with these hyperscalers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When US East 1, the main and original region for AWS goes offline, which has happened more than a few times over the years, seemingly a third of the internet is offline.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like that in itself is just an insult to DARPA's design.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
detract from the fact that what AWS built was marvelous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think the cloud has moved so many things so far forward, especially around virtualization, automation, setup.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And suddenly I go, oh, I can make things for the internet that someone in Germany can be able to access and see.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's all those giant leaps forward for system administration that's allowing us now to be able to run things on-prem in a way that smells and feels much like the cloud, just at half the cost or less.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And with the autonomy and the satisfaction of owning hardware,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't know what the last time you looked at an actual server and took it apart and looked inside of, these things are gorgeous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I posted a couple of pictures of our racks out in the data center and people always go crazy for them because we've gotten so abstracted from what the underlying metal looks like in this Cloud age that most people have no idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They have no idea how powerful a modern CPU is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They have no idea how much RAM you can fit into a 1U rack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Progress in computing has been really exciting, especially I'd say in the last four to five years after TSMC, with Apple's help, really pushed the envelope.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, we kind of sat still there for a while while Intel was spinning their wheels going nowhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I don't have to ask anyone for permission.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then TSMC, with Apple propelling them, really moved things forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And now servers are exciting again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like you're getting...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
jumps year over year in the 15, 20% rather than the single digit we were stuck with for a while.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that all means that owning your own hardware is a more feasible proposition than it's ever been, that you need fewer machines to run ever more, and that more people should do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because as much as I love Jeff and Amazon, he doesn't need another, whatever, 40% margin on all the tech stuff that I buy to run our business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is super cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is just something I've been focused on, both because of the ideology around honoring DARPA's original design, the practicality of running our own hardware, seeing how fast we can push things with the latest machines, and then saving the money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I got to do more of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I got into the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that has all been so enjoyable to do, but also so counterintuitive for a lot of people, because it seemed, I think, for a lot of people in the industry that like we'd all decided that we were done buying computers, that that was something we would just delegate to AWS and Azure and Google Cloud, that we didn't have to own these things anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I got into working with HTML.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I think there's a little bit of whiplash for some people that, oh, I thought we agreed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We were done with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then along come us and say, yeah, you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I still had all these friends from these demo parties.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Maybe you should have a computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, plenty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's pain points to operating computers of all kinds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Have you tried just like using a personal computer these days?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Half the time when my kids or my wife have a problem, I go like, have you tried turning it just off and on again?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Computers are inherently painful to humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Owning your own computer, though, kind of makes some of that pain worth it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's a responsibility that comes with actually owning the hardware that, to me, at least make the burden of operating that hardware seem slightly more enjoyable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I started working with them on creating gaming websites.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There are things you have to learn, certainly at our scale, too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, we're not just buying a single computer and plugging it into an Ethernet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We have to have racks and racks of them, and you've got to set it up with network cabling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And there is some specialized expertise in that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it's not like that expertise is like building nuclear rockets, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not like it's not widely distributed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Literally the entire internet was built on people knowing how to plug in a computer to the internet, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, Ethernet cable goes here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Power cable goes here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Let's boot up Linux.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's how everyone put anything online until 10, 12 years ago when the cloud sort of took over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'd write about the video games.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So the expertise is there and can be rediscovered.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You too can learn how to operate a Linux computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'd review them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, they're beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Calming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Computers are really fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is actually something I've gotten into even deeper after we moved out of the cloud.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now my next kind of tingle is that if you could move out of the cloud, can you also move out of the data center?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This was another good way of getting new video games was to walk down to some store and say, like, hey, I'm a journalist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Personal servers have gotten really scarily quick and efficient, and personal internet connections rival what we connected data centers with just a decade or two ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So there's a whole community around this concept of home lapping, which is essentially installing server hardware in your own apartment, connecting it to the internet, and then
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
exposing that directly to the internet that harks back to those glorious days of the 90s when people building for the internet would host the actual website on their actual computer in the closet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I'm pretty fired up about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm doing a bunch of experiments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've ordered a bunch of home servers for my own apartment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I marvel at the fact that I can get a 5 gigabit fiber connection now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think, do you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
5 gigabit, that could have taken Basecamp to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm like this 15-year-old kid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
multiple millions of MRR in the way that back then I ran the whole business on a single box with 2004 technology and probably a hundred megabit cable, like the capacity we have access to both in terms of compute and connectivity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And they're looking at me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
is something that people haven't readjusted to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And this happens sometimes in technology where progress sneaks up on you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This happened with SSDs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I love that, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're a journalist?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yeah, can I borrow some games?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We designed so much of our technology and storage approach and database design around spinning metal disks that had certain seek rate properties.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then we went to NVMe and SSDs, and it took
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Quite a while for people to realize that the systems have to be built fundamentally different now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because this was when games moved on to the PlayStation and these other things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That the difference between memory and disk was now far smaller when you weren't spinning these metal plates around with a little head that had to read off them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You were essentially just dealing with another type of memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think we're a little bit in that same phase when it comes to the capacity of new businesses to be launched literally out of your damn bedroom.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's bringing back the startup in the garage, in the literal, physical sense of the word.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, some of that is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Do we need to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can get relatively cheap cloud capacity if you don't need very much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You couldn't just as easily pirate, at least not at first.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's just an aesthetic to it that I am completely in love with and I want to try to push on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Is that going to be the same thing as getting out of the cloud?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Our exit out of the cloud was not the exit out of the data center.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We basically just bought hardware, shipped it to a professionally managed data center that we didn't even actually touch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I went down there, did all that, and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is the other misconception people have about moving out of the cloud, that we have a bunch of people who are constantly driving to a data center somewhere to rack new boxes and change dead RAM.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not how things happen in the modern world at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We have a company called...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Summit, previously Deft, that is what we call white gloves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They just, they work in the data center.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When we need something like, hey, Deft, can you go down and swap the debt SSD in box number six?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And what we see is akin to what someone working with the cloud would see.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That started the journey of the internet for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You see IP addresses coming online.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You see drives coming online.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not that different, but it is a whole heck of a lot cheaper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
when you are operating at our scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And of course it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Of course it's cheaper to own things if you need those things for years rather than it is to rent it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In no other domain would we confuse those two things that it's cheaper to own for the long duration than it is to rent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It started working on these gaming websites, working with programmers, figuring out that I could do something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, and I love that, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're dealing with a frontier problem, and they're dealing with it not by renting a bunch of GPUs at a huge markup from their main competitor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're going like, no, screw that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're going to put 100,000 GPUs in our own tents, right, and build it in absolute record time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I think, if anything, this is testament to the idea that owning hardware can give you an advantage, both at the small scale, at the medium scale, and at the pioneer levels of computing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I could work on the HTML part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not really programming, but it kind of smells like it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't think he's finding as much as he's attracting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He's attracting the talent because of the audaciousness of his goals and his mission, the clarity by which he states it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He doesn't have to go scour the earth to find the best people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The best people come to him because he is, talking about Elon here, one of the singular most invigorating figures in both the same order of the universe here, haters and lovers, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're talking to a computer, you're making it put text on the screen, and you're communicating with someone halfway around the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like he's having such an impact at such a scale that of course he's got to have literally millions of people think he's the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
worst person in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And he's also going to have millions of people thinking he's the greatest gift to humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Depending on the day, I'm somewhere in between, but I'm more on the greatest gift to humanity end of the scale than I'm on the other end of the scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think that really inspires people in a way that we've almost forgotten that that level of audacity is so rare.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That when we see it, we don't fully know how to analyze it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We think of Elon as finding great talent, and I'm sure he's also good at that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I also think that this beacon of the mission, we're going to fucking Mars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're going to transform transportation into using electricity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're going to cover the Earth in Internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's so grand that there are days where I wake up and go like, what the fuck am I doing with these to-do lists?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like, Jesus, should I go sign up for something like that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So that became my pathway back into programming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That sounds invigorating in a sense I can only imagine like a Viking back in 1050 going like, should we go to Normandy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You may die along the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But, oh boy, does that sound like a journey and an adventure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then slowly I picked up more and more of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
First,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Website I did with someone, one of these programs from the demo scene that was dynamic was ASP.NET.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think part of the secret there is that Elon actually knows things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And when you know things, you can evaluate the quality of work products.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And when you can evaluate the quality of work products, you can very quickly tell who's full of shit and who will actually take you to Mars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you can fire the people who's full of shit and you can bet on the people who'll get us to Mars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That capacity to directly evaluate the competency of individuals
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
is actually a little bit rare.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not widely distributed among managers, hiring managers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It wasn't even actually called .NET.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not something you can easily delegate to people who are not very skilled at the work itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was what we started on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And Elon obviously knows a lot about a lot and he can smell who knows stuff for real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And is this at our tiny scale, something I've tried to do in the same order where when we hire programmers, for example,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then we moved on to PHP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's going to be interesting now with AI as a new challenge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But up until this point, the main pivot point for getting hired was not your resume, was not the schooling you've had, was not your grades, was not your pedigree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And PHP was when I finally got it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was how well you did on two things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
A, your cover letter, because I can only work with people remotely if they're good writers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So if you can't pen a proper cover letter and can't bother to put in the effort to write it specifically for us, you're out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Two, you have to be able to program really well to the degree that I can look at your code and go like, yeah, I want to work with that person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not only I want to work with that person, I want to work on that person's code when I have to see it again in five years to fix some damn bug.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When it finally clicked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So we're going to give you a programming test.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That simulates the way we work for real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we're going to see how you do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I've been surprised time and again where I thought for sure this candidate is a shoo-in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When conditionals and loops and variables and all that stuff started to make sense enough to me that I thought, I can do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They sound just right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The CV is just right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then you see the code getting churned in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm like, no way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No way are we hiring this person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the other way has been true as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've gone like, I don't know about this guy or this woman.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then they turn in their coach stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I'm like, holy shit, can that person be on my team tomorrow, preferably?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The capacity to evaluate a work product is a superpower when it comes to hiring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think this is the hallmark of the true greats, that they not only have the insight into what's required to do the work, but they also have the transcendent vision to go beyond what
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
the engineer would do, the programmer would do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think if we're looking at these rarities, obviously the myth of Steve Jobs was also this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Even though perhaps he was less technical than Elon is in many ways, he had the same capacity to show up to a product team and really challenge them to look harder for the simplification or for making things greater.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
in a way that would garner disbelief from the people who are supposed to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like this guy is full of shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like this is crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We can never.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then two months later it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So there is something of this where you need,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You need the vision.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You need it anchored by the reality of knowing enough about what's possible, knowing enough about physics, knowing enough about software that you're not just building bullshit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There are plenty of people who can tell a group of engineers, no, just do it faster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not a skill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's got to be anchored in something real, but it's also got to be anchored in something
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
it's a tired word, but a passion for the outcome to a degree where you get personally insulted if a bad job is done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is what I've been writing about lately with Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They've lost that asshole who would show up and tell engineers that what they did was not good enough in ways that would actually perhaps make them feel a little small in the moment, but would spark that zest to really fix it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
100% that's true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now they have
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
a logistics person who's very good at sourcing components and lining up production Gantt charts, but you're not getting that magic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, what's interesting with that whole scenario was I actually thought how well Tim Cook ran things and has run things at Apple for so long that maybe we were wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's even better than that because PHP to me didn't just give me a start in terms of making my own web applications.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Maybe we were wrong about the criticality of Steve Jobs to the whole mission.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Maybe you could get away with not having it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think the bill was just going to come later and now it has.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Apple is failing in all these ways that someone who would blow up Steve's ghost and really exalt him would say like, see, this is what's happening now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So the other thing here too, of course, is it's impossible to divorce your perception of what's a critical component of the system and the messy reality of a million different moving parts in the reality of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You should be skeptical about your own analysis or your own thesis at all time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It actually gave me a bar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But first I'll tell you how I fell in love with Apple, which was all the way back in also early 2000s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
when Microsoft was dominating the industry in a way we now see Apple and Google dominate mobile phones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Microsoft was just everything when it came to personal computers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In many ways, I think the pinnacle of web developer ergonomics is late 90s PHP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I really did not like the Microsoft of the 90s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The Microsoft of the 90s was the cutoff, the air supply to Netscape kind of characters, was the Bill Gates sitting defiant in an interview with the DOJ asking about what the definition of what is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
and just overall unpleasant, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can have respect for what was achieved, but I certainly didn't like it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And as we've talked about, I came begrudgingly to the PC after Commodore fell apart and I couldn't continue to use the Amiga.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I already had a bit of a bone to pick with PCs just over the fact that I love my Amiga so much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But then in the early 2000s, Apple emerged as a credible alternative because they bet the new generation of Macs on Unix underpinnings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that allowed me to escape from Microsoft.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And suddenly I became one of the biggest boosters of Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I was in my graduating class at the Copenhagen Business School.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I started with the first white iBook.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
First person using Mac.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And by the time we were done in graduating, I had basically converted half the class to using Apple computers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because I would evangelize them so hard and demonstrate them and do all the things that a super fan would do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I continued that work over many years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You write this script, you FTP it to a server, and instantly it's deployed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Jason and I actually, in I think 2004, 2005, did an ad for Apple that they posted on the developer site where we were all about, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Apple is so integral to everything that we do and we look up to them and we are inspired by them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that love relationship actually continued for a very long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I basically just became a Mac person for 20 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I didn't even care about looking at PCs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It seemed irrelevant to me, whatever Microsoft was doing, which felt like such a relief because...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In the 90s, I felt like I couldn't escape Microsoft and suddenly I had found my escape.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And now I was with Apple and it was glorious and they shared so many of my sensibilities and my aesthetics and they kept pushing the envelope and there was so much to be proud of, so much to look up to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then that sort of started to change with the iPhone, which is weird because the iPhone is what made modern Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's what I lined up in 2007 together with Jason for five hours to stand in the line to buy a first-generation product where Apple staff would clap at you when you walked out of the store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Instantly it's available.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't know if you remember that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You change anything in that file and you reload, boom, it's right there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was a whole ceremony.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it was part of that myth and mystique and awe of Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I just, I wasn't in the market for other computers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I wasn't in the market for other computer ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I thought perhaps I'd be with the Mac until the end of days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But as Apple discovered the gold mine it is to operate a toll booth where you don't have to innovate, where you don't actually even have to make anything, where you can just take 30% of other people's business, there was a rot that crept in to the foundation of Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that started all the way back from the initial launch of the App Store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's no web servers, there's no setup, there's just an Apache that runs mod.php and it was essentially the easiest way to get a dynamic web page up and going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I don't think we saw at the time, I didn't see at the time, just how critical Apple
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
the mobile phone would become to computing in general.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I thought when the iPhone came out that like, oh, it's like a mobile phone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've had a mobile phone since the early 90s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Well, it wasn't a mobile phone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was a mobile computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And even more than that, it was the most important computer or it would become the most important computer for most people around the world, which meant that if you like to make software and wanted to sell it to people, you had to go through that computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And if going through that computer meant going through Apple's toll booth,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And not just having to ask them permission, which in and of itself was just an indignity when you're used to the internet, where you don't have to ask anyone permission about anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You buy a domain and you launch a business and if customers show up, boom, you're a success.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And if they don't, well, you're a failure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now suddenly, before you could even launch, you'd have to ask Apple for permission?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That always sat wrong with me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it wasn't until we launched Hey!
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In 2001, that I saw the full extent of the rot that has snug into Apple's Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes, I like to pitch it as what Gmail would have been with 20 years of lessons applied in a way where they could actually ship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Gmail was incredible when it launched in 2004.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it still is a great product, but it's also trapped in its initial success.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can't redesign Gmail today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It just has way too many users.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So if you want fresh thinking on email, I wanted fresh thinking on email.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I needed to build my own email system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And not just my own email client.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's what a lot of people have done over the years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They build a client for Gmail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But you're severely constrained if you don't control the email server as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you really want to move the ball forward with email, you have to control both the server and the client.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And this is one of the things I've been chasing that high for basically the rest of my career, that it was so easy to make things for the Internet in the mid to late 90s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that was the audacious mission we set out to do with Hay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that was...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What's funny, I thought our main obstacle here would be Gmail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's the 800-pound gorilla in the email space.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Something like 70% of all email in the U.S.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
is sent through Gmail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think their world rates are probably in that neighborhood as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're just absolutely huge and trying to attack an enormous...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
established competitor like that, who's so actually still loved by plenty of people and is free, seems like a suicide mission.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it was only a mission we signed up for because we had grown ambitious enough after making Basecamp for 20 years that we thought we could tackle that problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I thought, hey,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is dumb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I would not advise anyone to go head to head with Gmail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That seems like a suicide mission.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're going to try anyway, because you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If we fail, it's going to be fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're just going to build a better email experience for me and Jason and the people at the company and our cat, and that'll be okay because we can afford to do so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But when we got ready to launch, after spending two years building this product, millions of dollars in investment to it,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We obviously needed mobile apps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're not going to be a serious contender with email if you're not on a mobile phone and you need to be there with a native client.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So we had built a great native client for both iOS and for Android.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And as we were getting ready to launch, we submitted both of them to the app stores, got both of them approved on, I think, Friday afternoon for the iOS app.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we then went live on Monday.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How did we lose the sensibilities that allowed us to not just work this way, but get new people into the industry to give them those success experiences that I had?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we were so excited.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Hey, world, we've been working on this new thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'd love for you to check it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And of course, as with anything, when you launch a new product, there are some bugs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So we quickly found a few in the iOS client and submitted a new build to Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Hey, here's our bug fixes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Can you please update?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's when all the help broke loose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not only were they not going to approve our update...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They said, oh, wait a minute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We gave you permission to be in the App Store, but I'm sorry, that was a mistake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We see that you're not using our in-app payment system, which means that we don't get 30% of your business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You will have to rectify that or you can't be in the App Store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And first I thought, like, well, it got approved already.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're running on the same model we've run Basecamp on in the App Store for a decade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you're not signing up through the app and we're signing up our own customers on our own website and they're just going to the App Store to download their companion app, we're going to be fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was the truth, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was why I never got so fired up about the App Store, even as Apple started tightening the screws, was like my business was OK.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, suddenly my business wasn't okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Apple was willing to destroy Hay if we did not agree to give them 30% of all the signups that came through the iOS app.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it wasn't just about the 30%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was also about splitting and not longer having a direct relationship with our customers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When you sell an app in the app store, you're not selling an app to a customer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're selling an app to inventory at Apple, and then Apple sells an app to that customer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That customer has a purchasing relationship with Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So if you want to give discounts or refunds or whatever, it's complete hell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you want to easily support multi-platform, that's complete hell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If someone signs up for Hay on their iPhone and they want to switch to Android, but that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Billing relationship, it's tied to Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's complete hell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
adding a freaking blink tag to an HTML page, FTPing a PHP page to an Apache web server without knowing really anything about anything, without knowing anything about frameworks, without knowing anything about setup.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
For a million reasons, I did not want to hand my business over to Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I did not want to hand 30% of our revenue over to Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So we decided to do something that seemingly Apple had never heard before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We said, no, we're not going to add the in-app payment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't care if you're threatening us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is not fair.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is not reasonable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Please approve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And of course they didn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it escalated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And after a couple of days, we realized, you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This isn't a mistake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This isn't going away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're going to be dead if they go through with this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If we're not going to yield and give them the 30%, they're going to kick us off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Unless...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We make such a racket, such noise, that they will regret it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's exactly what then happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We were blessed by the fact that we launched Hay one week before the WWDC, their Worldwide Developer Conference, where Apple loves to get up on stage and harp on how much they do for developers, how much they love them, and why you should bill for their new devices, and so on and so forth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then we also just happened to have a platform on the internet, which is very convenient when you need to go to war with a $3 trillion company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I started kicking and screaming and essentially turning it up to 11 in terms of the fight and going public with our denial to be in the app store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that turned into a prolonged two-week battle with Apple that essentially ended in the best possible outcome we could have gotten as David fighting Goliath, which was a bit of a truce.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We wouldn't hand 30% over to Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They wouldn't kick us out of the App Store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But we had to build some bullshit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
dummy account such that the app did something when you downloaded it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was a rule that Phil Schiller seemingly made up on the fly when pressed for the fifth time by the media about why we couldn't be in the app store when a million other companion apps could.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But we just happened to be able to create so much pain and noise for Apple that it was easier for them to just let us be than to keep on fighting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think it is incredible, and the entire developer ecosystem, not just on iOS, but on Android as well, owe Epic, Tim Sweeney, and Mark Raine an enormous debt of gratitude for taking on the only battle that has ever inflicted a serious wound on Apple in this entire sordid campaign of monopoly enforcement, and that is Epic's fight versus them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
All of that stuff have really taken us to a place where it sometimes feels like we're barely better off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Tim recently revealed that it has cost well over $100 million in legal fees to carry on this battle against Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We, for a hot moment, considered suing Apple when they were threatening to kick us out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We shopped the case around with a few law firms, and perhaps, of course, they would tell us, you have a good case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, they're trying to sell a product here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But they would also tell us it's going to cost a minimum of $10 million, and it's going to take...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Five to seven years through all the appeals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, we now learned the actual price tag was 10 times higher, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Epic spent over $100 million.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It would have destroyed us to take on Apple in the legal realm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like webpages aren't that different from what they were in the late 90s, early 2000s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Only a company like Epic could do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And only a company run by founders like Tim, like Mark, could do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
risk the business in the way that they did, the audacity they had to provoke the fight in the first place, which I thought was just incredible, and to stick with it for the long term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No board would have signed off on this lawsuit to a professional CEO.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No freaking way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So the fact that they've been able to beat Apple in also the most hilarious way possible, I think it's just incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because remember, their first...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
victory in the case was actually not much of a victory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There were about 11 counts in the trial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Apple basically won 10 of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the judge awarded Epic this one little win that Apple couldn't tell him not to link up to the internet to be able to do the payment processing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're still just forms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So they want this one little thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They still just write to databases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And Apple, instead of just taking the 10 out of 11 wins and going, fine, you can have your little links, but all these other rules stay in place, decided to essentially commit criminal contempt of court, as they've now been referred to for prosecution, and angered the judge to such a degree that the rule of law in the U.S.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
A lot of people, I think, are very uncomfortable with the fact that they are essentially crud monkeys.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
now is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
that you can launch an app in the App Store and you don't have to use in-app payment, but you can have a direct billing relationship with a customer if you just link out to the open internet when you take the credit card and then hop back into the app.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we owe all of that to Tim and Mark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We owe all of that to Epic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're going to launch new apps any minute now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I hope actually next week to take advantage of this, that revamp the Hey app so that people who download the Hey app off the Apple App Store can sign up in the app
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
and can then use the web to put in their credit card.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So we don't have to pay 30%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We have a direct billing relationship and such that they can take that subscription to Android, to PCs, whatever, without any hassle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we have Tim and Mark to thank for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They just make systems that create, read, update or delete rows in a database.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's the exact language basically I used in our original campaign.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I will burn this business down before I hand over 30% of it to Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that sort of indignation, that actual rage is something I try to be a little careful about tapping into because it is a little bit of a volatile compound.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because, I mean, I have a bunch of employees.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And they have to compensate for that existential dread by overcomplicating things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We have a bunch of customers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It would be pretty sad if the journey of 37 signals after 25 years would come to an end because Apple would burn us down or I would burn the business down over this fight with Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I think you also need that level of conviction to be able to even drive day-to-day decisions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
One of the other Apple examples, I know I'm racking on Apple a little bit here, and I don't actually hate them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I really don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I am tremendously disappointed at the squandered relationship that did not need to be sold away for so little.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, I understand that the App Store toll booth is actually pretty big business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's multiple billions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
but Apple is a trillion dollar company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think in the lens of history, this is gonna come off as a tremendous mistake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think it's already coming off as a tremendous mistake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The flop that was the Vision Pro was partly because Apple had pissed off every other developer
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No one was eager to come build the kind of experiences for their new hardware that would perhaps have made it a success.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So when you're on top and you have all the cards, you can delude yourself into thinking that you can dictate all terms at all times and there are no long-term consequences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, that's a bit of a character.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Apple is learning finally the fact that there are long-term consequences and that developers actually are important to Apple's business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's more to it and there's things you can learn for more sophisticated ways of thinking about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the relationship is not entirely one-sided.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We don't owe our existence to Apple and Apple alone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We've built our own customer bases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Apple has been beneficial to the industry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm glad the iPhone exists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not that it doesn't go both ways, but Apple wants it only one way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That is a mistake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's a mistake that was avoidable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And A, that's disappointing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Certainly disappointing for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've literally spent 20 years evangelizing this shit, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've spent so much money buying Apple hardware, excusing a bunch of things they've done over the years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But there's still an ideal here, which is why I was so happy you had Petal Levels on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then for what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
For the fact that you wanted 30% of something that I created in the most unreasonable way possible, couldn't we have found a better way to do this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think they're going to get forced to do a better way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But did you also have to go through the indignity of having a criminal contempt?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
charge against you getting referred to prosecution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It just seems so beneath Apple, but it also seems so in line with what happens to huge companies who are run by, quote unquote, professional managers rather than founders and unreasonable people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He still basically works like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I look at that and go like, man, that's amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is why the disappointment is all greater because we had such high aspirations and expectations to Apple that they were the shining, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
city on the hill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And they were guiding the industry in a million positive ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think, as we talked about earlier, hardware is exciting again, in large part because Apple bought PA Semi and pursued a against all odds mission to get ARM up to the level it is today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we have these incredible M chips now because of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The design sensibilities that Apple bring to the table are unparalleled.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No one has taste, certainly at the hardware level, like Apple does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Even at the software level, I'd say there's a lot of taste left in Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But there's also some real sour taste now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So they have to wash that off first, I think, before they find their way back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But Apple's been in a mirage before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, Wozniak and Steve Jobs started this thing in the garage, has great success with the Apple II.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He hands the company over to a sugar drink salesman who tanks the company into the 90s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He doesn't learn the lesson, spends the next 20 years building up this amazing company, then hands the company over again to a logistics person who presumably had more redeeming qualities than the first guy who put in charge, but still ends up leading the company astray.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think it's amazing because he's proving that this isn't just a nostalgic dream.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is the norm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The norm is the great companies don't last forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In the long arc of history, almost no company lasts forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There are very few companies around that was here 100 years ago, even fewer 200 years ago, and virtually nothing that are 1,000 years old outside of a handful of Japanese sorts makers or something like that, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can get deluded into thinking that something is forever when you're in the moment and they seem so large.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Apple could absolutely stumble.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think they have more reason to stumble now than ever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're behind on AI, terribly behind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Their software quality is faltering in a bunch of ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The competition is catching up on the hardware game, in part because TSMC is not an Apple subsidiary, but a foundry that services AMD and NVIDIA and others who are now able to use the same kind of advanced processes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is something I learned after not looking at PC hardware for the longest time that, holy smokes,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He's actually doing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
AMD actually makes CPUs that are just as fast, if not faster than Apple's.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're not quite as efficient yet because ARM has some fundamental efficiencies over x86, but they're still pretty good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He's running all these businesses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So Apple should have reason to worry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Apple shareholders should have reason to be concerned.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, some of that is, as he would admit himself,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
not just about all these stumbles, but also by the fact that Apple is run by old people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Apple's board has an average age of, I think, 75.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Their entire executive team is above 60.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That sounds horribly ageist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And in some ways, it a little bit is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In the same way I'm ageist against myself, like I'm 45 now, and I sort of kind of have to force myself to really get into AI because it is such a paradigm shift.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And a lot of people, when they reach a certain age, are just happy to stay with what they know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They don't want to go back to being a beginner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They don't want to go back to having to relearn everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Up first, up front, is that he's just one guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think like, this is a little hard for me at 45.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How the hell do you do that at 75?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think what's funny about fatherhood is that for me, I wasn't even sure it's something I wanted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It took meeting the right woman and letting her
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
convinced me that this was the right idea before we even got started.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you can do different things when you're just one guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I didn't have starting my own family on the list of priorities in my late 20s or even early 30s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was really the impetus of meeting my wife, Jamie, and her telling me, this is what I want.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When you're working in a team, when I started working on the team, when I started working with Jason Freed on Basecamp, we at first didn't use version control together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I want to have a family.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I want to get married.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I want to have kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I want to have three.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And me going for a second, like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then, all right, let's do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think that's the kind of happy accident where some parts of my life have been very driven, where I knew exactly what I wanted and how to push forward to it and what the payoff was going to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But when it comes to having a family, that always felt like a very fuzzy, abstract idea that, sure, someday, maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then it became very concrete because I met a woman who knew what she wanted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And looking back on it now, it almost seems...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's this fork in the road of reality where if that hadn't happened and I had been sitting here now, not being a father, not having a family, the level of regret, knowing what I know now about the joys of having that family would have been existential, would have been
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't know if they would have been devastating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think men have a little bit of a longer window to pursue these things than women do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There are just certain biological facts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But ending up with the family I have now, ending up with my three boys, have been just a transformative experience in the sense that here's something that turned out to be the most important thing
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it was an open secret.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I used version control for myself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not even an open secret.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was an open truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Through all of history, you listen to anyone who's ever had children, they will all say, my children are the most important to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yet somehow that wisdom couldn't sink in until you were in the situation yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I find those truths fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
you can't actually relay them with words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then I thought, you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can tell you, hey, Lex, what are you doing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Get a wife, make some kids, get a move on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And these are just words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're not communicating the gravity of what it actually feels to go through the experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you can't really learn it without going through it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, of course, you can be influenced and whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Designers, they're probably not smart enough to figure out CVS.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We can all help contribute and little sparks and little seeds can grow in your mind about it, but it still has to happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And now that I am in this situation and just the sheer joy on a daily basis where you think your level of life satisfaction is on a scale of one to 10.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then the satisfaction of seeing your children understand something, accomplish something, learn something, do something, just be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
just goes like, oh my God, the scale doesn't go from 1 to 10, it goes from 1 to 100.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I've been playing down here in the 1 to 10 range all this time and there's a 1 to 100?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That has been humbling in a way that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And therefore I just like, no, no, no, you just FTP it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
is impactful in and of itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This whole idea that I thought I had a fair understanding of the boundaries of life in my early 30s, like, what is this about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, I've been on this earth long enough now here to know something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And he goes, I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I did not know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I did not know that the scale was much broader.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I've often talked about the joys of having kids and just seeing your own DNA, which...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You just FTP it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's remarkable to me because literally that's been the pursuit of humans since the dawn of time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I am here today because, whatever, 30,000 years ago, some Neanderthal had the same realization that I should procreate and I should continue my bloodline.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I knew they knew how to do FTP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that all amounts to me sitting here now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
it didn't become a practical reality to me before meeting the right woman.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think that that's sometimes not part of the conversation enough, that there's something broken at the moment about how
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then after the third time I had overridden their changes, I was like, God damn it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
people pair up in the Western world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's at the source of why we're not having enough children, because there's not enough couples.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's not enough marriage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's not a lot of these.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's not enough of all these traditional values that even 50, 60, 70 years ago was just taken for granted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're in this grand experiment of what happens if we just remove a bunch of institutions?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What happens if we no longer value marriage as a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
something to aspire to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What happened if parenthood is now seen in some camps as almost something like weird or against your own self-expression?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I guess I got to teach Jason CBS to not do that again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a grand experiment that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm kind of curious how it turns out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'd prefer to watch it as a movie, like the children of men of like, that was a good show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I kind of wish that was reality, but we're seeing that reality play out while I'm sitting here in a very traditional two parent loving household with three children and going, this is now at the top.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've done a lot of things in my life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've built software, I've built companies, I've raced cars, I've done all sorts of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I would trade all of it in a heartbeat for my kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's just a really fascinating human experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That the depth of that bond is something you can't appreciate before you have it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think there's still way more truth to the fact that we can work the way we did in the 90s, work the way Peter works today, even in the team context.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I also think there is a role to play to talk it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because we're being bombarded constantly with reasons why not to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, it's too expensive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Well, you could get divorced and then you might lose half.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's all these voices constantly articulating the case against marriage, the case against having children.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That those of us who've chosen to do the traditional thing
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
to get married and to have children, have an obligation to kind of talk it up a little bit, which would have seen ridiculous again 50 years ago that you'd have to talk up something so fundamental as that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I have become kind of obligated in that sense to do just that, to talk it up, to say, do you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can look at everything that I've done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And if you like some of those parts, realize that to me in this situation,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The kids, the family, the wife is more important than all of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it sounds like a cliche because you've heard it a thousand times before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And by becoming a cliche, maybe you start believing it's not true, that it's just something people say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
but it is reality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I know almost no parents that I have personal relationships with that don't consider their children to be the most important thing in their life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that we've been far too willing to hand over far too much of our developer ergonomics to the merchants of complexity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
One of the reasons I think it's also difficult is, I mean, I like kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not that I actively dislike them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But when I was around other people's kids, I didn't have a emotional reaction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Some women have, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They see a baby and they go, oh, I never had any emotion of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, I could appreciate, I'm glad for you that you have children.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It did not provoke anything in me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The emotions that are provoked in me when I look at my own children, just
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This doesn't exist in the same universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you don't have something, you don't have a complete parallel, or at least a lot of men, or at least me, I didn't have sort of a framework to put it into.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What would it be like to have my own child?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then you experience it, it's like the... And it happens so quickly too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is what I found fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It happens before that little human is even able to return any words to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That the love you develop to an infant...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It happens quite quickly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not necessarily immediately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Different people have different experiences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it took me a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But then once it hit, it just hit like the kick of a horse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I love that it's also just such a universal experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That you can be the most successful person in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can be the poorest person in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can be somewhere in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we share this experience that being a parent for most of them turns out to be the most important thing in their life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You should listen to The School of Life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He has this great bit on YouTube.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You'll marry the wrong person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you accept upfront that you will marry the wrong person, that every potential person you can marry is going to be the wrong person in some dimension.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're going to annoy you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're going to be...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
not what you hoped in certain dimensions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The romantic ideal that everything is just perfect all the time is not very conducive to the reality of hitching up and making babies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because I think as you just accounted, even when it turns to shit, I find that most of the people I personally know where things have fallen apart and have turned to shit are
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Never in a million years would they go like, I regret it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I would rather my children did not exist because a relationship turned sour.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, I think you should try very hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think this is also one of those things where we didn't fully understand those fences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And when we pulled them up and celebrated how easy it is to get divorced, for example, that that wasn't going to have some negative consequences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not saying you shouldn't have divorces.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not saying return to marriage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Times past, I am saying, though, that civilization over thousands of years developed certain technologies for ensuring the continuation of its own institutions and its own life that perhaps we didn't fully appreciate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, again...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is something Jordan Peterson and others are far more articulate to speak about and that I've learned a lot to just analyze my own situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why is it that this incredible burden it is to be responsible for someone else's life that you brought into this world is also the most rewarding part of existence?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's just curious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Before I heard Peterson articulate the value of taking on the greatest burden you know how to carry, I always thought about burdens as negative things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it should be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why would I want the burden of a child?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I might screw it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I might be a bad parent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They might have bad outcomes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
All this stuff, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why should it be harder than that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
All the reasons why you shouldn't and so few voices articulating why you should.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Our computers today are almost infinitely faster than what they were in the 90s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's breaking down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a great example, again, of how all the greatest intentions still led us straight to hell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I really enjoyed Louise Perry's analysis of the sexual revolution not being an unqualified good, which was something I hadn't thought about at all before she articulated it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That, of course, women should be able to have freedom and self-determination and abortions and all of these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So shouldn't we be able to work in even easier ways?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Louise Perry is not arguing against that either, of course, but there are second order effects that we don't appreciate at the time and we may not have ready-made solutions for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's just interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You make life better in a million different ways and somehow we end up more miserable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why is it that humans find meaning in hardship?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think some of that is that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a difficult question to answer through science.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And again, Peterson articulates well this idea that you have to find some of it through art, some of it through authors, some of it through different... I was just about to say modes of knowing before I stop myself because that sounds like woo bullshit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We should be looking back on the 90s and go like, oh, that was way too complicated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But there are different ways to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
acquire those deep lessons that sort of a paper is not going to tell you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now we have more sophisticated technology that's way faster and it allows us to work in these easier to use ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we've had a bunch of bad replacements, especially over the last few decades where,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Religion is one of those things I've struggled with a lot because I'm not religious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
but I sort of wish I was, I can now fully appreciate the enormous value having an operating system like that brings, not just at the individual level, but rather at a societal level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's not clear at all what the answer is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think we've tried a lot of dead ends when it came to replacements, and people have been filling that void in a million different ways that seem worse than all the religions, despite their faults,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
in a myriad of ways, have been able to deliver.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's the institutions where we don't fully understand the rules and why they're there and what's going to happen if we remove them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Some of them, seems obvious to me, are just bullshit of the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But that's not true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, you should need, whatever, shellfish because in that region of the world, there was something, something, something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Okay, fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But there's a bunch of other things that are pivotal to keeping society functioning for the long term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we don't fully understand which is which.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What's the bullshit and what's the load bearing pillars of society?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But now you can see the line I draw in my work with Ruby on Rails, and especially with Rails 8.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think it's one of the reasons why ambitious people are often afraid of having children because they think I have so much more to do and I barely have enough time now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How would I possibly be able to accomplish the things I want to accomplish if I add another human into the mix?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, A...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
we've always worked 40 hours a week, not 80 or 100 or 120.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think that's very beneficial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
B, kids don't exist in this vacuum of just them alone being entered into your life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Hopefully there's a partner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And in my life, I'm married to a wonderful woman who decided to stop working her corporate job when we got together and have been able to carry a huge part of that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No build to me is reaching back to that 90s feeling and going, now we can do some of those things without giving up on all the progress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I was just about to say burden.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think that's exactly how it often gets presented, especially from a feminist perspective, that caring for your own children is some sort of unpaid labor that has to be compensated for in some specific way beyond the compensation of what...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
bringing life into this world, raising wonderful humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's something screwy about that analysis that I actually think the modern trad movement is a reply against.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Whether they have all the answers, I'm certainly not sure of either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But there's something that's just not right in the analysis that children are a burden and that if
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
woman chooses to stay at home with the kids, that that's some sort of failure mode of feminist ambition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think that's actually a complete dead end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, depends on different people, different circumstances.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can just speak to my life being married to a wonderful woman who have decided to
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
be home with the kids, at least at their early age, and taking on a lot of those responsibilities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, it doesn't mean there isn't plenty of ways that I have to be part of that and have to chip in, but it's allowed me to continue to work the 40 hours a week that I've
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Always worked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it's made the 40 hours more strict.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I have a schedule where I wake up, whatever, 6.30, and we have to get out of the door a little before 8.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I usually have to play at least one or two rounds of Fortnite with my youngest, sometimes middle child.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because I do think you can get too nostalgic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Then take the kids to school, get in, start work at, I don't know, 8.39.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Then work until 5, 5.30, sometimes 6 o'clock.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But then it's dinner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I have to be there for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then I have to read to the kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And by the time that's done, I don't want to go back to work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I do think you can start just fantasizing that everything was better in the 90s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So my work time really is 9 to 5, 9 to 6, depending of whatever is going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Sometimes there's emergencies and you have to attend to them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it's made it more structured.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I found some...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I have some benefit in that and I find some productivity in that, that I can't goof around quite as much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That the day will end at around 536.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's just, if I didn't accomplish what I wanted to do today, if I get to that time, it's done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I have to try again tomorrow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Whereas before having a family and before having kids, I could just like not do it and just make it up in the evening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So in that way, it's made me more structured, but it hasn't really changed my volume of work all that much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I still work about the same amount of hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's, by the way, enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It wasn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is one of the key points we make in It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work, the latest book we wrote, is that there's enough time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
40 hours a week is actually a ton if you don't piss it away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, I was there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Most people do piss it away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They piss it away in meetings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They piss it away on just stuff that doesn't matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There was a lot of things that sucked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
even three hours, four hours of concentrated, uninterrupted time every day would move to goals they truly care about way down the field.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And if we can somehow find a way to combine
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It keeps you honest because...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The advantages and advances we've had over the past 20 years with that ease of developer ergonomics, we can win.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can squander one day, you can squander two days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But if I squander a whole week, I feel terrible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, that's just some drive I have in me where I feel content and full of meaning if I actually do stuff that matters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If I can look back upon the week and go like, that was a nice week.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Really, we moved forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Maybe we didn't get done, but we moved forward and everything got better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think kids really help just time box things in that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And a lot of people need that because I find just so much of the celebration of overwork to be so tiresome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, I work 60 hours or 80 hours, 100 hours a week.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And just like, first of all, no, you don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No, you don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like those 80 hours are full of all sorts of fluff that you label work, but that I would laugh at and that most people laugh at, that you would laugh at if you actually did the analysis of where is that time going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Most of the important stuff that have to be done is done in these uninterrupted chunks of two hours here or four hours there or five hours there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The hard part is making sure you get them in the whole piece.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So don't give me that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's time enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And also, what's so important that it ranks above continuing your lineage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No build is a rejection of the part of web development I've hated the most in the past 10, 15 years, which is the JavaScript scene.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think there's just some...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
ancient honor in the fact that, again, this DNA that's sitting on this chair traveled 30,000 years to get here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you're going to squander all that away just so you can send a few more emails?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I have a thousand hours logged in Fortnite since 19, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
all of it with my kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'd never be playing Fortnite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Well, I don't know if I never would be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I wouldn't be playing a thousand hours of Fortnite if it wasn't for my kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The enjoyment for me is to do something with them that I also happen to enjoy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I really love Fortnite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a phenomenal game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't have to force myself to play that with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I often ask like, hey, do you want to play Fortnite?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But still, it's an activity that I get to share with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a passion that I get to share with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've started doing go-karting with my oldest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've been driving race cars for a long time and now they're getting into go-karting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And just being at the go-kart track, seeing them going around, seeing them get faster, seeing them learn that skill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You just go look at like, what else would I be doing with my life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
My age, 45, I'm standing here truly enjoying life I brought into this world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What else is it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was so important at this stage that I would otherwise be spending my time on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I don't say that as someone who hates JavaScript.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What do you love about it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The funny thing about getting into racing is I did not get my driver's license until I was 25.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I grew up in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
where the tax on cars is basically over 200%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you pay for three cars and you get one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, I often joke that JavaScript is my second favorite programming language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I didn't even have the money for one car, let alone three.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I could not afford a car growing up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We did not have a car growing up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But Copenhagen is a nice city to be able to get around on a bike or with a bus or as I did for a long period of time on rollerblades.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When I was 25, I realized I wanted to spend more time in the U.S.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I wasn't sure yet that I was going to move there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That turned out later to be true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I knew that if I wanted to spend time in the U.S., I needed to have a driver's license.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I was not going to get around very well if I didn't know how to drive a car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I got a driver's license at 25, then ended up moving to the U.S.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
later that year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I'd always been into video games, racing video games.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
metropolitan street racer on the dreamcast was one of those games that really sucked me into it was the precursor to project got him which was the precursor to essentially force a horizon i think oh okay i think that's how the lineage goes just a great game i actually just fired it up on an emulator um a few weeks ago and it's
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a very distant second.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Ruby is by far and away number one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This sort of kind of holds up because it has enough real car dynamics that it smells a little bit like driving a real car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not just like an arcade racer like Sega Rally or something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I actually like JavaScript.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I'd always been into that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Then I got my driver's license at 25.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And moved to the U.S.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then two years later, a friend that I'd met in Chicago took me to the Chicago Autobahn Country Club, which is this great track about 45 minutes from Chicago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't think it's a bad language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I sat in a race car and I drove a race car for the first time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I had the same kind of pseudo-religious experience I did as when I started working on Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Where I did maybe 20 laps in this, basically a Mazda race car from, I think, like the 90s or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like a pretty cheap race car, but a real race car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It gets a lot of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Single-seater, manual gearbox, but exposed slick wheels, all the stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And after having had that experience...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Flack, people add a string of two plus a one and it gives something nonsense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
First of all, it was just the most amazing thing ever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like the physical sensation of driving a race car is really unique.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think if you're driving a car fast, you have maybe a 2% taste of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
the exposure to the elements that you get in a single seat race car, especially one like that, where your head is actually out in the elements, you can see the individual wheels and you sensation of speed is just so much higher is at a completely different level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not only can you see the bumps because you're literally looking straight at the wheels, you can feel all the bumps because you're running a slick tire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a really stiff setup.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's nothing like taking a fast street car out on a racetrack and try to driving a little bit around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I just go like, yeah, but why would you do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's a huge part of the satisfaction of driving a race car is driving it at the edge of adhesion, as we call it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
where the car is actually sliding a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
A couple of percent slip angle is the fastest way to drive a race car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Just don't do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You don't want to slide too much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That looks great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Lots of smoke, but it's not fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How you want to drive it is just at the limit of adhesion where you're rotating the car as much as your tires can manage and then slightly more than that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The language is actually quite lovely, especially the modern version.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
and playing at it, keeping it just at that level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because when you're at the level of, or at the limit of adhesion, you're essentially just a tiny movement away from spinning out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, it doesn't take much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Then the car starts rotating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Once it starts rotating, you lose grip and you're going for the wall.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That balance of danger and skill is what's so intoxicating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's so much better than racing video games too, because the criticality is taking up two notches.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I often think about people who really like gambling, where I think like, aren't you just playing poker?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
ES6 that really introduced a proper class syntax to it so I could work with JavaScript in many of the same ways that I love working with Ruby made things so much better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And no, the point is not poker.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Poker is maybe part of it, but the point is that I could lose my house, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like that's the addiction that some people get to gambling, that there's something real on the line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When you're in a race car, there's something very real on the line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you get it wrong, at the very least, you're going to spin out and probably hit a wall and it's going to be expensive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
At the very worst...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
you're not getting out alive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And even if modern race cars have gotten way safer than they used to be, there is that element of danger that's real, that there are people who still get seriously hurt or even killed in a race car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's mercifully rare compared to what it used to be when those maniacs in the 60s would do Formula One and whatever, 13% of the grid wouldn't make it to the end of the year because they'd just die in a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
fiery flaming fireball but there's still some of it there and I think that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
sense that there's something on the line really contributes to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it's something more than that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's just a physical sensation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's activation of all your forces.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's the flow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think that really cements like why I got addicted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because I always, I love that flow I got out of programming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But getting flow out of programming is a very inconsistent process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can't just sit down in front of a keyboard and go like, all right,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Let's get the flow going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It doesn't happen like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The problem has to be just right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It has to meet my skills in just the right moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a bit of a lottery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In a race car, it's not a lottery at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You sit down in that car, you turn the ignition, you go out on track, and I get flow virtually guaranteed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because you need, or I need, at least 100% of my brain processing power to be able to go at the speed I go without crashing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But in the early 2010s, until quite recently, all of that advancement happened in pre-processing, happened in built pipelines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's no time to think about dinner tonight or the meeting next week or product launch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's completely zen in actually the literal sense of the word.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think of someone who's really good at meditation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's probably kind of state they get into.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's just clear you're in the now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's nothing but you and the next corner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's a really addictive thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So after I've had that, I couldn't get enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I just, I kept going to the track every opportunity I got every single weekend for about four years, I would go to the track.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And by the end of that time, I'd finally worked up enough skill and enough success with the company that I could afford to go quote unquote real racing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I started doing that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I started driving these Porsches.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then as soon as I got into that, as soon as I got into quote unquote real competition, I was like, I wonder how far you can take this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it didn't take that long before I decided, you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can take this all the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
My great hero in racing is Tom Christensen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Fellow Dane, the Mr. Le Mans, as they call him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The greatest endurance race in the world, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, has been won more times than any other by Tom Christensen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He won the race nine times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So Tom...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
just really turned me on to Le Mans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'd been watching Le Mans since, I think, the 80s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I have my earliest memories of watching that on TV.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The race has been going since, I think, 20s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But in the 80s, I got kind of into it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then in the late 90s, early 2000s, when Tom started winning, I, like pretty much every other Dane, started watching the race almost religiously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I thought, you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I want to get to Le Mans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is the magic thing about racing, that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If I get into basketball, I can't set a realistic expectation that I'm going to play in the NBA, that I'm going to go to the finals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The browsers couldn't speak a dialect of JavaScript that was pleasant to work with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Or I get into tennis and I'm going to play at Wimbledon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That just doesn't happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But racing is special in this way because it requires a fair amount of money to keep these cars running.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's really expensive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's like having a small startup.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You need to fly a bunch of people around the world and buy expensive equipment and so forth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you need a bunch of capital.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I had some through the success of the company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I could do it, which meant that I could get to Le Mans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I set that as my goal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I want to get to Le Mans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I started racing in real competition 2009.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And three years later in 2012, I was at the grid of Le Mans for the first time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There are three drivers, mind you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So it's not like one guy just driving for 20 hours, 24 hours straight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So everyone started to pre-compiling their JavaScript to be able to use more modern ways of programming with a browser that was seen as stuck with an ancient version of JavaScript that no one actually wanted to work with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But still, it's a pretty tough race, both physically and mentally, especially mentally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When you've been up for 24 plus hours, you're not quite as sharp...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's when you first wake up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And this is funny about Le Mans, too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It starts at around four o'clock in the afternoon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you've already been up for half a day by the time the race starts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then there's 24 hours to go before you're done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you'll be in the car for anywhere from usually an hour and a half to a maximum of four hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The regulations say four out of six is the max you can do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've spent perhaps two and a half hours in a single stint at Le Mans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's pretty taxing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're going 200 miles an hour.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Into some of these turns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And there's another 60 cars on track.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Whenever I'm in my normal category, which is the LMP2 category, I have GT cars, which are more like a Ferrari and a Porsche that I have to overtake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then I have these hyper cars, which is the top class that are overtaking me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you've got a lot going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you got to stay sharp for two and a half hours straight to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That is just a guaranteed way to get incredible flow for long, long stretches of time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's why you get addicted to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's why I got addicted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This was probably my favorite battle of my career.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yeah, so this is me driving against Nico Muller at the Shanghai International Circuit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm on the outside in the blue and white.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How cool is this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we go a whole track around with basically a piece of paper between a seat down, this back straight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I get so close to him because I want to force him over on the other side of the track such that he can't just box me in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we've been fighting already at this point for basically 40 minutes straight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've been managing to keep this professional driver behind me for 40 minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And he finally passes me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But we just keep the battle on for the whole time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it really just shows both these kinds of cars, the Le Mans prototypes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We don't actually ever touch cars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We get within about an inch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And keep going around the Shanghai circuit too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that made sense to me, but it was also deeply unpleasant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That you are able to get so good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm pretty good for the kind of driver I am, which is called the gentleman driver, which means I'm not a professional driver.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And like many good gentleman drivers, when we're at our really best, we can be quite competitive with even professional drivers who've been doing this their whole life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The difference between us and the professionals is the professionals could do it every time or more or less every time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I can't be this good all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When everything is just right, I can be competitive with everyone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
professional drivers but that's not how you win championships that's not how you get paid by factories to drive you got to be good every time you go out so that's a huge difference but some of it was also just i really put my mind to it by the time i realized race cars is what i want to do as my serious hobby i put in thousands of hours have you crashed what's the worst crash
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I remember thinking during that time, the dark ages, as I refer to them with JavaScript, that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've had a lot of crashes, but thankfully, nug on wood, I haven't had any crashes where I've gotten really seriously hurt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've wrecked many a car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Just you wreck a car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like, how do you get... It feels like total shit if you're in a real race and other people depend on you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not even so much the car, although it's also sometimes that these cars are expensive to repair and that sucks and it feels...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So wasteful in a way when you crash some of these cars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But the sense that you're letting a team down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Endurance racing is a team sport.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not only do you have your mechanics, you usually have co-drivers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So when I crash, I just feel like, damn it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I could have avoided this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
this cannot be the final destination.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Do you know what's funny?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I never think about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't think you can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because I think the moment you start thinking about being able to die, you can't do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can't go fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It is in the sense that it's part of the appeal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's no way that we have managed to turn the internet into such an unpleasant place to work, where I would start working on a project in JavaScript using Webpack and all of these dependencies, and I would put it down for literally five minutes and the thing wouldn't compile anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's part of the sense that there's something on the line, that this isn't just virtual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can't just hit reset, restart, reboot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If I crash this car...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're going to be out or we're going to be disadvantaged or it's going to get destroyed or I might get hurt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've gotten lightly hurt a few times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I actually had the year we won 24 Hours of Le Mans in our class, I'd been training in this Formula 3.5 car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a really fast car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a really nice exercise to do, but it's also, it doesn't have power steering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So some of these race cars, especially the open seaters, they don't have power steering, which means that the steering wheel is basically directly connected to the front wheels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So if you crash one of those cars and the front wheels suddenly turn, you're really going to hurt your hands if you don't get your hands off the wheel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I hadn't raced enough of those cars to know that I had to get, or to have the instinct, to have developed the instinct that I had to get my hands off the wheel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I didn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I really hurt my hand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And this was just, I think, a month before the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I thought, oh man, I'm going to have to miss it this year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I had like a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not a cast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was just seriously sprained.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then somehow, miraculously, like a week before the event, I was like, oh, yeah, actually, it's okay now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So got to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that would have been grave regret if I would have seen my team go on to win the race and I would have to sit on the sidelines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I really have been quite fortunate in the sense that most of my crashes have just been expensive or sporting inconvenient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They've never been...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Something where I got seriously hurt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I've seen plenty of people who have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In fact, my co-driver this year and for several years, Petro Fittipaldi, drove a race car at Spa.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Spa is one of the great race tracks of all time and has this iconic corner called Arouge, which is probably the most famous corner in all of motorsports.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It has a great compression before you...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Climb uphill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's an extremely fast, very difficult corner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And just as he does the compression, his car basically sets out and he loses his power steering and he drives straight into the wall and breaks both his legs and basically faced the prospect that maybe his career was over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've had other teammates and people I know have serious injuries that's really hurt them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And yet what's funny, as you say, you'd think that would sink in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Year before we won in 2014, that same car had a Danish driver in it at Le Mans at the race I was driving who died.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He lost control of the car when there was a bit of rain on the track.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the track was unfortunately designed in such a poor way that there was a very big tree right behind the railing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And he died.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
hit that tree at full speed, pulled 90 Gs and was dead on the spot, which was just such an extremely awful experience to go through.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I finished second that year, which should have been cause for a bunch of celebration, but it was just tainted by the fact that not only did a driver die, a fellow Dane died, a guy I knew died,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The amount of churn that the JavaScript community, especially with its frameworks and its tooling, went through in the decade from 2010 to 2020 was absurd.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was pretty tough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Even just last year at Le Mans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was raining and I was out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I hadn't made a serious mistake at the 24 Hours of Le Mans since I did the first race in 2012, where I put it in the sand trap with like four hours to go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we lost a couple of laps getting pulled out, but it didn't actually change anything for our result because that was just how the field was spread out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'd made minor mistakes over the years, but nothing that really set us out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And at the race last year,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
when it was raining.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I first clobbered a Ford Mustang when I made an overambitious pass on a damp part of the track and couldn't stop in time and then felt absolutely awful as I sat in the gravel pit for two laps and knew that our race was over, a race where we were highly competitive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're not blessed with a competitive car, a competitive team and competitive setup every year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I know how rare that is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So to know that we had had a chance that year and I sort of squandered it,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Felt really bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But that got compounded when I got back on track.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Barely made it another stint and then put it in the gravel trap again when it started raining on the entrance into Porsche.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So this is part of why racing is so addicting too, because the highs are very, very high.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you had to be trapped inside of that asylum to not realize what an utterly...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When you win a race like the 24 Hours of Le Mans, it feels just incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's so much emotion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But if you fuck it up, the lows are very, very low.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's really interesting about that specific battle where we're literally a few inches apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can't fully explain it, but humans can develop an incredible sense of space where I can't see the edge of the back of my car, but I can know exactly where it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can have a mental model in my head that gives me the exact dimensions of this car so that I can run within a few inches of a competitor car or within a few inches of the wall and not hit either when things go well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The car is about two meters wide and it's quite long, five meters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you can't see everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The mirrors are actually kind of shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's no rear view mirror in these cars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can't see out the back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can only see through your two side mirrors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But you form this intuitive mental model when you get good enough at this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
perverse situation we had landed ourselves in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But what I actually pay attention to most is I run a program.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What I try to do when I go to a racetrack is I try to load up the best program I know how for every single corner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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What's my break point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What's my acceleration point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What's my brake trailing curve?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I try to pick up that program in part just by finding it myself and how fast I can go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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But even more so than that, by copying my professional competitors or not competitors, co-drivers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why does everything break all the time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I usually always race with a pro and modern race cars produce an absolute enormous amount of data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you can analyze all that data after each outing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can see an exact trace of how much you push the brake pedal, how much you did in terms of steering inputs, when you got on the gas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can see every millisecond you're losing is evident in those charts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So what I try to do is I try to look at the chart and then I try to load that in
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And like, that's what I got to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, the joke wouldn't be just that the software would break.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, in this corner 17, I actually, I have to be 10 bar lighter on the brake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I try to load that program in and then I try to repeat it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, then there are all the things that changes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Your tires change quite a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
These tires are made to only last 40 minutes in many cases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Sometimes at Le Mans, we can go longer, but at some racetracks, they last as little as 40 minutes before they really fall off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That would annoy me personally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you got to manage that, that the grip is constantly changing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So your program have to suddenly fit those changing circumstances.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then in endurance racing, you're constantly interacting with other cars because you're passing slower classes or you're getting passed by a faster class.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So that's part of the equation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But then I'd go on Hacker News and I'd see some thread on the latest JavaScript release of some framework.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then you're trying to dance the car around the limit of adhesion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you got all those factors playing at the same time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But above all else for me is to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Try to become a robot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like, how can I repeat this set of steps exactly as I'm supposed to for two and a half hours straight without making 100 milliseconds worth of mistakes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's really a huge part of it, actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Your latency...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
is enormously important in terms of being able to catch when the car starts slipping.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You get this sensation in your body that the G-forces are a little off, the slip angle is a little off, and then you have to countersteer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And obviously the best race car drivers just feel like an intuition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I have some intuition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't have all of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I do occasionally spin my car, but that's the challenge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the thread would be like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Obsession is part of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When I read and hear about Senna and the other greats, they were just singularly focused.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Max Verstappen is the current champion of the world, and he is the same kind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Max has been fascinating to watch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Someone would ask, well, aren't we using the thing we just used three months ago?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, he's a phenomenal race car driver, but he also...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Literally does nothing else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When he's not at the racetrack, he's driving sim racing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like he's literally in video games doing more racing when he's not doing all the racing he's already doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're able to develop very fine-tuned sensibilities for when the car is sliding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They can feel just these tiny moments or movements in the chassis that transports up usually through their ass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And people would be like, that thing is so outdated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's why you call it like a butt meter that goes up and you feel like the car is loose or you feel like you're just about to lock up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
you can really hone that tuning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Then the other thing is you have to have really good reaction time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And when you look at great Formula One drivers, they can generally have a reaction time of just under 200 milliseconds, which is awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And even 10 milliseconds difference makes a huge difference.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's so three months ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You'll see it when the Formula One grid, for example, they do a standing start and you see the five red lights come on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And when the last light goes out, they're supposed to release the clutch and get going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You got to get with the new program.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And they can time this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you can see exactly who has the reaction time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And even being off by 20 milliseconds can make the difference of whether you're in front or behind at the first corner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's some of that, and some of it is also just nerve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Who wants it more?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's exactly when that sense of danger comes in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's a great quote from Fernando Alonso when he was driving at Suzuka against Schumacher, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're completely rewriting everything for the oomph team time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're coming up to this incredibly fast corner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's very dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And Alonzo basically accounts, I was going to make the pass because I knew he had a wife and kids at home.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Just absolutely, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I knew he valued life more than I did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So there's a bit of poker sometimes in that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Who's going to yield?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's a bit of chicken race in that regard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And anything you've learned in the framework you've been spending the last amount of time on, it's all useless.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And sometimes it doesn't work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No one yields and you both crash.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But very often one person will blink first.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can pass wherever you want as long as you have just a slight part of the car on the racetrack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And even before him, by the time, I mean, he died in the 90s, but by the time we got to the 90s, racing was already a lot safer than it was when Niki Lauda raced in the 60s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That level of danger is no longer there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's still just a remnant of it, and it is still dangerous, but nothing like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's a little hard to compare through the ages, like who's the greatest driver of all time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think there's a fair argument that Senna is, but we don't have the data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We don't know who he was up against.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How would he fare if we pitted him against Max Verstappen today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I do think sometimes that you can have a bit of a nostalgia for the all-time greats, but
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The world moves forward and new records are being set all the time and the professionalism keeps improving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You got to throw everything out and you got to start over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Sometimes to the detriment of the sport, I think there's a lot of professional drivers who are not only just very good at driving, but are very good at being corporate spokespeople.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it used to be quite different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There used to be more characters in racing that had a bit more personality that they were allowed to shine because there weren't a billion sponsorships on the line that they were afraid to lose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why aren't you doing it, stupid idiot?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
ridiculous question what's the greatest car ever made or maybe uh what's the funnest one to drive the greatest car for me of all time is the pagani sonda okay i'm looking this up so the pagani sonda was made by this wonderful argentinian called horacio pagani my god that's a beautiful car well it's a gorgeous car you can look up mine it's the pagani sonda hh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So that's a car I had made in 2010 after we visited the factory in Modena and by sheer accident ended up with this car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it became my favorite car in the world, basically, when I watched an episode of Top Gear, I think in 2005 or
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
where one of the presenters was driving the Pagani Sonda F around, and I just thought, that's the most beautiful car in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It is the most incredibly sounding car in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If I one day have the option, this is what I want.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then I had the option in 2010.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've had the car ever since.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm never, ever going to sell it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's truly a masterpiece that stood the test of time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's some great cars from history that are recognized as being great in their time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This car is still great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Have you taken it on the racetrack?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's terrible at that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I don't want to say it's terrible at that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not what it's designed for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's designed for the road.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's why it's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There are a lot of fast cars that are straddling their race car for the road.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You don't actually want a race car for the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
A race car for the world is a pain in the ass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's way too stiff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's way too loud.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's way too uncomfortable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can't actually take it on a road trip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Always.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is why I love having this car in Spain, because they're a little more relaxed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not entirely relaxed, but more relaxed than they are in a lot of places.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In Denmark, I kid you not, if you are on the highway and you go more than twice the speed limit, they confiscate your car and keep it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think we're getting out of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're not getting it back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They don't even care if it's your car or not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you were boring my car and you went twice the speed limit, it's gone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So they don't do that in Spain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, in most places, except for the German Autobahn, they get pissy if you go twice the speed limit for all sorts of fair reasons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we're getting out of it because browsers have gotten so much better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not advocating that you should be going much more than that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But there are certain special roads where you can open things up and no one's in harm's way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's an incredible sensation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I do think that some of those speed limits actually are kind of silly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I'm not just saying that in a vacuum.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In Germany, they have the glorious Autobahn.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And on the Autobahn, there is no speed limit in a bunch of segments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And they're so committed to their speed limitless Autobahn, which is, by the way, very weird of Germans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They usually love rules.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They usually are very precise about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then they have this glorious thing called the Autobahn.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There was a great case a couple of years ago where a guy took out a Bugatti Chiron, went 400 kilometers an hour on the Autobahn, and he filmed it and put it on YouTube and posted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There was a stagnation in browser technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
A case was brought against him because even though they don't have a speed limit, they do have rules that you can't drive recklessly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And he won the case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He wasn't driving recklessly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He was just going very, very fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've done the Autobahn a couple of times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
My wife and I went on a road trip in Europe in 2009.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I got the Lamborghini Giada we were driving up to 200 miles an hour.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I'd driven 200 miles an hour or close to it on a racetrack before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Some of it was an overhang all the way back from IE5.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That feels like one thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Driving on a public road 200 miles an hour feels really, really fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Scary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Actually, a little scary, yes, because you constantly think, like, on a racetrack, you know the road, you know the surface, you can walk the track most of the time, you can know if there's a dip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
On a public road, you can't know if there's suddenly a pothole.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Presumably, there's not going to be a pothole on the German Autobahn, but it does feel a little scary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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but also exhilarating.
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Speed is just intrinsically really fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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I don't know anyone I've taken out in a fast car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Well, actually, I do know a few people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Most people I take out in a fast car, they grin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So IE5 essentially put the whole internet development experience into a deep freeze because Microsoft won the browser wars in the mid-2000s.
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It's a human reaction to grin when you go really fast.
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I was probably at Le Mans.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think when the LMP2s were at their maximum power and had 600 horsepower and really sticky tires, we were going 340 kilometers an hour, which is just over...
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200 miles an hour, a bit over 200 miles an hour.
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That does feel fast.
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And it's really interesting with speed is that the difference between going, let's say, 150 and 160 doesn't feel that much, actually, those 10 miles an hour.
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But the difference between going 190 and 200 feels crazy faster.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Okay.
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which as a percentage change is actually less than going from 150 to 160.
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But there's some sense of exponentiality once you get up to those limits, where it's just on a complete different level.
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It really is crazy.
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It's funny because if you'd asked me, let's see, a year and a half ago, I would have given you the same answer as I would have given anyone for basically 20 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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I want a Mac.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I like the Magic Keyboard.
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And then they basically disbanded their browser development team because they're like, all right, job done.
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I like the single monitor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Apple makes an awesome 6K 32-inch XDR screen that I still haven't found anyone who's beaten that I still use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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Even though I switched away from Apple computers, I still use their monitor because it's just fantastic.
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But I've always been a single screen kind of guy.
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I do like a big screen, but I don't want multiple screens.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've never found that that really works with my...
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perception.
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I want to be able to just focus on a single thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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I don't want all of it all over the place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I've always used multiple virtual desktops and being able to switch back and forth between those things.
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But the setup I have today is Linux.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I switched to a little over a year ago after I finally got fed up with Apple enough that I couldn't do that anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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And
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then I use this low-profile mechanical keyboard called the Low Free Flow 84, which is just the most glorious-sounding keyboard I've ever heard.
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We don't need any more innovation on the internet.
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I know there are a lot of connoisseurs of mechanical keyboards that will probably contest me on this.
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This is too talky or too clicky or too clacky or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Can we just go back to writing Windows forms or something now that we control everything?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But for me, the Low Free Flow 84 is just...
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
at the light that I did not even know existed, which is so funny because, I mean, I've been programming for a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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Mechanical keyboards have been a thing for a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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And the keyboard, when you look at it like this, it just kind of, it looks plain.
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It doesn't look extravagant, but the tactile sensation you get out of pushing those keys, the talky sound that you hear when the keys hit the board, it's just sublime.
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And I'm kicking myself that I was in this Mac keyboard
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bubble for so long that I wasn't even in the market to find this.
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And it really wasn't until, obviously, Firefox kind of kindled a little bit of something.
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I knew mechanical keyboards existed, but to be blunt, I thought it was a bit of a nerd thing that only real nerds that were much more nerdy than me would ever care about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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And then I got out of the Apple bubble and suddenly I had to find everything again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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I had to find a new mouse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I had to find a new keyboard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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I had to find everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I thought like, all right, let me give mechanical keyboards a try.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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And I gave quite a few of them a try.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The Keychron is one of the big brands in that.
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I didn't like that at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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I tried a bunch of other keyboards.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then I finally found this keyboard and I just went like,
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angels of singing where have you been my whole life we spent as programmers so much of our time interacting with those keys it really kind of matters in a way i didn't fully appreciate i used to defend the apple magic keyboard like it's it's great it's actually a great keyboard and i think for what it is this ultra low profile ultra low travel it's actually a really nice keyboard but once you've tried a longer travel mechanical keyboard there's no going back
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It's worth investing in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's exactly right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I actually do regret that a little bit, especially with this damn keyboard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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Then Chrome got into the scene and Google got serious about moving the web forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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I could have been listening to these beautiful, talky keys for years and years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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But sometimes you have to get really pissed off before you open your eyes and see that something else exists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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I feel the same way about Linux.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I've been using Linux on the server since 2012.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
late 90s, probably, we ran servers on Linux back then.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I never seriously considered it as a desktop option.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I never ran Linux before directly myself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I always thought, do you know what?
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I just, I want to focus on programming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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I don't have time for all these configuration files and all this setup bullshit and whatnot.
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And Apple is close enough.
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It's built on Unix underpinnings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why do I need to bother with Linux?
Lex Fridman Podcast
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And again, it was one of those things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I needed to try new things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
and try something else to realize that there is other things other than Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And again, it's not because I hate Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think they still make good computers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think a lot of the software is still also pretty okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You had a kindling of maybe the browser could be better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I have come to realize that as a web developer, Linux is just better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Linux is just better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's closer to what I deploy on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The tooling is actually phenomenal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And if you spend a bit of time setting it up, you can record...
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a reproducible environment that I've now done with this Amacube concept or project that I've done, that I can set up a new Linux machine in less than 30 minutes and it's perfect.
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It's not pretty good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not like I still need to spend two hours on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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Maybe the browser wasn't frozen in time in 2005.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's perfect because you can encode all aspects of the development environment into this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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I didn't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I didn't even know, to be fair, that Linux could look as good as it can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you look at a stock Ubuntu or Fedora boot,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, not that it's ugly, but I'd pick the Mac in the day of the week.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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You look at Amacoop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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I mean, I'm biased here, of course, because I built it with my own sensibilities.
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But I look at that and go like, this is better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then you look at some of those true Linux rising setups where people go nuts with everything and you go...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Maybe the browser could actually evolve like the development platform that it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, yeah, I remember when computers used to be fun in this way, when there was this individuality and this setup and it wasn't just all bland, the sameness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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And I think that's the flip side sometimes of something like Apple, where they have really strong opinions and they have really good opinions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They have very good taste and it looks very nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it also looks totally the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And Linux has far more variety and far more texture and flavor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Sometimes also annoyances and bugs and whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I run Linux now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's Ubuntu based with the Amacube stuff on top, the low free keyboard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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I use a Logitech, what's it called?
Lex Fridman Podcast
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The MS3 mouse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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Which I love how it feels in my hand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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I don't love how it looks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I actually was a magic mouse stand for the longest time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I thought it was genius that Apple integrated the trackpad into a mouse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I used that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I always thought it was ridiculous that people would slag it just because you had to charge it by flipping it over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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But then what happened was you had a lot of smart people who poured in to the web because the web turned out to be the greatest application development platform of all time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because the battery would last for three months and then you'd charge it for half an hour.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I felt like that was a perfect...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
compatibility with my sensibilities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't mind giving up a little inconvenience if something is beautiful, and that Magic Mouse is beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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But it wasn't going to work on Linux, so I found something else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The MS3 is nice, but I sometimes do wish the Magic Mouse was pretty good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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If you're a developer, you should learn how to control your environment with the keyboard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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It's just, it's faster, it's more fluid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think one of those silly things I've come to truly appreciate about my Amakoop setup is that I can, in whatever time it takes to refresh the screen, probably five milliseconds, switch from one virtual desktop to another.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Even on Windows, can't get it that smooth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can get close, can't get it that smooth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
On macOS, for whatever reason, Apple insists on having this infuriating animation when you switch between virtual desktops, which makes it such that you don't want to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You don't want to run full-screen apps because it's too cumbersome to switch between the virtual desktops.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The kind of immediacy that you can get from...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
a wonderful Linux setup in that regard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's just next level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
it changes how you use the computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It really does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's funny, I actually had to watch, I think it was the Primogen on YouTube when he was showing off his setup, and I was seeing how quickly he was switching between those virtual desktops.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This was where all the money was being made.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'd always been using virtual desktops, but I didn't like switching too much because just of that latency and it's like, oh, you can do that on Linux?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, that's pretty cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I run that, and then my editor of choice now is NeoVim.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes, TextMate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was actually the main blocker of moving away from Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This was where all the billionaires were being minted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Everything else I thought, you know what, I can swing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But TextMate was and is a wonderful editor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
One, I helped birth Into This World.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The programmer, Alan Uggle, is a good friend of mine all the way back from the party days when we were lugging our computers around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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This was where the Facebooks and whatever of the world came to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And he was a big Mac guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And in 2005, he was writing this editor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I helped him with the project management of kind of keeping him on track, keeping him focused on getting something released because I really wanted it for myself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I thought this was the last editor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I thought I was never going to switch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Is this... It's quite featureful, but it's...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
A GUI-driven editor in some regards.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was really early on with ways of recording macros and having...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
sort of sophisticated syntax highlighting, and it did a bunch of firsts, and it was just a really pleasant editing experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you had all of this brainpower applied to the problem of how to work with the web.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think these days, a lot of people would just use VS Code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
VS Codes exist in the same universe as TextMate in some ways, and actually I think it's compatible with the original TextMate bundles, the original TextMate format.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So it really trailed a path there, but it also just didn't evolve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, a lot of people saw a huge problem with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They were like, oh, it needs to have more features.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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It needs to have all these things.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I was like, I'm happy with this text editor that hasn't changed at all, basically, when Alan stopped working on it for a decade or more.
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I don't need anything else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because as our original discussion went, I don't want an IDE.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't want the editor to write code for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I want a text editor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I want to interact with characters directly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And NeoVim...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
allows me to do that in some ways that are even better than TextMate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I love TextMate, but VI, as you know, once you learn the commands and it sounds, I sometimes feel like VI fans overplay how difficult it is to learn because it makes them perhaps seem kind of more awesome that they were able to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And there were some very smart people
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not that difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it doesn't take that long, in my opinion, to learn just enough combo moves to,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
to get that high of, holy shit, I could not do this in any other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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with some, I'm sure, very good ideas, who did not have programmer happiness as their motivation number one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You have a, you have a treat in mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Well, I switched in about,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I had three days when I switched here about a year ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I had three days of cursing where I thought it was absolutely terrible and it was never going to happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I had three days of annoyance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And already the next week I was like, this is sweet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not going anywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I also had a bit of a head start about 20 years ago in the early 2000s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I tried Vim for like a summer and it didn't stick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I didn't, for whatever reason, love it at the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But NeoVim is really good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The key to NeoVim is to realize that you don't have to build the whole damn editor yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So a lot of NeoVim stands are like, here's how to write the config from scratch over 17 episodes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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It's going to take you three weeks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't care that much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I love a great editor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I love to tailor it a little bit, but not that much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you have to pair NeoVim with this thing called LazyVim.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
LazyVim.org is a distribution for NeoVim that takes all the drudgery out of getting an amazing editor experience right out of the box.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
TypeScript wouldn't even be in this universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I hate TypeScript as much as I like JavaScript.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They had other priorities, and those priorities allowed them to discount and even rationalize the complexity they were injecting everywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The JavaScript smells a lot like Ruby when it comes to some aspects of its metaprogramming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And TypeScript just complicates that to an infuriating degree when you're trying to write that kind of code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And even when you're trying to write the normal kind of code, none of the benefits that accrue to people who like it, like autocompletion, is something I care about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't care about autocompletion because I'm not using an IDE.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I understand that that is part of what separates it and why...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't see the benefits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I only see the costs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I see the extra typing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I see the type gymnastics that you sometimes have to do and where a bunch of people give up and just do any instead, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like that they don't actually use the type system because it's just too frustrating to use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I've ever only felt the frustration of TypeScript and the obfuscation of TypeScript in the code that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
gave me no payoff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Again, I understand that there is a payoff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't want the payoff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So for my situation, I'm not willing to make the trade and I'm not willing to take a language that underneath is as dynamic of a language as Ruby is and then turn it into this pretend statically typed language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I find that just intellectually insulting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't want to take something away from people who enjoy it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So if you like TypeScript, all the most part of you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you're using TypeScript because you think that's what a professional program is supposed to do, here's my permission.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You don't have to use TypeScript.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I would 100% start with Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It is magic for beginners in terms of just understanding the core concepts of conditionals and loops and whatever, because it makes it so easy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Even if you're just making a shell program that's outputting to the terminal,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Some of that complexity came from organizational structure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Getting hello world running in Ruby is basically puts, P-U-T-S, space, start quotes, hello world, end quotes, you're done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's no fluff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's nothing to wrap it into.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There are other languages that does that, especially in the Perl or Python would be
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
rather similar, but Go would not, Java would not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's a lot of other languages that have a lot more ceremony and boilerplate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Ruby has none of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So it's a wonderful starting language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When you have a company like Facebook, for example, that does depend on the web and want to push it forward, but have sliced the development role job into these tiny little niches.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's a book called Learn to Program by Pine that uses Ruby essentially to just teach basic programming principles that I've seen heavily recommended.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So that's a great language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How quickly would you go to Rails?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It depends on what you want to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you want to build web applications, go to Rails right away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Learn Ruby along with Rails because I think what really helps power through learning programming is to build programs that you want, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you're just learning it in the abstract, it's difficult to motivate yourself to actually do it well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Some people learn languages just for the fun of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Most people do not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Most people learn it because they have a mission.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They want to build a program.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They want to become a programmer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you got to use it for something real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I actually find that it's easier to learn programming that way too, because it drives your learning process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can't just learn the whole thing up front.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can't just sit down and read the language specification.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Then go like, Ooh, like Neo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now I know Kung Fu.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now I know Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It doesn't download that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You actually have to type it out in anger on a real program.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yeah, for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I would start there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But then number two, I probably would be JavaScript.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because JavaScript just is the language you need to know if you want to work with the web.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the web is the greatest application platform of all time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you're making business software, collaboration software, all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you're making video games, you should probably go off and learn C++ or C or something else like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But if you're in the realm of web applications, you got to learn JavaScript.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Regardless of what else you learn, you got to learn JavaScript.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't know if there's any concepts missing, but it doesn't have the speed or the low-level access of memory manipulation that you would need to build a 3D gaming engine, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm a front end glob pipeline configurator, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No one's going to build that in Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can build quite low-level stuff when it comes to web technologies in Ruby, but at some point you're going to hit the limit and you should use something else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not someone who prescribes just Ruby for everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Once you reach the level of abstraction that's involved with web applications, Ruby is superb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But if you're writing, for example, a HTTP proxy, Go is great for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We've written quite a few HTTP proxies lately at the company for various reasons, including our cloud exit and so forth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And Kevin, one of the programs I'm working with, he writes all of that in Go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Go just have the primitives and it has the pace and the speed to do that really well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I highly recommend it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you're writing an HTTP general proxy, do it in Go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Great language for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Don't write your business logic in Go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I know people do, but I don't see the point in that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
oh yeah, well, I'm a front end, whatever engineer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yeah, if you're interested in working with the web, I'd probably pick those three.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Go, Ruby, and JavaScript.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Functional languages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Someone's talking about OCaml?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I love that there are people who love functional languages to that degree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And suddenly the web developer was no longer one person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Those people are not me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't care at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I care about functional principles when they help me in these isolated cases where that's just better than everything else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But at heart, I'm an object-oriented guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's just how I think about programs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's how I like to think about programs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's how I carve up a big problem space into a domain language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Objects are my jam.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was 15 different roles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I really should pick up a language like that at some point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've been programming long enough that it's a little embarrassing that I haven't actually done anything real in anger in a fully functionally programmed language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That in itself injected a ton of complexity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I also want to give it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's my problem, too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I just, I don't care as much about these low-level problems in computer science.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I care about the high level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I care about writing software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I care about the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
the bold case here, which was that some of that complexity was necessary to get to where we are today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
abstraction layer that really floats well with web applications and business logic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I've come to accept that about myself, even though, as we talked about when I was a kid, I really wanted to become a games programmer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then I saw what it took to write a collision detection engine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I go like, yeah, that's not me at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm never going to be into vector matrix manipulation or any of that stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's way too much math.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I'm more of a writing person than I am of a math person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's actually exactly right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I did actually a keynote at RailsConf 10 years ago where I called myself a software writer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, I'm not the first person to say that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Software writer has been in the vernacular for a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But the modern...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
identity that most programmers adopt when they're trying to be serious is software engineer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That the complexity was a bridge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I reject that label.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not an engineer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Occasionally I dabble in some engineering, but the vast majority of the time I'm a software writer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I write software for human consumption and for my own delight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can get away with that because I'm working in a high-level language like Ruby, working on collaboration software and to-do lists and all the other stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Again, if I was trying to apply my talent to writing 3D game engines, no, that's not the right mindset.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It wasn't the destination, but we had to cross that bridge to get to where we are today, where browsers are frankly incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not the right identity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I find that the software engineering identity flattens things a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'd like to think that we have software writers and software mathematicians, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then those are actually richer ways of describing the abstraction level that you're working at than engineer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I actually wish that AI had a bit higher standards for writing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I find the fact that it accepts my slobby, incomplete sentences a little offensive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I wish there was like a strict mode for AI where it would snap my fingers if I was just feeding it keywords.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And like, speak proper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Do pronunciation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Do punctuation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because I love that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I love crafting words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The JavaScript you can write in a text file and then serve on a web server for a browser to ingest
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
a just right sentence that hasn't been boiled down that it has no meat on it, has no character in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's succinct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not overly flowery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's just right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That writing phase to me is just addictive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I find that when programming is the best, it's almost equivalent exactly to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You also have to solve a problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're not just communicating a solution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You have to actually figure out what are you trying to say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Even writing has that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Half the time when I start writing a blog post, I don't know exactly which arguments I'm going to use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They develop as part of the writing process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's how writing software happens too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You know roughly the kind of problem you're trying to solve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You don't know exactly how you're going to solve it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And as you start typing, the solution emerges.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
is amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's actually a really good experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's a big part of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Trying to give more people the permission to trust their own instincts and their own gut and realizing that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
developing that supercomputer in your stomach is actually the work of a career and that you should not discard those feelings in preference to over
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You don't need any pre-processing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You could just write text files, send them to a browser, and you have an incredible development.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
or not even complicated, to analytics, to intellectualism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Very often when we look at the big decisions we've had to make, they've come from the gut where you cannot fully articulate, like, why do I think this is the right thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Well, because I've been in this business for 20 years and I've seen a bunch of things and I've talked to a bunch of people and that is percolating into this being the right answer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
A lot of people are very skeptical about that in business or unable to trust it because it feels like they can't rationalize.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why are we doing something?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Well, because I feel like it, damn it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's a great privilege of being a bootstrapped independent founder who don't owe their business to someone else and doesn't have to produce a return.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
because I feel like a lot of the bullshit really creeps in when you're trying to rationalize to other people why you do the things you do and why you take the decisions that you do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you don't have anyone to answer to, you are free to follow your gut.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's a hell of enjoyable way to work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's also in very often the correct way to work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Your gut knows a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like you can't articulate it, but it's spot on more times than not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
My favorite essay in Rework is the last one, and it's entitled Inspiration is Perishable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think that captures a lot of it, that if you take the time to do a detailed plan, you may very well have lost the inspiration by the time you're done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you follow the inspiration in that moment and trust your gut, trust your own competence that you will figure it out,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
you're going to get so much more back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're going to go on the adventure you otherwise wouldn't have, whether that's just a business decision or a life decision.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You have to seize that inspiration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's a great set of children's books written by this Japanese author about...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
chasing an idea and trying to get ahold of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's beautifully illustrated as an idea, something that's floating around as something you have to catch and latch onto that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I really feel captures this notion that inspiration is perishable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It'll disappear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you just put it back on the shelf and say like, well, I got to be diligent about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I got to line up a plan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You may run out and then there's no, there's no steam to keep going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Which is going to be a bit of a biased piece of evidence here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You should definitely have dictators and they should control everything, especially when the dictator is me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, well, I think I learned very early on that a quick way to burn out in open source is to treat it as a business, as though your users are customers, as though they have claims of legitimacy on your time and your attention and your direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is one of the hardest problems in computing today is to parse the entire internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because I faced this almost immediately with Ruby on Rails.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
As soon as it was released, there were a million people who had all sorts of opinions about where I ought to take it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And not just opinions, but actually demands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Unless you implement an Oracle database adapter, this is always going to be a toy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was actually more or less that exact demand that prompted me to have a slide at one of the early Rails conferences that just said, fuck you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yeah, I saw that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not going to do what you tell me to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm here as a bringer of gift.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I am sharing...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
code that i wrote on my own time on my own volition and you don't have to say thank you i mean be nice if you did you can take the code and do whatever you want with it you can contribute back if you want but you can't tell me what to do or where to go or how to act
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because thankfully for us as web developers, but perhaps not so much for the browser developers, every webpage that has ever been created, minus the brief period with Flash, still runs today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not a vendor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is a fundamental misconception that users of open source occasionally step into because they're used to buying software from companies who really care about their business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I care about people using my software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think it's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But we don't have a transactional relationship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't get something back when you tell me what to do, except grief.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I don't want it, so you can keep it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So my open source philosophy from the start has been, I got to do this primarily for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I love when other people find use in my open source.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not my primary motivation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not primarily doing it for other people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm primarily doing it for me and my own objectives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
As Adam Smith said, it's not for the benevolence of the butcher that we expect our daily meat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's for his self-interest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I actually find that to be a beautiful thought, that our comments increase in value when we all pursue our self-interest, certainly in the realm of open source.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is also why I reject this notion that open source is in some sort of crisis, that there's a funding crisis, that we have to spend more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No, we don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Open source has never been doing better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Open source has never controlled more domains in software than it has right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There is no crisis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's a misconception from some people making open source and from a lot of people using open source that open source is primarily like commercial software, something you buy and something where you can then make demands as a customer and that the customer is always right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Customer is not always right, not even in business, but certainly not in open source.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In open source, the customer as it is, is a receiver of gifts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We are having a gift exchange.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I show up and give you my code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you like it, you can use it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And if you have some code that fits in with where I'm going with this, I would love to get those gifts back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we can keep trading like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The web page I did in ninth grade would render on a modern browser today, 30 years later.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I give you more gifts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You give me some of your gifts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Together, we pool all the gifts such that someone's showing up brand new.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Just get a mountain of gifts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is the magic thing of open source is it increases the total sum value of what's in the comments when we all pursue our own self-interest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I'm building things for Rails that I need.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You want me to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You do not want me to build things that I don't need on behalf of other people because I'll do a crap job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I build much better software when I can evaluate the quality of that software by my own use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I have to, I need this feature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm gonna build a good version of that feature and I'm gonna build just enough just for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I'm not gonna bloat it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not trying to attract a customer here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not trying to see some angle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm just building what I need.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And if you go into open source with that mentality that you're building for you and everything else is a bonus,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think you have all the ingredients to go the distance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think the people who burn out in open source is when they go in thinking, I'm making all these gifts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't really need them myself, but I'm like hoping someone else does and maybe they'll also give me some money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That is completely crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's a losing proposition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It never basically works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you want money for your software, you should just sell it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We have a perfectly fine model of commercial software that people can make that kind and then they can sell it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I find a lot of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
confusion, let's just call it that politely, in open source contributors who want to have their cake and eat it too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When you think about the amount of evolution we've had with the web, how much better we've made it, how many more standards browsers have adopted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They like the mode of working with open source.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They maybe even like the status that comes from open source, but they also would like to earn a living from making that open source.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And therefore, they occasionally end up with the kind of grievances that someone who feels underappreciated at work will develop when others aren't doing enough to recognize their great gifts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think that's actually also part of the beauty of open source.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You are not obligated to do this code forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're obligated to do this for as long as you want to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's basically your own obligation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's essentially an Apollo project today to create a new browser, which is why it doesn't happen very often, which is why even companies like Microsoft had to throw in the towel and say, we can't do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's some ways for some people that made it easier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
GitHub donations is one way of doing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I donate to a few people, even though I don't love the paradigm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I also accept that we can have multiple paradigms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I accept that I can do open source for one set of motivations, and other people can do...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
open source for other motivations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We don't all have to do it the same way, but I do want to counter the misconception that open source is somehow in a crisis unless we all start paying for open source.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That model already exists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's commercial software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It works very well, and plenty of great companies have been built off the back of it, and the expectations are very clear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I pay you this amount and I get this software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Open source, once you start mixing money into it, gets real muddy real fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And a lot of it is just from those misaligned expectations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That if you feel like you're starving artists as an open source developer and you are owed X amount of money because your software is popular,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
you're delusional and you need to knock that off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Just get back on track where you realize that you're putting gifts into the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And if you get something back in terms of monetary compensation, okay, that's a bonus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But if you need that money back in terms of monetary compensation, you should just charge for software or go work for a software company that will employ you to open source.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, I actually don't think that's
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's tons of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That is probably actually the primary mode that open source software is being developed in the world today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Commercial companies are,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
making open source that they need themselves and then contributing it back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
good for the web.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There is the danger of the monoculture if we just get a single browser engine that runs everything, and we are in danger of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I love the fact that the Ladybird project, for example, is trying to make a new browser engine from scratch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
First, I echo what you said about what a wonderful thing it is that WordPress exists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There are not many projects in the open source world or in the world at large that has had as big of an impact on the internet as WordPress has.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've supported that project.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He deserves a ton of accolades for that work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So that was my engagement, essentially, my premise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I would encourage people to look into that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Do you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I had tremendous respect for what Matt has built with WordPress, what that entire ecosystem has built around itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a true marvel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But there's some principles that are larger than my personal sympathies to the characters involved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I agree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The Silver Lake private equity company that's involved with WP Engine is not my natural ally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's really a wonderful thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not the natural ally of private equity doing some game with VP Engine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not my interest in the case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
My interest is essentially a set of principles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the principles are, if you release something as open source...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
People are free to use it as they see fit, and they are free to donate code or resources or money back to the community as they see fit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's staffed by a bunch of people who worked on other browser projects in the past.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You may disagree about whether they've done enough, whether they should do more, but you can't show up after you've given the gift
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
of free software to the world and then say, now that you've used that gift, you actually owe me a huge lot of your business because you got too successful using the thing I gave you for free.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You don't get to take a gift back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's why we have open source licenses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They stipulate exactly what the obligations are on both sides of the equation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The users of open source don't get to demand what the makers of open source do and how they act.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the makers of open source don't get to suddenly show up with a ransom note to the users and say, actually, you owe me for all sorts of use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm 100% allergic to that kind of interaction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think Matt, unfortunately, for whatever reason,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
got so wrapped up in what he was owed that he failed to realize what he was destroying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We really need that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
WordPress and Automatic already makes a ton of money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is part of the wonder of WordPress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is a project that generates hundreds of millions of dollars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I can hold that thought in my head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And Matt didn't feel like he was getting enough of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not a good argument, bro.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can't just violate the spirit and the letter of these open source licenses and just start showing up with demand letters, even to characters that are not particularly sympathetic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This goes to the root of my interpretation of open source in general.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The GPL.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
is a particular license that actually demands code from people who use it under certain circumstances.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
At the same time, I hold the thought in my head that Google's Chrome was pivotal to the web surviving as the premier web development platform.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've never liked the GPL.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't want your shitty code if you don't want to give it to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What am I going to do with that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Some code dump that you've... I'm not on board with that part of Stallman's vision at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I love the MIT license.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
To me, that is the perfect license because it is mercifully short.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think it's two paragraphs, three paragraphs, really short.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it basically says, here's some software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It comes with no warranty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can't sue me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can't demand anything, but you can do whatever the hell you want with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Have a nice life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's a perfect open source interaction, in my opinion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that license needs to be upheld.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
These licenses in general, even the GPL, even if I don't like it, we have to abide by them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because if we just set aside those licenses when we, in a moment's notice, feel like something's slightly unfair, we've lost everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We've lost the entire framework that allowed open source to prosper and allowed open source to become such an integral part of commerce too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, back when open source was initially finding its feet,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was at war with commercial software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Stallman is at war with commercial software and always has been.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Bill Gates was in return at war with open source for the longest time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The open source licensees and the clarity that they provide allowed us to end that war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Today, commercial software and open source software can peacefully coexist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I make commercial software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I sell Basecamp.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I sell Hay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then I also make a bunch of open source software that I give away for free as gifts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That can't happen if we start violating these contracts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No commercial company is going to go, let me base my next project off this piece of open source if I'm also running the liability that some mad maker is going to show up seven years in and demand I give them $50 million.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If it had not been for Google and their entire business depending on a thriving open web,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not an environment conducive to commerce, collaboration, or anything else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's just basically wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think there's one analysis that's all about kind of the practical outcomes of this, which I think are bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's also an argument that's simply about ethics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is not right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can't just show up afterwards and demand something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is not too dissimilar, in my opinion, to the whole Apple thing we talked about earlier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Apple just showing up and feeling like they're entitled to 30% of everyone's business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not fair.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I think Matt, unfortunately, kind of stared himself blind on the indignity he thought was being perpetrated against him because there was all this money being made by VP Engine making a good product and not giving quite enough back in Matt's opinion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Tough cookie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Apple, Microsoft, I think would have been just as fine to see the web go away, to disappear into being something that just served native mobile applications and native desktop applications that they could completely control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
get mad too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's totally fine to get mad when people disappoint you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not justification for upending decades of open source licensees and the essential de facto case law we've established around it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is why I chose to even weigh in on this because I like WordPress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't use WordPress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not a part of that community.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't actually have a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
dog in this fight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm biased, if anything, towards Matt just as a fellow BDFL.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I would like to see him do well with this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I also think there's some principles at stake here that ring much louder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't want Rails to suddenly be tainted by the fact that it's open source and whether companies can rely on it and build businesses on it because, wait, maybe one day I'm going to turn Matt and I'm going to turn Matt King and I'm going to show up with a demand ransom letter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No, screw that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We have...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Way more to protect here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's way more at stake than your personal beef with someone or your perceived grievance over what you're owed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Decide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is the curious thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He could decide to give this up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's very, very difficult for driven, ambitious people to do, to accept that they're wrong and to give up and lay down their sword.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I had a hope earlier on in this that that was possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I haven't seen any evidence that Matt is interested in that, and I find that deeply regretful, but that's his prerogative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I continue to speak out when he's violating the spirit and ethics of open source, but I wish he would just accept that this was a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Really bad idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He just, he made a bad bet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I thought, I think he thought he'd just get away with it, that they'd just pay up and that he could put pressure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, I know that temptation when you sit as the head of a very important project and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
you know that that comes with a great degree of power and you really need a great degree of discipline to rein that in and not exercise that power at every step where you feel aggrieved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've felt aggrieved a million times over in the 20 plus years of Ruby on Rails.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I have all sorts of problems with Google, but it's not Chrome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've really tried very hard not to let those sometimes petty, sometimes substantial grievances over time
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
seep in to the foundation of the ecosystem and risk ruining everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm sure it has.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, who wouldn't?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Occasionally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I do marvel at both what's been built, what's been possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Over a million applications have been made with Ruby on Rails by one estimate that I've seen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Chrome is a complete gift to web developers everywhere, to the web as a development platform, and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Businesses like Shopify and GitHub and a million others have been built on top of something that I started.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's very gratifying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
you really have to be careful not to smell your own exhaust too much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you have to be just as careful not to listen too much to the haters and not to listen too much to the super fans either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That you assess the value and the sort of principles of what you're working towards on its own merits, on your own scoreboard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I try to,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
block that out, and then just go, well, I'm working on Rails because I love to write Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I love to use Ruby to make web applications.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's my North Star, and I'll continue to do that, and I'll continue to share all of the open source GIFs that I uncover along the ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's enough too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't have to get all of it out of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is sometimes just as with the guy who thought I'd given up on being Jira or something instead of doing Basecamp.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There are people over the years who've asked like, why didn't you charge for Rails?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like, don't you know how much money have been made off Rails?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If we just look at something like Shopify, it's worth billions of dollars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not a billionaire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And so freaking what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I got more than enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I got plenty of my share.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I will say, though, I'm also introspective enough to realize that if it hadn't panned out as well as it did for me on my own business, maybe I would have been more tempted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They deserve an enormous amount of credit, I think, for that, even if it's entangled with their business model and half of Chrome is code that spies on you or informs targeted ads and a bunch of things I'm not a big fan of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Maybe if you see other people build huge, successful companies off the back of your work and you really don't have a pot to piss in, you might be tempted to get a little...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
upset about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've seen that in the Rails world as well, where there are people who contributed substantial bodies of work and then got really miffed when they didn't feel like they got enough back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I was fortunate enough that the business that Jason and I built with Ruby on Rails was as successful as it was, and I made the money I needed to make that I didn't need to chase the rest of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I also think of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This example with Matt, he probably thought there was easy money for the taking and it wasn't so easy, was it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It looked like low hanging dollar bills and they turned out to be some really sour grapes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It turned out he turned, he probably destroyed vast sums of money by undermining the whole WordPress trust and the ecosystem and putting question marks in the heads of folks who would choose to use WordPress or something else going forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I often think when people think like, oh, you left money on the table.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
First of all, so what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't have to have all the money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But second of all, maybe the money wasn't on the table at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can divorce that from the fact that we need champions in the corner of the web who have trillions of dollars of market cap value riding on the open web.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When I look at an upcoming week and I see that I have no scheduled meetings at all, which is quite common, or maybe I just have one thing for one hour on one day, I think to myself, do you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This could very easily have been very different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We could have been running a company of hundreds of people or thousands of people, and my entire calendar would have been packed solid with little Tetris blocks of other people's demands on my attention and time, and I would have been miserable as fuck.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I look at that and go like, what more can I ask for?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Which is a really nice state of being, I'd actually say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I didn't have this always.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I did have, early on in my career, some sense of, like, I need a little more, a little more security.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I remember this really interesting study where a bunch of researchers asked people who had made certain amounts of money, how much money would it take for you to feel secure?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They'd ask people who had a million dollars net worth, how much money do you need?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Probably need two million.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Two million, then it'd be good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Then they asked people with a net worth of five million, how much do you need?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
10.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I need 10.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Ask people with 10 million.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What do you need?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
20.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Every single time people would need double of what they did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I did that for a couple of doublings until I realized, you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is silly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I am already where I wished I would be and a million times over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So what less is there to pursue?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, that doesn't mean that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If more money is coming my way, I'm going to say no to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Of course not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it does mean that I'm free to set other things higher.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I also do think you realize, as Jim Carrey would say, I wish everyone would get all the money that they wished for and they'd realize it wasn't the answer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That money solves a whole host of problems and anxieties, and then it creates a bunch of new ones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then it also doesn't touch a huge swath of the human experience at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The world is full of miserable, anxious, hurt, rich people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's also full of miserable, anxious, poor people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I'd rather be a miserable, anxious, rich person than a poor person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it isn't this magic wand that make everything go away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's, again, one of those insights, just like having children, that you cannot communicate in words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've never been able to persuade a person who's not wealthy that wealth wasn't going to solve all their problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I would even say you can care about the other stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Just know the order of priority.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you are blessed with
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
a partner that you love, some children that you adore, you've already won the greatest prize that most humans are able to achieve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Most humans in this world, if they are of marital age and they have children, if you ask them what's the most important thing, they would all say that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They would all say that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No matter whether they're rich or poor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's easy to lose sight of that when you're chasing the second best things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because do you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're also very nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I really liked that Pagani Sonda.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was a very expensive car and I would have had no chance of acquiring it if I hadn't become rather successful in business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I don't want to dismiss it either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's great fun to have money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's just...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
not as fun for quite as long or as deep as you think it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And these are the things, having an occupation and a pursuit that you enjoy, being able to carry burdens with a stiff upper lip and with, again, a sense of meaning is incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
To have family, to have friends, to have hobbies, to have all these things that are actually available
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
to most people around the world, that's winning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it doesn't mean you have to discount your ambitions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It doesn't mean you can't reach for more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it does mean it's pretty dumb if you don't realize that it's not going to complete you in some hocus-pocus-woo sense to make more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It really isn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I find it easier to be optimistic than pessimistic because I don't know either way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So if I get to choose, why not just choose to believe it's going to pan out?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like we suffer more in our imagination than we do in reality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's one of the quotes out of Stoicism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I also think we have a tendency, a lot of humans have a tendency to be
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
pessimistic in advance for things they don't know how it's going to pan out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Climate change, for example, is making a lot of people very anxious and very pessimistic about the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You know nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
40 years ago, we thought the problem was that the planet was going to be too cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I happen to believe that it's probably correct that the planet is getting too hot and that CO2 has something to do with it, whether we have the right measures to fix it in time, if that's even possible or not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
is completely up in the air.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you convince yourself with such certainty that the world is going to turn to shit, it is right up here in your head today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Climate change might wipe out this entire species in 200 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not next year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not 10 years from now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Your life might become more unpleasant and there might be more negative effects and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But then deal with that hardship when it arrives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
take down in advance?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How are you helping earth by just walking around being depressed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
is a disaster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The funny thing, just to pick up one of the points you mentioned, the atom bomb, for example, when that was first invented, a lot of people thought we have essentially ended life on earth, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I say that as someone who's been very sympathetic to the antitrust fight, because I do think we have antitrust problems in technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Or maybe we prevented World War III from happening in the past 80 years because assured mutual annihilation kept the superpowers from attacking each other at least head on and kept their fighting to proxy wars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Proxy wars are not great, but they're probably better than World War III with nuclear weapons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So it's quite difficult in the moment to tell what's actually benefit and what's
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think we should be a bit more humble.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've certainly become more humble over time of thinking I know which way it's going to turn.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think the pandemic was a huge moment for a lot of people where there was so much certainty about whether this intervention worked or that intervention didn't work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And most people were wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Certainly a lot of very smart people, very qualified people got that just utterly and catastrophically wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So just a little intellectual humility.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think back upon that and go like, you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not a PhD in virology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
and I don't claim that I somehow saw how it all was going to play out, but the people who were really experts, they got a bunch of it wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Nobody knows anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I keep reminding myself of that every day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No one knows anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We can't predict the economy a month out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We can't predict world affairs a month out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The world is just too complicated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But the one place where we don't have them, by and large, is with browsers, is with...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The capacity is certainly there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Whether we choose that capacity or not, who knows and in what situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think accepting that we all have the capacity for both ways, for both incredible generosity and kindness and also cruelty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
the tools we use to access the open web.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think Jung with his whole theory of the shadow was really spot on that we all have that capacity in us and accepting that we
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
it's our job to attempt to cultivate the better parts of our human nature is weighed against our propensity to sometime be the worst of ourselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
First of all, we have Firefox.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now Firefox is not doing all that great, and Firefox has been propped up by Google for many years to deter from exactly what's going on with the DOJ, that they were the only game in town.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Apple has Safari.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I have a bunch of problems with Apple too, but I love Safari.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I love the fact that we have a premier browser running on a premier operating system that people can't turn the web into just a Chrome experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I also think that the open web needs this trillion dollar champion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
or at least benefits from it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Maybe it doesn't need it, but it certainly benefits from it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And of all the things that are wrong with monopoly formation in technology, Chrome is the last thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And this is why I get so frustrated sometimes about the anti or the monopoly fight, that there are real problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we should be focusing on the premier problems first, like the toll booths on our mobile phones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're a far bigger problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not the open web.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not the tools that we use to access the open web.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If I don't want to use Chrome, if my customers of my businesses that run on the Internet don't want to use Chrome, they don't have to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're never forced to go through it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The open Internet is still open.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I think it's a real shame.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
that the DOJ has chosen to pursue Google in this way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I do think there are other things you can nail Google for and their ad monopoly maybe or the shenanigans they've done in controlling both sides of the ad ledger that they both control the supply and the demand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There are problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Chrome isn't it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you end up making...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
the web much worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And this is the thing we always got to remember when we think about legislation, when we think about monopoly fights is you may not like how things look today and you may want to do something about it, but you may also make it worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The good intentions behind the GDPR in Europe currently has amounted to what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Cookie banners that everyone on the Internet hates, that helps no one do anything better, anything more efficient, that saves no privacy in any way, shape or form, has been a complete boondoggle that has only enriched lawyers and accountants and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a monument to good intentions leading straight to hell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the Europe is actually world class in good intentions leading straight to hell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Just on a human scale, try to imagine how many hours every day are wasted clicking that away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And how much harm we've done to the web as a platform that people enjoy because of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The internet is ugly in part because of cookie banners.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Cookie banners were supposed to save us from advertisement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And advertisement can make the web ugly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's plenty of examples of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But cookie banners made the entire internet ugly in one fell swoop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's a complete tragedy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But what's even worse, and this is why I call it out as a monument to everything the EU gets wrong, is that we have known this for a decade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No one...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
anywhere who's serious, believes that cookie banners does anything good for anyone, yet we've been unable to get rid of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's this one piece of legislation that's now, I think, 10 or 12 years old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a complete failure on every conceivable metric.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Everyone hates it universally, yet we can't seem to do anything about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's a bankruptcy declaration for any body of bureaucrats who pretend or pretend to make things better for not just citizens, but people around the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is the thing that really gets me about cookie banners, too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not just the EU.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's the entire world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can't hide from cookie banners anywhere on this planet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you go to goddamn Mars on one of Elon's rockets and you try to access a webpage, you'll still see a cookie banner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No one in the universe is safe from this nonsense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It'll be even slower.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You'll have basically 150 second ping time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So it'll take you 45 seconds just to get through the cookie banners from Mars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If I was going to steel man the other side just for a half second.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
People would say, well, maybe, yes, most people do sort of begrudgingly agree that Chrome is a pretty good browser.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But then they'll say the reason it got dominance was distribution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the reason it got distribution was because Google also controls Android and therefore can make Chrome the default browser on all these phones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't buy that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the reason I don't buy that is because on Android, you're actually allowed to ship a different browser that has a browser engine that's not the same as Chrome, unlike on iOS, where if you want to ship a browser, Chrome, for example, ships for iOS, but it's not Chrome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's Safari wrapped in address.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And every single alternative browser on iOS have to use the Safari web engine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not competition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not what happened on Android.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Again, I think there are some nuances to it, but if you zoom out and you look at all the problems we have with big tech, Chrome is not it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Chrome won on merits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I begrudgingly have switched to Chrome on that realization alone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
As a web developer, I just prefer it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I like Firefox in many ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I like the ethos of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But Chrome is a better browser than Firefox, full stop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because it's also Chrome in address.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Maybe you have, because you know what is Bing in address?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
DuckDuckGo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
which is actually the search engine that I use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
DuckDuckGo gets its search results from Bing, or at least it used to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If they changed that, that would be news to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
PHP was what converted me from just being able to fondle HTML and turn out some web pages to actually being able to produce web applications myself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I owe a tremendous gratitude to PHP in that regard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I never thought of PHP as a calling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I never thought, I'm a professional programmer who writes PHP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's who I am and that's what I do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I thought of PHP as a tool I needed to smack the computer with until it produced web applications I wanted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was very much a means to an end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I didn't fall in love with PHP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm very grateful that it taught me the basics of programming, and I'm very grateful that it set the bar for the economics, but it really wasn't until Ruby that I started thinking of myself as a programmer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the way that came about was...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That the first time I ever got hired as a professional programmer to write code was actually by Jason Freed, my business partner still.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
All the way back in 2001, I had been working on these gaming websites in PHP for essentially 18 months at that point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No one had been paying me to do code in that regard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I connect with Jason Freed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Over an email sent from Copenhagen, Denmark, to Chicago, Illinois, to a person who didn't know who I was, I was just offering solicited advice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Jason had asked a question on the internet, and I had sent in the answer, and he was asking in PHP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I'd send them the answer to that question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we started talking and then we started working, which, by the way, is a miracle of what the Internet can allow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How can a kid in Copenhagen who's never met this guy in Chicago connect just over email and start working together?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And by the way, we're still working together now, 24 years later.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But we started working together and we started working together on some client projects.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Jason would do the design.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
37signals would do design.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I would bring the programming PHP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And after we worked on, I think, two or three client projects together in PHP, we kept hitting the same problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That whenever you work with a client, you start that project off an email.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, yeah, let's work together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Here's what we're building.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you start trading more and more emails.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And before a few weeks have passed, you've got to add someone to the project.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They don't have the emails.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They don't have the context.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You send them, where's the latest file?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, I've uploaded it on the FTP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's like final, final V06 2.0.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's the one to get.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's just a mess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
A beautiful mess in some ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
A mess that still runs the vast majority of projects to this day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Email is the lowest common denominator.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's wonderful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But we had dropped the ball a couple of times in serious ways with customers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we thought...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We can do better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We know how to make web applications.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Can't we just make a system that's better than email for managing projects?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It can't be that hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We've been doing blogs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We've been doing to-do lists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Let's put some of these things together and just make a system where everything that anyone involved in the project needs is on one page.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it has to be simple enough that I'm not going to run a seminar teaching you how to use the system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm just going to give you the login code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're going to jump into it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So that's Basecamp.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And when we started working on Basecamp, I, for the first time in the experience I had with Jason, had the freedom of technology choice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There was no client telling me, yeah, PHP, that sounds good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We know PHP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Can you build it in PHP?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I had free reigns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And at that time, I'd been reading IEEE magazine and a couple of other magazines back from the early 2000s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
where Dave Thomas and Martin Fowler had been writing about programming patterns and how to write better code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And these two guys, in particular, were both using Ruby to explain their concepts because Ruby looked like pseudocode.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Whether you were programming in C or Java or PHP, all three constituencies could understand Ruby because it basically just reads like English.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So these guys were using Ruby to describe the concepts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And first of all, I would read these articles for just the concepts they were explaining.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I'd be like, what is this programming language?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, I like the concept you're explaining, but I also want to see the programming language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why haven't I heard of this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I started looking into Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I realized...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
At that time, Ruby might not be known by anyone, but it's actually been around for a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Mats, the Japanese creator of Ruby, had started working on Ruby back in 93, before the internet was even a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And here I am in 2003, 10 years later, picking up what seems like this hidden gem that's just laying in obscurity in plain sight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But Dave Thomas and Martin Fowler, I think...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
successfully put me and a handful of other people on the trail of a programming language that hadn't been used much in the West, but could be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I picked up Ruby and I thought, this is very different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
First of all, where are all the semicolons?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'd been programming in PHP and ASP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'd even done some Pascal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'd looked at some C. There are semicolons everywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that was the first thing that struck me is where are the damn semicolons?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I started thinking, actually, why do we have semicolons in programming?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're to tell the interpreter that there's a new line of instructions, but I don't need them as a human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, someone is looking out for the human here, not for the machine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So that really got me interested.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then I thought to myself, do you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I know PHP quite well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
an amazing programmer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I haven't been working in programming for all that long, but maybe I can figure it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm going to give myself two weeks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm going to write a proof of concept where I talk to a database, I pull some records, I format them a bit, and I display them on an HTML page.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Can I figure that out in a couple of weeks?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It took about one weekend and I was completely mesmerized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I was completely mind blown because Ruby...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
was made from my brain like a perfect tailored glove by someone I'd never met.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like, how is this even possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's line noise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Here's a while loop that does five iterations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can literally type the number five
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now I'm calling a method under number five, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's one of the beautiful aspects of Ruby, that primitives like integers are also objects.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you can call five dot times start brackets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now you're iterating over the code in that bracket five times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not just nice, that's exceptional.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's literally no other programming language that I know of that has managed to boil away the line noise that almost every other programming language would inject into a five-time iteration over a block of code to that extent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Ruby is full of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And there's... So let me dive into a couple of examples because I really think it helps paint the picture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And let me preface this by saying I actually... I like the ethos of Python.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think the Ruby and the Python community share a lot of similarities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're both dynamic, interpreted languages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're both focused on...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
immediacy and productivity and ease of use in a bunch of ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But then they're also very different in many other ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And one of the ways they're very different is aesthetically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Python to me, I hope I don't offend people too much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've said this before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's just, it's ugly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's ugly in its base because it's full of superfluous instructions that are necessary for legacy reasons of when Guido made Python back in 87.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
that are still here in 2025, and my brain can't cope with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Let me give you a basic example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When you make a class in Python, the initializer method, the starting method, is def, okay, fair enough, that's actually the same as Ruby, D-E-F, definition of a method.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Then it is underscore, not one, underscore, two, init, underscore, underscore, parentheses start, self,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
comma, and then the first argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I look at that and go, I'm sorry, I'm out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can't do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's just, it's everything about it offends my sensibilities to the core.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Here you have the most important method that all new objects or classes have to implement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it is one of the most aesthetically offensive ways of typing initialize that I've ever seen anywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you guys are okay with this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That, to me, by the way, was the magic of Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It opened my eyes to how beautiful programs could be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I didn't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'd been working in ASP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'd been working in PHP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I didn't even have the concept that aesthetics, beautiful code, was something we could optimize for, that's something we could pursue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And even more than that, that we could pursue it above other objectives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That Ruby is as beautiful as it is is not an accident, and it's not easy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Ruby itself is implemented in C. It's very difficult to parse Ruby code because Ruby is written for humans, and humans are messy creatures.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They like things in just the right way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can't fully explain why the underscore, underscore, init, underscore, underscore make me...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
repulse, but it does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And when I look at the Ruby alternative, it's really instructive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So it's def, same part, def, space, initialize, parentheses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not even parentheses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you don't need to call it within the arguments, there's not even a parentheses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That in itself is actually also a major part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If the human doesn't need the additional characters, we're not just going to put them in because it'd be nicer to parse for the computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're going to get rid of the semicolons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're going to get rid of the parentheses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're going to get rid of the underscores.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're going to get rid of all that ugliness, all the line noise, and boil it down to its pure essentials.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And at the same time, we're not going to abbreviate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is a key difference in the aesthetics between Ruby and Python as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Init is short of type, it's only five characters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Initialize is a lot longer, but it looks a lot better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you don't type it very often, so you should look at something pretty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you don't have to do it all the time, it's okay that it's long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Those kinds of aesthetic evaluations are rife all over the Ruby language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But let me give you an even better example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
the if conditional.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's the bedrock of all programming languages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They have the if conditional.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you take most programming languages, they all have if.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's basically the same in almost every language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Space, start parentheses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We all do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then you have, perhaps let's say you're calling a object called user.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
dot isAdmin, close parentheses, close parentheses, start brackets, and here's what we're going to do if the user's an admin, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That would be a normal programming language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Ruby doesn't do it like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Ruby boils almost all of it away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We start with the if.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Okay, that's the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No parentheses necessary because there's no ambiguity for the human to distinguish that the next part is just a single statement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you do if space user dot admin question mark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No open brackets, no parentheses, no nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Next open line, here's your conditional.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That question mark means nothing to the computer, but it means something to the human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Ruby put in the predicate method style purely as a communication tool between humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's actually more work for the interpreter to be able to see that this question mark is there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why is this question mark in here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because it just reads so nicely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If user admin question mark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's a very human phrase, but it gets better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can turn this around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can have your statement you want to execute before the conditional.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can do user.upgrade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Let's say you're calling an upgrade method on a user.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Space if, space user.admin question mark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We do the thing if the thing is true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Instead of saying if the thing is true, do the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it gets even better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is why I love this example with the conditional, because you can keep diving into it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So let's flip it around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
User dot downgrade if exclamation point not user dot admin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That'd be a typical way of writing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Ruby goes, that exclamation point is light noise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why do we have if and then an exclamation point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's ugly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We could do user.downgrade unless user admin question mark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That to me is an encapsulation of the incredible beauty
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
that Ruby affords the programmer through ambiguity that is only to serve the human reader and writer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
All of these statements we've just discussed, they're the same for the computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It'll compile down to the same C code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They'll compile down to the same assembly code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It makes no difference whatsoever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In fact, it just makes it harder to write an interpreter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But for the human who gets to choose whether the statement comes before the conditional or the predicate method has, it's just incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It reads like poetry at some point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's what Matt's thought about because he started his entire mission off a different premise than almost every programming language designer that I'd heard at least articulate their vision.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That his number one goal was programmer happiness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That his number one goal was the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
affordances that would allow programmers to articulate code in ways that not just executed correctly, but were a joy to write and were a joy to read.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that vision is based on a fundamentally different view of humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's no greater contrast between Matz and James Gosselin, the designer of Java.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I wanted to listen to James talk about the design of Java.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why was it the way it was?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why was it so rigid?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And he was very blunt about it, which, by the way, I really appreciate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think Gosselin's done a tremendous job with Java.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But his view of humanity is rather dark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
His view of humanity was programmers, at the average...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
are stupid creatures.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They cannot be trusted with sophisticated programming languages because they're going to shoot their foot off or their hand off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that would be kind of inconvenient to the regional development office of a mid-tier insurance company writing code that has to last for 20 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's actually a very Thomas Sowell view of constrained capacity in humans that I've come to appreciate much later in life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it's also a very depressing view of programmers that there are just certain programmers who are too dumb to appreciate code poetry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're too ignorant to learn how to write it well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We need to give them a sandbox where they just won't hurt themselves too much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Matz went the complete opposite direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He believes in humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He believes in the unlimited capacity of programmers to learn and become better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So much so...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
that he's willing to put the stranger at his own level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is the second part I truly appreciate about Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Ruby allows you to extend base classes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You know how we just talked about five dot times is a way to iterate over a statement five times?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That five is obviously a base class.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a number.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Do you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can add your own methods to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I did, extensively.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In Rails, we have something called Active Support, which is essentially my dialect of Ruby for programming web applications.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I'll give you one example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've added a method called days to the number.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So if you do five dot days, you get five days in seconds because seconds is the way we set cash expiration times and other things like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you can say cash expires in five dot days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Damn.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you're going to get whatever five times 24 times 60 times 60 is or whatever the math is, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Very humanly readable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In a normal programming language, you would type out the seconds and then you would have a little comment above it saying this represent five days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In Ruby, you get to write five days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But even better than that, Matz didn't come up with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Matz didn't need the five days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I needed that because I needed to expire caches.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I was allowed by Matz to extend his story with my own chapters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
on equal footing, such that a reader of Ruby could not tell the difference between the code Mats wrote and the code that I wrote.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He trusted me as a complete stranger from Denmark who had never met to mess with his beautiful story?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That level of trust is essentially unheard of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I know there are other program languages that allow things with macros and so forth, but none do it in a way like Ruby does it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
None does it with an articulated vision of humanity, a trust in humanity like Matz does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That is the opposite end of the spectrum of Java.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's the good feeling that come out of a concept compressed to its pure essence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's nothing you can take away from that statement that's superfluous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No, you can compress it too far.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Perl Golf is a thing where you can turn programs into something that's unreadable for humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, the great thing about Perl was that it came out before Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Matz was a great student of Wahl.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
was a great student of Perl, was a great student of Python and Smalltalk and Lisp.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He took inspiration from all of these prior attempts at creating good programming languages and really edited down the very best bits into this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So he was able to learn from his lessons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But what I found incredible about Ruby is that here we are, 2025, Ruby has been worked on for over 30 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And essentially the first draft,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
is 90% of what we're still using.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There was almost a sense of divine inspiration possible in wherever Matz was writing that initial version of Ruby that transcended time to such a degree that no one has still even begun to reach it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is the other thing I always find fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
generally believe in the efficient market theory that if someone comes up with a better mousetrap or better idea, others will eventually copy them to such an extent that perhaps the original mousetrap is no longer even remembered.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No one has been able to copy that essence of Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They borrowed elements and that's totally fine, but Ruby still stands taller than everyone else on these metrics, on this trust in humanity and programmers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the machinery of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Worse is better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, that's actually the name of a pattern in software development and other ways of how do... It's the pattern of Linux.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Linux was quantifiably worse than, I think it was Minix at the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Other ways of it that were more cathedral, less bizarre.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
is still one, that there's something to it that the imperfections can help something go forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's actually a trick I've studied to the degree that I now incorporate it in almost all open source that I do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I make sure that when I release the first version of any new thing I work on, it's a little broken.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
it's a little busted in ways that invite people to come in and help me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because there's no easier way to get the collaboration of other programmers than to put something out that they know how to fix and improve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But Ruby is somehow, or was at least, a little bit different in that regard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not in all regards.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Matt's got the ethos of the language, the design of the language just right, but the first versions of Ruby were terribly slow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's taken...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, hundreds of man years to get Ruby to be both this beautiful, yet also highly efficient and really fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So that takes all of these elements we've just talked about and turned them up to 11.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'll explain metaprogramming real simple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Metaprogramming is essentially a version of the 5.days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You get to add keywords to the language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Active record is the part of Rails that communicates with the database.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is a system where every table in the database is represented by a class.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So if we take the user example again, you do class user descends from active record base.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then the first line you can write is this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I want my users to have many posts or have many comments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Let's do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're making some system where users can make comments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The very next line is has underscore many space
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
colon comments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now you've set up a dependency between users and comments that will give you a whole host of access and factory methods for users to be able to own comments, to create comments, to update comments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In that line alone has many
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
looks like a keyword.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It looks like it's part of the Ruby language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's metaprogramming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When Rails is able to add these elements to how you define a class, and then that runs code that adds a bunch of methods to the use of class, that's metaprogramming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And when metaprogramming is used in this way, we call it domain-specific languages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You take a generic language like Ruby and you tailor it to a certain domain, like describing relationships in a database at a object level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And this is one of those early examples where you can do user has many comments, belongs underscore two space colon account.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now you've set up a one-to-one relationship before we had a one-to-many relationship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Rails is rife with all these kinds of domain-specific languages where...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And sometimes it doesn't even look like Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can't identify Ruby keywords.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can just identify what looks like keywords in its own programming language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, again, I know that Lisp and others also do this stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They just do it with the maximum amount of line noise that can ever be crammed into a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Programming language, and Ruby does it at a level where you cannot tell my metaprogramming from Matz's keywords and with zero line noise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've actually never written any real Lisp myself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because I have two eyes and I can look at code and my aesthetic sensibilities forbid me to even go much further, which is a limitation, I know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I should actually dive into Lisp because I found that I've learned a lot just diving into, maybe I'm insulting Lisp again here, but the past of programming languages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
With Smalltalk, for example, I think Smalltalk is a incredible experiment that also worked, but isn't suitable for today's programming environments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's the essence of what makes Ruby Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is why I don't fully understand when people call for Ruby to add static typing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because to me, it's the bedrock of what this is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why would you want to turn one of the most beautiful languages into something far uglier?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is one of my primary objections to Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
static typing it's not just that it limits you in certain ways it makes metaprogramming harder i write a bunch of metaprogramming i've seen what it takes to do metaprogramming in typescript that was actually one of the things that just really sent me on a tear of getting meta or getting typescript out of some of the projects that i'm involved with we pulled typescript out of um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Turbo, one of the front-end frameworks that we have, because I tried to write to metaprogramming in TypeScript, and I was just infuriated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't want that experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I also don't want it from an aesthetic point of view.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I hate repetition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We've just talked about how much I love that Ruby boils all of these expressions down to its...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Essence, you can't remove one dot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can't remove one character without losing something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This moment you go for static typing, that you declare at least, I know there are ways to do implied typing and so forth, but let's just take the stereotypical case of an example, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Capital U, user, I'm declaring the type of the variable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Lowercase user, I'm now naming my variable, equals uppercase user or new uppercase user.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've repeated user three times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't have time for this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't have sensibilities for this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't want my Ruby polluted with this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now I understand all the arguments for why people like static typing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
One of the primary arguments is that it makes tooling easier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It makes it easier to do auto-complete in editors, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It makes it easier to find certain kinds of bugs because maybe you're calling methods that don't exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
on an object and the editor can actually catch that bug before you even run it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't care.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
First of all, I don't write code with tools.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I write them with text editors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I chisel them out of the screen with my bare hands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't auto-complete and this is why I love Ruby so much and this is why I continue to be in love with the text editor rather than the IDE.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't want an IDE.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I want my fingers to have to individually type out every element of it because it will force me
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
to stay in the world where Ruby is beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because as soon as it gets easy to type a lot of boilerplate, well, guess what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're going to have a lot of boilerplate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Every single language, basically, that has great tooling support has a much higher tolerance for boilerplate because the thinking is, well, you're not typing it anyway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're just auto-completing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't want that at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I want something where...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The fabric I'm working in is just a text file.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's nothing else to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So these things play together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's the aesthetic part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's the tooling part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's the metaprogramming part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's the fact that Ruby's...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
ethos of duck typing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't know if you've heard that term before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's essentially not about, can I call this method if a object is of a certain class?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It is, can I call this method if the method responds?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's very out of small talk in that regard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You don't actually check of whether that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
class has the method, which allows you to dynamically add methods at runtime and do all sorts of really interesting things that underpin all the beautiful metaprogramming that we do in Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't want to lose any of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I don't care for the benefits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
One of the benefits I've seen touted over and over again is that it's much easier to write correct software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're going to have fewer bugs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're going to have less null pointer exceptions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're going to have less all this stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yeah, I don't have any of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's just not something that occurs in my standard mode of operation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not saying I don't have bugs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Of course I do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I catch those bugs with unit testing, with integration testing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Those are the kinds of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
precautions that will catch logical bugs, things that compile but are wrong, along with the uncompilable stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I've never been drawn into this world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And part of it is because I work on a certain class of systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I fully accept that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you're writing systems that have 5, 10, 50 million lines of code with hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of programmers, I fully accept that you need different methods.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What I object to is the idea that what's right for a code base of 10 million lines of code with 100,000 programmers working on it is also the same thing I should be using in my bedroom to create Basecamp because I'm just a single individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's complete nonsense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In the real world, we would know that that makes no sense at all, that you don't, I don't know, use your Pagani to go pick up groceries at Costco.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a bad vehicle for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It just doesn't have the space.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You don't want to muddy the beautiful seats.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You don't want to do any of those things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We know that certain things that are very good in certain domains don't apply to all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In programming languages, it seems like we forget that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, to be fair, I also had a little bit, perhaps, of a reputation of forgetting that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When I first learned Ruby,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I was so head over heels in love with this programming language that I almost found it unconceivable that anyone would choose any other programming language at all to write web applications.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I kind of engaged the evangelism of Ruby on Rails in that spirit as a crusade, as I just need to teach you the gospel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I just need to show you this conditional code that we just talked about, and you will convert at the point of a sharp argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, I learned that that's not the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And part of the reason it's not the way is the programmers think differently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Our brains are configured differently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
My brain is configured perfectly for Ruby, perfectly for a dynamically duck-typed language that I can chisel code out of a text editor with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And other people need the security of an IDE.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They want the security of classes that won't compile unless you call the methods on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I have come to accept that, but most programmers don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're still stuck in essentially, I like static typing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Therefore, static typing is the only way to create reliable, correct systems, which is just such a mind-blowing thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
to be blunt, idiotic thing to say in the face of evidence, mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is one of the reasons I'm so in love with Shopify as the flagship application for Ruby on Rails.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Shopify exists at a scale that most programmers will never touch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
On Black Friday, I think Shopify did 1 million requests per second.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not 1 million requests of images.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's of dynamic requests that are funneling through the pipeline of commerce.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, Shopify runs something like 30% of all e-commerce stores on the damn internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
A huge portion of all commerce in total runs through Shopify, and that runs on Ruby on Rails.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So Ruby on Rails is able to scale up to that level without using
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
static typing in all of what it does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, I know they've done certain experiments in certain ways because they are hitting some of the limits that you will hit with dynamic typing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And some of those limits you hit with dynamic typing are actually, by the way, just limits you hit when you write 5 million lines of code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think the Shopify monolith is about 5 million lines of code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
At that scale, everything breaks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
because you're at the frontier of what humans are capable of doing with programming languages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The difference in part is that Ruby is such a succinct language that those 5 million, if they'd been written in, let's just say, Go or Java, would have been 50 or 25.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, that might have alleviated some of the problems that you have when you work on huge systems with many programmers, but it certainly would also have compounded them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Try to understand 25 million lines of code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You gotta have Toby on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yeah, for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a huge company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think just under 10,000 employees, market cap of 120 billion, GMV of a quarter of a trillion every quarter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And he's involved with the details, though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He is, very much so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Funny story about Toby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Toby was on the Rails core team back in the mid 2000s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Toby himself wrote Active Merchant, which is one of the frameworks for creating shops.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He wrote the liquid templating language that Shopify still uses to this day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He has a huge list of contributions to the Rails ecosystem, and he's the CEO of the company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think it's just, it's very inspiring to me because it's such at the opposite end of what I like to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I like to chisel code with my own hands most of the day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He runs a company of almost 10,000 people that is literally...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like world commerce depends on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
A level of criticality I can't even begin to understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And yet we can see eye to eye on so many of these fundamental questions in computer science and program development.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That is a dynamic range, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
be able to encompass Rails being a great tool for the one developer who's just starting out with an idea, who don't even fully know everything, who is right at the level where PHP would have been a good fit in those late 90s because, yeah, I can probably upload something to an FTP server and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Rails does have more complexity than that, but it also has so much longer runway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The runway goes all the way to goddamn Shopify.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That is about the most convincing argument I can make for sort of dynamic range that we can do a lot of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Even having said that, Shopify is the outlier, of course.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't think about Shopify as the primary target when I write Rails.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think of the single developer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Actually, I do think about Shopify, but I don't think about Shopify now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think of Shopify when Toby was writing Snowdevil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
which was the first e-commerce store to sell snowboards that he created that was the pre-Shopify, Shopify, he created all by himself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that was possible because Ruby on Rails isn't just about beautiful code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's just as much about productivity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's just as much about the impact that an individual programmer is able to have, that they can build a system where they can keep the whole thing in their head and be able to move it forward such that you can go from one developer sitting and working on something
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that something is Shopify and turns into what it is today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When we talk about programming languages and we compare them, we often compare them at a very late stage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like what is the better programming language for, let's say, Twitter in 2009, when it's already a huge success?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Twitter was started on Ruby and Rails.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They then hit some scaling problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was a big debacle at the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They end up...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
than I think writing it in some other language, which by the way, I think is the best advertisement ever for Ruby on Rails because nothing fucking happened for 10 years after they switched over, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Essentially zero innovation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Some of that was because they were doing a long conversion and all of the early success in part came because they had the agility to quickly change and adopt and so forth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's what startups needs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's what Shopify needed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's what Twitter needed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's what everyone needs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's the number one priority for Ruby on Rails, to make sure that we don't lose that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because what happens so often when development tools and programming language are driven by huge companies is that they mirror their org chart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
React and everything else needed to use that is in some ways a reflection of how Meta builds Facebook.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because of course it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because of course it's an instruction of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not saying React isn't a great tool and that can't be used by smaller teams.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Of course it can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it's born in a very different context than something like Ruby on Rails.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yeah, so one of the great contributions that Shopify has made to the entire Ruby ecosystem, not just Rails, but in particular Rails, is YGIT.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So YGIT is their compiler for Ruby that just makes everything a lot more efficient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And at Shopify's scale, eking out even a 5%, 10% improvement in Ruby's overhead and execution time is a huge deal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, Shopify didn't need YGIT.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Shopify was already running on the initial version of Ruby that was, I think, 10 times slower than what we have today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you look back upon the Ruby 1.8.6 that Topi probably started on, just as I started on, and that was enough to propel Shopify to the scale that it has today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
A lot of the scaling conversation is lost in a failure to distinguish two things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Scale is kind of one package we talk about when there are really multiple packages inside of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
One is runtime performance, latency.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How fast can you execute a single request?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Can it happen fast enough that the user will not notice?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If your Rails request takes a second and a half to execute, the user's going to notice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Your app is going to feel slow and sluggish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You have to get that response time down below, let's say, at least 300 milliseconds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I like to target 100 milliseconds as my latency.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's kind of performance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How much performance of that kind of latency can you squeeze out of a single CPU core?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That tells you something about what the price of a single request will be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But then whether you can
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
deal with one million requests a second, like Shopify is doing right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you have one box that can do a thousand requests a second, you just need X boxes to get up to a million.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And what you'll actually find is that when it comes to programming languages, they're all the same in this way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They all scale largely, beautifully horizontally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You just add more boxes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The hard parts of scaling a Shopify is typically not
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
the program language, it's the database.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's actually one of the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
challenges that Shopify has now is how do you deal with MySQL at the scale that they're operating at?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When do you need to move to other databases to get worldwide performance?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
All of these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The questions about scaling Ruby are economic questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If we're spending so and so much on application servers, if we can get just 5% more performance out of Ruby, well, we could save 5% of those servers and that could filter down into the budget.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, that analysis concludes into basically one thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Ruby is a luxury language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a luxury, the highest luxury, in my opinion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It is the Coco Chanel of programming languages, something that not everyone can afford.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I mean this in the best possible way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There are some applications on the Internet where each request works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
has so little value, you can't afford to use a luxurious language like Ruby to program in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You simply have to slum it with a C or a Go or some other low-level language or a Rust.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Talk about line noise there for a hot second.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Where you need kind of just, you need a very low level to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can't afford to use a luxury language to build it with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not true of Shopify.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It wasn't true of Basecamp.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Even back in 2004, it's not been true of 99% of all web applications ever created because the main cost component of 99% of web applications...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not CPU cores.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's wet cores.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's human cores.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's human capacity to understand and involve systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's their personal productivity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I did a calculation once when someone had for the 400th time said that, oh, if you switch from Ruby to some faster language, you could save a bunch of money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I calculated it out that at the time, and I think the last time I did this calculation was almost a decade ago, we were spending about 15% of our operating budget on Ruby application servers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Commodore 64 was the inspiration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So for me to improve my cost profile of the business...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
by seven percentage points, I'd have to pick something twice as fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's quite hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Versus if Ruby and Ruby on Rails was even 10% more productive than something else, I would move the needle far more because making individual programmers more productive actually matters a lot more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I really wanted a Commodore 64.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is why people are so excited about AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is why they're freaking out over the fact that a single programmer in Silicon Valley who makes $300,000 a year can now do the work of three or five, at least in theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I haven't actually seen that fully in practice, but let's just assume the theory is correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was the first computer I ever sat down in front.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If not now, then in six months.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's a huge deal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That matters so much more than whether you can squeeze a few more cycles out of the CPU.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When it comes to these kinds of business applications, if you're making Unreal Engine rendering stuff like Tim Sweeney you had on,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yeah, he needs to really sweat all those details.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The nanite engine can't run on Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's never going to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was not meant for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
These kinds of business applications absolutely can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the way I sat down in front of it was I was five years old and there was this one kid on my street who had a Commodore 64.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And everything that people are excited about AI for right now, that extra capacity to just do more, that was why we were excited about Ruby back in the early 2000s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was because I saw that if we could even squeeze out a 10% improvement of the human programmer,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
we'd be able to do so much more for so much less.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No one else had a computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So we were all the kids just
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The paradigm I really love with this was something Elon actually said on one of your shows when you guys were talking about Neuralink, that Neuralink allows the bandwidth between you and the machine to increase.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That language, either spoken or written, is very low bandwidth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you were to calculate just how many bits we can exchange as we're sitting here, it's very slow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Getting over there and we were all playing Yer Kung Fu.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Ruby has a much higher bandwidth of communication
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
reveals, conveys so much more concept per character than most other programming languages do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So when you are collaborating with AI, you want really high bandwidth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You want it to be able to produce programs with you, whether you're letting it write the code or not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't know if you've ever seen that game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
that both of you can actually understand really quickly and that you can compress a grand concept, a grand system into far fewer parts that both of you can understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was one of the original fighting games.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, I actually love collaborating with AI too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I love chiseling my code and the way I use AI is in a separate window.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't let it drive my code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've tried that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've tried the cursors and the windsurfs, and I don't enjoy that way of writing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And one of the reasons I don't enjoy that way of writing is I can literally feel competence draining out of my fingers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's really a great game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like that level of immediacy with the material
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I was playing that for the first time at five years old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And where I felt this the most was I did this remix of Ubuntu called Amacube when I switched to Linux.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's all written in Bash.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'd never written any serious amount of code in Bash before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I was using AI to collaborate to write a bunch of Bash with me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because I needed all this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I knew what I wanted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I could express it in Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I thought it was an interesting challenge to filter through Bash.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because what I was doing was setting up a Linux machine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we were like seven kids sitting up in this one kid's bedroom, all taking our turn to play the game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's basically what Bash was designed for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a great constraint.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But what I found myself doing was asking AI for the same way of expressing a conditional, for example, in Bash over and over again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That by not typing it, I wasn't learning it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I was using it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I was getting the expression I wanted, but I wasn't learning it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I got a little scared.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I got a little scared.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Is this the end of learning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Am I no longer learning if I'm not typing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the way I...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
For me, recast that was, I don't want to give up on DAI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It is such a better experience as a programmer to look up APIs, to get a second opinion on something, to do a draft.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I have to do the typing myself because you learn with your fingers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you're learning how to play the guitar, you can watch as many YouTube videos as you want.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're not going to learn the guitar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You have to put your fingers on the strings to actually learn the motions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think there is a parallel here to programming where programming has to be learned in part by the actual typing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I just found that unbelievably interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I begged and I begged and I begged my dad, could I get a computer?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I agree, I wouldn't dismiss it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a little too slow is actually my main problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's a little too dumb in some ways, but it's a little too slow in other ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When I use Claude's code, the terminal version of Claude, which is actually my preferred way of using it, I get too impatient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It feels like I'm going back to a time where code had to compile and I had to go do something else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And he finally comes home.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I boil some tea while the code is compiling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Well, I've been working in Ruby for 20 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
don't have compile weight in me anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So there's that aspect of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I think the more crucial aspect for me is I really care about the competence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He's like, I got your computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I've seen what happens to even great programmers the moment they put away the keyboard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because even before AI, this would happen as soon as people would get promoted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I was like, yes, my own Commodore 64.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Most great programmers who work in large businesses stop writing code on a daily basis because they simply have too many meetings to attend to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They have too many other things to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And invariably, they lose touch with programming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That doesn't mean they forget everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But if you don't have your fingers in the sauce, the source, you are going to lose touch with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's just no other way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't want that because I enjoy it too much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is not just about outcomes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And he pulls out this black, green and blue keyboard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is what's crucial to understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Programming for programmers who like to code is not just about the programs they get out of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That may be the economic value.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not the only human value.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The human value is just as much in the expression.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When someone who sits down on a guitar and plays Stairways to Heaven, there's a perfect recording of that that will last in eternity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can just put it on Spotify.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You don't actually need to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The joy is to command the guitar yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The joy of a programmer, of me as a programmer, is to type the code myself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If I elevate myself, if I promote myself out of programming...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I turned myself into a project manager, a project manager of murder of AI crows, as I wrote the other day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I could have become a project manager my whole career.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's an Armstrong 464.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I could have become a project manager 20 years ago if I didn't care to write code myself and I just wanted outcomes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's how I got started in programming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I just wanted outcomes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Then I fell in love with programming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And now I'd rather retire than giving it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, that doesn't mean you can't have your cake and eat it too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've done some vibe coding where I didn't care that I wasn't playing myself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I was like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I just wanted to see something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There was an idea in my head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I wanted to see something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I also use AI all day long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In fact, I'm already at the point where if you took it away from me, I'd be like, oh my God, how do we even look things up on the internet anymore?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Is Stack Overflow still around?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
that what's this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Is Quorum still a thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How do I even find answers to some of these questions I have all day long?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't want to give up AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In fact, I'd say the way I like to use AI, I'm getting smarter every day because of AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because I'm using AI to have it explain things to me, even stupid questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I would be a little embarrassed to even enter into Google.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
AI is perfectly willing to give me the ELI 5 explanation of some Unix command I should have known already, but I don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm sorry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Can you just explain it to me?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And now I know the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So at the end of the day of me working with AI all day long, I'm a little bit smarter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is not a Commodore 64, but it was a computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
5%, sorry, not 5%, half a percent, maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That compounds over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But what I've also seen when I worked on the Omiku project and I tried to let AI drive for me, I felt I was maybe half a percent dumber at the end of the day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I got my first computer at essentially six years old, that Amstrad 464.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And of course, the first thing I wanted to do, I wanted to play video games.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I like to think of it as a pair programmer for exactly that reason.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Pair programming came vogue in like the 2000s where you'd have two programmers in front of one machine and you'd push the keyboard between you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
One program would be driving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They'd be typing in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The other programmer would essentially sit and watch the code, suggest improvements, look something up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think the computer, which he, by the way, had traded for a TV and a stereo recorder or something like that, came with like two games.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was a really interesting dynamic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, unfortunately, I'm an introvert, so I can do that for about five minutes before I want to jump off a bridge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So it doesn't work for me as a full-time occupation, but AI allows me to have all the best of that experience all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, I think what's really interesting what you said about it makes it more fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I hadn't actually thought about that, but...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What it's made more fun to me is to be a beginner again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It made it more fun to learn Bash successfully for the first time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, I had to do the detour where I let it write all the code for me, and I realized I wasn't learning nearly as much as I hoped I would, and that I started doing once I typed it out myself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it gave me the confidence that, you know what, if I need to do some iOS programming myself...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I haven't done that in probably six years was the last time I dabbled in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I never really built anything for real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I feel highly confident now that I could sit down with AI and I could have something in the app store by the end of the week.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I would not have that confidence unless I had a pair programming body like AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't actually use it very much for Ruby code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm occasionally impressed whenever I try it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're like, oh, it got this one thing right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That is truly remarkable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's actually pretty good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then I'll ask it two more questions and I go like, oh, yeah, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you were my junior programmer, I'd start tapping my fingers and going like, you got to shape up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
One was this Frogger game where you had to escape from underground.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, the great thing, of course, is we can just wait five minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The entropic CEO seems to think that 90% of all code by the end of the year is going to be written by AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
more than a little bit skeptical about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I'm open-minded about the prospect that programming potentially will turn into a horse when done manually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Something we do recreationally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's no longer a mode of transportation to get around LA.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're not going to saddle up and go to the grocery store and pick up stuff from Whole Foods in your saddlebags.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's just not a thing anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That could be the future for programming, for manual programming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Entirely possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I also don't care.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was actually kind of dark, like this frog, you're trying to get it out from underground.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Even though we have great renditions of all the best songs, as I said, there are millions of people who love to play the guitar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It may no longer have as much economic value as it once did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm quite convinced it's true that we perhaps have seen the peak.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, I understand the paradox when the price of something goes down, actually the overall usage goes up and total spend on that activity goes up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That could also happen, maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But what we're seeing right now is that a lot of the big shops, a lot of the big companies are
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I was just, I was pretty bad at it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
are not hiring like they were five years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're not anticipating they're going to need tons more programmers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Controversially, Toby actually put out a memo inside of Shopify asking everyone who's considering hiring someone to ask the question, could this be done by AI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, he's further ahead on this question than I am.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I look at some of the code entrenches and I go like, I'd love to use AI more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I see how it's making us more productive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it's not yet at the level where I just go like, oh, we have this project.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I only had those two games.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Let me just give it to the AI agent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's going to go off and do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's part of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think it is important to have that humility that what you are good at may no longer be what society values.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I wanted more games.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This has happened a million times in history that you could have been exceptionally good at saddle making, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's something that a lot of people used to care about because everyone rode a horse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And one way to get more games when you're a kid who doesn't have a lot of money and can't just buy a bunch of games is to type them in yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then suddenly riding a horse became this niche thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
hobby that there's some people care about it, but not nearly as many.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, the other thing of this is I've had the good fortune to have been a programmer for nearly 30 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's a great run.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I try to look at life in this way that I've already been blessed with decades of economically viable, highly valuable ways of translating what I like best into
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
in the working world to write Ruby code, that that was so valuable that I could make millions and millions of dollars doing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And if that's over tomorrow, I shouldn't look at that with regret.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I should look at it with gratitude.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Back in 84, 85, magazines would literally print source code at the back of their magazines, and you could just sit and type it in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's absolutely not enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not if you want to learn.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not if you want to become better at it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you just become a tap monkey, maybe you're productive in a second, but then you have to realize, well, can anyone just tap if that's all we're doing is just sitting around all day long tapping?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not a marketable skill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I always preface this both to myself and when I speak to others about it, is rule number one, nobody fucking knows anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No one can predict even six months ahead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Right now, we're probably at peak AI future hype because we see all the promise because so much of it is real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I tried to do that, and it would take like two hours to print –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And so many people have experienced it themselves, this mind-boggling thing that the silicon is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
thinking in some way that feels eerily reminiscent of humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'd actually say the big thing for me wasn't even ChatGPT, wasn't even Claude, it was DeepSeek.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Running DeepSeek locally and seeing the think box where it converses with itself about how to formulate the response.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I almost wanted to think, is this a gimmick?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Is it doing this as a performance for my benefit, but that's not actually how it thinks?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If this is how it actually thinks, okay, I'm a little scared.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is incredibly human, how it thinks in this way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
this game into the Amistrad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But where does that go?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In 95, one of my favorite movies, one of my favorite B movies came out, The Lawnmower Man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Great movie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Incredible movie about virtual reality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Being an avatar and living in VR, like the story was a mess, but the aesthetics, the world it built up was incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I thought...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're five years away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm going to be living in VR now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm just going to be floating around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm going to be an avatar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And of course, I'd make some spelling mistake along the way and something wouldn't work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is where most humans can spend most of the day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That didn't happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're 30 years later.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
VR is still...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's here for gaming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's here for some specialized applications.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
My oldest loves playing Gorilla Tag.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't know if you've tried that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's basically the hottest VR game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Wonderful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's really hard to predict the future because we just don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then when you factor in AI and you have...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
even the smartest people go like, I don't think we fully understand how this works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the whole thing, I wasn't that good of English.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And this is what I find so fascinating, too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I forget who did this presentation, but someone in the web community did this great presentation on the history of the airplane.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I was born in Denmark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you go from the Wright brothers flying in 1903 or something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And 40 years later, you have a jet flight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Just an unbelievable amount of progress in four decades.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Then in 56, I think it was, the hull design for the Boeing 747, essentially precursor, was designed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I was really trying to get into it because I wanted all these games.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And basically nothing has happened since.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Just minor tweaks and improvements on the flying experience since the 50s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Somehow, if you were to predict where flying was going to go and you were sitting in 42 and you'd seen, you'd remember the Wright brothers flying in 03 and you were seeing that jet engines coming, you're like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're going to fly to the stars in another two decades.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're going to invent super mega hypersonic flights that's going to traverse the Earth in two hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then that didn't happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It tapped out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is what's so hard about predicting the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I didn't have the money to buy them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We can be so excited in the moment because we're drawing a line through early dots on a chart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it looks like those early dots are just going up and to the right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And sometimes they just flatten out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is also one of those things where we have so much critical infrastructure, for example, that still runs on COBOL, that about five humans around the world really understand truly, deeply, that it's possible for society to lose a competence it still needs because it's chasing the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I tried quite hard for quite a while to get into it, but it just never clicked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
COBOL is still with us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is one of the things I think about with programming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Ruby on Rails is at such a level now that in 50 years from now, it's exceedingly likely that there's still a ton of Ruby on Rails systems running around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, very hard to predict what that exact world is going to be like, but yesterday's weather tells us that if there's still COBOL code from the 70s operating Social Security today, and we haven't figured out a clean way to convert that, let alone understand it, we should certainly be...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then I discovered the magic of piracy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
humble about predicting the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't think any of the programmers who wrote that COBOL code back in the 70s had any damn idea that in 2025 checks were still being cut off the business logic that they had encoded back then.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But that just brings me to the conclusion on the question for what should a young programmer do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're not going to be able to predict the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No one's going to be able to predict the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And after that, I basically just took some time off from learning the program because...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you like programming, you should learn programming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, is that going to be a career forever?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But what's going to be a career forever?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Who knows?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like a second ago, we thought that it was the blue collar labor that was going to be extracted first.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was the robots that were going to take over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Then Gen AI comes out and then all the artists suddenly look like, holy shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Is this going to do all animation now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Is it going to do all music now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They get real scared.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And now I see the latest Tesla robot going like, oh, maybe we're back now to blue collar being in trouble because if it can dance like that, it can probably fix a toilet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So no one knows anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you have to then position yourself for the future in such a way that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It doesn't matter that you pick a profession or path where if it turns out that you have to retool and reskill, you're not going to regret the path you took.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's a general life principle for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How I look at all endeavors I involve myself in is I want to be content with all outcomes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Well, now suddenly I had access to all sorts of games.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When we start working on a new product at 37signals, I set up my mental model for its success.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I go, do you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If no one wants this, I will have had another opportunity to write beautiful Ruby code, to explore a greenfield domain, to learn something new, to build a system I want, even if no one else wants it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What a blessing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What a privilege.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If a bunch of people want it,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So that was the first attempt, like around six, seven years old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We can pay some salaries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We can keep the business running.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And if it's a blow away success, wonderful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I get to impact a bunch of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And what's funny is I remember these fragments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There should be more of the time writing from scratch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you are interested in learning how to program, unfortunately, you're not going to get fit by watching fitness videos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I remember not understanding the purpose of a variable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're not going to learn how to play the guitar by watching YouTube guitar videos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You have to actually play yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You have to do the sit-ups yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
programming, understanding, learning, almost anything requires you to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Humans are not built to absorb information in a way that transforms into skills by just watching others from afar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, ironically, it seems AI is actually quite good at that, but humans are not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you want to learn how to become a competent programmer,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You have to program.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If there's a thing and you assign something, why would you assign another thing to it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's really not that difficult to understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, I understand the temptation, and the temptation is there because vibe coding can produce things, perhaps in this moment, especially in a new domain you're not familiar with, with tools you don't know perfectly well, that's better than what you could do, or that you would take much longer to get at, but you're not going to learn anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're going to learn in this superficial way that feels like learning, but it's completely empty calories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And secondly, if you can just vibe code it, you're not a programmer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Then anyone could do it, which may be wonderful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's essentially what happened with the Access database.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's what happened with Excel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It took the capacity of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So for some reason, I understand constants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
accountants to become software developers because the tools became so accessible to them that they could build a model for how the business was going to do next week that required a programmer prior to Excel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now it didn't because they could do it themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Vibe coding enables non-programmers to explore their ideas in a way that I find absolutely wonderful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Constants made sense to me, but variables didn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it doesn't make you a programmer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Then maybe I'm 11 to 12.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've gotten into the Amiga at this point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The Amiga, by the way, still perhaps my favorite computer of all time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's the dream of the prompt engineer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think it's a complete pipe dream.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't think editors exist that aren't good at writing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, this is one of those things where you're like, people get older and they're like, oh, the music from the 80s was amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've written a number of books.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've had a number of professional editors write.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not all of them wrote their own great books, but all of them were great writers in some regard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You cannot give someone pointers if you don't know how to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's very difficult for an editor to be able to spot what's wrong with a problem if they couldn't make the solution themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Editing, in my opinion, is the reward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The capacity to be a good editor is the reward you get from being a good doer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You have to be a doer first.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, that's not the same as saying that vibe coding, prompt engineering won't be able to produce fully formed, amazing systems even shortly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think that's entirely possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But then there's no skill left, which maybe is the greatest payoff at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
To me, even as someone who loves computers, who loved new computers, the Amiga was this magical machine that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Wasn't that the whole promise of AI anyway, that it was just all natural language, that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
even my clumsy way of formulating a question could result in a beautiful, succinct answer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That actually, to me, is a much more appealing vision that there's going to be these special prompt engineering wizards who know how to tickle the AI just right to produce what they want.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The beauty of AI is to think that someone who doesn't know the first thing about how AI actually works is able to formulate their idea and their aspirations for what they want and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the AI could somehow take that messy clump of ideas and produce something that someone wants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's actually what programming has always been.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's very often been people who didn't know how to program, who wanted programs, who then hired programmers, who gave them messy descriptions of what they wanted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then when the programmers delivered that back, said, oh, no, actually, that's not what I meant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I want something else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
AI may be able to provide that cycle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If that happens to the fullest extent of it, yeah, there's not going to be as many programmers around, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But hopefully, presumably, someone still, at least for the foreseeable future, have to understand whether what the AI is producing actually works or not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
was made by the same company that produced the Commodore 64.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What I've seen when I've been trying to do this, trying to use vibe coding to build something real, is you actually fail really early.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The vibe coding is able to build a veneer at the current present moment of something that looks like it works, but it's flawed in all sorts of ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There are the obvious ways, the meme ways that it's leaking all your API keys.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
it's storing your password in plain text.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think that's ultimately solvable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I got the Amiga 500, I think in 87.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's going to figure that out, or at least it's going to get better at that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But its capacity to get lost in its own labyrinth is very great right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You let
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
it codes something, and then you want to change something, and it becomes a game of whack-a-mole real quick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Peter Levels, who's been doing this wonderful flight simulator, was talking to that, where at a certain scale, the thing just keeps biting its own tail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You want to fix something, and it breaks five other things, which I think is actually uniquely human, because that's how most bad programmers are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
At a certain level of complexity with the domain, they can't fix one thing without breaking three other things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So in that way, I'm actually...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In some way, it's almost a positive signal for that the AI is going to figure this out because it's on an extremely human trajectory right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The kind of mistakes it's making are the kind of mistakes that junior programmers make all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you're looking at the nine points I wrote out in, I think, 2012.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And first, before we dive into them, I want to say the reason I wrote it down is that if you want a community to endure, you have to record its values and you have to record its practices.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you don't, eventually you're going to get enough new people come in who have their own ideas of where this thing should go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And if we don't have a guiding light
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
helping us to make decisions, we're going to start flailing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is from an age, by the way, where computing wasn't global in the same sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're going to start actually falling apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think this is one of the key reasons that institutions of all kinds start falling apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We forget why Chesterton's fence is there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We just go like, why is that fence there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Let's yank it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oh, it was to keep the wolves out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now we're all dead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Oops.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I wanted to write these things down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And if we just take them quick one by one, you talked about optimizing for programmer happiness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I put that at number one in homage of Matt's.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's a lot about accepting that there is occasionally a tradeoff between writing beautiful code and other things we want out of systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There could be a runtime tradeoff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There can be a performance tradeoff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But we're going to do it nonetheless.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're also going to allow ambiguity in a way that many programmers by default are uncomfortable with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The different territories had different computers that were popular.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I give the example actually here of in the interactive Ruby shell where you can play with the language or even interact with your domain model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can quit it in two ways, at least that I found.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can write exit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Boom, you're out of the program.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can write quit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Boom, you're out of the program.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They do the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We just wrote both exit or the people who built that wrote both exit and quit because they knew humans were likely to pick one or the other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Python is the perfect contrast to this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In the Python interactive protocol, if you write exit,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
it won't exit.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It'll give you a fucking lesson.
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The Amiga was really popular in Europe.
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It'll basically tell you to read the fucking manual.
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It says, use exit parentheses or control D, i.e.
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end of file to exit.
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I'm like, one is very human and another is very engineer.
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And I mean that, both of them, in the best possible way.
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But it wasn't very popular at all in the U.S., as far as I understand it.
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Python is pedantic.
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Python's
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The value from the start stated is that there should be preferably one and only one way to do a certain thing.
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Ruby goes the complete opposite.
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No, we want the full expression that fits different human brains such that it seems like the language is guessing just what they want.
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It wasn't popular in Japan.
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Which is why you can't do it in one way, which is why I use the example of both exit and quit.
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The principle of least surprise for some people would be like, oh, exit.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's how I get out of the prompt.
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For other people, it would be quit.
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Why don't we just do both?
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There were just different machines.
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That's a big one.
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That's a huge one.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it was born out of a frustration I had in the early days with especially Java frameworks, where when you were setting up a web application framework for Java back in the day, it was not uncommon to literally write hundreds, if not thousands of lines of XML configuration files.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The Apple II was a big thing in the U.S.
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Oh, I need this.
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I want the database to use the foreign keys as post underscore ID.
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No, no, no.
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I want it as post capital I D. Oh, no, no, no.
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You have to do a capital P ID.
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There are all these ways where you can configure how foreign relation keys should work in a database and none of them matter.
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We just need to pick one and then that's fine.
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I'd never even heard of Apple in the 80s in Copenhagen.
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And if we pick one and we can depend on it, it becomes a convention.
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And if it's a convention, we don't have to configure it.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And if we don't have to configure it, you can get started what you actually care about much quicker.
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So convention over configuration is essentially to take that idea that the system should come pre-assembled.
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I'm not just handing you a box of fucking Legos and asking you to build the Millennium Falcon.
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I'm giving you a finished toy.
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You can edit.
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You can change it.
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It's still built out of Legos.
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You can still take some pieces off and put in some other pieces.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I'm giving you the final product.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And this cuts against the grain of what most programmers love.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They love a box of Legos.
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They love to put everything together from scratch.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But the Amiga 500 was the machine that brought me to want to try it again.
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They love to make all these detailed little decisions that just don't matter at all.
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And I want to elevate that up such that, hey, I'm not trying to take the decisions away from you.
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I just want you to focus on decisions that actually matter, that you truly care about.
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No one cares about whether it's post underscore ID or post ID or PID.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yeah, great defaults.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Absolutely.
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And I think this is one of those part of the doctrine that a lot of programmers who get to use Ruby on Rails begrudgingly will acknowledge it's a nice thing, even if they don't really like it.
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And you know what's funny?
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like it's hard to beat the...
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sort of attraction to building with Legos from scratch out of programmers.
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That's just what we like.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The reason I wanted to try it again was I remembered the first time to learn, and then there was this programming language that was literally called Easy Amos.
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This is why we're programmers in the first place, because we'd like to put these little pieces together.
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But we can direct that instinct towards a more productive end of the stack.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Okay, what are some of the other ones?
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The menu is a macasa.
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It actually comes out of the same principle that great defaults really matter.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you look at everything that's wrong with the JavaScript ecosystem right now, for example, it is that no one is in charge of the menu.
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There are a billion different dishes and you can configure just your tailored specific configuration of it, but no one done the work to make sure it all fits together.
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So you have all these unique problems in the JavaScript ecosystem.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
For example, there's probably 20%,
Lex Fridman Podcast
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25 major ways of just doing the controller layer.
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And then as many of how to talk to the database.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So you get this permutation of N times N times N of no one is using the same thing.
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And if they are using the same thing, they're only using the same thing for about five minutes.
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So we have no retained wisdom.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We build up no durable skills.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Rails goes the complete opposite way of saying, do you know what?
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Rails is not just...
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a web framework.
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It is a complete attempt at solving the web problem.
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It's a complete attempt at solving everything you need to build a great web application.
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And every piece of that puzzle should ideally be in the box, pre-configured, pre-assembled.
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If you want to change some of those pieces later, that's wonderful.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But on day one, you'll get a full menu designed by a chef who really cared about every piece of the ingredient, and you're going to enjoy it.
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Like the easy version of Amos.
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And that's, again, one of those things where many programmers think, like, I know better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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I'm like, if it's easy Amos, how hard can it be?
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And they do in some hyper-local sense of it.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Every programmer knows better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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This is what Ruby is built on, that every programmer knows better in their specific situation.
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Maybe they can do something dangerous.
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Maybe they think they know better, and then they blow their foot off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then they truly will know better because they've blown their foot off once and won't do it again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But the menu is omakase is that.
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Yes.
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The integrated system.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Integrated system.
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That someone thought of the whole problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is one of the reasons why I've been on a crusade against microservices since the term was coined.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Microservices was born out of essentially a good idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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I got to be able to figure this out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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What do you do at Netflix scale when you have thousands of engineers working on millions of lines of code?
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No one can keep that entire system in their head at one time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You have to break it down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Microservices can be a reasonable way to do that when you're at Netflix scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When you apply that pattern to a team of 20 programmers working on a code base of half a million lines of code, you're an idiot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And this time I tried harder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You just don't need to turn method invocations into network calls.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It is the first rule of distributed programming.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Do not distribute your programming.
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It makes everything harder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
All the failure conditions you have to consider as a programmer just becomes infinitely harder when there's a network cable involved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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I got into conditionals.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So...
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I hate the idea of premature decomposition.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And microservices is exactly that.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The monolith says, let's try to focus on building a whole system that a single human can actually understand and push that paradigm as far as possible by compressing all the concepts such that more of it will fit into memory of a single operating human.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I got into loops.
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And then we can have a system where I can actually understand all of Basecamp.
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I can actually understand all of Hay.
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I got into all these things and I still, I couldn't do it.
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Both of those systems are just over 100,000 lines of code.
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I've seen people do this at maybe twice, maybe three times that scale, and then it starts breaking down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Once you get north of certainly half a million lines of code, no individual human can do it, and that's when you get into maybe some degree of microservices can make sense.
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100,000 lines of code.
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It is.
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Considering the fact that Basecamp, I think, has something like 420 screens, different ways and configurations.
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Do you include the front end in that?
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No, that's the Ruby code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Well, it's front-end in the sense that some of that Ruby code is beneficial to the front-end, but it's not JavaScript, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, the other thing we might talk about later is we write very little JavaScript, actually, for all of our applications.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And on the second attempt, I really got to the point of like, maybe this is, maybe I'm not smart enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Hay, which is a Gmail competitor, Gmail ships, I think, 28 megabytes of uncompressed JavaScript.
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If you compress it, I think it's about 6 megabytes, 28 megabytes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Think about how many lines of code that is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When Hay launched, we shipped 40 kilobytes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's trying to solve the same problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can solve the email client problem with either 28 megabytes of uncompressed JavaScript or with 40 kilobytes if you do things differently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But that comes to the same problem, essentially.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is why I have fiercely fought splitting front-end and back-end apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That, in my opinion, this was one of the great crimes against web development.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That we are still atoning for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That we separated and divided what was and should be a unified problem-solving mechanism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When you are working both on front-end and back-end, you understand the whole system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you're not going to get into these camps that decompose and eventually you end up with shit like GraphQL.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Maybe programming is just not, maybe it's too much math.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No one paradigm goes to the fact that Ruby is a fiercely object-oriented programming language at its core, but it's also a functional programming language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This five times I told you about, you can essentially do these anonymous function calls and you can chain them together very much in the spirit of how true functional programming languages work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like I like math in this sort of superficial way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Ruby has even moved closer towards the functional programming end of the scale by making strings immutable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So there are ideas from all different disciplines and all different paradigms of software development that can fit together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Smalltalk, for example, was only object-oriented, and that was just it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Ruby tries to be mainly object-oriented, but borrow a little bit of functional programming, a little bit of imperative programming, be able to do all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Rails tries to do the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're not just going to pick one paradigm and run it through everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't like it in the deep way that some of my perhaps slightly nerdier friends did, who I had tremendous respect for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Object orientation is at the center of it, but it's okay to invite all these other disciplines in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's okay to be inspired.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's okay to remix it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I actually think...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
one of the main benefits of Rails is that it's a remix.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I didn't invent all these ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I didn't come up with active record.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I didn't come up with the MVC way of dividing an application.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I took all the great ideas that I had learned and picked up from every different camp and I put it together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not because there was going to be just one single overarching theory of everything, but I was going to have a cohesive unit that incorporated the best from everywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think the monolith can be thought of as quite roomy, quite as a big tent that the monolith needs actually to borrow a little bit of functional programming for the kinds of problems that that excels, that discipline excels at solving and that paradigm excels at solving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you also want object orientation as its core.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm like, I'm not that person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I actually think when I've looked at functional programming languages, there's a lot to love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then I see some of the crazy contortions they have to go through when part of the problem they're solving calls for mutating something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you go like, holy shit, this is a great paradigm for 90% of the problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then you're twisting yourself completely out of shape when you try to solve the last 10.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We've talked about that at length, and here's a great example that really summarizes the domain-specific language quality of Ruby on Rails, that you can make code actually pleasant to write and read, which is really funny to me because, as we talked about when I started learning programming, it wasn't even a consideration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not the math geek who's going to figure it all out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I didn't even know that that could be part of the premise, that that could be part of the solution, that writing code could feel as good as writing a poem.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
See, you could read it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You didn't even change anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So after that attempt with Easy Amos and failing to even get, I don't even think I completed one even very basic game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Right.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Isn't that beautiful?
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's the crown jewel of Rails.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It really is.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It is the defining characteristic of how to work with Ruby on Rails.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's born in an interesting level of controversy because it actually uses a pattern that had been described by Martin Fowler in the Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, one of the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
books for anyone working on business systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And if you have not read it, you must pick it up immediately.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think it was published in 2001.
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It is one of the very few programming books that I have read many times over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In it,
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#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Martin describes a bunch of different patterns of how to build business systems, essentially.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And Active Record is a little bit of a footnote in there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The pattern is literally called Active Record.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can look it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's called Active Record.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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I wasn't even creative enough to come up with a name of my own, but it allows the creation, the marriage of database and object orientation in a way that a lot of programmers find a little off-putting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They don't actually want to pollute the beautiful object-oriented nature of that kind of programming with SQL.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There was a rant by Uncle Bob the other day about how SQL is the worst thing ever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I thought, the program's just not for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Blah, blah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Okay, fine, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't care.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is practical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We are making crud applications.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're taking things out of an HTML form and you're sticking them into a damn database.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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It's not more complicated than that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The more abstractions you put in between those two ends of the spectrum, the more you're just fooling yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm going to have to do something else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is what we're doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We're talking to SQL databases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
By the way, quick aside, SQL was one of those things that have endured the onslaught of no SQL databases, structured list data for a better part of a decade and still reigns supreme.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I still love computers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
SQL was a good thing to invest your time in learning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Every programmer working with the web should know SQL to a fair degree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I still love video games.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Even if they're working with an ORM, an object relational mapper as ActiveRecord, you still need to understand SQL.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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What ActiveRecord does is not so much try to abstract the SQL away behind a different kind of paradigm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's just making it less cumbersome to write, making it more amenable to build domain models on top of other domain models in a way so you don't have to write every damn SQL statement by hand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I actually, at that time, had already begun making friends with people who knew how to program, who weren't even programming Easy Amos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Even simpler than that, it turns tables into classes and rows into objects.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I actually think SQL is very easy to understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Most of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can write some SQL golf too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's very hard to understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But SQL at its base and much of the criticism against SQL was it was written for human consumption.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's actually quite verbose, especially if you're doing things like inserts over and over again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's quite verbose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Insert into table, parentheses, enumerate every column you want to insert, values, parentheses, every value that fits with that column.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It gets tedious to write SQL by hand, but it's actually very humanly
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readable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Active record just takes that tediousness away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They were programming freaking Assembler.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It makes it possible to combine things in a way that a humanly describable language just doesn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It composes things into methods and you can combine these methods and you can build structures around them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I don't dislike SQL.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I dislike a lot of things in programming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I try to get rid of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
SQL wasn't really one of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was just a sense of, I don't want to write the same thing over and over again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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And I would sit down and just go...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was a
Lex Fridman Podcast
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Can we be a little more succinct?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Can we match it just slightly better to the object orientation without trying to hide away the fact that we're persisting these objects into a database?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's where I think a lot of ORMs went wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They tried to live in the pure world of objects.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
never to consider that those objects had to be consistent into a SQL database.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then they came up with convoluted way of translating back and forth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Active record says, do you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How do you, the moves and the memories and the copies, how do you even do this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Just accept it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This record, this object is not going to get saved into some NoSQL database.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not going to be saved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's going to be saved into a SQL database.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So it's just structured the whole thing around that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's going to have attributes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Those attributes are going to respond to columns in the database.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not more complicated than that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Stop making it so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't even understand how you go from this to Amiga demos, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
as long as you want to stay at the entry level of competence, and this is actually my overarching mission with Rails, is to lower the barrier of entry so far down that someone can start seeing stuff on the browser without basically understanding anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They can run Rails new,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
blog, run a couple of generators.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They have a whole system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They don't understand anything, but it's an invitation to learn more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Where I get fired up, and this ties back to the AI discussion, is when that's turned into this meme that programmers no longer have to be competent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was the big thing with the Amiga.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The AI is going to figure it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The generators is going to figure it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't need to know SQL.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Active Record is going to abstract it away from me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No, no, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Dude,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Hold up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It had this wonderful demo scene in Europe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The path here is competence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm trying to teach you things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I understand I can't teach you everything in five minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No one who's ever become good at anything worthwhile could be taught everything in five minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you want to be a fully well-rounded web application developer, that takes years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But you can actually become...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
somewhat productive in a few days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can have fun in a few days for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can have fun in a few minutes, in a few hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And over time, I can teach you a little more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Active Record says like, yeah, yeah, all right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Start to hear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then like next week, we'll do a class on SQL.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's this really interesting period of time in the Amiga's history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it never stops.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's always more to learn.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is one of the reasons I'm still having fun programming, that I'm still learning new things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can still incorporate new things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The web is deep enough as a domain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're never going to learn all of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Provide sharp knives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is a good one, because another way of saying this, the opposite way of saying this, the Java way of saying is do not provide foot guns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I don't want to give you sharp knives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You're a child.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can't handle a sharp knife.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Here's a dull butter knife.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Cut your damn steak.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's a very frustrating experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You want a sharp knife, even though you might be able to cut yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I trust humans in the same way that Matt's trust humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Maybe you cut off a finger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We had all these programmers spread out mostly all over Europe who would compete on Amiga.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
All right, you're not going to do that again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Thankfully, it was a virtual finger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's going to grow back out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Your competence is going to grow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's more fun to work with sharp tools.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes, to the learning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We kind of hit on that one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Rails is trying to solve the whole problem of the web, not just one little component.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not leaving you a bunch of pieces you have to put together yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If there's one that's dated, it's probably that one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
At this stage, Rails has been incredibly stable over many, many generations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The last major release, Rails 8, was basically a no-op upgrade for anyone running Rails 7.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Rails 7 was almost a no-op upgrade for anyone running Rails 6.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I used to think it required more churn to get
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
progress to stay on the leading edge of new stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I wrote this before I experienced the indignity of the 2010s in the JavaScript community, where it seemed like stability was not just unvalued, it was actually despised.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
graphic competitions where you could probably bring one of these on this thing they would make these little um almost like music videos combining some midi music combining some cool graphics and they would do all of it in like 4k four kilobytes that is not four days of revolution four kilobytes of of memory and i just thought that was such a cool scene this was obviously
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That churn in and off itself was a value we should be pursuing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That if you were still working with the same framework three months later, you were an idiot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I saw that and I actually recalled, and if I was going to write the doctrine today, I'd write that differently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I wouldn't say progress over stability.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Maybe, or a deeper understanding of the problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think part of what's so fascinating about technology is that we have this perception that everything constantly moves so fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No, it doesn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Everything moves at a glacial pace.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There is occasionally a paradigm shift, like what's happening with AI right now, like what happened with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, like what happened with the internet in 95.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's basically the total sum of my career.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Three things changed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Everything else in between was incremental, small improvements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can recognize a Rails application written in 2003.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I know because the Basecamp I wrote back then is still operating, making millions of dollars in ARR, servicing customers on the initial version that was launched back then.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it looks like the Rails code, if I squint a little, that I would write today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So most things don't change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
even in computing, and that's actually a good thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We saw with the JavaScript ecosystem what happens when everyone gets just mad about constant churn.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Things don't change that often.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I would say, oh, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then also, oh, no, in the sense that there are absolutely fundamental things, both about human nature, about institutions, about programming, about business that I've changed my mind on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then I've also had experiences that are almost even more interesting where I thought I had changed my mind and I tried it a new way, realized why I had the original opinion in the first place and then gone back to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So it happens both ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
An example of the later part, for example, was managers at 37signals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
For the longest time, I would rail against engineering managers as an unnecessary burden on a small or even medium-sized company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And at one point, I actually started doubting myself a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I started thinking like, you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Maybe all programmers do need a one-on-one therapy session every week with their engineering manager to be a whole individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So we tried that for a couple of years where we hired some very good engineering managers who did engineering management the way you're supposed to do it, the way it's done all over the place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And after that, I thought, like, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No, I was right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This was correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We should not have had managers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Not every programmer needs a therapy session with an engineering manager every week.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We don't need these endlessly scheduled huddles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We don't need all these meetings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We just need to leave people the hell alone to work on problems that they enjoy for long stretches of uninterrupted time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That is where happiness is found.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's where productivity is found.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And if you can get away with it,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You absolutely should.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Engineering management is a necessary evil when that breaks down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The case for managers is that if you do have a lot of people, there's a bunch of work that kind of just crops up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The one-on-one is one example that programmers need someone to check in with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There's another idealized version that someone needs to guide the career of juniors, for example, to give them redirecting feedback and all this other stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it's not that in the abstract, I don't agree with some of those things, but in practice, I've found that they often create more problems that they solve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
A good example here is can you get feedback from someone who's not better at your job than you are?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You get some feedback.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
pre-internet, it was even pre-BBS, bulletin board systems to some extent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You get feedback on how you show up at work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Are you being courteous to others?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Are you being a good communicator?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
OK, yes, but you can't get feedback on your work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's more important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's more important that you work under and with someone who's better at your job than you are if you wish to progress in your career.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And every single programmer I've ever worked with was far more interested in progressing in their career on that metric, getting better at their craft, than they were in picking up pointers that a middle manager could teach them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not saying that there isn't value in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's not saying there isn't value in being a better person or a better communicator.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Of course, there is all those things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But if I have to choose one or the other, I value competence higher.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Like that's, again...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I caveat this a million times because I know what people sometimes hear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They hear the genius asshole is just fine and that's great and you should excuse all sorts of malicious behavior if someone's just really good at what they do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm not saying that at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What I am saying is that the history of competence is a history of learning from people who are better than you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was you swap your demo software with someone else by sending them a disk in the mail, like the 3.5s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that relationship should take precedence over all else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that relationship gets put aside a bit when engineering managers are introduced.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, the funny thing is, this conversation ties back to the earlier things we were talking about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Most engineering managers are actually former programmers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They at least know programming to some extent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But what I've seen time and again is that they lose their touch, their feel with it very, very quickly and turn into pointy-haired bosses very, very quickly who are really good at checking for updates, just seeing where we are on Project A here, if you need anything or we're ready to deliver to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes, and also, no, just shut up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Leave me the hell alone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Let me program, and then I'll come up for air.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'll talk with other programmers who I can spar with, that we can learn something with, I can turn the problems over with, and we can move forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you look back on the history of computer industry, all the great innovation that's happened, it's all been done by tiny teams with no engineering managers, just full of highly skilled individuals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You've had John Carmichael here,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I used to look up to id Software so much, not just because I loved Quake, not just because I loved what they were doing, but because he shared a bit about how the company worked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
There were no managers, or maybe they had one business guy doing some business stuff, but that was just to get paid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Everything else was basically just designers and programmers, and there were about eight of them, and they created a goddamn Quake 2.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I just, I was enamored with that whole scene.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So why do you need all these people again?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why do you need all these managers again?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think, again, at a certain scale, it does break down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's hard to just have 100,000 programmers running around wild without any product mommies or daddies telling them what to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I understand that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then, even as I say that, I also don't understand it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because if you look at something like Gmail, for example, that was like a side project done by Boucher at Google at the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So much of the enduring long-term value of even all these huge companies were created by people who didn't have a goddamn manager.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I was enamored with what they were able to create.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's not an accident.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's a direct cause and effect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I've turned in some way even more militant over the years against this notion of management, at least for myself and knowing who I am and how I want to work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because the other part of this is I don't want to be a manager.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I just wanted to be a part of it, even though I kind of didn't have any skills to contribute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And maybe this is just me projecting the fact that I'm an introvert who don't like to talk to people on one-on-one calls every week.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But it also encapsulates how I was able to progress my career.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I did not really go to the next level with Ruby or otherwise until I had a door I could close and no one could bother me for six hours straight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's how I got into running BBSs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I didn't learn programming then, and I wouldn't learn programming until much later, until I was almost 20 years old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've essentially run that branch at 37 Singles for 20 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I've experimented with forking back on the other side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've experimented with having a full-time lawyer on staff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I've experimented with having engineering managers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I can tell you, life is much better at 50, 60 people when none of those individuals or none of those roles, it's never about the individuals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's about the roles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
None of those roles are in your organization full-time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Occasionally, you need a manager.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Occasionally, you need a lawyer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I can play the role of manager occasionally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then I can set it back down to zero.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's almost like a cloud service.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I want a manager service I can call on for seven hours this week, and then I want to take it down to zero for the next three months.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So what's actually funny is these days we do have a head of finance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We did not for the first 19 years of life, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The bulletin board systems existed in this funny space where they were part
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We got away with basically just having an accountant
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
do our books in the same way you do a small ice cream shop, except we would over the times have done hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The scale seemed quirky.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And at some point, you can also fall in love with your own quirkiness to a degree that isn't actually healthy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I've certainly done that over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we should have had someone count the beans a little more diligently a little earlier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This was part of a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
blessing of just being wildly profitable and selling software that can have infinite margins, basically, that you kind of can get away with a bunch of stuff that you perhaps shouldn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
service to the demo scenes, allowing all these demo groups to distribute their amazing demos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What partially taught me this lesson was when we realized we had not been collecting sales tax.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In different US states where we had Nexus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And it took us about two years and $5 million in settlements and cleanups to get out of that mess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And after that, I went like, okay, fine, we can hire a finance person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we now have a wonderful finance person, Ron, who actually ended up replacing something else we used to have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We used to have a full-time data analytics person who would do all sorts of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
insight mining for why are people signing up for this thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We ran that for 10 years and realized, you know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If I can have either a data analytics person or an accountant, I'm picking the accountant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Worse is better on adoption with technology a lot of times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I think it actually comes out of the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It comes out of the fact that many of the great breakthroughs are created by not even just tiny teams, but individuals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Individuals writing something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And an individual writing something, on some parameter, what they do is worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then it was also a place to trade piracy software, pirated software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Of course, it's worse when one person has to make something that a huge company have hundreds, if not thousands of developers that they can have work on that problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But in so many other parameters, that worseness is the value.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That less is the value.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
In Getting Real, which we wrote back in 2006, we talk about this notion of less software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When we first got started with Basecamp back in 2004, people would ask us all the time, aren't you petrified of Microsoft?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They have so many more resources.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They have so many more programmers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What if they take a liking to your little niche here and they show up and they just throw a thousand programmers at the problem?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I ended up starting one of those when I was 14 years old in my tiny little bedroom in Copenhagen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And my answer, perhaps partly because I was like 24, was first of all, no, no care in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But the real answer was they're not going to produce the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You cannot produce the kind of software that Basecamp is with a team of a thousand people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You will build the kind of software that a thousand people build.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that's not the same thing at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So, so much of the main breakthrough is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
in both end-user systems, but also in open-source systems, in fundamental systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're done by individuals or very small teams.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Even all these classical histories of Apple has always been like, well, there's a big organization, but then you have the team that was actually working on the breakthrough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was four people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was eight people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It was never 200.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Because humans don't scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Communication between humans certainly don't scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I had my, at that point, Amiga 4000.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You basically get the network cost effect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Every time you add a new node, it goes up exponentially.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is perhaps the key thing of why I get to be so fond of having no managers at Basecamp because our default team size is two.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
One programmer, one designer, one feature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When you're operating at that level of scale, you don't need sophistication.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You don't need advanced methodologies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You don't need multiple layers of management because you can just do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The magic of small teams is that they just do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They don't have to argue because we don't have to set direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I had three telephone lines coming into my tiny room.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We don't have to worry about the roadmap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
We can just sit down and make something and then see if it's good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
When you can get away with just making things, you don't have to plan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And if you can get out of planning, you can follow...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
The truth that emerges from the code, from the product, from the thing you're working on in the moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You know far more about what the great next step is when you're one step behind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Rather than if you try 18 months in advance to map out all the steps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
How do we get from here to very far away?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's difficult to imagine in advance because humans are very poor at that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Maybe AI one day will be much better than us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But humans can take one foot or put one foot in front of each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's not that hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And that allows you to get away with all that sophistication.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So the process has become much simpler.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You need far fewer people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It compounds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You need much less process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You need to waste less time in meetings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You can just spend these long, glorious days and weeks of uninterrupted time solving real problems you care about and that are valuable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Which was funny because, again, I'm 14 years old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And you're going to find that that's what the market actually wants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No one is buying something because there's a huge company behind it most of the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They're buying something because it's good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the way you get something good is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
you don't sit around and have a meal about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
By the time I was installing my third line, you had to get someone from the telephone company to come do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You try stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
You build stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
So I'll tell you this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I tracked exactly the number of hours I spend on the first version of Basecamp.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I was doing this because at the time I was working on a contract basis for Jason.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He was paying me, I was going to say $15 an hour.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's what I got paid when we first got started.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I think he had bumped my pay to a glorious $25.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But I was billing him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And I know that the invoice for the first version of Basecamp was $400.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's what it took for one sole individual in 2004 to create an entire system that has then gone on to gross hundreds of millions of dollars and continues to do extremely well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I get this guy, and he's just looking around like, what is this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
One person, just me, setting up everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Part of that story is Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Part of that story is Rails.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But a lot of it is also just me plus Jason plus Ryan plus Matt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That was the entire company at the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And we could create something...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
of sheer sustaining value with such a tiny team, because we were a tiny team, not despite of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Small is not a stepping stone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is the other thing that people get into their head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
This is one of the big topics of rework, that it gave entrepreneurs the permission to embrace being a small team, not as a waypoint, not as like, I'm trying to become a thousand people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why the hell is a 14-year-old having three phone lines into their tiny little bedroom?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
No, I actually like being a small team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Small teams are more fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you ask almost anyone,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I'm sure Toby would say this too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Even at his scale, the sheer enjoyment of building something is in the enjoyment of building it with a tiny team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, you can have impact at a different scale when you have a huge company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I fully recognize that and I see the appeal of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But in the actual building of things, it's always small teams.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Always.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Don't take venture capital.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Point number one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
What's going on here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
I mean, that's been the answer for the longest time because the problem isn't just venture capital.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
It's other people's money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Once you take other people's money, completely understandably, they want a return and they would prefer to have the largest return possible because not them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
sitting in the code, not them getting the daily satisfaction out of building something, chiseling beautiful code poems out of the editor, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Why are all these modems blinking red and black and making funny sounds?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They don't get that satisfaction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
They get the satisfaction maybe of seeing something nice put into the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
That's fair.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
But they certainly also get a satisfaction of a higher return.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And there is this sense, certainly in venture capital, stated in venture capital, that the whole point of you taking the money is to get to a billion dollars or more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Now, the path to that usually does go through running established playbooks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And then when it comes to software, the enterprise sales playbook is that playbook.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
If you're doing B2B software, SaaS, you will try to find product market fit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And the second you have it, you will abandon your small and medium-sized accounts to chase the big whales with a huge sales force.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
And by then, you're 1,000 people and life sucks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
He bought secondaries.