David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

I think the cloud has moved so many things so far forward, especially around virtualization, automation, setup.

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.

And with the autonomy and the satisfaction of owning hardware,

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.

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.

They have no idea how powerful a modern CPU is.

They have no idea how much RAM you can fit into a 1U rack.

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.

I mean, we kind of sat still there for a while while Intel was spinning their wheels going nowhere.

And then TSMC, with Apple propelling them, really moved things forward.

And now servers are exciting again.

Like you're getting...

jumps year over year in the 15, 20% rather than the single digit we were stuck with for a while.

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.

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.

And

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.

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.

So I think there's a little bit of whiplash for some people that, oh, I thought we agreed.

We were done with that.