David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

It was 15 different roles.

That in itself injected a ton of complexity.

But I also want to give it

the bold case here, which was that some of that complexity was necessary to get to where we are today.

That the complexity was a bridge.

It wasn't the destination, but we had to cross that bridge to get to where we are today, where browsers are frankly incredible.

The JavaScript you can write in a text file and then serve on a web server for a browser to ingest

is amazing.

It's actually a really good experience.

You don't need any pre-processing.

You could just write text files, send them to a browser, and you have an incredible development.

This is one of the hardest problems in computing today is to parse the entire internet.

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.

The web page I did in ninth grade would render on a modern browser today, 30 years later.

That is completely crazy.

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.

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.

Now, I actually don't think that's

good for the web.

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.