David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

At that scale, everything breaks.

because you're at the frontier of what humans are capable of doing with programming languages.

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.

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.

Try to understand 25 million lines of code.

You gotta have Toby on.

Yeah, for sure.

It's a huge company.

I think just under 10,000 employees, market cap of 120 billion, GMV of a quarter of a trillion every quarter.

And he's involved with the details, though.

He is, very much so.

Funny story about Toby.

Toby was on the Rails core team back in the mid 2000s.

Toby himself wrote Active Merchant, which is one of the frameworks for creating shops.

He wrote the liquid templating language that Shopify still uses to this day.

He has a huge list of contributions to the Rails ecosystem, and he's the CEO of the company.

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.

I like to chisel code with my own hands most of the day.

He runs a company of almost 10,000 people that is literally...

Like world commerce depends on it.