Joy & Curiosity #67

Joy & Curiosity #67 Interesting & joyful things from the previous week Last issue of the year, let’s do this! This week, Ryan and I got to interview DHH . It’s very rare that I get nervous before an online conversation, but this was one of those times. I mean, that’s the guy who made Rails, man! I wouldn’t be here without Rails. Rails is what I did for the first seven years of my career. Rails is the reason why I have a career. I read every book he and Jason have ever written, of course, and 37signals has had as deep an impression as a company can have on probably anybody who’s worked in a startup between 2008 and 2015. ...and then we had a great conversation. It’s been a few days, and different parts of it keep popping back into my head. David said quite a few things that I now feel I have to share. Some things about marketing that resonate with what we’ve been talking about internally; some things I want the world to hear; some things that were funny; other things that were very fascinating (he said he still writes 95% of his code by hand); and the rant on cookie banners that I want politicians to hear. But here’s something that I want to leave you with, in this last edition of the year, this year that brought and announced more change to this profession than any other year I’ve lived through as a working software developer. Here’s something that David said that sums up why I’m excited and so curious about where all of this is going, something that I hope makes you feel something positive too: “Where does the excitement come from? First and foremost, I love computers and I love to see computers do new things. It’s actually remarkable to me how many people who work in tech don’t particularly like computers. Yes, even programmers who have to interact with them every day and make these computers dance, not all of them like computers. I love computers. I love computers just for the- sheer machine of it . I’m not just trying to be instrumental about it. I’m not just trying to use computers to accomplish something. There’s a whole class of people who view the computer just as a tool to get somewhere. No, no, no. For me, it’s much deeper. I just love the computer itself and I love to see the computer do new things. And this is the most exciting new thing that computers have been doing, probably in my lifetime. Or at least it’s on level with the network-connected computer. Yes.” The computer can now do new things. My teammate Tim wrote about how he ported his TUI framework from Zig to TypeScript and how, in the process of porting it, he noticed that he’s getting in the way of the agent, slowing it down and costing more tokens. So he took his hands off...

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