Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7

The following is a conversation with Jeff Atwood. He is the co founder of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, websites that are visited by millions of people every single day. Much like with Wikipedia, it is difficult to understate the impact on global knowledge and productivity that these networks of sites have created. Jeff is also the author of the famed blog Coding Horror and the founder of Discourse, an open source software project that seeks to improve the quality of our online community discussions. This conversation is part of the MIT course on Artificial General Intelligence and the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes or your podcast provider of choice. Or simply connect with me on Twitter lexfriedman, spelled F R I D. And now here's my conversation with Jeff Atwood. Having co created and managed for a few years the world's largest community of programmers in Stack Overflow ten years ago, what do you think motivates most programmers? Is it fame, fortune, glory, process of programming itself? Or is it the sense of belonging to a community?

I think it's puzzles, really. I think it's this idea of working on puzzles independently of other people and just solving a problem. Sort of like on your own almost. Although nobody really works alone in programming anymore. But I will say there's an aspect of sort of hiding yourself away and just sort of beating on a problem until you solve it. Like brute force, basically, to me, is what a lot of programming is. The computer's so fast, right? You can do things that would take forever for a human, but you can just do them like so many times and so often that you get the answer right.

You're saying just the pure act of tinkering with the code is the thing that drives most problems. The joy, the struggle, balance within, the joy of overcoming the brute force process of pain and suffering that eventually leads to something that actually works well.

Data is fun too. Like there's this thing called the shuffling problem. Like the naive shuffle that most programmers write has a huge flaw. And there's a lot of articles online about this because it can be really bad. If you're like a casino and you have an unsophisticated programmer writing your shuffle algorithm, there's surprising ways to get this wrong. But the neat thing is the way to figure that out is just to run your shuffle a bunch of times and see how many orientations of cards you get. You should get an equal distribution of all the cards. And with the naive method of shuffling, if you just look at the data, if you just brute force it and say, okay, I don't know what's going to happen? You just write a program that does it a billion times and then see what the buckets look like of the data. And the Monty hall problem is another example of that, where you have three doors and somebody gives you information about another door. So the correct answer is you should always switch in the money hall problem, which is not intuitive and it freaks people out all the time, right? But you can solve it with data. If you write a program that does the money hall game and then never switches, then always switches. Just compare, you would immediately see that you don't have to be smart, right? You don't have to figure out the answer algorithmically. You can just brute force it out with data and say, well, I know the answer is this because I ran the program a billion times and these are the data buckets that I got from it, right?

So empirically find it. But what's the joy of that? So for you, for you personally, outside of family, what motivates you in this process?

Well, to be honest, I don't really write a lot of code anymore. Like, what I do at Discourse is managery stuff, which I always kind of despised, right? Like as a programmer, you think of managers as people who don't really do anything themselves. But the weird thing about code is like, you realize that like language is code. Like the ability to direct other people lets you get more stuff than done than you could by yourself anyway.

You said languages, code languages, meaning communication with other humans.

Yes, it is.

You can think of it as a systematic. So what is it like to be what makes, before we get into programming, what makes a good manager? What makes a good leader?

Well, I think a leader, it's all about leading by example, first of all, like sort of doing and being the things that you want to be. Now this can be kind of exhausting, particularly you have kids because you realize that your kids are watching you like all the time. Like, even in ways that you've stopped seeing yourself. Like the hardest person to see on the planet is really yourself, right? It's a lot easier to see other people and make judgments about them but yourself. Like, you're super biased. You don't actually see yourself the way other people see you often. You're very, very hard on yourself in a way that other people really aren't going to be. So that's one of the insights is you got to be really diligent about thinking, like, am I behaving in a way that represents how I want other people to behave? Like, leading through example. There's a lot of examples of leaders that really mess this up. They make decisions that are like, wow, it's a bad example for other people. So I think leading by example is 1. The other one I believe is working really hard. And I don't mean like working exhaustively, but like showing a real passion for the problem. Like, you know, not necessarily your solution to the problem, but the problem itself is just one that you really believe in. Like with Discourse, for example, the problem that we're looking at, which is my current project, is how do you get people in groups to communicate in a way that doesn't like break down into the howling of wolves? Right. Like how do you deal with trolling? Not like technical problems of how do I get people to post paragraphs? How do I get people to use bold, how to get people to use complete sentences, Although those are problems as well. But how do I get people to get along with each other and solve whatever problem it is they set up to solve or reach some consensus on discussion or just not hurt each other even. Maybe it's a discussion that doesn't really matter. But are people yelling at each other? And why? That's not the purpose of this kind of communication. So I would say leadership is about, you know, setting an example, you know, doing the things that represent what you want to be and making sure that you're actually doing those things. And there's a trick to that too, because the things you don't do also say a lot about what you are.

Yeah, so let's pause on that one. So those two things are fascinating. So how do you have as a leader that self awareness? So you just said it's really hard to be self aware. So for you personally, or maybe for other leaders you've seen or look up to, how do you know both that the things you're doing are the wrong things to be doing? The way you speak to others, the way you behave and the things you're not doing. How do you get that signal?

There's two aspects that one is like processing feedback that you're getting.

How do you get feedback?

Well, right. So are you getting feedback? Right, like, so one way we do it, for example, at Discourse, we have three co founders and we periodically talk about decisions before we make them. So it's not like one person can make a mistake or like, wow, that's, you know, there can be misunderstandings, things like that. So it's part of like group consensus of leadership is like, it's good to have, I think systems where there's One leader and that leader has the rule of absolute law are just really dangerous in my experience for communities. For example, if you have a community that's run by one person, that one person makes all the decisions, that person's going to have a bad day, something could happen to that person. There's a lot of variables. First, when you think about leadership, have multiple people doing leadership and have them talk amongst each other, giving each other feedback about the decisions that they're making. Then when you do get feedback, I think there's that little voice in your head or your gut or wherever you want to put it in your body. I think that voice is really important. Like, I think most people who have any kind of moral compass or like want to do. Most people want to do the right thing. I do believe that. I mean, there might be a handful of sociopaths out there that don't, but most people, they want other people to think of them as a good person. And why wouldn't you, right? Like, do you want people to despise you? I mean, that's just weird, right? So you have that little voice, that sort of the angel and devil on your shoulder sort of talk, talking to you about like what you're doing, how you're doing, how does it make you feel to make these decisions, right? And I think having some attunement to that voice is important.

But you said that voice also for, I think this is a programmer situation too, where sometimes the devil on the shoulder is a little, a little too loud. So you're a little too self critical for a lot of developers, especially when you have introverted personality, how do you struggle with the self criticism or the criticism others? So one of the things of leadership is to do something that's potentially unpopular or people doubt you and you still go through with the decision. So what's that balance?

Like, I think you have to walk people through your decision making, right? Like you have to. This is where blogging is really important and communication is so important. Again, code language is just another kind of code is like, here is the program by which I arrived at the conclusion that I'm going to reach, right? It's one thing to say like this is a decision that's final, deal with it, right? That's not usually satisfying to people. But if you say, look, you know, we've been thinking this problem for a while, here's some stuff that's happened, here's what we think is right, here's our goals, here's what we want to achieve and we've looked at these options and we think this, of the available options is the best option, people will be like, oh, okay, right. Maybe I don't totally agree with you, but I can kind of see where you're coming from. And, like, I see it's not just arbitrary decision delivered from a cloud of flames in the sky. Right. It's like a human trying to reach some kind of consensus about goals. And their goals might be different than yours. That's completely legit. Right. But if you're making that clear, it's like, oh, well, the reason we don't agree is because we have totally different goals. Right. Like, how could we agree? It's not that you're a bad person. It's that we have radically different goals in mind when we started looking at this problem.

And the other one you said is passion or hard work.

Sorry, no, those are tied together to me in my mind. Let's say hard work and passion. For me, I just really love the problem Discourse is setting out to solve. Because in a way, it's like there's a vision of the world where it all devolves into Facebook basically owning everything and every aspect of human communication. Right. And this has always been kind of a scary world for me. First, because I don't. I think Facebook is really good at execution. I gotta compliment them. They're very competent in terms of what they're doing, but Facebook has not much of a moral compass in terms of. Facebook cares about Facebook. Really. They don't really care about you and your problems. What they care about is how big they can make Facebook. Right.

Is that you talking about the company or just the mechanism of how Facebook works?

Well, kind of both, really. Right. Like, and the idea with Discourse, the reason I'm so passionate about it is because I believe every community should have the right to own themselves. Right. Like, they should have their own software that they can run that belongs to them. That's their space where they can set the rules. And if they don't like it, they can move to different hosting or, you know, whatever they need, they need to happen can happen. But like this, this idea of a company town where all human communication is implicitly owned by WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. And it's really disturbing too, because Facebook is really smart. Like I said, they're great at execution. Buying in WhatsApp and buying Instagram were incredible, incredibly smart decisions. And they also do this thing. I don't know if you know, but they have this VPN software that they give away for free on Smartphones and it indirectly feeds all the data about the traffic back to Facebook so they can see what's actually getting popular through the VPNs.

Right?

They have low level access to the network data because users have let them have that.

So let's take a small pause here. First of all, discourse. Can you talk about, can you lay out the land of all the different ways you can have communities? So there's Stack Overflow that you've built, there's discourse. So Stack Overflow is kind of like a wiki Wikipedia you talk about. And it's a very specific scalpel, very focused. So what is the purpose of discourse? And maybe contrast that with Facebook. First of all, say what is discourse? Yeah, start from the beginning.

Well, let me start from the very beginning. So Stack Overflow is very structured wiki style, Q and A for programmers, right? And that was the problem we first worked on. And when we started we thought it was discussions because we looked at like programming forums and other things, but we quickly realized we were doing Q and A, which is a very narrow subset of human communication. Right.

So when you started Stack Overflow, you thought you didn't even know the Q and A. Not really, you know, it would be.

Q and A kind of. Well, we didn't know. We had an idea of like, okay, these are things that we see working online. We had a goal, right? Our goal was there was this site, Experts Exchange with a very unfortunate name.

Thank you for killing that site.

Yeah, I know, right? Like a lot of people don't remember it anymore, anymore, which is great. That's the measure of success. When people don't remember the thing that you were trying to replace, then you've totally won. So it was a place to get answers to programming questions. But it wasn't clear if it was focused Q and A, if it was a discussion. There were plenty of programming forums, so we weren't really sure. We were like, okay, we'll take aspects of Digg and Reddit, like voting were very important. Reordering answers based on votes, wiki style stuff of being able to edit posts, not just your post, but other people's posts to make them better and keep them more up to date. Ownership of blogging of like, okay, this is me, I'm saying this in my voice. This is the stuff that I know. And your reputation accrues to you. And it's peer recognition. So you asked earlier what motivates programmers? I think peer recognition motivates them a lot. That was one of the key insights of Stack Overflow was like recognition from your peers is why things get done. Not necessarily money, not necessarily your boss, but your peers saying, wow, this person really knows their stuff has a lot of value. So the reputation system came from that. So we were sort of Frankensteining a bunch of stuff together in Stack Overflow, like, stuff we had seen working and we knew worked, and that became Stack Overflow. And over time, we realized it wasn't really discussion, it was very focused questions and answers. There wasn't a lot of room on the page for, let me talk about this tangential thing. It was more like, okay, is it answering the question? Is it clarifying the question? Or could it be an alternative answer to the same question? Because there's usually more than one way to do it in programming. There's like, say, five to 10 ways. And one of the patterns we got into early on with Stack Overflow was there are questions where there would be like hundreds of answers, and we're like, how can there be a programming question with 500, 200, 500 answers? And we looked at those and we realized those were not really questions in the traditional sense. They were discussions. It was stuff that we allowed early on that we eventually decided wasn't allowed, such as, what's your favorite programming food? What's the funniest programming cartoon you've seen? And we had to sort of backfill a bunch of rules about, like, why isn't this allowed? So, such as, is this a real problem you're facing? Like, nobody goes to work and says, wow, I can't work because I don't know what the funniest programming cartoon is. So, sorry, can't compile this code now, right? It's not a real problem you're facing in your job. So that was one rule. And the second, like, what can you really learn from that? It's like what I call accidental learning, or Reddit style learning, where you're just like, oh, I'll just browse some things, and oh, wow, did you know tree frogs only live three years? I mean, I just made that up. I don't know if that's true, but I didn't really set out to learn that. I don't need to know that.

Right?

It's accidental learning. It was more intentional learning, where you're like, okay, I have a problem and I want to learn about stuff around this problem having. Right? And it could be theory, it could be compiler theory, it could be other stuff, but I'm having a compiler problem, hence I need to know the compiler theory. That aspect of it that gives me the. Gets me to my answer. Right? So kind of a directed learning. So we had to backfill all these rules as we sort of figured out what the heck it was we were doing. And the system came very strict over time and a lot of people still complain about that. And I wrote my latest blog entry. What does Stack Overflow want to be? Want to be when it grows up?

Celebrating the 10 year anniversary.

Yeah, yeah. So 10 years. And the system has trended towards strictness. There's a variety of reasons for this. One is people don't like to see other people get reputation for stuff as they view they view as frivolous, which I can actually understand because if you saw a programmer got like 500 upvotes for funniest programming cartoon or funniest comment they had seen in code, it's like, well, why do they have that reputation? Is it because they wrote the joke? Probably not. I mean, if they did, maybe, or the cartoon, right. They're getting a bunch of reputation based on someone else's work. That's not even like programming. It's just a joke. Right. It's a related. So you begin to resent that. You're like, well, that's not fair. And it isn't. At some level they're correct. I mean, I empathize because like it's not correct to get reputation for that. Versus here's a really gnarly regular expression problem. And here's a really, you know, clever, insightful, you know, detailed answer laying out, oh, here's why you're seeing the behavior that you're seeing here. Let me teach you some things about how to avoid that in the future. That's, that's great. Like that's gold, right? You want people to get reputation for that. Not so much for, wow, look at this funny thing I saw.

Right, Great. So there's this very specific Q and A format and then take me through the journey towards discourse and Facebook and Twitter. So you started at the beginning that Stack Overflow evolved to have a purpose. So where does discourse, this passion you have for creating community, for discussion, when was that born and how?

Well, part of it is based on the realization the Stack Overflow is only good for very specific sites, subjects, where there's sort of. It's based on data, facts and science where answers can be kind of verified to be true. Another form of that is there's the book of Knowledge, like the tome of knowledge that defines, like whatever it is, you can refer to that book and it'll give you the answer. There has to be. It only works on subjects where there's like semi clear answers to things that can be verified in some form. Now, again, there's always more than one way to do it. There's complete flexibility in the system around that. But, but where it falls down is stuff like poker and Lego. Like we had. If you go to stackexchange.com, we have an engine that tries to launch different Q and A topics, right? And people can propose Q and A topics, sample questions, and if it gets enough support within the network, we launched that Q and A site. So some of the ones we launched were poker and Lego, and they did horribly, right? Because I mean, they might still be there lingering on in some form, but it was an experiment. This is like a test, right? And some subjects work super well in the Stack engine and, and some don't. But the reason LEGO and poker don't work is because they're so social. Really. It's not about, you know, what's the rule here in poker. It's like, well, you know, what kind of cigars do we like to smoke while playing poker? Or, you know, what's, what's a cool set of cards to use when I'm playing poker? Or, you know, what, some strategies, like, say I have this hand, come up with some strategies I could use. It's more of a discussion around, like, what's happening, like with Lego, you know, same thing, like, here's this cool LEGO set I found. Look how awesome this is. And like, yeah, that's freaking awesome, right? So not a question, right? There's all these social components to the discussions that don't fit at all. Like, we literally have to disallow those in Stack Overflow because it's not about being social, it's about problems that you're facing in your work that you need concrete answers for, right? Like you have a real demonstrated problem that's sort of blocking you in something nobody's blocked by. You know, what should I do when I have a straight flush, right? Like, it's not a blocking problem in the world. It's just an opportunity to hang out and discuss. So discourse was a way to address that and say, look, you know, discussion forum software was very, very bad. And when I came out of Stack Overflow in late 2013, early 2012, it was still very, very bad. I expected it improved in the four years since I last looked, but it had not improved at all. And I was like, well, that's kind of terrible because I love these Communities of people talking about things that they love. They're just communities of interest. Right. And there's no good software for them. Like, startups would come to me and say, hey, Jeff, I want to, you know, I have this startup. Here's my idea. And the first thing I would say to them is like, well, first, why are you asking me? Like, I don't really know your field, right. Necessarily. Like, why aren't you asking, like the community, like the people that are interested in this problem, the people that are using your product, why aren't you talking to them? And then they'd say, oh, great idea. Like, how do I do that? And then that's when I started playing sad trombone because I realized all the software involving talking to your users, customers, audiences, patrons, whatever it is, it was all really bad. You know, it was like stuff that I would be embarrassed to recommend to other people. And yet that's where I felt they could get the biggest and strongest, most effective input for what they should be doing with their product. Right. It's from their users, from their community. Right. That's what we did on Stack Overflow.

So what we're talking about with forums, the. What is it? The dark matter of the Internet, it's still. I don't know if it's still, but for the longest time has some of the most passionate and fascinating discussions. And what's the usual structure? There's usually what. It's a. It's linear, so it's sequential. So you're posting one after the other. And there's pagination. So it's every. There's 10 posts and you go to the next page and that format still is used by like I'm. We're doing a lot of research with Tesla vehicles and there's Tesla Motors club for them, which is extremely.

Wanted to run that. Actually they pinged us about it. I don't think we got it, but I really would have liked to gotten that one.

But they've started before even 2012, I believe. I mean, they've been running for a long time. It's still an extremely rich source of information. So what. What's broken about that system and how are you trying to fix it?

I think there's a lot of power in connecting people that love the same stuff around that specific topic. Meaning Facebook's idea of connection is just any human that's related to another human. Right? Like through friendship or any other reason. Facebook's idea of the world is sort of the status update. Right? Like a friend of yours did Something ate at a restaurant, right? Whereas discussion forums were traditionally around the interest graph. Like, I love electric cars, specifically, I love Tesla, right? Like, I love the way they approach the problem. I love the style of the founder. I just love the design ethic. And there's a lot to like about Tesla. If you saw the oatmeal, he did a whole love comic to Tesla and it was actually kind of cool because I learned some stuff. He was somehow how great Tesla cars were, specifically like, how they were built differently. And he went into a lot of great detail that was really interesting. And to me, that Oatmeal post, if you read it, is the genesis of pretty much all interest communities. I just really love this stuff. So for me, for example, there's Yo Yos, right? Like, I'm into the yo yo communities, and there's these interest communities are just really fascinating to me, and I feel more connected to, to the yo yo communities than I do to friends that I don't see that often. Right. Like, to me, the powerful thing is the interest graph. And Facebook kind of dabbles in the interest graph. I mean, they have groups. You can sign up for groups and stuff, but it's really about the relationship graph. Like, this is my coworker, this is my relative, this is my friend, but not so much about the interest. So I think that's the linchpin of which forums and communities are built on that I personally love. Like, I, I, like I said, leadership is about passion, right? And being passionate about stuff is. It's a really valid way to look at the world. And I think it's a way a lot of stuff in the world gets done. Like, I once had someone describe me as. He's like, Jeff, you're a guy who you just get super passionate about a few things at a time, and you just go super deep in those things. And I was like, oh, that's kind of. Right. That's kind of what I do. I'll get into something and just be super into that for a couple of years or whatever and just learn all I can about it and go super deep in it. And that's how I enjoy experiencing the world, right? Like not being shallow on a bunch of things, but being really deep on a few things that I'm interested in. So forums kind of unlock that, right? And, you know, you don't want a world where everything belongs to Facebook, at least I don't. I want a world where communities can kind of own themselves, set their own norms, set their own rules, control the experience because community is also about ownership, right? Like if. If you're meeting at the Barnes and Noble every Thursday and Barnes and Noble says, get out of here, you guys don't buy enough books, well, you know, you're kind of hosed, right? Barnes and Noble owns you, right? Like, you can't. But if you have your own meeting space, you know, your own clubhouse, you can set your own rules, decide what you want to talk about there, and just really generate a lot better information than you could. Like hanging out at Barnes and Noble every Thursday at 3pm, right? So that's kind of the vision of Discourse is a place where it's fully open source, you can take the software, you can install it anywhere, and, you know, you and a group of people can go deep on whatever it is that you're into. And this works for startups, right? Startups are a group of people who go super deep on a specific problem, right? And they want to talk to their community. It's like, well, install discourse, right? That's what we do at Discourse. That's what I did at Stack Overflow. I spent a lot of time on Meta Stack Overflow, which is our internal, well, public community feedback site, and just experiencing what the users were experiencing, right? Because they're the ones doing all the work in the system and they had a lot of interesting feedback. And there's that 9010 rule of like, 90% of the feedback you get is not really actionable for a variety of reasons. It might be bad feedback, it might be crazy feedback, it might be feedback you just can't act on right now, but there's 10% of it that's like gold. It's like literally gold and diamonds, where it's like feedback of really good improvements to your core product that are not super hard to get to and actually make a lot of sense. And my favorite is about 5% of those stuff I didn't even see coming. It's like, oh, my God, I never even thought of that. But that's a brilliant idea, right? And I can point to so many features of Stack Overflow that we derive from Meta. Stack Overflow, Feedback and Meta Discourse, right? Same exact principle at Discourse. You know, we're getting ideas from the community. I was like, oh, my God, I never thought of that. But that's fantastic, right? Like, I love that relationship with the.

Community from having built these communities. What have you, what have you learned about. What's the process of getting a critical mass of members in a community? Is it luck, skill, timing, persistence? What is. Is it the tools like discourse that empower that community. What. What's the key aspect of starting from one guy or gal and then building it to two, and then 10 and 100 and 1,000 and so on?

I think we're starting with an n of 1. I mean, I think it's persistence. And also you have to be interesting. Like, somebody I really admire once said something that I always liked about blogging. He's like, here's how you blog. You have to have something interesting to say and have an interesting way of saying it, right?

Yeah.

And then do that for like 10 years. So that's the genesis is like, you have to have sort of something interesting to say that's not exactly what everybody else is saying. And an interesting way of saying, which is another way of saying, kind of entertaining way of saying it. And then as far as growing it, it's like ritual, you know? Like, you have to, like, say you're starting a blog. You have to say, look, I'm going to blog every week, three times a week. And you have to stick to that schedule, right? Because until you do that for, like, several years, you're never going to get anywhere. Like, it just takes years to get to where you need to get to. And part of that is having the discipline to stick with the schedule. And it helps. Again, if it's something you're passionate about, this won't feel like work. You're like, I love this. I could talk about this all day, every day. Right. You just have to do it in a way that's interesting to other people. And then as you're growing the community, that pattern of participation within the community, of, like, generating these artifacts and inviting other people to help you collaborate on these artifacts. Even in the case of blogging, I felt in the early days of my blog, which I started in 2004, which is really the genesis of Stack Overflow, if you look at all my blog, it leads up to Stack Overflow, which was, I have all this energy in my blog, but like 40,000 people were subscribing to me, and I was like, I want to do something. And then I met Joel and said, hey, Joel, I want to do something. Take this ball of energy from my blog and do something. And all the people reading my blog saw that. It's like, oh, cool, you're involving us. You're saying, look, you're part of this community. Let's build this thing together. Like, they pick the name. Like, we voted on the name for Stack Overflow on my blog. Like, we came up and naming is super hard. First of all, the hardest problem in computer science is coming with a good name for stuff, right? Yep. But you can go back to my blog. There's the poll where we voted and Stack Overflow became the name of the site. And all the early beta users of Stack Overflow were audience of my blog, plus Joel's blog, right? So we started from, like, if you look at the genesis, okay, I was just a programmer who said, hey, I love programming, but I have no outlet to talk about it. So I'm just gonna blog about it because I don't have enough people to work to talk to about it. Because at the time I worked a place where, you know, programming wasn't the core output of the company, it was a pharmaceutical company. And I just love this stuff, you know, to an absurd degree. So I was like, I'll just blog about it and then I'll find an audience. And eventually found an audience, eventually found Joel, and eventually built Stack Overflow from that one core of activity, right? But it was that repetition of feeding back in feedback from my blog comments, feedback from Joel, feedback from the early Stack Overflow community. When people see that you're doing that, they will follow along with you, right? They say, cool, you're here in good faith. You're actually not listening to everything, because that's impossible. That's impossible. But you're actually waiting our feedback in what you're doing. And why wouldn't I? Because who does all the work on Stack Overflow? Me. Joel? No, it's the other programmers that are doing all the work. So you gotta have some respect for that and then discipline around. Look, we're trying to do a very specific thing here on Stack Overflow. We're not trying to solve all the world's problems. We're trying to solve this very specific Q and A problem in a very specific way. Not because we're jerks about it, but because these strict set of rules help us get really good results, right? And programmers, that's an easy sell for the most part, because programmers are used to dealing with ridiculous systems of rules, like constantly. That's basically their job. So they're very. Oh yeah, super strict system of rules that lets me get what I want. That's programming, right? That's what Stack Overflow is.

So you're making it sound easy. But in 2004, let's go back there, in 2004, you started the blog Coding Horror. Was it called that at the very beginning?

It was one of the smart things. I did it's from a book by Steve McConnell, Code Complete, which is one of my favorite programming books, still probably my number one programming book for anyone to read. One of the smart things I did back then. I don't always do smart things. When I start stuff, I contacted Steven and said, hey, I really like this. It was a sidebar illustration indicating danger in code coding. Horror was like, watch out. And I love that illustration because it spoke to me, because I saw that illustration go, oh, my God, that's me. I'm always my own worst enemy. That's the key insight in programming is every time you write something, think, how am I going to screw myself? Because you will constantly. That icon was like, oh, yeah, I need to constantly hold that mirror up and look and say, look. You're very fallible. You're gonna screw this up. Like, how can you build this in such a way that you're not gonna screw it up later? Like, how can you get that discipline around making sure at every step, I'm thinking through all the things that I could do wrong or that other people could do wrong. Because that is actually how you get to be a better programmer a lot of times, right? So that sidebar illustration, I loved it so much, and I wrote Steve before I started my blog and said, hey, can I have permission to use this? Because I just really like this illustration. And Steve was kind enough to give me permission to do that and just continues to give me permission. So, yeah, really?

That's awesome. But in 2004, you started this blog. You know, you look at Stephen King, his book on writing, or Steven Pressfield War of Art book. I mean, it seems like writers suffer. I mean, it's a hard process of writing, right?

There's gonna be suffering. I mean, I won't kid you. Like, well, the work is suffering, right? Like, doing the work. Like, even when you're. Every week you're like, okay, that blog post wasn't very good. Or, you know, people didn't like it, or people said disparaging things about it. You have to, like, have. The attitude is like, you know, no matter what happens, I want to do this for me. Right? It's not about you. It's about me. I mean, in the end, it is about everyone, because this is how good work gets out into the world. But you have to be pretty strict about saying, like, you know, I'm selfish in the sense that I have to do this for me. You know, you mentioned Stephen King, like, his book on writing. But, like, one of the things I do, for example, when Writing is like, I read it out loud. One of the best pieces of advice for writing anything is read it out loud, like multiple times and make it sound like you're talking, because that is the goal of good writing. It should sound like you said it with slightly better phrasing because you have more time to think about what you're saying, but it should sound natural when you say it. And I think that's probably the single best writing advice I give everyone. It's just read it over and over out loud, make sure it sounds like something you would normally say, and it sounds good.

And what's your process of writing? See, there's usually a pretty good idea behind the. The blog post.

So ideas, right? So I think you gotta have the concept that there's so many interesting things in the world. Like, I mean, my God, the world is amazing, right? Like, it's. You can never write about everything that's going on because it's so incredible. But if you can't come up with, like, let's say, one interesting thing per day to talk about, then you're not trying hard enough because the world is full of just super interesting stuff. And one great way to like mine stuff is go back to old books because they bring up old stuff that's still super relevant. And I did that a lot because I was, like, reading classic programming books, and a lot of the early blog posts were like, oh, I was reading this programming book and they brought this really cool concept and I want to talk about it some more. And you get the. I mean, you're not claiming credit for the idea, but it gives you something interesting to talk about that's kind of evergreen, right? Like, you don't have to go, what should I talk about? So just go dig up some old classic programming books and find something that, oh, wow, that's interesting. Or how does that apply today? Or what about X and Y? Or compare these two concepts.

So pull a couple of sentences from that book and then sort of play off of it. Almost agree or disagree. So in 2007, you wrote that you were offered a significant amount of money to sell the blog. You chose not to. What were all the elements you were thinking about? Cause I'd like to take you back. It seems like there's a lot of nonlinear decisions you made through life. So what was that decision like?

Right. So one of the things I love is the choose your own adventure books, which I loved as a kid. And I feel like they're early programmer books because they're. They're all about if, then statements. If this, then this. And they're also very, very unforgiving. Like, there's all these sites that map the classic choose your own adventure books. And how many outcomes are bad? A lot of bad outcomes. So part of the game is like, oh, I got a bad outcome. Go back one step. Go back one further step. It's like, how did I get here? It's a sequence of decisions. And this is true of life, right? Every decision is a sequence. Individually, any individual decision is not necessarily right or wrong, but they lead you down a path. I do think there's some truth that. So this particular. The blog had gotten fairly popular. There's a lot of RSS readers that I discovered. And this guy contacted me out of the blue from this, like, bug tracking company. He's like, oh, I really want to buy your blog. For, like, I think it was around. It was $100,000. Might have been like 80,000, but it was a lot, right? And that's, you know, at the time, like, I would have a year's worth of salary all at once. So I'd really think about, like, well, you know, and I remember talking to people at the time, I was like, wow, that's a lot of money. But then, like, I really like my blog, right? Like, do I want to sell my blog? Because it wouldn't really belong to me anymore at that point. And one of the guidelines that I like to. I don't like to give advice to people a lot, but one of the pieces of advice I do give, because I do think it's really true and it's generally helpful, is whenever you're looking at a set of decisions like, oh, gosh, should I do A, B or C? You got to pick the thing that's a little scarier in that list because not, like, jump off a cliff scary, but the thing that makes you nervous, because if you pick the safe choice, it's usually you're not really pushing. You're not pushing yourself. You're not choosing the thing that's going to help you grow. So for me, the scarier choice was to say no. I was like, well, no, let's just see where this is going, right? Because then I own it. I mean, it belongs to me. It's my thing, and I can just take it and to some other logical conclusion, right? Because imagine how different the world would have been had I said yes and sold the blog. It's like, there probably wouldn't be stack overflow. A lot of other stuff would have changed. So for that particular decision, I think it was that same rule, like, what scares me a little bit more.

Do the thing that scares you.

Yeah.

So speaking of which startups, I think there's specifics and more general questions that a lot of people would be interested in. You've started Stack Overflow, you started Discourse. So what's the. There's one, two, three guys, whatever it is in the beginning, what was that process like? Do you start talking about it? Do you start programming? Do you start like, where is the birth and the catalyst that actually.

Well, I can talk about it in the context of both Stack Overflow and Discourse. So I think the key thing initially is there is a problem, something. There's some state of the world that's unsatisfactory to the point that, like, you're upset about it. Right? Like, in that case, it was Experts Exchange. I mean, Joel's original idea. Because I approached Joel's like, look, Joel, I have all this energy behind my blog. I want to do something, I want to build something, but I don't know what it is because I'm not, I'm honestly not a good idea person. I'm really not. I'm like the execution guy. I'm really good at execution, but I'm not good at like blue skying ideas. It's not my forte. Which is another reason why I like the community feedback. Because they blue sky all day long for you, right? So when I can just go in and cherry pick a blue sky idea from Community, even if I have to spend three hours reading to get one good idea, it's worth it, man. But anyway, so the idea from Joel was, hey, Experts Exchange, it's got great data, but the experience is hideous, right? It's trying to trick you. It feels like a used car salesman. It's just bad. So I was like, oh, that's awesome. It feeds into community. It feeds into like, you know, we can make Creative Commons. So I think the core is to have a really good idea that you feel very strongly about in the beginning. That like, there's a wrong in the world, that we will an injustice that we will right through the process of building this thing. For Discourse, it was like, look, there's no good software for communities to just hang out and like, do stuff, right? Like, whether it's problem solving, startup, whatever. Forums are such a great building block of online community and they're hideous. They were so bad, right? It was embarrassing. Like, I literally was embarrassed to be associated with this software, right? I was like, we have to have software that you'd be proud of. It's like, this is competitive with Reddit, this is competitive with Twitter. This is competitive with Facebook, right? I would be proud to have the software on my site. So that was the genesis of discourse. Was feeling very strongly about there needs to be a good solution for communities. So that's step one, Genesis. One idea you feel super strongly about, right? And then people galvanize around the idea. Like, Joel was already super excited about the idea. I was excited about the idea. So with the forum software, I was posting on Twitter, I had research. As part of my research, I start researching the problem, right? I found a game called Forum wars, which was a parody of forum. It's still very, very funny of like, forum behavior. Circa, like, I would say 2003. It's age some, right? Like, the behavior's a little different in there of Twitter. But it was awesome. It was very funny. And it was like a game. It was like an RPG and it had a forum attached to it. So it was like a game about forums with a forum attached to it. I was like, this is awesome, right? This is so cool. And the founder of that company or that project, it wasn't really a company, contacted me. This guy, Robin Ward from Toronto, said, hey, you know, I saw you've been talking about forums. And like, I really love that problem space. He's like, I'd still love to build really good form software because I don't think anything out there is any good. And I was like, awesome. At that point, I was like, we're starting a company because, like, I couldn't have wished for a better person to walk through the door and say, I'm excited about this too. Same thing with Joel, right? I mean, Joel is a legend in the industry, right? So when he walked through. So I'm excited about this problem. Like, me too, man. We can do this, right? So that, to me, is the most important step. It's like having an idea you're super excited about and another person, a co founder, right? Because again, you get that dual leadership, right? Of like, am I making a bad decision? Sometimes it's nice to have checks of like, is this a good idea? I don't know, right?

So those are the crucial seeds. But then starting to build stuff, whether.

It'S you programming somebody else, prototyping. So there's tons of research. There's tons of research, like, what's out there that failed because a lot of people looked at successes, oh, look at how successful X is. Everybody looks at the successes. Those are boring. Show Me, the failures. Because that is what's interesting. That's where people were experimenting, that's where people were pushing. But. And they failed. But they probably failed for reasons that weren't directly about the quality of their idea. Right? Yeah. So look at all the failures. Don't just look what everybody looks at, which is like, oh gosh, look at all these successful people. Look at the failures. Look at the things that didn't work. Research the entire field. And so that's the research that I was doing that led me to Robin. Right? Was that. And then when we, for example, we did Stack Overflow, we're like, okay, well I really like elements of voting and dig and Reddit. I like the Wikipedia. Everything's up to date. Nothing is like an old tombstone that has horrible out of date information. We know that works. Wikipedia is an amazing resource. Blogging, the idea of ownership is so powerful. Right? Like, oh, I. Joe wrote this and look how good Joe's answer is. Right? Like all these concepts, we rolling together, researching all the things that were out there that were working and why they were working and trying to like fold them into that again, that Frankenstein's monster of what Stack Overflow is. And by the way, that wasn't a free decision because there's still a ton of techniques tension in the Stack Overflow system. There's reasons people complain about Stack Overflow because it's so strict. Right? Why is it so strict? Why are you guys always closing my questions? It's because there's so much tension that we built into the system around like trying to get good, good results out of the system. And you know, it's not a free. That stuff doesn't come for free. Right. It's not like we'll have perfect answers and nobody will have to get their feelings hurt or nobody will have to get downvoted like that. It doesn't work that way. Right.

So this is an interesting point and a small tangent. Yeah, you're right about anxiety. So I've posted a lot of questions and written answers on Stack Overflow on the question side. Usually go to something very specific to something I'm working on. This is something you talk about that really the goal of Stack Overflow isn't about, is to write a question that's not about you. It's about the question that will help the community in the future.

Right. That's a tough sell. Right? Because people are like, well, you know, I don't really care about the community. What I care about is my problem, my problem. And that's fair, right. It's sort of that again, that tension, that balancing act of we want to help you but we also want to help everybody comes behind you, right? The long line of people are going to come say, oh, I kind of have that problem too, right? And if nobody's ever going to come up and say I have this problem too, then that question shouldn't exist on Stack Overflow because the question is too specific. And even that's tension, right? How do you judge that? How do you know that nobody's ever going to have this particular question again? So there's a lot of tension in the system.

Do you think that anxiety of asking the question, the anxiety of answering that tension is inherent to programmers, is inherent to this kind of process? Or can it be improved? Can it be Happy Land where that tension is not quite so harsh?

I don't think Stack Overflow can totally change the way it works. One thing they are working on finally is the ask page had not changed since 2011. I'm still kind of bitter about this because I feel like you have a Q and A system. And what are the core pages in a Q and A system? Well, first of all, the question, all the answers and also the ask page, particularly when you're a new user or someone trying to ask a question, that's the point at which you need the most help. And we just didn't adapt with the times. But the good news is they're working on this, from what I understand. And it's going to be a more wizard based format and you could envision a world where as part of this wizard based program, when you're asking the questions, come up with a good time title. What are good words to put in the title? One word that's not good to put in the title is problem, for example, I have a problem. Oh, you have a problem. Okay, a problem. That's great, right? Like you need specifics, right? Like, so it's trying to help you make a good question title, for example, that step will be broken out, all that stuff. But one of those steps in that wizard of asking could say, hey, I'm a little nervous. You know, I've never done this before. Can you put me in a queue for like special mentoring? Right. You could opt in to a special mentor. I think that would be fantastic. Like, I don't have any objection to that at all in terms of being an opt in system because there are people that are like, you know, I just want to help them. I want to help a person no matter what I want to go above and beyond. I want to spend, like, hours with this person. It depends what their goals are, right?

It's a great idea.

Who am I to judge, right? So that's fine. It's not precluded from happening. But there's a certain big city ethos that we started with. Like, look, we're of New York City. You don't come to New York City and expect them to be. Be, oh, welcome to the city, Joe. How's it going? Come on in, let me show you around. That's not how New York City works, right? I mean, and you know, again, New York City is a reputation for being rude, which I actually don't think it is, having been there fairly recently. It's not rude. People are just, like, going about their business, right? They're like, look, I have things to do. I'm busy. I'm a busy professional, as are you. And since you're a busy professional, certainly when you ask a question, you're gonna ask the best possible question, right? Because you're a busy professional and you would not accept anything less than a very well written question with a lot of detail about why you're doing it, what you're doing, what you researched, what you found, right? Because you're a professional like me, right? And this rubs people sometimes the wrong way. And I don't think it's wrong to say, look, I don't want that experience. I want just a more chill place for beginners. And I still think Stack over is not, Was never designed for beginners. Right. There's this misconception that, you know, even Joel says something, oh, yeah, Stack Overflow for beginners. And I think if you're a prodigy, it can be right, but for the most part, not really representative, right? Like, I think as a beginner, you want a totally different set of tools. You want, like, live screen sharing, live chat. You want access to resources. You want a playground, Like, a playground you can experiment in and, like, test. And all this stuff that we just don't give people because that was never really the audience that we were designing Stack Overflow for. That doesn't mean it's wrong. And I think it would be awesome if there was a site like that on the Internet or if Stack Overflow said, hey, we're going to start doing this, that's fine too. You know, I'm not there. I'm not making those decisions. But I do think the pressure, the tension that you described is there for people to be, look, I'm a little nervous because I know I gotta do my best work, right?

The other one is something you talk about, which is also really interesting to me, is duplicate questions. Or.it's a really difficult problem that you highlight.

Super problem. It's super hard.

Like, you can take one little topic and you could probably write 10, 20, 30 ways of asking about that topic, and they will be all different. I don't know if there should be one page that answers all of it. Is there a way that Stack Overflow can help disambiguate, like separate these duplicate questions or connect them together? Or is it a totally hopeless, difficult, impossible task?

I think it's a very, very hard computer science problem, and partly because people are very good at using completely different words. It always amazed me on StackOverflow, you'd have two questions that were functionally identical, and one question had like zero words in common with the other question. Like, oh my God, from a computer science perspective, how do you even begin to solve that? And it happens all the time. People are super good at this, right? Accidentally at asking the same thing in like, in 10, 20 different ways. And the other complexity is we want some of those duplicates to exist because if there's five versions with different words, have those five versions point to the one centralized answer, right? It's like, okay, this is duplicate. No worries. Here's the answer that you wanted over here on this. You know, the prime example that we want to have, rather than having 10 copies of the question and the answer. Because if you have 10 copies of the question, the answer. This also devalues the reputation system, which programmers hate. As I previously mentioned, you're getting reputation for an answer that somebody else already gave. It's like, well, it's an answer, but somebody gave that answer. So why are you getting reputation for the same answer as the other guy who gave it four years ago? People get offended by that, right? So the reputation system itself adds tension to the system in that the people who have a lot of reputation become very incentivized to enforce the reputation system. And for the most part, that's good. I know it sounds weird, but for most part it's like, look, strict systems, I think to use Stack Overflow, you have to have the idea that, okay, strict systems ultimately work better. And I do think in programming you're familiar with loose typing versus strict typing, right? The idea that you can declare a variable, not declare a variable, rather just start using a variable and okay, I see it's implicitly an integer. Bam. Awesome. And duck equals five. Well, duck is now an integer five, right? And you're like, cool, awesome, Simpler, right? Why would I want to worry about typing? And for a long time, like in the Ruby community, they're like, yeah, this is awesome. Like, you just do a bunch of unit testing, which is testing your program's validity after the fact to catch any bugs that strict typing of variables would have caught. And now you have this thing called TypeScript from Microsoft, from the guy who built C, Anders, who's one of the greatest minds in software development, right? Like in terms of language design, and says, no, no, no, we want to bolt on a strict Type system to JavaScript because it makes things better. And now everybody's like, my God, we deployed typescript and found 50 latent bugs that we didn't know about, right? Like this is super common. So I think there is a truth in programming that strictness, it's not the goal. We're not saying be super strict because strictness is correct. No, it's. No, no. Strictness produces better results. That's what I'm saying, right? So strict typing of variables, I would say you almost universally have consensus now is basically correct. Should be that way in every language, right? Duck equals five should generate an error because, no, you didn't declare, you didn't tell me that duck was an integer, right? That's a bug, right? Or maybe you mistyped. You type deck right, instead of duck, right? You never know. This happens all the time, right? So with that in mind, I will say that the strictness of the system is correct. Now, that doesn't mean cruel, that doesn't mean mean, that doesn't mean angry. It just means strict, okay? So I think where there's misunderstanding is and people get cranky, right? Like another question you asked is like, why are programmers kind of mean sometimes? Well, who do programmers work with all day long? So I have a theory that if you're at a job and you work with assholes all day long, what do you eventually become?

An asshole.

An asshole. And what is the computer except the world's biggest asshole? Because the computer has no time for your bullshit. The computer, the minute you make a mistake, everything is crashing down, right? One semicolon has crashed space missions, right? So that's normal. So you begin to internalize that. You begin to think, oh, my co worker, the computer is super strict and kind of a jerk about everything. So that's kind of how I'm going to be because I work with this computer and I have to exceed to its terms on everything. So therefore you start to Absorb that and you start to think, oh, well, being really strict arbitrarily is really good. An error of error code 56249 is a completely good error message because that's what the computer gave me. Right? So you kind of forget to be a person at some level. And you know how they say great detectives internalize criminals and kind of are criminals themselves? Like, this trope of the master detective is good because he can think like the criminal. Well, I do think that's true of programmers. Really good programmers think like the computer because that's their job. But if you internalize it too much, you become the computer. You kind of become a jerk to everybody because that's what you've internalized.

You're almost not a jerk, but you have no patience for a lack of strictness.

As you said, it's not out of a sense of meanness, it's accidental. But I do believe it's an occupational hazard of being a programmer is you start to behave like the computer. You're very unforgiving. You're very terse. You're very. Oh, wrong. Incorrect. Move on. It's like, well, can you help me? Like, what could I do to fix. No. Wrong. Next question. Right. Like that's normal for the computer. Right. Just fail. Next. Right. Like, I don't know if you remember in Saturday Night Live, like in the 90s, they had this character who was an IT guy. Yeah, the Move guy. Move. Move.

Was that Jimmy Fallon? No, no. Who played him? Okay, yeah, I remember Move.

Right. He had no patience for it.

Might have been Mad tv, actually.

Or Mad tv Might have been. Might have been. But anyway, that was the. That's always been the perception, right. You start to behave like the computer. It's like, oh, you're wrong. Out of the way.

You know, you've written so many blog posts about programming, about programs, programming programmers. What do you think makes a good. Let's start with what makes a good solo programmer.

Well, I don't think you should be a solo programmer. I think to be a good solo programmer, it's kind of like what I talked about. Well, not on Mike, but one of the things John Carmack, one of the best points he makes in the book Masters of Doom, which is a fantastic book, and anybody listening to this who hasn't read it, please read it. It's such a great book, is that at the time they were working on stuff like Wolfenstein and Doom. Like, they didn't have the resources that we have today. They didn't have stack overflow. They didn't have Wikipedia, they didn't have like discourse forums. They didn't have places to go to get people to help them. Right? They had to work on their own. And that's why it took a genius like Carmack to do this stuff, because you had to be a genius to invent from first principles, a lot of stuff. He was, he was like the hacks he was coming up with were genius, right? Genius level stuff. But you don't need to be a genius anymore. And that means not working by yourself. You have to be good at researching stuff online. You have to be good at asking questions, really good questions that are really well researched, which implies, oh, I went out and researched for three hours before I wrote this question. It's like, that's what you should be doing because that's what's going to make you good, right? To me, this is the big difference between programming in like the 80s versus programming today is like, you, you kind of had to be by yourself back then. Like, where would you go for answers? I remember in the early days when I was learning Visual Basic for Windows, like I would call the Microsoft helpline on the phone when I had like, program, because I was like, I don't know what to do. So I would like go and call and they had these huge phone banks and like, can you imagine how alien that is now? Like, who would do that? Right? Like, that's crazy. So there was just nowhere else to go when you got stuck, right? Like, I had the books that came with it. I read those, studied those religiously. I just saw a post from Steve Sinofsky that said this C version 7 came with like 10,000 pages of written material. Because where else were you going to figure that stuff out? Go to the library? I mean, you didn't have Wikipedia, you didn't have Reddit, you didn't have anywhere to go to answer these questions.

So you've talked about through the years basically not having an ego and not thinking that you're the best programmer in the world. So always kind of just looking to improve, to become a better programmer than you were yesterday. So how have you changed as a programmer and as a, as a thinker designer around programming over the past, what is it, 15 years really, of being a public figure?

I would say the big insight that I had is eventually as a programmer, you have to kind of stop writing code to be effective, which is kind of disturbing because you really love it. But you realize, like, being effective at programming, at programming in the general sense, doesn't mean Writing code. And a lot of times you can be much more successful by not writing code than writing code in terms of just solving the problems you have, essentially hiring people that are really good and setting them free and giving them basic direction on strategy and stuff. Because a lot of the problems you encounter aren't necessarily solved through really gnarly code. They're solved by conceptual solutions which can then be turned into code. But are you even solving the right problem? I would say for me, the main insight I have is to succeed as a programmer, you eventually kind of stop writing code. That's going to sound discouraging, probably to people hearing, but I don't mean it that way. What I mean is that you're coding at a higher level language eventually like, okay, so we're coding an assembly language, right? That's the beginning, right? You're hard coded to the architecture. Then you have stuff like C, where it's like, wow, we can abstract across the architecture. You can write code. I can then compile that code for arm or whatever, XA6 or whatever else is out there. And then even higher level than that, you're looking at like Python, Ruby, interpreted languages. And then to me as a programmer, like, okay, I want to go even higher. I want to go higher than that. How do I abstract higher than language? It's like, well, you abstract in spoken language and written language, right? Like you're sort of inspiring people to get things done, giving them guidance, like, what if we did this? What if we did this? You're writing in the highest level language that there is, which is for me, English, right? Whatever your spoken language is. So it's all about being effective, right? And I think Patrick McKenzie, Patty 11 on Hacker News and works at Stripe, has a great post about this of how calling yourself a programmer is a career limiting move at some level once you get far enough in your career. And I really believe that. And again, I apologize. This sound discouraging, I don't mean it to be, but he's so right. Because all the stuff that goes on around the code, like the people, like that's another thing. If you look at my early blog entries, it was about, wow, programming is about people more than it's about code. Which doesn't really make sense, right? But it's about, can these people even get along together? Can they understand each other? Can you even explain to me what it is you're working on? Are you solving the right problem? Peopleware, right? Another classic programming book, which again, up there with codecomplete, please read Peopleware, it's that software is people, right? People are the software first and foremost. So a lot of the skills that I was working on early in the blog were about figuring out the people parts of programming, which were the harder parts. The hard part of programming, once you get to a certain skill level in programming, you can pretty much solve any reasonable problem that's put in front of you. You're not writing algorithms from scratch. Right. That just doesn't happen. So any sort of reasonable problem put in front of you, you're going to be able to solve. But what you can't solve is our manager is a total jerk. You cannot solve that with code that is not a code solvable problem. And yet that will cripple you way more than, oh, we had to use this stupid framework I don't like, or, you know, Sam keeps writing bad code that I hate, or, you know, you know, Dave is off there in the wilderness writing God knows what. Right. These are not your problems. Your problem is your manager or a coworker is so toxic to everybody else in your team that like, nobody can get anything done because everybody's so stressed out and freaked out. Right. These are the problems that you have to attack.

Absolutely. And so as you go to these higher level abstractions, as you've developed as a programmer to higher, higher level abstractions and go into natural language, you're also the guy who kind of preached, you know, building it, you know, diving in and doing it and like learn by doing.

Yes.

Do you, do you worry that as you get to higher and higher level abstractions, you lose track of the lower level of just building is like, do you worry about that? You know, even not maybe now, but 10 years from now, 20 years from now?

Well, no. I mean, there is always that paranoia around, oh, gosh, I don't feel that's valuable since I'm not writing code. But for me, when we started the Discourse project, it was Ruby, which I didn't really know Ruby, as you pointed out, and this is another valuable observation of Stack overflow. You can be super proficient. For example, C, which I was working in. That's what we built, Stack Overflow and still is written in. And then switch to Ruby and you're a newbie again, but you have the framework. I know what a for loop is, I know what recursion is, I know what a stack trace is. I have all the fundamental concepts to be a programmer. I just don't know Ruby. So I'm still on a higher level. I'm not like a Beginner. Beginner. Like you're saying I'm just like, I need to apply my programming concepts I already know to Ruby.

Well, so there's a question that's really interesting. So looking at Ruby, how do you go about learning enough that your intuition can be applied? Well, that's carried over.

That's what I was trying to get to is like what I realized when I started with just me and Robin, I realized if I bother Robin, I am now costing us productivity.

Right.

Every time I go to Robin, rather than building the, the our first alpha version of Discourse, he's now answering my stupid questions about Ruby. Is that a good use of his time? Is that a good use of my time? The answer to both of those was resoundingly no. Right? Like we were getting to an Alpha and it was pretty much just, okay, we'll hire more programmers. Right? Like we eventually hired Neil and then eventually Sam who came in as a co founder. Actually it was Sam first, then Neil later. But the answer to that problem is just hire other competent programmers. It's not like teach now I shall pull myself by my bootstraps and learn Ruby. But at some point writing code becomes a liability to you in terms of getting things done. There's so many other things that go on in the project, like building the prototype you mentioned. Well, how do you. If you're not writing code, how does everybody keep focus on like, what are we building? Well, first basic mock ups and research. Right. What do we even want to build? There's a little bit of that that goes on, but then very quickly you get to the prototype stage, like build a prototype, let's iterate on the prototype really, really rapidly. That's what we do with this course and that's what we demoed to get our seed funding for Discourse was the alpha version of Discourse that we had running and ready to go. And it was very, it was bad. I mean, it was. I'll just tell you it was bad. We have screenshots of it. I'm just like embarrassed to look at it now. But it was the prototype we were figuring out like what's working, what's not working. Because there's such a broad gap between, between the way you think things will work in your mind or even on paper and the way they work once you sit and live in the software, like actually spend time living and breathing in software. So different. So my philosophy is get to a prototype and then what you're really optimizing for is speed of iteration, like how you can turn the crank how quickly can we iterate? That's the absolutely critical metric of any software project. And I had a tweet recently that people liked and I totally. This is so fundamental to what I do, is like, if you want to measure the core competency of any software tech company, it's the speed at which somebody can say, hey, we really need this word in the product. Change this word, right, because it will be more clear to the users, like what? Like instead of respond, it's reply or something. But there's some. From the conception of that idea to how quickly that single word can be changed in your software and rolled out to users, that is your life cycle. That's your health, your heartbeat. If your heartbeat is like super slow, you're basically dead. No, seriously, like, if it takes two weeks or even a month to get that single word changed, everybody's like, oh, my God, this is a great idea. That word is so much clearer. I'm talking about like a super. Like, everybody's on board for this change. It's not like, let's just change a word because we're bored. It's like, this is an awesome change. And then it takes months to roll out. It's like, well, you're dead. You can't iterate. You can't. How you can do anything right. So anyway, about the heartbeat, it's like, get the prototype and then iterate on it. That's what I view as the central tenet of modern software development.

That's fascinating you put it that way. It's actually. So I work in. I build autonomous vehicles. And when you look at what maybe compare Tesla to most other automakers, the psych, the whatever. The heartbeat for Tesla is literally days now in terms of they can over the air, deploy software updates to all their vehicles, which is markedly different than every other automaker, which takes years to update a piece of software. And so. And that's reflected in everything. That's the final product. That's reflected in really how slowly they adapt to the times.

And to be clear, I'm not saying being a hummingbird is the goal either. It's like you don't want a heartbeat. That's like so fast. It's like you're just freaking out. But like, it is a measure of health. You should have a healthy heartbeat. It's up to. For people listening to decide what that means. But it has to be healthy, it has to be reasonable. Because otherwise you're just gonna be frustrated. Cause like, that's how you build software. You make mistakes, you roll it out, you live with it, you see what it feels like and say, oh God, that was a terrible idea. Oh my gosh, this could be even better if we did Y. Right? You turn the crank and then the more you do that, the faster you get ahead of your competitors ultimately, because it's rate of change. Right? Delta V. Right. How fast are you moving? Well, within a year, you're gonna be miles away by the time they catch up with you. Right? Like, that's the way it works. And plus, users, as a software developer user, I love software that's constantly changing because I don'. Understand. People get super pissed off when like, oh, they changed the software on me. How dare they. I'm like, yes, change the software. Change it all the time, man. That's. That's what makes this stuff great, is that it can be changed so rapidly and become something that is greater than it is now. Now, granted, there are some changes that suck. I admit, I've seen it many times. But in general, it's like, that's what makes software cool, right? Is that it is so malleable. Like, fighting that is like, weird to me because it's like, well, you're fighting the essence of the thing that you're building. Like, that doesn't make sense. You want to really embrace that. Not to be a hummingbird, but embrace it to a healthy cycle of your heartbeat. Right?

So you talk about that. People really don't change. It's true. That's why probably a lot of the stuff you write about in your blog probably will remain true.

Well, there's a flip side of the coin. People don't change. So investing in understanding people is like learning Unix in 1970 because nothing has changed. Right? All those things you've learned about people will still be valid 30, 40 years from now. Whereas if you learn the latest JavaScript framework, that's going to be good for like two years, right?

Exactly. But if you look at the future of programming, so there's a people component, but there's also the technology itself.