Kind: captions
Language: en
No one anywhere who's serious believes
that Cookie banners does anything good
for anyone. Yet, we've been unable to
get rid of it. This is the thing that
really gets me about cookie banners,
too. It's not just the EU. It's the
entire world. You can't hide from cookie
banners anywhere on this planet. If you
go to goddamn Mars on one of Elon's
rockets and you try to access a web
page, you'll still see a cookie banner.
No one in the universe is safe from this
nonsense. It sometimes feels like we're
barely better off. Like web pages aren't
that different from what they were in
the late 90s, early 2000s. They're still
just forms. They still just write to
databases. A lot of people, I think, are
very uncomfortable with the fact that
they are essentially CRUD monkeys. They
just make systems that create, read,
update, or delete rows in a database.
And they have to compensate for that
existential dread by over complicating
things. That's a huge part of the
satisfaction of driving a race car is
driving it at the edge of adhesion, as
we call it, where you're essentially
just a tiny movement away from spinning
out. Doesn't take much. Then the car
starts rotating. Once it starts
rotating, you lose grip and you're going
for the wall. That balance of danger and
skill is what's so intoxicating.
The following is a conversation with
David Heinmire Hansen, also known as
DHH. He is a legend in the programming
and tech world. Brilliant and
insightful, sometimes controversial and
always fun to talk to. He's the creator
of Ruby on Rails, which is an
influential web development framework
behind many websites used by millions of
people, including Shopify, GitHub, and
Airbnb.
He is the co-owner and CTO of 37 signals
that created base camp and once he is a
New York Times best-selling author
together with his co-author Jason
Frerieded of four books rework remote
getting real and it doesn't have to be
crazy at work. And on top of that, he's
also a race car driver, including being
a class winner at the legendary 24-hour
lemon race. This is the Lex Rubin
podcast. To support it, please check out
our sponsors in the description and
consider subscribing to this channel.
And now, dear friends, here's DH.
For someone who became a legendary
programmer, you officially got into
programming late in life. And I guess
that's because
uh you tried to learn how to program a
few times and you failed. So can you
tell me the uh the full story, the saga
of your failures to learn programming?
Was Commodore 64 involved? Commodore 64
was the inspiration? I really wanted a
Commodore 64. That was the first
computer I ever sat down in front. And
the way I sat down in front of it was I
was 5 years old and there was this one
kid on my street who had a Commodore 64.
No one else had a computer, so we were
all the kids just getting over there and
we were all playing Y Kung Fu. I don't
know if you've ever seen that game. It
was one of the original fighting games.
It's really a great game. And I was
playing that for the first time at 5
years old. And we were like seven kids
sitting up in this one kid's bedroom all
taking our turn to play the game. And I
just found that unbelievably
interesting. And I begged and I begged
and I begged my dad, could I get a
computer? And he finally comes home.
He's like, "I got your computer." I was
like, "Yes, my own Commodore 64." And he
pulls out this black, green, and blue
keyboard. That's an Armstrong 464. I was
like, "Dad, what's this?
>> The disappointment.
>> This is not a Commodore 64." But it was
a computer. So, I got my first computer
at essentially 6 years old, that
Armstrad 464. And of course, the first
thing I wanted to do, I wanted to play
video games. And I think the computer,
which he, by the way, had traded for a
TV and a stereo recorder or something
like that, came with like two games. One
was this Frogger game where you had to
escape from underground. It was actually
kind of dark, like this frog. You're
trying to get it out from underground.
And I was just I was pretty bad at it.
And I only had those two games. And then
I wanted more games. And one way to get
more games when you're a kid who don't
have a lot of money and can't just buy a
bunch of games is to type them in
yourself. Back in ' 84 85 magazines
would literally print source code at the
back of their magazines and you could
just sit and type it in. So I tried to
do that and it would take like two hours
to print this game into the Armistrad
and of course I'd make some spelling
mistake along the way and something
wouldn't work and the whole thing I
wasn't that good of English. I was born
in Denmark. So I was really trying to
get into it because I wanted all these
games and didn't have the money to buy
them and I tried quite hard for quite a
while to get into it but it just never
clicked. And then I discovered the magic
of piracy. And after that I kind
basically just took some time off from
learning to program because well now
suddenly I had access to all sorts of
games. So that was the first attempt
like around six seven years old. And
what's funny is I remember these
fragments. I remember not understanding
the purpose of a variable. If if there's
a thing and you assign something, why
would you assign another thing to it?
So, for some reason, I understood
constants. Like, constants made sense to
me, but variables didn't. Then, maybe
I'm 11 or 12. I've gotten into the
AmIGGA at this point. The Amigga, by the
way, still perhaps my favorite computer
of all time. I mean, this is one of
those things where you like people get
older and they're like, "Oh, the music
from the 80s was amazing." To me, even
as someone who loves computers, who
loved new computers, the AmIGGA was this
magical machine that was made by the
same company that produced the Commodore
64. And I got the AmIGGA 500, I think in
87.
>> Look at this sexy thing. That is a sexy
machine right there.
>> This is from an age, by the way, where
computing wasn't global in the same
sense. The different territories had
different computers that were popular.
The Amigga was really popular in Europe,
but it wasn't very popular at all in the
US, as far as I understand. It wasn't
popular in Japan. The there were just
different machines. The Apple 2 was a
big thing in the US. I'd never even
heard of Apple in the8s in Copenhagen.
But the Omega 500 was the machine that
brought me to want to try it again. And
you know what's funny? The reason I
wanted to try it again was I remembered
the first time to learn. And then there
was this programming language that was
literally called easy Amos.
>> Mhm.
>> Like the easy version of Amos. I'm like,
if it's if it's easy Amos, how hard can
it be? I got to be able to figure this
out. And this time I tried harder. I got
into conditionals. I got into loops. I
got into all these things and I still I
couldn't do it.
And on the second attempt, I really got
to the point like maybe this is just
maybe I'm not smart enough. Maybe
programming is just not maybe it's too
much math. Like I like math in this sort
of superficial way. I don't like it in
the deep way that some of my perhaps
slightly nerdier friends did who I had
tremendous respect for. Like I'm not
that person. I'm not the ma math geek
who's going to figure it all out. So
after that attempt with easy Amos and
failing to even get I don't even think I
completed one even very basic game. I
thought the program is just not for me.
I'm going to have to do something else.
I still love computers. I still love
video games. I actually at that time had
already begun making friends with people
who knew how to program who weren't even
programming easy Amos. They were
programming freaking Assembler. And I
would sit down and just go I'm how do
you the moves and the memories and the
copies? How do you even do this? I don't
even understand how you go from this to
AmIGGA demos, for example. That was the
big thing with the Amigga. had this
wonderful demo scene in Europe. It's
this really interesting period of time
in the Amigga's history where you had
all these programmers spread out mostly
all over Europe who would compete on
graphic competitions
>> where you could probably bring one of
these on YouTube on on this thing. They
would make these little um almost like
music videos combining some MIDI music,
combining some cool graphics and they
would do all of it in like 4K. 4
kilobytes that is not 4K is a
revolution, 4 kilobytes of of memory.
And I just thought that was such a cool
scene. This was obviously pre- internet.
It was even prebs
bulletin board systems to some extent.
me was you swap your demo software with
someone else by sending them a disc in
the mail
>> like the 3.5s and I just I was enamored
with that whole scene. I was enamored
with what they were able to create and I
just wanted to be a part of it even
though I kind of didn't have any skills
to contribute and that's how I got into
running BBS's. I didn't learn
programming then and I wouldn't learn
programming until much later until I was
almost 20 years old. The bulletin board
systems existed in this funny space
where they were partly a service to the
demo scenes allowing all these demo
groups to distribute their amazing
demos. And then it was also a place to
trade piracy software, pirated software.
And I ended up starting one of those
when I was 14 years old in my tiny
little bedroom in Copenhagen. I had my
at that point Amigga 4000. I had three
telephone lines coming into my tiny
room.
>> Nice.
>> Which was funny because again, I'm 14
years old. By the time I was installing
my third line, you had to get someone
from the telephone company to come do
it. I get this guy and he's just looking
around like, "What is this? Why the hell
is a 14-year-old having three phone
lines into their tiny little bedroom?
What are what's going on here? Why are
all these modems blinking red and um
black and making funny sounds?" Did your
parents know?
>> They did and they didn't. They knew I
had the phone lines. They knew I had the
computer. I don't think they really
understood that I was trading pirated
software that was both illegal and
whatever else was going on.
>> Oh, we should probably say that in
Europe, maybe you can comment on this in
especially in Eastern Europe, but Europe
in general, piracy, I think, was more
acceptable than it was in the United
States. I don't know there maybe maybe
it's just my upbringing. That
conversation wasn't present. I never
spoke to anyone growing up in Denmark
who had any moral qualms whatsoever
about piracy. It was just completely
accepted that
>> you're a kid. You want a lot of games.
You don't have a lot of money. What do
you do? You trade.
>> Yeah.
>> Some people would occasionally buy a
game. I mean, I once bought a uh Sega
Master System and the I bought one game
cuz that was what I could afford. I got
Afterburner 2. I don't know if you've
ever played that game. It's pretty bad
implementation on the uh Sega Master
System, but it was like 600 crowners and
I was making money at that time uh doing
newspaper delivery. I had to do that for
a month to afford one game. I like video
games way too much to wait a month just
to get one game. So piracy was just the
way you did it. And that was how I got
into running this bulletin board system,
being part of the demo scene, being part
of the piracy scene to some extent. And
then also at some point realizing, oh,
you can actually also make money on this
and this can fund buying more phone
lines and buying more modems and buying
more amiggas. Oh yeah, that was one of
the demo parties. These were amazing
things.
>> What am I looking at?
>> Look at all those CRT monitors.
>> All these CRT monitors. Again, when I
was 14, I I don't understand fully why
my parents allowed this, but I traveled
from Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark,
to O, this tiny little town in Judan on
the train with a bunch of dudes who were
like late teens in their 20s. I'm 14
years old. I'm lugging my 14in CRT
monitor with my computer in the back to
go to the party. That was what it was
called. That was the biggest demo scene
party at that time. And it was exactly
as you see in that picture. Thousands of
people just lining up with their
computers, programming demos all day
long, and trading these things back and
forth.
>> That's kind of awesome. Not going to
lie, it's a little ridiculous.
>> It's totally awesome. And I I I miss it
in ways where the internet has connected
people in some ways, but the connection
you get from sitting right next to
someone else
>> who has their own CRT monitor who's
lugged it halfway around the country to
get there is truly special because it
was also just this burst of creativity.
You're constantly running around. You're
constantly surrounded by people who are
really good at what they could do.
They're really good at programming
computers. It's infectious. It was part
of that pang I felt then going like oh
man why can't I figure this out? I mean
why can't I even figure out easy Amos?
I it's kind of frustrating.
>> But on your third attempt you were more
successful.
>> So third attempt is when I start getting
it. This is when I start helping out
let's say building things for the
internet. So around 95 I think it is or
I discovered the internet. Actually
ninth grade that was my first
experience. I went to some university in
in Denmark and in ninth grade we had
this excursion and they sat us down in
front of a computer and the computer had
Netscape Navigator the first version or
maybe it was even the the precursor to
that and they had a text editor and us
kids just got like hey built something
on the internet and it was just HTML and
the first thing you do is like oh I can
make the text text blink by just putting
in this tag and saving it. That was that
moment. That was actually when I
reawakened the urge to want to learn to
program because I got a positive
experience. All the other experiences I
had with programming was I'd spend hours
typing something in, I'd click run and
it wouldn't work. And I'd get an error
message that made no sense to me as a
kid, either at six or seven or at 12.
And here I am sitting in front of a
computer connected to the internet and
I'm making text blink. I'm making it
larger. I'm turning it into an H1 or an
H2.
And these guys out here, we just did it
for like an hour and a half. And
suddenly I go, "Oh, I can make things
for the internet that someone in Germany
can be able to access and see and I
don't have to ask anyone for permission.
This is super cool. I got to do more of
this." So I got into the internet. I got
into working with HTML and I still had
all these friends from these demo
parties
>> and I started working with them on
creating gaming websites. I'd write
about the video games. I'd review him.
This was another good way of getting new
video games was to walk down to some
store and say like, hey, I'm a I'm a
journalist. I'm like this 15year-old kid
and they're they're looking at me,
you're you're a journalist. Yeah. Can I
borrow some some games? Cuz this was
when games moved on to the PlayStation
and these other things. You couldn't
just as easily pirate, at least not at
first. So, I went down there, did all
that. And that started the journey of
the internet for me. It started working
on these gaming websites, working with
programmers,
figuring out that I could do something.
I could work on the HTML part. It's not
really programming, but it kind of
smells like it. You're talking to a
computer, you're making it put text on
the screen, and you're communicating
with someone halfway around the world.
So, that became my pathway back into
programming. And then slowly I picked up
more and more of it. First website I did
with someone, one of these programmers
from the demo scene that was dynamic was
ASP.NET. net and it wasn't even actually
called.net that was what we started on
and then we moved on to PHP and PHP was
when I finally got it when it finally
clicked when conditionals and loops and
variables and all of that stuff started
to make sense enough to me that I
thought I can do this.
>> So would it be fair to say that we
wouldn't have DHH without PHP and
therefore you owe all your success to
PHP? 100% that's true and it's even
better than that because it's PHP to me
didn't just give me a start in terms of
making my own web applications it
actually gave me a bar in many ways I
think the pinnacle of developer web
developer ergonomics is late '90s PHP
you write this script you FTP it to a
server and instantly it's deployed
instantly it's available you change
anything in that file and you reload
boom it's right there. There's no web
servers, there's no setup, there's just
an Apache
>> that runs mod PHP. And it was
essentially the easiest way to get a
dynamic web page up and going. And this
is one of the things I've been chasing
that high for basically the rest of my
career that it was so easy to make
things for the internet in the mid to
late 90s. How did we lose the
sensibilities that allowed us to not
just work this way, but get new people
into the industry to give them their
success experiences that I had, adding a
freaking Blink tag to an HTML page,
ftping a PHP page to an Apache web
server without knowing really anything
about anything, without knowing anything
about frameworks, without knowing
anything about setup,
all of that stuff have really taken us
to a place where It sometimes feels like
we're barely better off. Like web pages
aren't that different from what they
were in the late 90s, early 2000s.
They're still just forms. They still
just write to databases. A lot of
people, I think, are very uncomfortable
with the fact that they are essentially
CRUD monkeys. They just make systems
that create, read, update, or delete
rows in a database. And they have to
compensate for that existential dread by
over complicating things. Now, that's a
bit of a character. There's more to it,
and there's things you can learn for
more sophisticated ways of thinking
about this, but there's still an ideal
here, which was why I was so happy you
had Peter Levels on because he still
basically works like this. And I look at
that and go like, man, that's amazing.
>> Yeah, you're chasing that high. He's
been high all along using PHP, jQuery,
and uh SQLite.
>> I think it's amazing because he's
proving that this isn't just a nostalgic
dream. He's actually doing it. He's
running all these businesses. Now, some
of that is, as he would admit up first
up front, is that he's just one guy. And
you can do different things when you're
just one guy. When you're working in a
team, when I started working on the
team, when I started working with Jason
Freed on Base Camp, we at first didn't
use version control together. I used
version control for myself and then I
thought, you know what, designers
ah, they're probably not smart enough to
figure out CVS. Yeah.
>> And therefore I just like, "No, no, no.
You just FTP it up. You just FTP it." I
knew they knew how to do FTP. And then
after the third time, I had overridden
their changes. I was like, "God damn it.
I guess I got to teach Jason CBS to not
do that again." But I think there's
still way more truth to the fact that we
can work the way we did in the '90s,
work the way Peter works today, even in
the team context and that we've been far
too willing to hand over far too much of
our developer ergonomics to the
merchants of complexity.
>> And you've been chasing that with Rails
8. So h how do you bring all the cool
features of a modern framework and make
it no build make it as as easy to create
something and to ship it as it was in
the '9s with just PHP. It's very
difficult for me to beat the Peter
Level's approach
uh of just just it's so easy to just
ship some PHP and it should be why
should it be harder than that? Our
computers today are almost infinitely
faster than what they were in the 90s.
So, shouldn't we be able to work in even
easier ways? We should be looking back
on the '90s and go like, "Oh, that was
way too complicated. Now we have more
sophisticated technology that's way
faster and it allows us to work in these
easier to use ways." But that's not
true. But now you can see the line I
draw in my work with Ruby and Rails and
especially with Rails 8. No build to me
is reaching back to that '90s feeling
and going now we can do some of those
things without giving up on all the
progress because I do think you can get
too nostalgic. I do think you can start
just fantasizing that everything was
better in the '90s. It wasn't. I mean I
was there. There was a lot of things
that sucked. And if we can somehow find
a way to combine
the advantages and advances we've had
over the past 20 years with that ease of
developer ergonomics, we can win. No
build is a rejection of the part of web
development I've hated the most in the
past 10-15 years which is the JavaScript
scene.
>> Yeah.
>> And I don't say that as someone who
hates JavaScript. I mean I often joke
that JavaScript is my second favorite
programming language. It's a very
distant second. Ruby is by far in a way
number one. But I actually like
JavaScript. I don't think it's a bad
language. It gets a lot of
>> flak. People add a string of two plus a
one and it gives something nonsense and
I just go like, "Yeah, but why are you
why would you do that? Just don't do
that." The language is actually quite
lovely, especially the modern version
ES6 that really introduced a proper
class syntax to it. So I could work with
JavaScript in many of the same ways that
I love working with Ruby made things so
much better. But in the early 20110s
until quite recently, all of that
advancement happened in pre-processing
happened in built pipelines. The
browsers couldn't speak a dialect of
JavaScript that was pleasant to work
with. So everyone started to
pre-ompiling their JavaScript to be able
to use more modern ways of programming
with a browser that was seen as stuck
with an ancient version of JavaScript
that no one actually wanted to work
with. And that made sense to me, but it
was also deeply unpleasant. And I
remember thinking during that time, the
dark ages as I refer to them with
JavaScript, that
this cannot be the final destination.
There's no way that we have managed to
turn the internet into such an
unpleasant place to work where I would
start working on a project in JavaScript
using Webpack and all of these
dependencies and I would put it down for
literally 5 minutes and the thing
wouldn't compile anymore. The amount of
churn that the JavaScript community,
especially with its frameworks and its
tooling, went through in the decade from
2010 to 2020 was absurd.
And you had to be
trapped inside of that asylum to not
realize what an utterly
perverse situation we had landed
ourselves in. Why does everything break
all the time? I mean, the joke wouldn't
be just that the software would break.
That would annoy me personally. But then
I'd go on hacker news and I'd see some
thread on the latest JavaScript release
of some framework and the thread would
be like um someone would ask well aren't
we using the thing we just used three
months ago and people would be like that
thing is so outdated that's so three
months ago you got to get with the new
program we're completely rewriting
everything for the teen time and
anything you've learned in the framework
you've been spending the last amount of
time on it's all useless. You got to
throw everything out and you got to
start over. Why aren't you doing it,
stupid idiot?
>> Is that a kind of mass hysteria that
took over the developer community? You
think? Like where you have to keep
creating new frameworks and new
frameworks and we are we past that dark
age?
>> I think we're getting out of it. And
we're getting out of it because browsers
have gotten so much better. There was a
stagnation in browser technology. Some
of it was an overhang all the way back
from IE5.
So I5 essentially put the whole internet
development experience into a deep
freeze because Microsoft won the browser
wars in the mid 2000s and then they
basically disbanded their browser
development team because they're like
all right job done we don't need any
more innovation on the internet. Can we
just go back to writing Windows forms or
something now that we control
everything?
And it really wasn't until obviously
Firefox kind of kindled a little bit of
something, then Chrome got into the
scene and Google got serious about
moving the web forward that you had an
kindling of maybe the browser could be
better, maybe the browser wasn't frozen
in time in 2005, maybe the browser could
actually evolve like at the development
platform that it is. But then what
happened was you had a lot of smart
people who poured in to the web because
the web turned out to be the greatest
application development platform of all
time. This was where all the money was
being made. This were this was where all
the billionaires were being minted. This
was where the Facebooks and whatever of
the world came to be. So you had all of
this brain power applied to the problem
of how to work with the web. And there
were some very smart people with some
I'm sure very good ideas who did not
have uh programmer happiness as their
motivation. Number one, they had other
priorities and those priorities allowed
them to discount and even rationalize
the complexity they were injecting
everywhere. Some of that complexity came
from organizational structure. When you
have a company like Facebook for example
that does depend on the web and want to
push it forward but have sliced the
development role job into these tiny
little niches. I'm a front-end
glob pipeline configurator. Oh yeah well
I'm a front-end whatever engineer. And
suddenly the web developer was no longer
one person. 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 can
just write text files, send them to a
browser, and you have an incredible
development.
>> And we should also say that it can kind
of be broken. At least the HTML, but
even the JavaScript could be a little
bit broken, and it kind of still works.
Like maybe it halfass works, but like
the just the amount of mess of smelly
code that a browser has to deal with is
insane. 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
web page 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. I love the
fact that the Ladybird project, for
example, is trying to make a new browser
engine from scratch. I've supported that
project. I would encourage people to
look into that. It's really a wonderful
>> nice
>> thing. It's staffed by a bunch of people
who worked on other browser projects in
the past.
>> Truly independent web browser.
>> We really need that. But I can hold that
thought in my head. At the same time, I
hold the thought in my head that
Google's Chrome was pivotal to the web
surviving as the premier web development
platform. If it had not been for Google
and their entire business depending on a
thriving open web,
Apple, Microsoft, I think would have
been just as fine to see the web go away
to disappear into being something that
just served native web applica or native
mobile applications and native desktop
applications that they could completely
control. So I have all sorts of problems
with Google, but it's not Chrome. Chrome
is a complete gift to web developers
everywhere to the web as a development
platform and they deserve an enormous
amount of credit I think for that even
if it's entangled with their business
model and half of Chrome is code that
spies on you or informs targeted ads and
a bunch of things I'm not a big fan of.
I can divorce that from the fact we need
champions in the corner of the web who
have trillions of dollars of market cap
value riding on the open web.
>> We're going to take tangents upon a
tangent upon a tangent. So, let's go to
Chrome. I think Chrome positive impact
on humanities is immeasurable for
reasons that you just described. On the
technology front, the features they
present, the competition they created,
it's spurred on this wonderful
flourishing of web technologies. But
anyway, I have to ask you about the the
recent stuff with the DOJ trying to
split up Chrome and Google. Do you think
this is a good idea? Do you think this
does harm? Is a disaster?
And I say that as someone who's been
very sympathetic to the antitrust fight
because I do think we have antitrust
problems in technology. But the one
place where we don't have them by and
large is with browsers, is with the
tools we use to access the open web.
First of all, we have Firefox. Now,
Firefox is not doing all that great and
Firefox has been propped up by Google
for many years to deter from exactly
what's going on with the DOJ that they
were the only game in town. Apple has
Safari. I have a bunch of problems with
Apple, too, but I love Safari. I love
the fact that we have a premier browser
running on a premier operating system
that people can't turn the web into just
a Chrome experience, but I also think
that the open web needs this trillion
dollar champion or at least benefits
from it. Maybe doesn't need it, but it
certainly benefits from it. And of all
the things that are wrong with monopoly
formation in technology, Chrome is the
last thing. And this is why I get so
frustrated sometimes about the anti- or
the monopoly fight that there are real
problems and we should be focusing on
the premier problems first like the toll
booths on our mobile phones. There are
far bigger problem. It's not the open
web. It's not the tools that we use to
access the open web. If I don't want to
use Chrome, if my customers of my
businesses that run on the internet
don't want to use Chrome, they don't
have to. We're never forced to go
through it. the open internet is still
open. So, I think it's a real shame that
the DOJ has chosen to pursue Google in
this way. I do think there are other
things you can nail Google for and their
ad monopoly maybe or the uh shenanigans
they've done in controlling both sides
of the ad ledger that they both control
the supply and the demand. There are
problems. Chrome isn't it. And you end
up making the web much worse. And this
is the thing we always got to remember
when we think about legislation, when we
think about um monopoly fights is you
may not like how things look today and
you may want to do something about it,
but you may also make it worse. The good
intentions behind the GDPR in Europe
currently has amounted to what? cookie
banners that everyone on the internet
hates that helps no one do anything
better, anything more efficient, that
saves no privacy in any way, shape, or
form, has been a complete boondoggle,
that has only enriched lawyers and
accountants and
bureaucrats.
>> Yeah. You said that the cookie banner is
a monument for why Europe is losing is
is doing the worst uh of all the regions
in tech. It's it's a monument to good
intentions leading straight to hell.
>> And the Europe is actually world class
>> in good intentions leading straight to
hell.
>> So hell is the cookie accept button.
They have to accept all cookies. That's
what hell looks like over and over. You
don't actually ever get to the web page.
>> Just on a human scale. Try to imagine
how many hours every day are wasted
clicking that away and how much harm
we've done to the web as a platform that
people enjoy because of them. The
internet is ugly in part because of
cookie banners. Cookie banners were
supposed to save us from advertisement
and advertisement can make the web ugly.
There's plenty of examples of that. But
cookie banners made the entire internet
ugly in one fell swoop. And that's a
complete tragedy. But what's even worse,
and this is why I call it out as a
monument to everything the EU gets
wrong, is that we have known this for a
decade. No one anywhere who's serious
believes that cookie banners does
anything good for anyone. Yet, we've
been unable to get rid of it. There's
this one piece of legislation that's
now, I think, 10 or 12 years old. It's
complete failure on every conceivable
metric. Everyone hates it universally,
yet we can't seem to do anything about
it.
That's a bankruptcy declaration for any
body of bureaucrats who pretend or
pretend to make things better for not
just citizens but people around the
world. This is the thing that really
gets me about cookie banners, too. It's
not just the EU. It's the entire world.
You can't hide from cookie banners
anywhere on this planet. If you go to
goddamn Mars on one of Elon's rockets
and you try to access a web page, you'll
still see a cookie banner. No one in the
universe is safe from this nonsense.
>> Probably the interface on on the rocket
>> slower. You have basically
150 second ping time. So it'll take you
45 seconds just to get through the
cookie banners from Mars.
>> Um, all right. Let's walk back up the
stack of this recursive tangents we've
been taking. So Chrome, we should say,
at least in my opinion, is not winning
unfairly. It's winning in the fair way
by just being better.
>> It is. If I was going to steal man the
other side just for a half second,
>> people would say, well, maybe yes, most
people do sort of begrudgingly agree
that Chrome is a pretty good browser.
But then they'll say the reason it got
dominance was distribution. And the
reason they got distribution was because
Google also controls Android and
therefore can make Chrome the default
browser on all these phones. Now, I
don't buy that. And the reason I don't
buy that is because on Android, you're
actually allowed to ship a different
browser that has a browser engine that's
not the same as Chrome. Unlike on iOS
where if you want to ship a browser,
Chrome, for example, ships for iOS, but
it's not Chrome. It's Safari wrapped in
address.
And every single alternative browser on
iOS have to use the Safari web engine.
That's not competition. That's not what
happened on Android. Again, I think
there are some nuances to it. But if you
zoom out and you look at all the
problems we have with big tech, Chrome
is not it. Chrome won on merits. I
begrudgingly have switched to Chrome on
that realization alone. As a web
developer, I just prefer it. I like
Firefox in many ways. I like the ethos
of it, but Chrome is a better browser
than Firefox. Full stop. And by the way,
we've never mentioned Edge. Edge is also
a good browser
>> because it's also Chrome in address,
>> but it never gets the love. I I don't
think I've ever used Bing and I'm sure
Bing is really nice.
>> Maybe you have because you know what is
Bing in address?
>> What?
>> Duck.Go, which is actually the search
engine that I use. Duck.Go gets its
search results from Bing. Or at least it
used to. If they changed that, that
would be news to me.
>> Well, maybe everything is just a wrap or
a dress. Everything is wearing a dress.
Underneath there's some other turtles.
It turtles all the dresses all the way
down. Okay. What were we talking about?
We got there from JavaScript and from
you learning how to program. So
eventually
the big success story is when you built
a bunch of stuff with PHP
and you were like actually shipping
things.
>> Yes.
>> And that's when the the Ruby story came.
So when your big love affair with
programming began there. So can you take
me there? What what is Ruby? Tell the
story of Ruby. Explain Ruby to me. PHP
was what converted me from just being
able to fondle HTML and turn out some
web pages to actually being able to
produce web applications myself.
So I owe a tremendous gratitude to PHP
in that regard. But I never thought of
PHP as a calling. I never thought I'm a
professional programmer who writes PHP.
That's who I am and that's what I do. I
thought of PHP as a tool I needed to
smack the computer with until it
produced web applications I wanted. It
was very much a means to an end. I
didn't fall in love with PHP.
I'm very grateful that it taught me the
basics of programming and I'm very
grateful that it set the bar for the
economics. But it really wasn't until
Ruby that I started thinking of myself
as a programmer. And the way that came
about was that the first time I ever got
hired as a professional programmer to
write code was actually by Jason
Frerieded, my business partner still.
All the way back in 2001,
I had been working on these gaming
websites in PHP for essentially 18
months at that point. No one had been
paying me to do code in that regard. And
I connect with Jason Freed over an email
sent from Copenhagen, Denmark to
Chicago, Illinois to a person who didn't
know who I was. I was just offering
solicited advice. Jason had asked a
question on the internet and I had sent
him the answer and he was asking in PHP
and I'd sent him the answer to that
question and we started talking and then
we started working which by the way is a
miracle of what the internet can allow.
How can a kid in Copenhagen who's never
met this guy in Chicago connect just
over email and start working together
and by the way we're still working
together now 24 years later that's
incredible but we started working
together and we started working together
on some client projects Jason would do
the design 37 signals would do the
design I would bring the programming PHP
and after we worked on I think two or
three client projects together in PHP
we kept
hitting the same problem that whenever
you work with a client, you start that
project off an email. Oh yeah, let's
work together. Here's what we're
building and you start trading more and
more emails and before a few weeks have
passed, you got to add someone to the
project. They don't have the emails.
They don't have the context. You send
where's the latest file? Oh, I've
uploaded on the FTP. It's like final
final V6 2.0, right? That's the one to
get. It's just a mess, a beautiful mess.
in some ways a mess that still runs the
vast majority of projects to this day.
Email is the lowest common denominator.
That's wonderful. But we had dropped the
ball a couple times in serious ways with
customers and we thought we can do
better. We know how to make web
applications. Can't we just make a
system that's better than email for
managing projects? It can't be that
hard. We've been doing blogs. We've been
doing to-do list. Let's put some of
these things together and just make a
system where everything that anyone
involved in the project needs is on one
page. And it has to be simple enough
that I'm not going to run a seminar
teaching you how to use the system. I'm
just going to give you the login code.
You're going to jump into it. So that's
base camp.
>> And when we started working on base
camp,
I for the first time in the experience I
had with Jason had the freedom of
technology choice. There was no client
telling me, "Yeah, PHP, that sounds
good. We know PHP. Can you build it in
PHP?" I had free reigns.
>> And at that time, I'd been reading uh IE
magazine
>> and a couple of other magazines back
from the early 2000s where Dave Thomas
and Martin Fowler had been writing about
programming patterns and how to write
better code. And these two guys in
particular were both using Ruby to
explain their concepts because Ruby
looked like pseudo code.
>> Whether you were programming in C or
Java or PHP, all three constituencies
could understand Ruby because it
basically just reads lang English. So
these guys were using Ruby to describe
the concepts. And first of all, I would
read these articles for just the
concepts they were explaining. And I'd
be like, what is this programming
language? I mean, I I like the concept
you're explaining, but I also want to
see the programming language.
Why haven't I heard of this? So, I
started looking into Ruby. And I
realized at that time, Ruby might not be
known by anyone, but it's actually been
around for a long time. Matts, the
Japanese creator of Ruby, had started
working on Ruby back in 93, before the
internet was even a thing. And here I am
in 2003,
10 years later, picking up what seems
like this hidden gem that's just laying
in obscurity in plain sight. But Dave
Thomas and Martin Fowler, I think,
successfully put me and a handful of
other people on the trail of a
programming language that hadn't been
used much in the West, but could be. So
I picked up Ruby and I thought this is
this is very different. First of all,
where are all the semicolons?
>> I'd been programming in PHP in ASP. I'd
even done some Pascal. I'd looked at
some C. There are semicolons everywhere.
And that was the first thing that struck
me is where are the damn semicolons? And
I started thinking actually why do we
have semicolons in programming? there to
tell the interpreter that there's a new
line of instructions, but I don't need
him as a human. How? Oh, someone is
looking out for the human here, not for
the machine. So, that really got me
interested. And then I thought to
myself, do you know what? I know PHP
quite well. I'm not an amazing
programmer. I haven't been working in
programming for all that long,
but maybe I can figure it out. I'm going
to give myself two weeks. I'm going to
write a proof of concept where I talk to
a database. I pull some records. I
format them a bit and I display them on
an HTML page. Can I figure that out in a
couple weeks? It took about one weekend
and I was completely mesmerized. I was
completely mind blown because Ruby
was made for my brain like a perfect
tailored glove. by someone I'd never
met. Like, how is this even possible?
>> We should say maybe like paint a picture
of the certain qualities that Ruby has.
Maybe even compared to PHP. We should
also say that there's a ridiculous thing
that I'm used to that I forget about
that there's dollar signs everywhere.
PHP
>> there's line noise. That's what I like
to call
>> line noise. Line noise. That's such a
beautiful phrase. Yeah. So, there's all
these things that look like programs.
And with Ruby, I mean, there's some
similarities in Python there. Uh, it
just looks kind of like natural
language. You can read it normally.
>> Here's a while loop that does a five
iterations. You can literally type the
number five dot. Now, I'm calling a
method on the number five. By the way,
that's one of the beautiful aspects of
Ruby that primitives like integers are
also objects. And you can call five dot
times
start brackets. Now you're iterating
over the code in that bracket five
times. That's it.
>> Okay, that's nice.
>> That's not just nice, that's
exceptional. There is literally no other
programming language that I know of that
has managed to boil away the line noise
that almost every other programming
language would inject into a five time
iteration over a block of code to that
extent.
>> That's a really nice Well, thank you for
giving that example. That's a beautiful
example. Wow, I don't think I know a
programming language that does that.
That's really nice.
>> Ruby is full of that. And there's So,
let me dive into a couple examples
because I really think it helps paint
the picture. And let me preface this by
saying I actually I like the ethos of
Python. I think the Ruby and the Python
community share a lot of similarities.
They're both dynamic interpreted
languages. They're both focused on
immediiacy and productivity and ease of
use in a bunch of ways, but then they're
also very different in many other ways.
And one of the one ways they're very
different is aesthetically.
Python to me, I hope I don't offend
people too much. I've said this before,
it's just it's ugly. And it's ugly at it
in its base because it's full of
superfluous instructions that are
necessary for legacy reasons
of when Guido made Python back in ' 87
that are still here in 2025 and my brain
can't cope with that. Let me give you a
basic example. When you make a class in
Python, the initializer method, the
starting method is defaf. Okay, fair
enough. That's actually the same as Ruby
def definition of a method. Then it is
underscore
not one underscore two in it underscore
underscore.
>> Yeah.
>> Parentheses start self,
and then the first argument.
>> Yeah, the whole self thing. Yeah.
>> Mhm.
>> I look at that and go, I'm sorry. I'm
out. I can't do it.
It's just it's everything about it
offends my sensibilities to the core.
Here you have the most important method
that all new objects or classes have to
implement and it is one of the most
aesthetically offensive ways of typing
initialize that I've ever seen anywhere.
And you guys are okay with this?
>> Yeah, you're making me you know where
you're like talking about my marriage or
something like this and and I'm now
realizing I've been in a toxic
relationship all along. Yeah, I just get
used to it. That to me, by the way, was
the magic of Ruby. It opened my eyes to
how beautiful programs could be. I
didn't know I'd been working in ASP. I'd
been working in PHP. I didn't even have
the concept that aesthetics, beautiful
code, was something we could optimize
for, that something we could pursue. And
even more than that, that we could
pursue it above other objectives. That
Ruby is, as beautiful as it is, is not
an accident and it's not easy. Ruby
itself is implemented in C. It's very
difficult to parse Ruby code because
Ruby is written for humans and humans
are messy creatures. They like things in
just the right way. I can't fully
explain why the underscore_initers
make me repulse, but it does. And when I
look at the Ruby alternative, it's
really instructive. So, it's defaf. same
part df space
initialize
parenthesis not even parenthesis if you
don't need to call it within the
arguments there's not even a parenthesis
that in itself is actually also a major
part if the human doesn't need the
additional characters we're not just
going to put them in because it'd be
nicer to parse for the computer we're
going to get rid of the semicolons we're
going to get rid of the parenthesis
we're going to get rid of the
underscores we're going to get rid of
all that ugliness all the line noise and
boil it down to its pure essentials
and at the same time we're not going to
abbreviate. This is a key difference in
the aesthetics between Ruby and Python
as well. In it is shorter type. It's
only five characters. Initialize is a
lot longer, but it looks a lot better.
And you don't type it very often. So,
you should look at something pretty. If
you don't have to do it all the time,
it's okay that it's long. Those kinds of
aesthetic evaluations are rife all over
the Ruby language. But let me give you
an even better example. The if
conditional, that's the bedrock of all
programming languages. They have the if
conditional. If you take most
programming languages, they all have if.
That's basically the same in almost
every language. Space start parenthesis.
We all do that. And then you have um
perhaps let's say you're calling a
object called uh user
dot is admin close parenthesis close
parenthesis start brackets
and here's what we're going to do if the
user is an admin. Right? That would be a
normal programming language. Ruby
doesn't do it like that. Ruby boils
almost all of it away. We start with the
if. Okay, that's the same. No
parenthesis necessary because there's no
ambiguity for the human to distinguish
that the next part is just a single
statement. So you do if space user dot
admin question mark.
>> Yeah.
>> No open brackets, no parentheses, no
nothing. Next open line here's
unconditional. That
question mark means nothing to the
computer,
but it means something to the human.
Ruby put in the predicate method style
purely as a communication tool between
humans. It's actually more work for the
interpreter to be able to see that this
question mark is there. Why is this
question mark in here? Because it just
reads so nicely. if user admin question
mark. That's a very human phrase. But it
gets better. You can turn this around.
You can have your statement you want to
execute before the conditional. You can
do userupgrade.
Say you're calling an upgrade method on
a user
space if space user.admin question mark.
We do the thing if the thing is true.
Instead of saying if the thing is true,
do the thing. But it gets even better.
This is why I love this example with the
conditional because you can keep diving
into it. So let's flip it around.
>> User.downgrade
if exc