Owning your own servers

`3:27:36`

that hardware seem slightly more enjoyable. Now there are things you have to learn, certainly at our scale too. I mean, we're not just buying a single computer and plugging into an ethernet. We have to have racks and racks with them and you gotta set it up with network cabling and there is some specialized expertise in that, but it's not like that expertise is like building nuclear rockets. It's not like it's not widely distributed. Literally the entire internet was built on people knowing how to plug in a computer to the internet, right? Oh, ethernet cable goes here, power cable goes here, let's boot up Linux. That's how everyone put anything online until 10, 12 years ago when the cloud sort of took over. So the expertise is there and can be rediscovered. You too can learn how to operate a Linux computer. — Yeah, and it's, you know, when you get a bunch of them, there's a bunch of flashing LEDs and it's just so exciting. — Oh, they're beautiful, calming, amazing. Computers are really fun. This is actually something I've gotten into even deeper after we moved out of the cloud. Now my next kind of tingle

`3:28:37`

is that if you could move out of the cloud, can you also move out of the data center? Personal servers have gotten really scarily quick and efficient and personal internet connections rival what we connected data centers with just a decade or two ago. So there's a whole community around this concept of home lapping, which is essentially installing server hardware in your own apartment, connecting it to the internet, and exposing that directly to the internet. That harks back to those glorious days of the '90s when people building for the internet would host the actual website on their actual computer in the closet. And I'm pretty fired up about that. I'm doing a bunch of experiments. I've ordered a bunch of home servers from my own apartment. I marvel at the fact that I can get a five gigabit, five connection now, I think, do you know what five gigabit that could have taken Basecamp to multiple millions of MRR

`3:29:37`

in the way that back then, I ran the whole business on a single box with 2004 technology or probably a hundred megabit cable. Like the capacity we have access to both in terms of compute and connectivity is something that people haven't readjusted to. And this happens sometimes in technology where progress sneaks up on you. This happened with SSDs. I love that, by the way. We designed so much of our technology and storage approach and database design around spinning metal disks that had certain seek rate properties. And then we went to NVMe and SSDs, and it took quite a while for people to realize that the systems had to be built fundamentally different now. That the difference between memory and disk was now far smaller when you weren't spinning these metal plates around with a little head that had to read off them. You were essentially just dealing with another type of memory.