DHH · 2026-08-26 · source ↗ · whole document (26)
Fatherhood
`3:35:19`
This stuff is gonna come, and it's gonna come in bulk. But again, I choose to be optimistic about it that-... whatever these models can do aggressively, they can also do it defensively.
`3:35:42`
It's a hell of a milepost for what's possible at the moment. And the reason I said it like that is not that I haven't worked on anything else of note. I've worked on a lot of things of note, a lot of things that I'm very proud of. There are very few other projects that I have worked on that in the amount of time that I've spent on Quattro, which is really three months, I have been able to accomplish as much, fulfill as many hopes, desires, wishes. It truly is like the metaphor we used earlier about finding the genie in the bottle-... and having an unlimited number of wishes, more or less, for getting everything I wanted out of a system. So it's strange because it's also perhaps the major software release that I've worked on the least in terms of lines of code. I have the least number of personally hand-chiseled lines of code in Quattro than I've had in any major release I've ever done. And yet, I am insanely proud of what we've accomplished. I would not have guessed that that was how it was gonna play out, that you could divorce the sense of achievement and make it be like a team victory. where other releases, I was very happy for my personal contribution because, like, I was the one chiseling out the lines of code, and then I would push it out there, and then later on, of course, these projects, Rails in particular, would grow into be huge open source projects with thousands and thousands of contributors, and then it certainly was a team effort.
But in the beginning, all code bases that I've almost all of them that I've worked on, I started, like, just myself. And Quattro started as a team effort right from the get-go, and where I was just the coach. I was telling us-- I was telling the agents where to go, and we would go. So to be able to find satisfaction in that actually gives me great hope for retirement in some way, that there is a phase after playing that you can enjoy. And I know that's not easy. You look at sports and the number of professional athletes who really struggle to cope with the fact that their career is over and have to find a new identity as someone who doesn't play football or race Formula 1 cars. I mean, it's more the rule than the exception. So I wasn't so sure about myself. I wasn't so sure about having to give up or not even having, wanting to give it up. Wanting to play another level of the game and finding not just equal satisfaction, but more satisfaction in it.