Programming - early days

`0:12:15`

But I traveled from Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark to Aarhus this tiny little town in Jutland on the train with a bunch of dudes who were like late teens and their 20s. I'm 14 years old. I'm lugging my 14-inch 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 gonna lie. It's a little ridiculous. — It's totally awesome. And 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 at 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.

`0:13:15`

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 EasyAMOS? It's kind of frustrating. — But on your third attempt, you a little more successful? — So third attempt is when I start getting it, this is when I start helping out, let's say build things for the internet. So around '95, I think it is, or '96, I discovered the internet. Actually, in ninth grade. That was my first experience. I went to some university 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 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 blink by just putting in this tag and saving it. That moment, that was actually when I reawaken the urge

`0:14:20`

to wanna learn the 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 gotta do more of this. So I got into to 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 rather buy 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 journalist. I'm like this 15-year-old kid.

`0:15:20`

And they're looking at you, "You're a journalist?" Yeah, can I borrow some games? Because 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 programs from the demo scene that was dynamic was ASP.NET. I 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

`0:16:23`

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 of your success to PHP? — 100% that's true. And it's even better than that because as PHP to me didn't just give 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 webpage 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