Programming - early days

`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

`0:17:24`

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 that was 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 webpages 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 row in a database, and they have to compensate for that existential dread by overcomplicating things.

`0:18:25`

Now that's a bit of a character. There's more to it. And there's things you can learn from more sophisticated ways of thinking about this. But there's still an ideal here, which is why I was so happy you had Pieter 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 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 upfront, is that he's just one guy. And you could do different things when you just one guy. When you're working in a team, when I started working on the team, when I started working with Jason Fried on Basecamp, we at first didn't use version control together. I used version control for myself. And then I thought, do you know what? Designers, ah, they probably not smart enough to figure out CBS. And therefore I just like, no, no, no, you just FTP it up.