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Jeff Atwood

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2018-11-29
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2018-11-29
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  1. “It's like how many keyboards this guy has, right? It's kind of like me with yo-yoos. How many yoos do you have? How many do you need? Well, technically one, but I like a lot. I don't know why. So same thing with keyboard. So yeah, they're awesome. Like I highly recommend anybody who doesn't have a mechanical to research it, look into it and see what you like. You know, it's ultimately a fetish item, but I think these sort of items, these religious artifacts that we have, are part of what make us human. Like that part's important, right?”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Right, no, totally. That's it. I mean, and it's funny because artisanal keyboards have exploded like mass drop is gone ballistic with this stuff. Probably like 500 keyboard projects on MassDrop alone. And there's some other guy I follow on Twitter. I used to write for the site, the Tech Report way back in the day. And he's like, every week he's just posting what I call keyboard porn of like. Cool keyboard. It's like, oh my god, this looked really cool, right?”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And, like, I can be very productive with it. So to be honest, it's a little bit of a fetish item, but a good one. It indicates that you're serious, it indicates you're interested. It indicates that you care about the fundamentals because, you know what makes you a good programmer? Being able to type really fast, right? Like, this is true, right? So a core skill is just being able to type fast enough to get your ideas out of your head into the code base. So just practicing your typing can make you a better programmer.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Super bad, right So, it's a fetish item. All that really says is look, I care really about keyboards because the keyboard is the primary method of communication with computer, right? So it's just like having a nice mic for this podcast You want a nice keyboard, right? Because it has very tactile feel. I can tell exactly when I press the key. I get that little click. So, oh, and it feels good. And it's also kind of a fetish item. It's like, wow. I care enough about programming, that I care about the tool, the primary tool that I use to communicate with the computer, make sure it's as good as it feels good to use for me.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Well, you know, this is another fetish item, really. Like, it's not required. You can do programming on any kind of keyboard, right? Even like on screen keyboard, oh God, that's terrifying, right? But you could. I mean, if you look back at the early days of computing, there were chicklet keyboards, which are, I mean, those are awful, right? But”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “But I was like, look, and on top of that, you're serving people ads that they hate. Like, you should just go full on Patreon because he had a little bit of Patreon, go full on Patreon, do the Amazon affiliates thing for any Amazon links to get posted and just do that and just triple down on that stuff. And that's worked really well for them and this creator in particular. So that stuff works, but traditional ads, I mean, definitely not working, at least on Discord.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Patreon, affiliate codes for like Amazon of like just, oh, here, here's a cool yo-yo click, and then you click and go to Amazon, they get a small percentage of that, which is fair, I think. I mean, because you saw the yo-yo on that site and you click through and you bought it, right? And that's fair for them to get 5% of that or 2% of that or whatever it is. Those things definitely work. In fact, a site that I used to participate on a lot, I helped the owner. And one of the things I got them switched to Discourse. I basically paid them to switch to discourse because I was like, look, you guys got to switch. I can't come here anymore on this terrible software.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “It's not effective, like it's too diluted, it's too weird, it doesn't pay well, and like users hate it. So it's a combination of like users hate it. It doesn't actually work that well in practice. Like in theory, yes, I agree with you. Clean, fast ads that were exactly the stuff you would be interested in. Awesome. We're so far from that though, right? Like, and Google does an okay job. They're retargeting and stuff like that. In the real world, discourse sites rarely can make ads work. It just doesn't work for so many reasons. But you know what does work is subscriptions.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Oh, there's so many companies in ed tech that's embarrassing. Like, you can do that. Have you seen those logo charts of just the whole page? It's like, you can't even see them. They're so small. There's so many companies in the space. But since you brought it up, I do want to point out that very, very few Discord sites actually run using an ad supportive model.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Interesting because I actually have a contrarian view of advertising, which I kind of agree with you. I recently installed AdBlocker reluctantly because I don't like to do that, but like the performance of the ads, man, they're so heavy now and it's just crazy. So it's almost like a performance argument more than like, I actually am pro ads. And I have a contrarian viewpoint. I agree with you. If you do ads right, it's showing you stuff you would be interested in anyway. mind that actually is kind of a good thing. So plus, I think it's rational to want to support the people that are doing this work through seeing their ads. But that said, I run ad block now, which I didn't want to do, but I was convinced by all these articles like 30, 40 megabytes of stuff just to serve you ads.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “There is. We're not strictly segmenting into the open source versus the commercial side. We have a hosting business. That's how Discourse makes money is we host Discourse instances and we have a really close relationship with our customers of the symbiosis of them giving us feedback on the product. We definitely wait feedback from customers a lot heavier than feedback from somebody who just wanders by and gives feedback. But that's where we make all our money. But we don't have a strict division. We encourage people to use Discourse. Like the whole point is that it's free, right? Anybody can set it up. I don't want to be the only person that hosts Discourse. That's absolutely not the goal. But it is a primary way for us to build a business. And it's actually kind of a great business. I mean, the business is going really, really well in terms of hosting.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “My idea is like, hey, eventually this is going to be very cheap for everybody, and I want to build it right using, again, higher bigger building block levels, right, that have more requirements.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Someone came to you and said, I want to start a blog, although the very question is kind of archaic now. It's like who actually blogs anymore. But I wanted the answer to that to be, it would be WordPress normally because that's the obvious choice for blogging most of the time. But if someone said, hey, I need a group of people to get together and do something, the answer should be discourse, right? That should be the default answer for people because it's open source, it's free, doesn't cost you anything. You control it, you can run it. Your minimum server cost for Discourse is five bucks a month at this point. They actually got the VPS prices down. It used to be $10 a month for one gigabyte of RAM, which we have a kind of heavy stack. There's a lot of stuff in discourse. You need Postgres, you need Redis, you need Ruby, Unrails, you need a sidekick for scheduling. It's not a trivial amount of stuff because we were architected for like, look, we're building for the next 10 years. I don't care about shared PHP hosting. That's not my model.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Discourse is what I do is originally I called it a five year project, then really quickly revised that to a 10 year project. So we started in early 2013 that's when we launched the first version. So we're still five years in. This is the part where it starts getting good. We have a good product now. Discourse, there's any project you build in software. It takes three years to build what you want it to build anyway. Like V1 is going to be terrible, which it was. But you ship it anyway because that's how you get better at stuff. It's about turning the crank. It's not about V1 being perfect because that's ridiculous. It's about V1, then let's get really good at V1.1, 1.2, 1.3. Like, how fast can we iterate? And I think we're iterating like crazy on discourse to the point that like it's a really good product now. We have serious momentum. And my original vision was I want to be the WordPress of discussion, meaning”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Unix, but it's still if you peel away one or two layers, it's going to be Unix for a long time. I think Unix 1, I mean, so definitively.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I kind of do. I mean, I was a big believer in Windows early on, and I was a big, you know, I was like Unix, what a waste of time. But over time, I've completely flipped on that where I was like, okay, the Unix guys were right. And pretty much Microsoft and Windows were kind of wrong, at least on the server side. And on the desktop, right, you need a GUI, you need all that stuff. And you have the two philosophies like Apple built on Unix effectively Darwin. And on the desktop, it's a slightly different story. But on the server side where you're going to be programming, now it's a question of where the programming is going to be. There's going to be a lot more client-side programming because technically discourse is client-side programming. The way you get discourse, we deliver a big ball of JavaScript, which is the next queue locally. So we're really using a lot more local computing power. We'll still retrieve the data. Obviously, we have to display the posts on the screen and so forth. But in terms of like sorting and a lot of the basic stuff, we're using the host processor. But to the extent that a lot of programming is still going to be server-side, I would say, yeah, the Unix philosophy definitely won. And there'll be different veneers over.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I mean, you can turn WordPress into anything. It's kind of crazy actually through plugins, right? And that's not programming per se. It's just Lego bricks stacking WordPress elements, right? And a little bit of configuration glue. So I would say maybe in a broader sense, what I'm seeing there'll be more gluing and less actual programming. And that's a good thing, right? Because most of the stuff you need is kind of out there already.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I do think that is possible because there's a lot of repetition in programming, right? Oh, Clippy would be the bad example of, oh, I see it. It looks like you're writing a for loop. But there are patterns in code, right? And actually libraries are kind of like that, right? Like rather than go code up your own HTTP request library, it's like, well, you'd use one of the existing ones that we have that's already troubleshot, right? That's not AI per se. It's just Building better Lego bricks, bigger Lego bricks that have more functionality in them so people don't have to worry about the low level stuff as much anymore. Like WordPress, for example, to me is like a tool for somebody who isn't a programmer to do something.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “First of all, they have a ton of AD because everybody has a smartphone. Now all of a sudden we have all this data that we didn't have before about location, about like, you know, communication and feeding that into some basic heuristics and maybe some fancy algorithms that turn it into predictions of anticipating your needs like a friend would, right? Like, oh, hey, I see your home. Would you like some dinner? Let's go get some food because that's usually what we do this time of day, right?”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “When you grand, maybe you're on a VPN, there's other ways to happen, but that's just a basic prediction based on the idea that people pretty much don't move around that much. Like they may travel occasionally, but like nobody's, I mean, unless you're a traveling salesman that's literally traveling the world every day, like there's so much repetition and predictability in terms of things you're going to do. And I think good software anticipates your needs. Like, for example, Google, I think it's called Google Now or whatever that Google thing is that predicts your commute and predicts based on your phone location, like where are you every day? Well, that's probably where you work, that kind of stuff. I do think computers can get a lot better at that, but I hesitate.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Oh, yeah, that's already happening. I mean, discourse is itself JavaScript is another bet on that side of the table, and I still strongly believe in that. So I would say smartphones have mostly a cultural shift more than a programming shift. Now, your other question was about artificial intelligence and like sort of advice is predicting what you're going to do. And I do think there's some strength to that. I think artificial intelligence kind of overselling it in terms of what it's doing. It's more like people are predictable, right? People do the same things. Like, let me give you an example. One check we put into Discourse that's in a lot of big commercial websites is say you log in from New York City and then an hour later you log in from San Francisco it's like well hmm that's interesting how did you get from New York to San Francisco in one hour so at that point you're like okay this is a suspicious login at that point so we would alert you it's like okay but that's not AI right that's just a heuristic of like how did you in one hour get 2000 miles right that doesn't”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Time. And we'll continue to, like I said, raise the baseline. The tools will get better. It'll get simpler, but it's still fundamentally going to be command line tools, fancy IDEs. That's kind of it for the foreseeable future. I'm not seeing any visual programming stuff on the horizon because you kind of think like, what do you do on a smartphone that will be directly analogous to programming? Like I'm trying to think, right? And there's really not much.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Positive, negative ramifications of that, right? Like everybody's connected all the time, everybody's on the computer all the time. That was my dream world as a geek, right? But it's like be careful what you ask for, right? Like, wow, now everybody has a computer and it's not quite the utopia that we thought it would be, right? Computers can be used for a lot of stuff that's not necessarily great. So to me, that's the central focus of the smartphone is just that it puts a computer in front of everyone, granted a small touchscreen, small-ish, touchscreen computer. But as for programming, like, I don't know, I don't think that I've kind of over time come to subscribe to the Unix view of the world when it comes to programming. It's like you want to teach these basic command line things, and that is just what programming is going to be for, I think, a long, long time. I don't think there's any magical visual programming that's going to happen. I just don't know. Over time, have become a believer in that Unix philosophy of just, you know, they kind of had it right with Unix. That's going to be the way it is for a long time.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Okay, so that's good. So smartphones have definitely changed. I mean, since, you know, I guess 2010 is when they really started getting super popular. I mean, in the last eight years, the world has literally changed, right? Like everybody carries a computer around and that's normal. I mean, that is such a huge change in society. I think we're still dealing with a lot of the...”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “As to whether programming is significantly different, I'm going to say no, but I think the baseline of what we view as fundamentals will continue to go up and actually get better, like source control, for example. That's one of the fundamentals that has gotten, I mean, Hundreds of orders of magnitude better than it was 10, 20 years ago”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Well, you got to go look back on sort of the basics of programming. And one of the things that always shocked me is like source control. I didn't learn anything about source control. Now, granted, I graduated from college in 1992. But I remember hearing from people like as late as like 1998, 1999, like even maybe today they're not learning source control. And to me, it's like, well, how can you not learn source control? That is so fundamental to working with other programmers, working in a way that you don't lose your work, like just basic literal bedrock software development is source control. Now, you compare today, like GitHub, right? Like Microsoft broad GitHub, which I think was an incredibly smart acquisition move on their part. Now they have anybody who wants reasonable source control to go send them on GitHub. It's all set up for you, right? There's tons of walkthroughs, tons of tutorials. So from the concept of like, has programming advanced from, say, 1999, it's like, well, hell, we have GitHub. I mean, my God, yes, right? Like it's massively advanced over what it was.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “True. Well, there's a flip side of the coin. People don't change. So investing in understanding people is like learning Unix in 1970 because nothing has changed, right? Those things you've learned about people will still be valid 30, 40 years from now. Whereas if you learn the latest JavaScript framework, that's going to be good for like two years, right? Yeah, exactly.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “See what it feels like and say, Oh, God, that was a terrible idea. Oh my gosh, this could be even better if we did why, right? You turn the crank and then the more you do that, the faster you get ahead of your competitors ultimately, because it's rate of change, right? Delta V, right? How fast are you moving? Well, within a year, you're going to be miles away by the time they catch up with you, right? Like that's the way it works. And plus, users, like as a software developer and user, I love software that's constantly changing because I don't understand people get super pissed off when like, oh, they changed the software on me. How dare they? I'm like, yes, change the software. Change it all the time, man. That's what makes this stuff great is that it can be changed so rapidly and become something that is greater than it is now. Now, granted, there are some changes that suck, I admit, I've seen it many times. But in general, it's like that's what makes software cool, right? It's that it is so malleable. Like fighting that is like weird to me because it's like, well, you're fighting the essence of the thing that you're building. Like that doesn't make sense.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And to be clear, I'm not saying being a hummingbird is the goal either. It's like you don't want a heartbeat that's so fast, it's like you're just freaking out. But like, it is a measure of health. You should have a healthy heartbeat. It's up to for people listening to decide what that means. It has to be healthy. It has to be reasonable because otherwise you're just going to get frustrated because that's how you build”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Or even a month to get that single word changed. They were like, oh my God, this is a great idea. That word is so much clearer. I'm talking about like a super, like everybody's on board for this change. It's not like let's just change a word because we're bored. It's like this is an awesome change. And then it takes months to roll out. It's like, well, you're dead. You can't iterate. You can't, how are you going to do anything, right? Like, so anyway, about the heartbeat, it's like, get the prototype and then iterate on it. That's what I view as like the central tenet of modern software development.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “How quickly can we iterate? That's the absolutely critical metric of any software project. And I had a tweet recently that people liked, and I totally, this is so fundamental to what I do is like, if you want to measure the core competency of any software tech company, it's the speed at which somebody can say, hey, we really need this word in the product change, this word, right? Because it will be more clear to the users. Instead of respond, it's reply or something. But there's some From the conception of that idea to how quickly that single word can be changed in your software and rolled out to users. That is your life cycle. Your health, your heartbeat. If your heartbeat is like super slow, you're basically dead. No, seriously. Like if it takes two weeks.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “And the way they work once you sit and live in the software, actually spend time living and breathing on software so different. So my philosophy is get to a prototype and then what you're really optimizing for is speed of iteration, like how you can turn the crank.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “In terms of getting things done, there's so many other things that go on in the project, like building the prototype. Like you mentioned, well, how do you, if you're not writing code, how does everybody keep focused on? First, basic mockups and research, right? Like, what do we even want to build? There's a little bit of that that goes on. Then very quickly, you get to the prototype stage. Like build a prototype, let's iterate on the prototype really, really rapidly. That's what we do with this course. And that's what we demoed to get our seed funding for discourse was the alpha version of discourse that we had running and ready to go. And it was very, it was bad. I mean, it was, I'll just tell you it was bad. We have screenshots of it. I'm just embarrassed to look at it now, but it was the prototype. We were figuring out what's working, what's not working, because there's such a broad gap between the way you think things will work in your mind or even on paper.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “We were getting to an alpha, and it was pretty much okay, we'll hire more programmers, right? Like we eventually hired Neil and then eventually Sam, who came in as a co-founder, actually was Sam first, then Neil later. But the answer to the problem is just hire other accompanied programmers. It's not like teach, now I shall pull myself up by my bootstraps and learn Ruby, but at some point, writing code becomes a liability to you.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “That's what I was trying to get to. Is like what I realized particularly when I started with just me and Robin, I realized. If I bother Robin, I am now costing us productivity, right? Every time I go to Robin, rather than building our first alpha version of discourse, he's now answering my stupid questions about Ruby. Is that a good use of his time? Is that a good use of my time? And the answer to both of those was resoundingly no, right? Like.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “No, I mean, there is always that paranoia around, oh gosh, I don't feel as valuable since I'm not writing code. But for me, like when we started the discourse project, it was Ruby, which I didn't really know Ruby. I mean, as you pointed out, and this is another valuable observation from Stack Overflow, you can be super proficient, for example, C sharp, which I was working in. That's what we built Stack Overflow and instill is written in. And then switch to Ruby and you're a newbie again, right? But you have the framework. I know what a for loop is. I know what recursion is. I know, you know, what a stack trace is, right? Like I have all the fundamental concepts to be a programmer. I just don't know Ruby. So I'm still on a higher level. I'm not like a beginner beginner, like you're saying. I'm just like, I need to apply my programming concepts I already know to Ruby.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “You cannot solve that with code that is not a code solvable problem. And yet, that will cripple you way more than, oh, we had to use this stupid framework I don't like, or Sam keeps writing bad code that I hate or Dave is off there in the wilderness writing, God knows what, right? These are not your problems. Your problem is your manager or a coworker is so toxic to everybody else in your team that nobody can get anything done because everybody's so stressed out and freaked out, right? These are the problems that you have to attack.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “It's that software is people, right? People are the software first and foremost. So a lot of the skills that I was working on early in the blog were about figuring out the people parts of programming, which were the harder parts. The hard part of programming, once you get to certain skill level and programming, you can pretty much solve any reasonable problem that's put in front of you. You're not writing algorithms from scratch, right? That just doesn't happen. So any sort of reasonable problem put in front of you, you're going to be able to solve. But what you can't solve is our manager is a total jerk.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “The code like the people. That's another thing if you look at my early blog entries, it was about wow, programming is about people more than it's about code, which doesn't really make sense, right? But it's about These people even get along together? Can they understand each other? Can you even explain to me what it is you're working on? Are you solving the right problem? People wear it, right? Another classic programming book, which again, up there with Code Complete, please read people where.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Write code, I can then compile that code for ARM or whatever x86 or whatever else is out there. And then even higher level than that, right? Like you're looking at like Python, Ruby, interpreted languages. And then to me as a programmer, like, okay, I want to go even higher. I want to go higher than that. How do I abstract higher than language? It's like, well, you abstract in spoken language and written language, right? Like you're sort of inspiring people to get things done, giving them guidance. Like, what if we did this? What if we did this? You're writing in the highest level language that there is, which is for me English, right? Whatever your spoken language is. So it's all about being effective, right? And I think Patrick Mackenzie, Patty 11 on Hacker News and works at Stripe, has a great post about this, of how calling yourself a programmer is a career limiting move at some level once you get far enough from your career. And I really believe that. And again, I apologize because it's sound discouraging. I don't mean it to be, but he's so right because all the stuff that goes on around him.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Which can then be turned into code, but are you even solving the right problem? I mean, so I would say for me, the main insight I have is to succeed as a programmer. You eventually kind of stop writing code. That's going to sound discouraging probably to people hearing, but I don't mean it that way. What I mean is that you're coding at a higher level language. Eventually, like, okay, so we're coding. You're hard coded to the architecture. Then you have stuff like C, where it's like, wow, we can abstract across the architecture.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “I would say the big insight that I had is eventually as a programmer, you have to kind of stop writing code to be effective, which is kind of disturbing because you really love it. But you realize being effective at programming, at programming in the general sense, doesn't mean writing code. And a lot of times you can be much more successful by not writing code than writing code in terms of just solving the problems you have, essentially hiring people that are really good and like setting them free and giving them basic direction, right? Like on strategy and stuff. Because a lot of the problems you encounter aren't necessarily solved through really gnarly code. They're solved by conceptual solutions.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Was just nowhere else to go when you got stuck, right? Like I had the books that came with it, I read those, studied those religiously. I just saw a post from Steve Sinofsky that said this C++ version 7 came with like 10,000 pages of written material because where else were you going to figure that stuff out? Go to the library? I mean, you didn't have Wikipedia. You didn't have Reddit. You know where to go to answer these questions”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “What you should be doing because that's what's going to make you good, right? To me, this is the big difference between programming in the 80s versus programming today is you kind of had to be by yourself back then. Like where would you go for answers? I remember in the early days when I was learning visual basic for Windows, like I would call the Microsoft helpline on the phone when I had like a program because I was like, I don't know what to do. So I would like go and call and they have these huge phone manks. And like, can you imagine how alien that is now? Like, who would do that, right? Like that's crazy.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “I don't think you should be a solo programmer. I think to be a good solo programmer, it's kind of like what I talked about, well, not on Mike, but one of the things John Carmack, one of the best points he makes in the book, Masters of Doom, which is a fantastic book, anybody listening to this who hasn't read it, please read it. It's such a great book, is that at the time they were working on stuff like Wolfenstein and Doom, like they didn't have the resources that we have today. They didn't have Stack Overflow. They didn't have Wikipedia. They didn't have discourse forums. They didn't have places to go to get people to help them, right? They had to work on their own. And that's why it took a genius like Carmac to do this stuff because you had to be a genius to invent from first principles a lot of the stuff. He was like the hacks he was coming up with were genius, right? Genius level stuff. But you don't need to be a genius anymore. And that means not working by yourself. You have to be good at researching stuff online. You have to be good at asking questions. Really good questions that are really well researched, which implies, oh, I went out and researched for three hours before I wrote this question. Like that's.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Wasn't Man TV? Might have been. Might have been. But anyway, that was the, that's always been the perception, right? You start to behave like the computer. It's like, oh, you're wrong, out of the way, you know.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “As you said, it's not out of a sense of meanness, it's accidental, but I do believe it's an occupational hazard of being a programmer is you start to behave like the computer. You're very unforgiving, you're very terse, you're very, oh, wrong, incorrect. Move on. It's like, well, can you help me? Like, what could I do to fix? No, wrong. Next question, right? Like that's normal for the computer, right? Just fail next, right? I don't know if you remember on Saturday Night Live, like in the 90s they had this character who was an IT guy. Move guy”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Arbitrarily is really good. An error of error code 56249 is a completely good error message because that's what the computer gave me, right? So you kind of forget to be a person at some level. And you know how they say great detectives internalized criminals and kind of are criminals themselves, like this trope of The master detective is good because he can think like the criminal. Well, I do think that's true of programmers, really good programmers, think like the computer because that's their job. But if you internalize it too much, you become the computer, you kind of become a jerk to everybody because. That's what you've internalized.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “An asshole. And what is the computer except the world's biggest asshole? Because the computer has no time for your bullshit. The computer, the minute you make a mistake, everything comes crashing down, right? One semicolon has crashed space missions, right? So that's normal. So you begin to internalize that. You begin to think, oh, my coworker, the computer is super strict and kind of a jerk about everything. So that's kind of how I'm going to be because I work with this computer and I have to accede to its terms on everything. So therefore, you start to absorb that and you start to think, oh, well, being really strict.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Time, right? So, with that in mind, I will say that the strictness of the system is correct. Now, that doesn't mean cruel, that doesn't mean mean, that doesn't mean angry. It just means strict, okay? So I think where there's misunderstanding is, and people get cranky, right? Like another question you asked is like, why are programmers kind of mean sometimes? Well, who do programmers work with all day long? So I have a theory that if you're at a job. You work with assholes all day long. What do you eventually become”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source