DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting | Lex Fridman Podcast #474

No one anywhere who's serious believes that cookie banners does anything good for anyone. Yet, we've been unable to get rid of it. This is the thing that really gets me about cookie banners too. It's not just the EU, it's the entire world. You can't hide from cookie banners anywhere on this planet. If you go to goddamn Mars on one of Elon's rockets and you try to access a webpage, you will still see a cookie banner. No one in the universe is safe from this nonsense. 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.

Mm-hmm.

They just make systems that create, read, update or delete rows in the database, and they have to compensate for that existential dread by over-complicating things. That's a huge part of the satisfaction of driving a race car, is driving it at the edge of adhesion, as we call it, where you're essentially just a tiny movement away from spinning out. Doesn't take much, then the car starts rotating. Once it starts rotating, you lose grip and you're going for the wall. That balance of danger and skill is what's so intoxicating.

The following is a conversation with David Heinemeier Hansson, also known as DHH. He is a legend in the programming and tech world, brilliant and insightful, sometimes controversial, and always fun to talk to. He's the creator of Ruby on Rails, which is an influential web development framework behind many websites used by millions of people, including Shopify, GitHub, and Airbnb. He is the co-owner and CTO of 37signals that created Basecamp, HEY, and Once. He is a New York Times bestselling author, together with his co-author Jason Fried, of four books, Rework, Remote, Getting Real, and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work. And on top of that, he's also a race car driver, including being a class winner at the legendary 24-hour Le Mans race. This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, dear friends, here's DHH. For someone who became a legendary programmer, you officially got into programming late in life, and I guess that's because, uh, you tried to learn how to program a few times and you failed. So, can you tell me the, uh, the full story, the saga of your failures to learn programming? Was Commodore 64 involved?

Commodore 64 was the inspiration. I really wanted a Commodore 64. That was the first computer I ever sat down in front. And the way I sat down in front of it was I was five years old and there was this one kid on my street who had a Commodore 64. No one else had a computer, so we were all the kids just getting over there and we were all playing Yie Ar Kung-Fu. I don't know if you've ever seen that game. It was one of the original fighting games. It's really a great game and I was playing that for the first time at five years old. And we were, like, seven kids sitting up in this one kid's bedroom all taking our turn to play the game. And I just found that unbelievably interesting. And I begged and I begged and I begged my dad, "Could I get a computer?"