• Recccomended by David Vargas

• "The original idea of relational databases was that they would be queried directly from the client"
• "The success of GraphQL shows that these pains are real and that people really do want to issue rich queries directly from the client"
• "Firebase was able to succesfully compete by recognizing that the current division of database + sql + orm + application-layer is a historical accident and can be dramatically simplified." To summarize:

Design flaws in the SQL language resulted in a language with no library ecosystem and a burdensome spec which limits innovation.
Additional design flaws in SQL database interfaces resulted in moving as much logic as possible to the application layer and limiting the use of the most valuable features of the database.
It's probably too late to fix either of these.

• "a modern gaming machine running at 4,000x the speed of an apple 2, with a CPU that has 500,000x as many transistors (with a GPU that has 2,000,000x as many transistors) can maybe manage the same latency as an apple 2 in very carefully coded applications"

• ""The OS is becoming increasingly irrelevant as we near the end of a multi-decade shift from desktop to web apps.  Now even applications you install (Slack, Notion, Figma, etc.) are often made with Electron, which is largely running the engine of a browser." - agree
• " When hardware advances, software commensurately absorbs the possibilities"

• "My gut told me that a lot of the new complexities in workflows, toolchains, and development methods are completely optional for many projects"
• "the websites. They separate themselves from the others, because I don’t feel much better at making them after 20 years. My knowledge and skills develop a bit, then things change, and half of what I know becomes dead weight. This hardly happens with any of the other work I do."
• "with flexbox, I can type 3 or 4 lines of CSS, and have two blocks of text line up at the baseline. Hallelujah. I only needed to wait a decade to get this."

• Enjoyed this. First ILB in a while - Matt's a good guest.

• So Many great quotes in this.
• "How is it that we’ve found ways to organize the work around so many other creative disciplines but writing software is still hard"
• "Agile software development doesn’t have an explicit metaphor, apart from it being a bunch of people essentially "
• "The film business, both a high degree of creativity but also a lot of specialization. They also had a couple more decades to figure it all out." <- They also baked top-down-ness, "creative genius" and coerce over convince into their cullture. Software culture is 10x more democratic.
• "As soon as you start to involve more than one person, you can either try to have them all work on the same mental representation (like in pair programming), or you need to introduce some restrictions on the area of responsibility, so that everyone can mind their own business, or at least work more independently."
• "whenever you need to design a system against many constraints, things get exponentially easier if you take problems one piece at a time" <- I need to read more Christopher Alexander.
• "The problem is that by breaking down problems into parts, you severely restrict the solution space. If you do it wrong, the right solution depends on two different part doing something that may not make sense if looked at in an isolated fashion."
• "Agile software development proposed: write the simplest thing that will work, and then refactor (that means cleanup) you code base constantly."
• "What if software were built in the same way we built cities? What if the core parts of our business would be like streets, and all that newfangled stuff is something we could build on top, experiment, tear it down if it does not work"
• "Some of these pieces of infrastructure change very slowly (like roads), while others are much more flexible, like the way apartments or shops are used." <- Love this. One thing that prevents us from doing this software is the arbitrary way in which we can expose "parts" of codebases. Git/github makes it next to impossible to say "x person/team owns this and can modify it", unless "this" is one single folder within which files are stored.
• "if we built our cities the way we build our software, you would need to enter the shop through the special garage, and exit through the roof to walk a wire to get to another custom made building from scrapped containers to do the checkout"

• "We’re due for another shift in the 2020s"
• "A builder today may not start with code at all"
• "What’s next : re-integrating and simplifying the increasing complexity of the SaaS landscape into standard, simple and shareable components and packages"
• "There is an opportunity to build the RubyGems of SaaS APIs"

• State management abstracted out as an API

• Essential vs accidental complexity
• We are asking more and more of our software
• The volume of software within companies is exploding

• If we consider that we need a re-bundling in order to see the promise of real productivity building crudware, this seems kind of big.

• A good one from the archives. Key points
  • Developers are now a big enough market to sell to (crazy that this was only 8 years ago considering how big that market is now).
  • Trends identified
  • Democratization of software development: I wonder would she think that this has progressed as fast as she predicted.
  • "Developer Components" - basically APIification
  • "Picks & Shovels" - Atlassian revenues were $100m then, now $1.6b