Hi everyone. My name is Patrick Akil and
joining me today is Paulina Force, Senior Software Engineer
over at MongoDB. And we talk about software
engineering culture. It didn't start in a vacuum.
It originated from somewhere hacking, do it yourself kind of
rebellious culture. That's what it was originally,
and you can still find it somewhere today, mainly an open
source in hacking communities. And what are the differences
between what we see now and how this originated?
That's what we discussed today. So enjoy.
Software culture has evolved, and I've never thought of
software culture being a thing. I just see what it is now.
Culture for me is like the way we do things here and the way we
do things are like the focus of software has not really changed,
at least like in my lifespan, being involved in this.
Yeah. But when talking to you, you
have a distinct opinion that things have changed.
Yeah. How did he originate?
What was like the OG software culture?
I mean, I, I wasn't born yet so I, I wouldn't have been there,
but I do like read a lot about it and like consume a lot about
it. And I was pretty early, I think
I was very extremely online already before a lot of people
were like when the word meme, for instance, wasn't like a
mainstream concept. But I think if you take it all
the way back, there's like a weird mixture between like
academia, like people coming from like math, physics,
engineering and stuff. But then also there are they
were already a little bit weird, a little bit strange and like a
little bit solitary. And a lot of it was quite
counterculture also. And I think that's the thing I
get passionate passionate about, as well as the the the kind of
counterculture aspect of it. And like the anti authoritarian.
And yeah, I just find there's a lot of overlap with other less
profit focused things like cultural things like punk
culture, DIY culture, anarchist culture.
And now software is very, I mean, you know, you have like
the VC money and stuff, which is, I mean, I'm not going to be
disingenuous about it. I work for a publicly traded
company. Money is nice.
Yeah. You know, but like, I think I
think especially I saw a pretty big shift around like 20/17/2018
when a lot of these like coding boot camps happened.
And a lot of people who originally maybe never really
considered software engineering is a job where then like, oh
shit, I never realized that, you know, this is where there's
quite a bit of money to be made and there's such a high demand
that you also don't even need to be super experienced to get
ahead and like to get a nice job.
And so a lot of people kind of shifted to software and kind of
missed that whole era of like, Internet culture and hacktivism
and all of that stuff. Yeah.
And I, I think it's a shame because it's, it's quite cool.
And yeah, I just feel like there's like an increasing
disconnect between the cultural aspects.
Yeah, yeah. I don't know how it evolved.
Like I, I think I started coding.
It must have been 6-7 years ago. I started in operations and then
I was kind of frustrated. I had some stuff in university,
but it was like data science oriented, so math, more
probability, statistics like that.
But it was really from operations where I, I wasn't
responsible in changing things, but I was responsible for
running things in production. Then I read about dev OPS and I
was like, yeah, this just dev OPS makes sense.
This what I have doesn't make sense.
Yeah, I think, I think that's the experience of most people
starting out, especially if you're like finding a job, any
job, and it's like you tend to find a job where best practices
don't really exist, Yeah, because people just don't really
know about it. And then I think everyone has
that same experience of like breaking something in production
just because like the, the appropriate guardrails are not
in place because, and also because there's this misguided
trust in developers like, oh, we're all smart people, right?
And it's like, it's not about being smart.
It's like, you know, I didn't sleep well last night.
I don't really know what I'm doing with this Engine X
configuration, Oddly specific. Yeah, and then that can destroy
your whole gateway. Yeah, which is what I did, yeah.
Really. Yeah, no way.
Yeah, 'cause I saw my, I saw my boss.
It was it was one of these shops that was just like a 0
guardrails basically. And I saw my boss just like SSH
ING into a server and just using I think nano to just like change
an engine X configuration. And you know, I was pretty
green. So I saw that I was like, OK,
this is what we do. That's it.
And I had SSH access to client servers.
And so I was like, all right, let's change this.
Engineer just took the whole shit down.
Oh, do you have a swearing policy on this?
Oh, no, no, no. OK, that's very good.
That's when you deal with me. Yeah, I mean, back to the
software culture, like I, I understand what we have now.
I see people starting up startups and their goal not
necessarily is to scale or to deliver value, but it's to exit
and like to sell this thing, to deliver value quickly and then
to sell it to a big company. And that's their model.
They're good at starting things. They're good at finding product
market fit. They're good at building
something out, good enough to have it sell.
They don't want to do this follow through.
There's people that still want to do this follow through, but
those are like the two aspects that I see.
There's not this hacking or puzzling or like counter culture
that you talked about. Like I don't see that.
Strangely, I think that was already a thing before and like
the the 80s and then I think there was already this thing of
like we're building because I think it also takes a certain
personality type to like build a thing, get super excited about
it. Not just to like exit, which is
obviously way more the goal now, but also way harder now because
like there's so much competition, but but not
necessarily to exit, but to like build something cool quickly.
And then so I think there were a lot of hacker types.
I mean, if you look at like the Homebrew Computer Club, and I
was saying that I think it was called Homebrew Computer Club
that had like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs and stuff, We're all
part of that as well. So you know, that was already
kind of a thing. Also Google being started from a
garage and that sort of stuff. So not unheard of at the time.
Those are all hacker adjacent as well so.
Yeah, I feel like like I've never hacked something.
I know that's like part of a security thing, but this, this
culture of like hacking, breaking, playing around, that
play around. I have.
I do see some stuff like from a puzzling mindset.
I like puzzles. That's always why I like solving
problems in software. But not everything is a puzzle.
Some stuff is also, you just have to get stuff done and it's
building an API. Building an API is very
different from solving a puzzle. Yeah, I think that's a very
different mindset. And that's like, well, I mean,
that stems from like running a business, right?
You have to deliver the value. I think a hacker mindset is much
more about the puzzling and the, the, the problem solving rather
than anything else. And I think also in a business
context, you still get those people who are like just simply
not interested in doing those menial tasks and really, and
they become like architects and stuff like that.
You know what I mean? They just have like different
roles I think because those are not the detail oriented people
that are going to really follow things through until the end,
but they're more like the big idea conceptual people, I guess.
I just came out of an architecture training and maybe
specifically I, I came into it with a similar notion as you and
it blew my mind that his architecture training, this was
Gregor Hope. He lives in Singapore.
He flew over for this training in person and in Netherlands.
And his training was mainly about only drawing, for example,
an architecture diagram if there's a concrete question.
And he mainly focused on communication.
So if you want to have buy in, have empathy with your people,
figure out what the way to speak basically to get buy in on a
certain idea. Be pragmatic, be practical.
Don't just draw a diagram to draw a diagram.
Be close to the people that do the work with regards to
software engineering and operations, he said.
I made my architecture team run operations to actually feel the
pain. You're responsible for building
a system run the pain of basically running it in
operations. Then you become a better
architect. I was like, that's interesting.
I think that's honestly like a really good because I think a
common pitfall for these very architectural types are they
want to build like like an amazing feat, you know, they
want to really design and then often it just leads to over
engineering, right? Like, and I think what he kind
of expresses from what I understand from you is very like
DDD as well. So very domain driven design,
which also focus on focuses on this like ubiquitous language.
Like you have stakeholders that have to be very closely involved
in like trying to understand what you're building and who
you're building it for and not just like, oh, look at this,
cool, I'm going to build the coolest system we've ever.
Yeah, exactly. You know this thing, talking to
this thing and yeah, yeah. It's a rocket ship, not what we
need right now. It's a little car.
Yeah, exactly. When we're talking about this
kind of do it yourself culture, at least the the more roots
where software engineering culture originated from.
Are there still aspects or in the current industry parts where
you see that most? Is it in security?
Is it in observability? Is it in platforming?
I mean, honestly, no, I feel like because the the mindset
behind DIY culture is very anti capitalist.
Yeah. And so it does not fit really in
a modern. So you have, you have companies
like Fairphone, for instance, where their whole, their whole
premise is we have this phone that's modular that you can
repair yourself. Whereas like profit margins
depend on us buying. You know, if you look at Apple,
you have to buy a new phone every every two years and you
cannot repair it yourself. Or, you know, they count on you
not being able to repair it yourself.
You could try but then your warranty is void.
Yeah, exactly. So, so DIY culture, there's a,
a, a very high is highly political.
It's it's anti consumerism, anti capitalist.
And it's the focus is on like self-sufficiency.
And there's also like a sort of eco socialism thing tied to it.
Because if you're, if you're buying a thing that is modular,
that you know how to take apart and you know how to salvage
parts, you know how to clean the parts, put it back together,
then the electronic waste that you produce is so much more
minimal. And it's, it's entirely
possible. Like if we were to just, you
know, even even if we look like before tech, it used to be
really common knowledge how to repair your clothes, right?
It's all the same thing to me. It's all the same.
You have, because you have hacker spaces for this sort of
thing, but you also have repair spaces, which is more of a punk
DIY culture thing. So not tech adjacent at all, but
it's the same mindset of like we repair our clothes, we don't buy
new stuff, you know, and it just, it's all the same concept.
It's minimizing waste, it's minimizing consumerism, it's
protecting our environment. Yeah, it's self-sufficiency.
What's your take then on on open source?
Because I see parts of it overlapping but other parts are
just not overlapping. And then there's also currently,
I wouldn't call it a trend because it's like a valid
business model, but productizing open source projects.
Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting, interesting
you say that because obviously I work for MongoDB, but in the DBX
department, which is basically the open source portion of it.
So, yeah, in terms of like open source being like open source
being productized, I do think for an ecosystem and for users,
it's important that like regular releases are being done for
libraries and packages and things like that.
Because, you know, we have several packages that used to be
kind of open source land and not maintained by us that we've then
taken over because that, you know, gives users a much more
like reliable. You can't expect like 1
maintainer who started this project by themselves to like
keep maintaining it over the years and keep everything up to
date sort of thing. So then to, as a business to be
able to offer like a reliable ecosystem to your users, which
you, you need to make money because there's this paid
product behind it, right? You need to ensure that that
you're the one maintaining it basically, because, yeah, then
you can ensure a healthy ecosystem.
So yeah, I think honestly, it's a really good business model
that we see these days where a lot of these open source
companies have this platform layer behind it, which drives
the open source portion of it as well.
But yeah, open source again as a culture also has very political
concepts, right? What do you mean by the
political concepts of that? So open source culture, like,
goes back to like the 70s, yeah, which is very closely tied to
hacker culture, same origins, essentially.
And there's a lot of people in open source who believe in the
Internet as like, and technology is like a public infrastructure,
right? Like for the people.
And quite a few of them see as see like free information, open
information, accessible information as a human right.
And so that that includes open source software basically.
Yeah. So it's, again, it's the same,
it's a slightly different expression of this DIY thing,
but still the same sort of, yeah, pro people, anti
capitalist, kind of, it's all kind of a socialist construct.
That's why I saw it overlapping. And I, I love this aspect.
And I don't know if there's a similar field where you have
something in place like open source, or you can have a
community around something that someone created, a single person
that then gets embraced by a group of people that gets built
out to this platform that upholds or is like an integral
part of certain organizations. And then I fully understand that
it cannot be maintained. It cannot be sustainable to them
be maintained by the same group with regards to speed and
release and focus. And real life happens.
And it being such a big part of like bigger organizations, a
multitude of organizations, it just grows to a certain level of
skill that having a dedicated team and those also need to be
paid. Those also need to provide.
So I fully understand the model. It's just, yeah, there's that's
where I see the biggest overlap. The fact that we can still
create open source software that can still have this growth in
kind of Catalyst without having the incentive to make money,
even though obviously there's varied opinions there, but I
think people do it for the greater good.
Look, this is something that we've built.
It works really well in and of its own.
Or we cleaned it up so it can be stand alone for others to build
on top of, for others to use for others to learn, which I think
is really cool. Yeah, I I think so as well.
Yeah. I think that I was thinking
about something and then I lost something.
Yeah, No, no worries. No worries.
Open source for me is also very different with regards to
comparing it to a product, because a product has different
end users. This is like open source is
usually part of a bigger piece of software, a puzzle piece that
someone uses in their own puzzle in whatever outcome they're
trying to achieve. I mean, sometimes, but there's
also like full blown products that are open source, like GIMP,
for instance, is open source, which is like the, the, the open
source version of Photoshop essentially, right.
So it's a whole, it's a whole UI and stuff.
It's not just like, oh, here's a get up repository.
You got to like install it and then use it through the CLI or
something. Does it have then the same team
that I would expect with regards to products or product manager,
UXUI people, researchers, developers?
Is that the same structure behind?
You don't know. I think for some probably and
then for others it's like this like loosely held sort of e-mail
group, I guess like this News Group, I mean PHP friends,
because I work in PHPPHP for the longest time was just like, it's
very recently organized a foundation.
So now we have the PHP foundation, which is like a core
group of people who, you know, like decide where the language
goes and like do the maintaining of the, the language and stuff
builds new features and things like that.
And then, you know, and now they have this sort of central
organization that also businesses that use PHP can
donate to so that there's like an active, but before that, and
this is like, so like 2 years ago and PHP was released in the
mid 90s. So that's like close to two
decades of it just being like a group of people just arguing on
RFCS and an e-mail groups like, yeah.
Yeah, I feel like the, I don't know where I saw this.
It was on a conference. What is that very specific
platform that you can run simple websites on?
That's always been a thing. WordPress.
Exactly. So WordPress running on PHPI
think it was the company behind WordPress and they laid out all
the pieces of software they use, which are all open source, which
ties together WordPress. And I was just amazed.
And I feel like this is me very much on a surface though, but I
feel like the PHP community embraces open source software
and I haven't seen that from. Oh, PHP.
This is why I love PHP. It's not.
I mean, not because it's like the best language.
I think it's a much better language than people.
Give it credit for. Yes, because there's this.
It's actually really interesting.
Neil's the the one of the founders of Composer, which is
like the dependency manager for PHP.
He's on this like, kind of like Crusade because there's this
thing that goes around people saying like, oh, is PHP dead?
And like nobody really knows who came up with it, but it's been
going since I started it's. Such a meme, it is ridiculous.
It's such a meme and it just has been going for.
So clearly it's nonsense because the meme itself has been going
for like 15 years already. And so but but he's now just
anyone who mentioned it, he's like, stop saying it.
Stop saying it because all you're doing is like reinforcing
this idea that came from nowhere.
That's absolute nonsense. And then so, yeah, that's why I
say like PHP is quite a good language, actually modern PHP,
and I love it. But what what I really love
about PHP is that the ecosystem is just so mature and there's so
many people who care about it involved.
And anything that you kind of are looking for, any type of use
case, there's always a library that's very stable, very active,
you know, and there's just lovely people in this ecosystem.
People don't realize. It's become joke that people use
that don't use PHP and they use it to each other.
And it's very strange how this has grown, right, Because it's
it's an ongoing job. I've seen that out in the open
for a while now and it's still running.
I cannot believe it's still running.
Yeah. And it's still modernizing.
It's definitely and I think a lot of.
So Laravel is this is this framework is and together with
Symphony or like the two weeks PHP frameworks basically.
And Laravel has a has a very strong focus on developer
experience. So there's a lot of like auto
generation scripts for like generating classes, generating
config my all this stuff. Symphony has that 2 two degree
Larva was built on Symphony and then larva just kind of is that
on steroids. And so it's a little bit less
pure PHP and much more the larval way that you're expected
to do things. But then in return you get.
All this like automation, right? And so that really blew up and
it's really easy to like do like a starter project.
And so now people from like the JavaScript world are trying out
Laravel and just their minds are being blown.
So it's really kind of blowing up at this point and people are
kind of looking at PHP now like, oh, I didn't realize you could.
Yeah, yeah, just heard about the memes and then you made
assumptions. Yeah, and now you're trying out
this thing. It's like, oh this is cool
actually. I mean, I love having a wow
factor. That's definitely one.
Yeah, yeah. Based on all the signals that
you get that it's it's going nowhere and then you use it and
it's actually pretty solid. That's very cool.
Yeah, and I mean, nothing beats like, you know, with one of
these starter kits, it's literally just like 21 liners in
your CLI and you have a whole app with authentication and
everything built in and yeah, that's it.
It's literally 30 seconds. So it's.
Yeah, Back to open source. For me, open source is still
kind of a community of created by developers and also for
developers. And like you said, there are
full blown products there. But I don't see many people with
regards to having a product background, having AUI or user
experience background also contributing in open source in a
similar manner. I feel like we could create very
cool products, but I don't know what it is that kind of brings
developers together with regards to open source in that way, and
that doesn't do it for the same kind of other user groups which
are very adjacent in creating software.
Yeah, so I, I really think it's this weirdness that like
software engineers have, I think there's this, you know, like the
people, people will say the same, like, oh, if you're a
software engineer, you're probably somewhere on the
spectrum sort of thing. I've seen that.
Yeah. So I, and this is, again, it
comes back to my theory that there's a lot of overlap with
these other like also like queer culture, for instance, in punk
culture, there's like people that are a little bit strange
generally and you know, from the outside looking in, but I feel
like if you're kind of in the thick of it, it's super obvious
that you're all some form of like neurodivergent.
And with that comes kind of this mindset like this sort of
idealism often and this sort of yeah, this idealism that we
talked about before. And I think a lot of people who
are like in design and product management, they're just not
necessarily always that into it. And if they are, they don't
realize that software engineers also are similar in that regard
and that there's a lot of like cool work that they can do.
But I think it's a, it's a massive shame because in terms
of this idealism and, and creating these open source
projects, which, you know, I could go on for days about like
how I think open source software and like, well, anyway, could
save the world in a, in a lot of ways, But maybe we'll get back
to that in a minute. But, but it's not going to
happen if, if you don't get people involved to understand
what users want. Because for instance, like, if
you look at like Mastodon, you know, because Twitter, when
Twitter was bought by Elon, a lot of people had like an exodus
because especially like journalists and, and people like
that because they were worried about like censorship and, and
things like that. And so they, they heard of
Macedon, which promised to be sort of like a Twitter clone or
whatever. So they all just went there.
But then, you know, and I think because Macedon is part of the
feta verse, I don't know if we need to expand on that, but
maybe. If you if you can in a in a
nutshell. Yeah.
So kind of hard to say, but like the feta verse is, is like a a
group of applications that run on the same protocol, not
necessarily the same protocol, but most of them run on the same
protocol called activity pub, which is yeah, essentially A
protocol for for messages, so like social messages.
So for instance, you have like you have all these objects on
this protocol, like post poster, like, you know, I can't remember
what the actual names are on the protocol, but and then this
shared protocol is reused between apps.
So you can build an app around this protocol, run it, and then
actually between apps, because it runs on the same protocol,
you can follow other people on a completely different app, but
subscribe to this. So for instance, let's say like,
Oh, my mom doesn't want to be on Instagram, but she is on some
other app. She can still follow me.
I can still. Yeah.
So that's one aspect of it. Another aspect of it is that
it's like decentralized. So instead of having one central
entity that manages Twitter, yeah, that is controlled by one
person called Elon Musk, a fed verse has multiple instances.
So anyone can start an instance. They just have to run the server
basically and maintain the server.
So the whole network runs over the activity pub.
If one instance is taken down, people can move to another one
and still follow what's going on on the network basically.
So it's super interesting in terms of like takedowns and, you
know, also censorship by governments.
And because it's really easy, for instance, for a repressive
government to cut off this big entity like Twitter, but it's
much harder to like cut off all these different instances of
fetaverse apps. So there's all these kind of
benefits. But then a big problem lies in
the fact that all these kind of idealistic, A principled
software engineers who make these things out of the sense of
idealism, they don't think about what how users think because
that's just not their bread and butter.
And so a user is going to go on Mastodon and then it's going to
go like, oh, you got to pick a server.
What does that mean? Server.
What are? You talking about I just want to
post it like go into the tippy taps and post a message like so
that sort of stuff is just what screws it for everyone else.
And then you get like instant, like Meta who did threads, which
is, you know, it instantly gets critical mass because they know
exactly how to reel people in. Oh, they know.
Yeah, they they're just sending notifications to every Instagram
and Facebook using like, hey, maybe you want to use Threads.
Yeah, why not? Yeah, you like this?
This. Cool thing, yeah, but what's
quite cool about threads is that it also runs on activity pub, so
it is actually Federated. And last time I checked, I'm
pretty sure you can like follow people from on threads from
Mastodon and vice versa. And obviously not just Mastodon,
but any other activity. I didn't know that, it was very
cool. If they have federation turned
on, then yeah. Yeah, look at that.
I I this sense of idealism, like I feel like I have it to a
certain degree at least that's based on feedback because it's
easy to say, well, I have it, but I never really thought about
open source in that way that it's something that people
create and it's also kind of an anarchistic.
Oh, as it makes me so. And this is exactly why I like
to talk about it because it's so sad to me.
Like the people. It's not, I'm not saying that
everyone should live with this like idealism and like everyone
should be an activist. And I'm, I'm not like that
either, to be fair. Like, I mean, you know, I have a
job and consume as well. But it's such an interesting
history and it's such an interesting culture.
And I mean, open source especially is so connected to
the politics of it. Like the the the original
premise was so purely political that and so purely idealistic
that it's such a shame that people can work with open source
every day for years and they've never heard of this.
No, no, that I, I fully agree with that.
Like when you and I spoke, I never thought of this history.
Like I get history taught in class and I see it online, but
no, no one really talks about, you know, the history of open
source. It's also me.
I also didn't really look for it, but I do think it's
fascinating. Like I can see culture evolving
and I can see what the culture is now for me, if I if I were to
say what culture is in the 1st place, it's just the way we do
things around here. And that can change from
organization to organization, but it definitely normalizes
among an industry. And I don't see this hacky DIY
kind of anarchist culture. I see a culture that is there to
use software, definitely to use it.
Also there's aspect to use it for the greater good, to also
contribute to humanity, but also to manipulate or like, not on
purpose, but to a certain degree.
That is the effect of some applications.
It's like to make money. And then a side effect is, yeah,
you zone in or you're not good for the brain or like these
aspects of it are side effects and the goal is to make money.
Yeah, exactly. That is more the culture we have
now. Yeah.
And it's, you know, like, it's the thing that came out recently
where it turned out that, like, was it?
I think Mehta was doing this on Instagram where they detected
when teenage girls deleted selfies.
OK. And then they would target them
specifically with beauty ads after they and it's like, you
know, and they said something like this is where we make money
like this is. A horrible thing.
Yeah, and it's like, you know, but they like they're not going
to think about that like, but there there is this whole layer
of society that's still very active.
It's not just historical who are like web pioneers who are trying
to do the. So I have this talk about the
decentralized web, which a lot of people now after NFTS and
crypto and stuff, when they hear decentralized web, they think it
means that. But actually there's this whole
separate move movement about which is more associated with
this feta verse thing and and some other like protocols and
interesting things that are happening that are just more
concerned with like the original purpose of the web as like a Tim
Berners Lee had intended it. So Tim Berners Lee like often
credited as the inventor of the web, but in reality, it was like
part of a group at CERN. But like the purpose there was
also it was political. It was supposed to be public
infrastructure. It was supposed to be the
purpose of connecting personal computers all around the world
was so that people who normally don't have access to
information, for instance, because they live in poverty or
because their governments were restrictive or they couldn't go
to university for whatever reason.
You know, you can imagine like a young girl in a country where
she's not allowed to go to school, for instance, maybe
she'll have access to a personal computer or something and then
she can still learn stuff, you know, that sort of stuff.
That's what it was meant for. And that was genuinely, I'm not
making this up. This is genuinely was the
premise and and he himself, so Tim Berners Lee himself now says
he deeply regrets how it's kind of been morphed into something.
I think he actually used the word perverted into something
that's not good for humanity. And so there's this whole
decentralized web movement that is trying to go back to this
premise of like the web is nodes of people connecting as opposed
to this these big like conglomerates, like, you know,
who control like at this point like 90% of the web.
Because it's not just like web traffic over like Facebook and
stuff. It's also like all the cloud
providers, all the same people like AWS, Google, you know, all
the Internet traffic is now centralized under these giant
entities as opposed to public infrastructure.
I, I forget who I was talking to, but it must have been like a
year, maybe year and a half ago. This person I had on the podcast
and he was working on this messaging app called Geet where
you and I have something locally running on our machine.
And that would just be point to point machine to machine
communication instead of going to a server and then having kind
of central centralized control lying with that server.
That's the first time where he, he mentioned this idea to me of
like the decentralized web and infrastructure and the
capabilities that we can have. I just feel like we need to
reach critical mass to get to that point where it's actually
valuable enough for people to use it.
If everyone used it, then it just made sense.
Yeah. And like, this is where we are
now. Yeah, and that's where you need
these, these people that we were talking about because like a
user doesn't really doesn't give a shit about decentralization.
They're like, especially when they're in a cushy place, right?
Like, especially when they're in a place where they don't feel
like they're they're being suppressed in any way or
whatever. Yeah, you know those people are
not going to care about like giving their data to MET or IT.
Doesn't hurt, yeah. So yeah, not.
In any immediate sense? In any Case, No.
I get that. What do you think of kind of how
the Internet is evolving? Because I talked to many people
with regards to AI and some people are of the opinion that
the Internet is dying, right? We are now having this one
interface, no ads. I ask it a question, it does all
the browsing for me. I stick to that interface
basically, and that's where I get my truth versus what would
happen five years ago. I would go to Google, I would go
to numerous websites, I'd be hit with ads, and I would be trying
to find the information I'm looking for.
We're moving to a singular interface.
I know not a lot about AI with the rest of the intricacies, but
I do think this way of interface evolving, that's definitely
something that's going to stick I feel like.
I, I do think so as well. I think we're in a weird spot
right now where it's all very new and nobody really knows
where it's going. I am a little bit concerned
about like the the brain training as a 'cause there's
already studies coming coming out that were atrophying our our
brains basically. Critical thinking.
Yeah, so I, I try not to use LLMS for, for things like, you
know, e-mail writing. And I just don't use it because
I've, I am of the opinion that we don't really need what you
call it now. What's the word like?
It's like a word for ease, the convenience you need.
I don't think we need convenience for everything.
And I think it's actually bad to have everything too convenient.
Like we're built to think and move and, and, and I feel like
increasingly people are going to start to miss things like real
life textures. And you know what I mean?
Like, I mean, I feel it. So if I'm feeling it, I'm, I'm
sure I'm not the only person. I do feel like at some point we
want to, on some level we want to like remain human.
And so I, I think, I think we shouldn't look for convenience
in everything that we we use. But that is so like counter
intuitive because convenience is nice.
Yeah, you want to get to think about the.
Efficient route to wherever. You're going right.
Why? Why would I do the math myself?
Why? I'm using a calculator.
Calculator just makes sense. It's a certain level of
convenience. Yeah, I think it's also like you
want to cherry pick what you like.
Using a calculator is one thing, but like completely cutting out
problem solving, like if you use a calculator is part of a
problem that you're trying to solve, you're still using your
brain basically, right? But like for instance, if you go
to a university to learn stuff and all you're doing is using
ChatGPT, then it's like, OK, what are you doing there then?
Trying to game the system. Yeah, And like, OK, valid.
I, I think gaming the system can also be a good exercise for your
brain in a lot of ways. But I do feel a little bit like,
OK, you got to, I don't know, you got to.
I think you're a human being with your own agency and I think
you have to like on a personal level, think about like, what do
I want? For me?
Also completely a different aspect of AI that I'm concerned
about is like I was trying out lovable for a little bit to like
it's a lovable. It's like the the AI generated
apps basically where you prompt like, Oh, I want this app and it
does a pretty good job in like the the front end aspect of it
where you know it can generate like this pretty bog standard
like crud application or whatever.
Yeah, pretty convincing looking like sauce thing, especially if
you like tell it to like make it look a certain way.
Mm hmm all good. But then like, I think there's a
lot of non software engineers who are using this thing and
thinking they're building hot shit and then not knowing how to
read the actual code that is generating.
Because like when I was using it and I looked at the code that it
was actually generating, it was full of holes of course.
And yeah, but like glaring holes.
Yeah. Like the worst one I got was I
tried to have it create a password reset link because like
out-of-the-box it'll generate an app with authentication and and
stuff, but it didn't have a password reset link.
So it's basically OK, here's a user can register, but if they
ever lose their password then we didn't think I can't do
anything. So.
I was like, I had a reset password link, please.
What? And I was like, yeah, yeah, all
right. And then it didn't work.
And I was like, hey, it's not working.
Can you make it work? I was like, there we go.
I'm clearly not a prompt engineer, but then I looked at
what it generated and basically what it did was like the IT
added to the recent link. It was like it added a query
parameter that said reset password equals true.
And if that was set to true is like, OK, reset the password.
I was like, I don't think that's.
But now I'm really concerned that we're now like entering a
great era for like a goldmine era for hackers like Black Hat
hackers, because you've got all these people who don't know how
to read code, who are deploying this and this, real users with
real user data. I I fully agree.
Like I love the idea of enabling many people to create software
to do something really cool with an idea.
They have to innovate to provide value to users, right?
And like you said, it works. They have users, but then it's
like they do take the easy Rd. Yeah.
It's like, OK, I use this tool and I just have an idea and bam,
it works. It's like you found this real
life cheat code. Basically.
Yeah. You press ABAB, left, right,
left, right, and something pops out and you're like that.
That's a cheat code. Yeah.
And you use it. And why not, right?
Because people are marketing. You can use these cheat codes.
Now. Look here what other people are
doing. They're making XY and Z.
Oh my God, I can't stand. Everywhere LinkedIn is lovable,
does a great job with their marketing because it's like,
look at these people, they make X amount in two days and you're
like, what the hell? Yeah, if it sounds too good to
be true, it usually is. But also like, at the end of the
day, like people were like, you know, spitting out these these
MVPS left and right for like concepts that are just like,
just because you can make the app doesn't make it a good app.
Like Kill Your Darlings cuz I yeah, is this sprouted stuff
sprouting up where it's just like, oh, look, I made
essentially an excel sheet. Well, it's, you know, the same
problems as every other Sauce app being like a glorified Excel
sheet. I mean, the, I do see like a, a
good side of it because me, if I look at myself as an individual,
I have a hard time starting things.
Yeah. So once something is already up
and running, this podcast, for example, I got help starting it
up. I keep it running forever.
That is really good. That's what I'm good at.
Opposite. I I'm really bad at starting
things. And then what I see nowadays is
that starting is super easy. I see everyone starting and I'm
like, oh, I should get better at starting.
So it is it gives me I I don't know if I would call anxiety.
It might be that. It gives me anxiety.
Yeah, 100%. I'm like.
I should like be like I should be moving.
Yeah, I am not. Yeah, I should move.
Yeah, yeah, I heard about Bitcoin in, you know, like 2012
and didn't do anything also 'cause I was broke as shit, so I
couldn't have done anything if I wanted to, but.
It wasn't that expensive though. Would have been nice, yeah, but
I didn't have 20 years in my name.
Most. Most months, frankly.
Gotcha. Yeah, that's yeah.
No, I see it maybe as a as a good thing because in the end
it's going to enable people to move.
They're going to look into things like there will be a good
side of things. But yeah, with regards to kind
of the the garbage that is being put out in production kind of
hacker friendly, I do see that. And I think, I think if you
thought about like making a pivot into infosec, this is like
a really good time because Infosec people are going to be
needed far and wide, I think. Have you heard of stop
squatting? I love that term so much.
Like I keep telling people about it because it's, it's so funny.
Stop squatting. Slop squatting, so you know,
like slop like AI swap. So there's like this thing
called like name squatting where you know.
For domain names. No, for actually, I think that
might have been. Yeah, name squatting is for
domain names. And then there's maybe registry,
so I can't remember the term, but there's a similar thing for
like packages. So for like MPM packages or like
compose packages. Of course, that's the thing.
So like, you know, people often make typos when they like,
install a dependency. So then people install back
doors and and packages with like a very similar name and then,
you know, a few people will accidentally install that
dependency and stuff. So that is that.
But now there's this new thing called slop squatting, which I
love because it's so funny and also not funny, but it's so
funny to me that so like slop is things that are AI generated,
right? So hackers found out the like
when you ask AI for like a dependency for a certain use
case that doesn't exist, it'll generate it'll go like, OK,
yeah, sure, I'll install that dependency that doesn't exist
and I'll make up a name for this dependency and it'll try to
install this package that doesn't exist with this name.
So they found like a, a series of commonly generated names for
a certain dependencies and then just like posted, like published
the package. And so you have all these like
AI applications and that have these dependencies that don't
exist. Yeah, I think people find a way
and they find kind of very creative ways and I think this
is a great example of it. I think that's fascinating.
I mean, my final thought is, and also a question to you is for
people that are listening that hear about the software culture
and it really hits home to them, You already mentioned that it's
it's kind of hard to find that culture in the way of working
nowadays. What would be your advice for
them if they want to do more with this?
Would it be to go and contribute to open source or what would be
your your advice to? That I think contributing to
open source is one thing, but I, I also find that like it's quite
hard to do outside of your day job and it, it's if you want to
be a part of the, the culture, I think it's nicer to actually
like really go into it. So there's like FOS, which is
like an event and a huge open source event that happens every
year. So people go there and there's
like talks and parties and stuff.
So that's quite fun. I think also the reason we
started talking about this is because I'm going to a hacker
camp soon, which was something that I'd wanted to go to for so
long, for years and years and years.
But I was always a little bit afraid, OK, because I thought I
wouldn't know anyone. I, I thought I'd be like, you
know, I'm not a real hacker sort of thing.
And then like the last time they had a so it's every four years
in Holland. And the last time I went was
also the first time I went, I was like, all right, fuck it,
I'll, I'll go. I'll try to see if I know anyone
who's going. Turned out.
I knew like heaps of people from like, because I, I do know quite
a few people from the Dutch hacker scene from way back, like
Operation Chenology. I don't know if you know that.
Do you know those like Anonymous protests that happened, like the
protesting Scientology in like 2008?
Yeah. OK, so that was monthly protests
of like 4 Chan and Something Awful people who would go, and a
lot of them were hackers. That's basically what
popularized Anonymous is a concept as well, because we were
all masked, basically, Yeah. Yeah.
So I made a whole bunch of friends from that era and a
whole bunch of them were there. And so I just joined their
village and then it also turned out that like, because they have
like this capture the flag that's for all levels, it's very
child friendly. They have like a family zone
that has to be quiet at some point at night.
So like, people come there with their families.
Are you talking about a physical capture the flag?
This Is this digital? Thing no, it's like a digital
thing slash physical because they're they incorporate hacking
of all kinds. So that's like and network
hacking and exploding websites, but also lock picking, you know,
all this other stuff like. Physical lock picking.
Yeah, yeah, physical lock picking.
Yeah, people don't realize how broad hacking is, but physical
lock picking, you know, you get like, actually I think I parked
my bike. Your pins.
With a practice lock. Really.
Yeah. Because I didn't have another
lock. Yeah.
So it's like a see through lock that you can pick.
They're really cool. So.
And that's super Zen. It's very fun, yeah.
So you definitely recommend that for the finding the culture that
is similar if you want to do more, it's.
So fun and it's not intimidating at all.
It's I thought it was going to be intimidating, but they're so
inclusive and these people are also so wacky.
Even if you haven't done anything with hacking.
Nothing at all. There's a lot of like community
as I convinced a bunch of friends to go this year and
we're creating our own village and our village because like a
village is like a group of people that you can camp with at
a hacker camp. And usually they have some sort
of theme and our theme is the library village.
So we're just going to have a bunch of like cyber related
books and people can just like come and like check out a book
and like just chill and have some coffee and stuff.
And then there's also like a, a cooking village where you can go
and have meals that they cook every day.
You know, there's all all sorts of different villages and it's
completely like community organized.
All the there's talks, there's like parties.
I'm actually organizing a battle snake competition at this one.
What is a Battlesnake competition?
So Battlesnake is really fun. It's came from like a bunch of
conferences. I think it specifically came
from a bunch of PHP conferences. OK, but Battlesnake is kind of
like, it's kind of like battle bots, you know, like people make
their own bots, like robots and they fight each other and like
I've. Seen that online?
Yeah. So this is like the coding
version. So you register your snake and
it's like snake like on a Nokia sort of.
But you there's like a kind of an API and I think it, it's like
events your Oh no, it's web hooks.
So you expose your, you run a little web server and you expose
an endpoint and then the Battlesnake game will like hit
your web hook and then you no, not web hook, just say API
endpoint. Yeah, it hits your API endpoint
and then you have to send it a response with like the moves
that you want your snake to do next, essentially.
And then you just get paired up with someone else with another
snake and then you know, and you're all watching it on like a
screen and cheering on your own snake and stuff.
It's very fun. It's.
Really cool. That's really cool.
I only know it from like the game Battletoads, but I love it
when people gamify something with regards to software.
The first time that I heard about it was from this YouTube
Kevin Powell. He does a lot with regards to
CSS and he says there's CSS battles.
So imagine you have this like black and white shape and then
you only have CSS and you're supposed to make the shapes in
CSS to make it pixel perfect and you're racing someone else.
So you and I would face off and try and fit CSS shapes in this
kind of black and white thing and it's insane.
And see, you don't realize, but this also has roots in this
hacker culture because it like it really reminds me of the demo
scene, which is also there's going to be demo parties at this
hacker thing as well. A lot of people don't know what
the demo scene is, which is such a shame because it's so cool.
It used to be, there's still demo scene party sort of, but
computers have normalized and not normalized, modernized and
stuff. But it used to be the like you
have a party, right? And you have a computer with
very limited memory resources and things like that.
And so live people are hacking programming this thing to make
like, cool visuals and like music and stuff.
And so you have this party where the music and or visuals are
being live programmed. And then, you know, it's
supposed to like, showcase the cool things you can do with this
like chiptune thing or like, yeah, this thing with limited
resources. I just think it's so cool and
all this stuff, like it's just an evolution of that basically.
It makes me sad to hear when people say they're not having
fun at work, right? Maybe because they get they just
have a golden handcuffs. They get paid really well, but
they're also really much focused on output and outcomes.
I feel like having fun in a way of battle snakes or like CSS
battles like gamifying or even finding a like minded people
that think along the same lines or just can give you insights
with regards to hacking and having fun and kind of puzzling.
I I love that that that aspect is still there and that you can
still find community in that way.
Yeah. And I think also, if you can't,
if you don't have the space to do it at work, I think people
would be surprised how many employers are prepared to, for
instance, pay their ticket for a hacker camp or for their
attendance to like things like Foss.
So I think if people haven't done that and they feel like,
oh, I have a job, I'm too busy, go ask your manager because
usually there's budget for this type of stuff.
So you can actually immerse yourself.
Even if it's just like a tech conference, it's really nice to
be able to talk to maintainers and because they're just out and
about and you can talk to them and it's, it's really quite
nice. They're usually very
approachable, very nice people. Yeah, yeah.
Awesome. I've really enjoyed this
conversation, Padina. Thank you.
Me too. Thank you so much for coming on
and sharing your perspective. I think it's extremely valuable
and really inspiring as well. Thank you.
Cool. And we're going to round it off.
If you're still here listening, leave a like.
If you like the episode, let us know in the comments section
what you thought. I'll leave Padina's socials in
the description below. Check her out.
Let him know you came from the show and otherwise we'll see.