Oxide and Friends

Bryan and Adam were joined by authors of the forthcoming book "Writing for Developers", Piotr Sarna and Cynthia Dunlop, to talk about blogging--for Bryan and Adam, it's been 20 years since they started blogging at Sun. The Oxide Friends were also joined by Tim Bray and Will Snow who kicked off blogging at Sun.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Tim Bray (BlueSky), Will Snow, Cynthia Dunlop and Piotr Sarna.
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
Appendix: Cool Technical Blogs


Crowdsourced by the Oxide Friends:
Bonus technical articles from chat and beyond:
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Creators & Guests

Host
Adam Leventhal
Host
Bryan Cantrill

What is Oxide and Friends?

Oxide hosts a weekly Discord show where we discuss a wide range of topics: computer history, startups, Oxide hardware bringup, and other topics du jour. These are the recordings in podcast form.
Join us live (usually Mondays at 5pm PT) https://discord.gg/gcQxNHAKCB
Subscribe to our calendar: https://sesh.fyi/api/calendar/v2/iMdFbuFRupMwuTiwvXswNU.ics

Bryan Cantrill:

Alrighty. Good to go. Thanks, everyone. Cynthia, Sarna, thanks for, thanks for joining us here, on a I would say this is European friendly, but it's only kind of like moderately friendly. Like, non hostile.

Bryan Cantrill:

Non hostile.

Bryan Cantrill:

So, Serna, I know it's

Adam Leventhal:

I know it's late over there. So, thanks for

Bryan Cantrill:

and I I gather you got a little one based on one of your recent, posts. So, hopefully Yeah.

Piotr Sarna:

Actually 9 PM is my is my sweet spot. So it's I I really hate when people schedule something for 4 PM, and I think that's I think I think that it's it's okay with me. It's actually my family time. Now it's perfect because the young ones are getting sleep and stuff. So this is the perfect one.

Bryan Cantrill:

So not not not better than nonhostile. European friendly.

Adam Leventhal:

Here it is.

Bryan Cantrill:

You're being and and Tim is here. Tim, how are you?

Tim Bray:

Not too bad. I only have half an hour. Sorry.

Bryan Cantrill:

No. That's great actually because this is a great way to kick it off. Because, Tim, I gotta tell you, I am, just so I I I just a real bout of renewed gratitude for you because, I, and Cynthia and Sarna, we'll get to the the the book that you're writing in a second, but, you know, Cynthia had tasked me with reflecting back a bunch of my past blog entries. And it really, in addition to getting us out of the creaking lifeboat that we had put ourselves in after Sun, it went it it really forced me to go back to that blogs. Sun.com history, that early history.

Bryan Cantrill:

And, Tim, I I gotta say, because Adam, you were telling me earlier, like, I don't think you said that you would not have been blogging were it not for me.

Adam Leventhal:

Definitely not.

Bryan Cantrill:

And I would not have been blogging were it not for blogs.sun.com. Yeah. I there's just like no question in my mind. And I actually went back to that kinda earliest mail, Tim, that was sent out to the company, in which Fowler strangely had a conversation with Jonathan in the email, very very, like, strange kind of, I guess this is I know, Adam, you missed the all email of the world, but I'm telling you that, like, it was weird. There were aspects of it that did not work.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. But, Tim, I went back to your kind of the the the policy that you rolled out and then your blog, which is still obviously still around and up and I'll drop a link to it. But could you walk us through kind of the thinking about blogs.sun.com because that was so personally transformative for me, honestly, and Adam, but by extension for you and, was so how how was that idea born?

Tim Bray:

Well, you know, John Fowler gets a lot of credit. Now I I more a lot of people won't know who he is or was. At that time, he was software CTO, I think.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. But But,

Bryan Cantrill:

yeah, he's

Tim Bray:

the guy who hired me at Sun. And he was interested in me because I had a fairly substantial web presence, you know, on on the on the blogging side and the and the standard side and and and so on, the open source side. And, I was also a loud public voice, on the blog. And Fowler was, I I guess, he's he's really the guy who had the vision here, who thought that having such a thing would be a good thing for Sun. And, when he when we talked about me coming to work there, he said, okay.

Tim Bray:

You know, we need your exposure to web technologies. At that point, Sun's policy was, well,

Bryan Cantrill:

for the web, all you need is Java,

Tim Bray:

and, and also, try and get us a public voice. And so it all happened very fast. It was, like, within weeks, I think, or a small number of months anyhow, after I was hired that, you know, John said, well, write us a policy and let's just do it. And,

Bryan Cantrill:

It's fair. That's that is actually very much in key keeping with Fower, at least the old the the the Sun Microsystems Fower was definitely a, yeah, let's just do it. That was been great to feel like, okay. So I just need to go, like, write a policy and we're gonna go make it happen.

Tim Bray:

At the same time, you know, it was interesting is that, Microsoft had hired Skobel for more or less the same reasons. Now Skobel was a technologist, which I am. But, you know, he was obviously a highly effective blogger back in the early days. And so I forget which of us actually splashed out first. I think I think Sun did first before Microsoft.

Tim Bray:

But, you know, this was this was the surfacing of social media. You know, blogs were social media back then, and clueful technology companies realized that there was something to be accomplished by starting a conversation with the world that included your customers.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Absolutely. And so and and so, the clearly, Fowler had the kind of the the vision for that. And then so how did it actually what what were the kind of the mechanics then of, you know, you wrote so you'd said and I thought it was, again, it was so interesting to go back and read your blog entry from back in the day where you had said that one of the kind of sources of reticence in the company is people didn't know they would didn't feel empowered to speak, which is kind of I mean, I always felt empowered to totally shoot my mouth

Adam Leventhal:

off at sun, but I guess I was

Bryan Cantrill:

I guess there are people that weren't. So you you developed this this policy, Tim, that I I mean, I going back and just rereading it now, I really love. I mean, it was basically, hinging on trusting people to do the right thing. And then then the policy was really offering advice on how to do the right thing.

Tim Bray:

Well, I see Will Snow just popped up. I'm gonna bring him into the conversation in just a second. So, yeah, because, you know, the son at that point had a fairly conventional public relations PR organisation. And, you know, that, and that dogma held that the company must always speak with one voice and always in very conventional terms, you know, Dilbert asks, terms actually, about how wonderful everything was and how great it was. And that was the only thing could ever be said by anybody.

Tim Bray:

And Fowler just said, okay. You don't have to pay any attention to that. Write a policy. As I recall, it took only a couple of iterations, you know, to get the policy where everybody agreed to it. And we were started wondering, you know, in some online conversation, oh, how are we gonna make this happen?

Tim Bray:

And Will Snow, who was very way up in in the IT organization at some of that point, stuck up his hand and then said, well, I could put a server up. And, we used oh, what was the name? Roller. That was the name of the Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Tim Bray:

Logging engine. And within a matter of days, Will had put up a substantial server with, you know, roller on it. And Fowler had signed off on the policy, and so we just did it. And boy, it had momentum almost instantly. And, it was a success story, you know, to the extent anything could have been a success story in the in the pitiful state the sun was in at that point, but it was.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. It definitely was. And, Will, it was so great. Thank you so much for joining us as well. It was great to see your name in in going back and reading Tim's blog piece.

Bryan Cantrill:

I'm like, of course. And I remember that so vividly now. What was your take on it as someone who is, because you were in Sun IT at the time, but you were I mean

Will Snow:

No. I wasn't in Sun IT. I was never in Sun IT.

Bryan Cantrill:

I was Excuse me.

Will Snow:

Anti Sun IT. Yes. Thank you very much.

Adam Leventhal:

I was I was in engineering. Let let me rephrase.

Bryan Cantrill:

You were deploying information infrastructure at Sun, but at but no one should confuse you with being an IT at Sun.

Will Snow:

That is correct. That is correct. Yes. We built the servers that under underlay all of the sun.com sites. But, yeah.

Will Snow:

No. It was a it was a fun experiment. As I recall, Michelle Dennedy was our our lawyer of choice. I think she helped her with the policy. And,

Bryan Cantrill:

I do like lawyer of choice because it implies that you went through a couple that were actually like, no. No. Not you. Actually, sorry. I need I I actually need a lawyer who's I need more of a more of a mob accountant on this one.

Will Snow:

Well, that was the funny thing is that, actually, as I recall, that's kind of what happened is is we needed somebody who understood that writing a policy that was complex and, you know, full of legalese and 24 pages long was not gonna be effective in communicating to the engineering team. Right? So they wrote a very straight you, Tim, pushed hard to get a very simple policy, put out there and straightforward, and I think it was very effective. Putting the servers

Bryan Cantrill:

Very effective. Easy thing.

Tim Bray:

Speaking with the the only legal obstacle we had was one lawyer, I forget who it was, not Michelle, had said, well, of course, you're gonna have to get legal, approval for all the links you put in.

Adam Leventhal:

Because Oh, Jesus.

Tim Bray:

And and that wasn't totally crazy because at that point, there was some rumble about people claiming that, you know, they could put up a policy that meant you had to pay if you linked to them. Obviously, that didn't float. But it was a bit of a buzz. And and I was trying to not say, you know, you're being stupid. And Fowler just stepped in, I think, and said, no.

Tim Bray:

No. Don't worry about it. So

Bryan Cantrill:

Right. I Fowler would be the one to be, like, actually, you're being stupid. Sorry. Oh, okay.

Adam Leventhal:

I I wasn't gonna

Bryan Cantrill:

say that, but yes. When I think, you know, I I I like the fact that you because I mean, engineers special and this is like this is aimed at people who are in the trenches. This is aimed at not just at not only engineers, but but folks who are are gonna gonna speak with, you know, kinda their lived experience from the inside perspective at Sun. And, like, people aren't gonna weigh into, like, to legal disputes. And, I mean, there's there's already a predisposition to kind of avoid those things.

Bryan Cantrill:

So you don't really have to work too hard to steer people away from it.

Tim Bray:

That that's almost entirely true. You know, by and large, the the people who started speaking up did so in a responsible, smart, and entertaining way. I mean, they they they got the idea. There were 1 or 2 cases where somebody released a mathematical mathematical model that predicted the sun share price.

Bryan Cantrill:

Well, yeah. Well, I do understand that you, the SEC might have darkened your door at some point.

Tim Bray:

Yeah. So, we we he had a he had a short and, urgent phone call right then. I think there were 2 cases where somebody went seriously out of bounds. But get given that we had, like, a couple of 100 people doing it at one point, that's not bad.

Bryan Cantrill:

No. That's not bad at all. We we had more than a couple hundred, Tim, because I actually went through one of your, updates to the company. We had over a 1000 bloggers at the I that was, oh, that was only like 6 months after starting it. I mean, it was just this is something that the company was really ready for, I think.

Bryan Cantrill:

And did that I

Tim Bray:

think the profession was really ready for it.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Interesting. So what do you mean by that? Expand on that. I I I agree with you.

Tim Bray:

Well, you know, the at that point, Google, I think, had just launched Blogger too, very shortly after that at some point, and and that had this insane growth rate. And and, you know, there was this obviously a hunger in in the profession for human voices in conversation and and the kind of things that no PR department would ever go for. And and there's also a need since we have a highly technical profession with full of our own jargon, you needed people who could actually explain what the company was doing using that jargon. I mean, you just can't talk about DTrace or, you know, the latest, activity, what was it called? Application server technology or whatever or your open source project without, you know, using a lot of words that no PR person could understand.

Tim Bray:

And it freed people to have conversations in their natural tone of voice using the vocabulary they would normally use. And how could how could people not like that? And and not just the people who got to do it, but the customers who had to try and figure out what their vendors were really doing, not what the PR said. So, you know, it was like a vast unfold unfilled hole in the ecosystem. Now it turns out, you know, blogging wasn't enough to fill the hole the entire hole.

Tim Bray:

We got micro blogging. We got short form video. We have all sorts of social media now. This was just the first step down that path.

Adam Leventhal:

It's really worth orienting folks that this is free Twitter. My several years Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Adam Leventhal:

This is free Facebook even, really, in terms of its breadth. I think it might have been consigned to specific universities at this point. This was like a Friendster era era. Like, that was the pinnacle of social media at the time.

Bryan Cantrill:

This is Friendster. This is Orchid. This is Yeah. No. This is in that that kind of period where the and it's interesting to me, you kind of phrase that as like there is like a lot of people are ready for these things, but the things don't really exist yet.

Bryan Cantrill:

So when I mean, this is like LiveJournal. This is a way like, LiveJournal and Usenet is the world that you're kinda coming out of. And the, where this and actually, I went I actually went through some Usenet archives, which is so weird and painful. And we, humanity, have made it really difficult to search Usenet. But that was kind of our interaction with people was over and there was a technologist interaction over Usenet, but not a very good vector for it and a terrible vector.

Bryan Cantrill:

But the real problem with those conversations is they would those conversations were essentially never initialized never initiated by the technologists themselves. So it wasn't like Bonwit coming on and be like, let me explain certain something to you that you let me answer a question that you didn't ask. Right? That's not happening on Usenet. It was all so it and and there were these there were these Sun forums, the big admin Oh, yeah.

Adam Leventhal:

Nice. Jeez.

Bryan Cantrill:

Big admin now known only in the dead links in both

Adam Leventhal:

of our blogs to various big admin things. Yeah. The discourse of its era, right? The corporate Q and A forum.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yes. And the so there were these kind of various things, but they were all highly kind of structured, and it wasn't really technologist initiated. So you you were were missing some of that kind of authentic voice that we So then, Tim, in

Tim Bray:

yeah. Also helped, the web technology itself also made a difference. You know, having a platform that has some decent typography, and you can put graphics in and, you know, do long longer form stuff, and had discoverability in search engines and things like that. So you could just say, oh, I'm interested in, you know, monitoring operating system latency kind of thing, and it might turn up blogs. Blogs got Google views very, very, very fast.

Tim Bray:

So so I think that, you know, Usenet also had cultural problems, but, you know, the NNTP just was not a a good platform for talking to the world.

Bryan Cantrill:

It was not. No. You're absolutely right. And I think the other thing that is actually mind bending about those old, old, old days, those early days of blogging, the comments were amazing. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Like the comments were like productive. And like and I and I don't actually you know, I don't think I didn't address in my blog post yesterday, but I need to because Adam, you know, I have these comments and I've got them preserved. I need to figure out what I'm gonna do with them exactly. But there there you know, I've got the pieces where I'm like, I'm going back and forth with Werner Vogels.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

And, like, everyone is saying things that are, like, really interesting and productive, and they're like, no Nazis or product placement, or there's obviously just like,

Adam Leventhal:

it's so quaint too to think of this time when the conversation is gonna happen like on the dude's blog. Like Virgil is gonna show up to your blog and just like share his thoughts and like you're gonna have a actual useful conversation back and forth. And that's not happening on Hacker News or or other places because they don't exist. They don't

Bryan Cantrill:

exist. Like, it's it's slash dot and OS news. It's kinda crazy. And then, Will, were you surprised by the level I mean, from your perspective, like, okay, I volunteered to put the infrastructure out. And I guess from the dotcom side, you always had, like, a ton of of horsepower.

Bryan Cantrill:

So from an actual horsepower perspective, I don't know how much of a draw this was, but it was always a very responsive experience.

Will Snow:

Yeah. Until it wasn't. It was roller in, you know, was it was good for kind of smaller volume, but we quickly realized that it was gonna run out of gas, and it did. And Yeah. As I recall, we really spent a lot of time trying to make it make stuff go faster.

Will Snow:

And, eventually, I think we changed out of roller to something else. I don't even remember what we used. But, just because we just couldn't get anything more out of it. But it it scaled up so fast. It was spooky to the point where I was driving machines up to our, data our our, data center and putting them in myself.

Bryan Cantrill:

That is awesome. I I was kinda thinking especially with the with the with, you know, the my blog now running on the oxide rack. I'm like, well, this is actually not the first time that it's been running on hardware that I've

Piotr Sarna:

had because this is the when it was,

Bryan Cantrill:

of course, running on sun sun gear back in the day, obviously. But that that feeling of, like, driving gear up to actually allow for for expansion, we because the demand from a sun side, from both a people blogging side and from a people wanting to consume the information side was pretty high. Right?

Will Snow:

It was very high. If Linda was on here, she'd probably tell you probably still remembers the numbers. But, yeah, we we saw a tremendous amount of demand from the in internal customers were you know, our sun engineers were particularly demanding.

Bryan Cantrill:

Guilty.

Will Snow:

The the writing yeah. The writing part of it is a little bit more resource intensive than actually the reading part. So I think that's actually how we eventually split up some of the load is actually try to push off the the writing to one server and then the reading onto multiple, replicas. But it was it it it it was challenging to keep up with the demand. It scaled up so fast.

Will Snow:

It was kinda spooky.

Tim Bray:

Maybe like Roller roller was based on hibernate, a snicker at this point. And, yeah. It it it had some bottlenecks.

Bryan Cantrill:

Some. Yeah. And then so and then, Tim, were you I mean, as you said, like, you felt that the industry was ready for it. But I but I gather that, like, even you were kind of surprised by the the scope and depth of some of the content that was created.

Tim Bray:

The the thing I was most impressed at was how great the engineers were. You know, that they they they behaved themselves and wrote you know, you didn't didn't require really much evangelism to get on board and and and and and and write useful stuff. But, you know, it was wildly controversial. People forget that now. There were all these, you know, highly reputed industry analysts and tech journalists and the the Walt Mossbergs and so on of this world who say, you know, oh, is this okay?

Tim Bray:

Is this safe? Are people gonna get career damage for doing this? And that was the conventional wisdom is that, you know, anybody who blogged was sticking their neck out and was gonna suffer career career damage. And I was pretty sure those people were wrong. And so it turned out, but, you know, people it's social media was not a no brainer.

Tim Bray:

It was not a controversy for you, still isn't today.

Bryan Cantrill:

It's still I was just gonna say, it still isn't today. I mean, I think that the thing is, you know, we would love that every company to have that kind of sense of transparency, but it was unusual then, and I think it's less unusual now, but still unusual. I mean, Tim, you've worked for, obviously, a bunch of different companies, and, you've seen varying perspectives on transparency.

Tim Bray:

One quickly develops, you know, a a skill set at dealing with over excited PR people.

Bryan Cantrill:

And the well, so from my perspective, I you excited again. I was kinda going back and replaying some of this early history. And, actually, it was someone in the Detrace community inside of Sun, Adam, who sent me a note saying it would be really helpful for you guys to get on here. That it was you know, it felt like I was on there the second it opened, but the reality was, it was like a week later, you know, and it was I was hanging back a little bit and seeing like, alright, like, what is this? I'm not sure But I think I saw so much, you know, so I saw some of that early energy too.

Bryan Cantrill:

And I'm like, okay, this seems like it's worth at least a shot. It does remind me and I kind of made reference to it in my blog entry. It kinda reminded me of the Twitter Spaces thing of like, right? You know, do I I feel like I'm going to a nudist speech over here. Do I, like where do I you know, where where do I put my clothes in?

Bryan Cantrill:

Do I

Adam Leventhal:

I'm having this flashback. Do you remember this presentation you gave called guerrilla marketing? Yeah. Okay. I don't know.

Adam Leventhal:

Did you blog about that? I can't remember. I

Bryan Cantrill:

never did blog about it. Yeah. Actually, I've never spoken about

Adam Leventhal:

it. This is you you started blogging. You're, like, I think maybe the first in the Solaris kernel team and then gave this presentation to the rest of the kernel team saying, you know, get out of it, you lazy jerks. He

Bryan Cantrill:

will you only and I because I felt like that I could also understand, like, I I having had a little bit of that reticence myself and, you know, this a a good segue, Sarno, to to your and Cynthia's book about, like, you know, that that reticence to write. And I think that, you know, one of the things that I really wanted to make clear to folks is like, you are not the daily newspaper. Like, you do not have a responsibility to like, there is no fixed cadence for this. And that is actually really important.

Tim Bray:

Let me let me butt in here for a sec, because I'm about to leave. Yeah. Sorry about that in advance. But but, you know, we've been talking about the past here, and I'm gonna leave now. But, we should talk about the future too.

Tim Bray:

Because one of the things that that, you know, the 20th 21st century has taught us is that new media do not dis really displays old media. You know, you know, radio, didn't kill books, and TV didn't kill radio, and, you know, movies didn't kill TV, and and and so on. You know, blogging is just a a a a subset, you know, a a minority subset of social media, right now, but it's it's still powerful. And, you know, in our profession and and in politics and to some extent in finance, a lot of the really serious needle moving discourse happens on blogs. And, you know, just because we have an interesting history, it doesn't mean we have don't have an interesting future.

Tim Bray:

You know, I got a piece on Hacker News yesterday. And, you know, we're getting thousands and thousands and thousands of hits about, you know, blue sky, which is obviously a highly material subject at the moment. So so let's not make this into a museum tour. That's all.

Bryan Cantrill:

Definitely. Yes. I I I thank you for that reminder, Tim, and and absolutely. And the, and actually a terrific segue, because I absolutely agree with you, and long form writing is very much, a part of still with us, a very important part of our presence, a present and a very important part of our future. So, Cynthia, maybe that's a good segue to you and Sarna in terms of of do you wanna talk about, your book and kinda how you what was kind of the genesis of of that?

Cynthia Dunlop:

The true genesis is we just had a crazy idea and wanted to do it. But the official genesis is we wanted to write a really practical guide that would help people write. And I think the term we used, intentionally ambiguous, was more compelling blog posts. Is it blog posts that are more compelling or just more greater quantity of compelling blog posts? And we thought that if we put our 2 very distinctively different backgrounds together, we could come up with something that was actually useful.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah.

Cynthia Dunlop:

So I come from the world of writing, and Sarna is the engineer in the trenches who grew to love or at least accept writing. And he's a unique species, at least among the engineers I've worked with. So I kind of wanted to capture Sarna in a bottle and share with the world. Sarna, do you wanna chime in? I think we we came up with it.

Cynthia Dunlop:

I proposed it. I looked back at our history. There was, I think, a 5 5:45 AM text to you. I don't remember why I was doing that at that point, and then we had agreed to do it by, I think, like, 6:10 in the morning after about 12 more exchanges.

Piotr Sarna:

Yeah. Pretty much. And it really reminds me of all the, book review discussions where Cynthia talks or writes a lot, and then I just agree with everything in one sentence. So that's what going to happen now as well. It's summed it up perfectly.

Piotr Sarna:

So, yeah, we, the the longer story is that we already kind of wrote another book together put together before it with more co authors of database performance, which was purely technical. Yeah. And we just, I guess, needed more. We we just can't stop if you if you wrote or, like like, writing, I suppose.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. That's great. And that, you know, I think it's, you know, so funny because I think, you know, sorry you're hearing from, you know, we heard heard from Tim and and, I mean, really, I think a generation removed, right, in terms of the the importance of long form writing and doing that via blogs. I I think actually, you know, and you you were kind of mentioning too, Adam, that the the the rise of microblogging, I think actually took some of the pressure off of blogging.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. Where And it also is evidenced in the cadence of our blogging. I don't know if you looked at like Oh, the cadence.

Bryan Cantrill:

Oh, for sure. And it's like you go look at some of those now that I can actually go see some of those old entries quickly.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. Some of

Bryan Cantrill:

them are really dumb. I mean, some

Adam Leventhal:

of them are really short and really dumb.

Bryan Cantrill:

And the things that would, like, 100% be a tweet. Like, no question. This is our post, in in blue sky parlance, which is definitely where we're all moving to. But the, I think that it'll it really reserved blogging for that true long form writing. And, Serna, I mean, you used to tell a great story in the book about how, you know, you were really had a lot of trepidation about that long form writing.

Bryan Cantrill:

Do you wanna kinda describe what what kinda your some of your early blog entries?

Piotr Sarna:

Alright. So, my first blog entry was, like, ever. The book entry ever was, as a mediocre tech piece on a feature I added to Cilla DB. And I was creating I'm just forced to do it or told. I suppose it was, and and no nobody ever, actually actually threatened me with anything, but it was implied a little bit.

Piotr Sarna:

But then I figured that this that this culture that a culture of writing tech blocks about everything that's even remotely interesting. It's really it was it was very nice, and I wanted to turn in after after I wrote this first one, and it turned out not to be a terrible experience after all. I thought it might be terrible because, I have this very advanced I I used to have this very advanced introvert, stage fright that or even into writing. I thought that if I write something and it gets public, then I'll I'll I'm ashamed of it. But it turned out it's actually quite okay.

Piotr Sarna:

And then, I just started writing more and more, and we can write them now. So, it's it's started, because I pretty much had to write a post, and, then it just, you know, went down the slope.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. And and I think you you do have a lot of that trepidation certainly when you're writing something of like, God, I don't wanna be wrong about what I'm writing. Yeah. Which I think is like, that's a, I mean, that's a it's a fear. It's a good fear.

Bryan Cantrill:

I mean, it's a fear that requires you to get really locked in and to like get multiple eyes on it and to make sure that like, okay, I want, you know, review it again and again. I mean, it makes it it's obviously time intensive to go do that, but I think it's it's healthy in a lot of ways. I mean, I I don't know. I'm trying to think of like, technically, I I don't feel I've had any huge technical gaps, but it's because I live in fear of them.

Adam Leventhal:

Oh, I definitely have, like, a blog post I retracted because it felt like it was such a tire fire. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Cynthia, this is in your very thoughtful questions. You did not ask, like, are there any blog posts that you have retracted? The Yeah. What was the blog post you retracted?

Adam Leventhal:

I think it was like, we were open sourcing DTrace. And there was some discussion about, like, what if this appears in Linux and what's preventing it? And what Yeah. And I think I came up with this very shitty argument about why everything would be fine. And that was pretty much picked apart.

Adam Leventhal:

And I was like, You know what? You know what, world, let's just make a ball again. I'm going to stick it

Bryan Cantrill:

on the hook or just Maybe not, Maybe not. But it was

Adam Leventhal:

basically, like, our dot like, something about documentation. I can't even remember the specifics, but I remember being like, okay. I'm so mortified of this that I'm gonna walk it back. But, fortunately, I think, like, going into it, I was really worried. It felt like a big microphone.

Adam Leventhal:

It felt like I'm you know, I've got sun.com at the end in this URL. I better not say anything like overtly stupid. Yeah. Then I got that out of my system, said lots of stupid things, and then it became easier.

Bryan Cantrill:

I also think it's, like, really helpful to have a blog because it's very deliberate. Like, you got the mic is on, but you know the mic is on.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

And, I would say that, like, the things I've regretted didn't quite appreciate how much the mic was on and the tape was rolling. And, you know, those of you just catching up, I may have shot my mouth off as a 22 year old on use that in a way that continues to haunt me so, that you can't actually go back and delete or edit. That's the

Adam Leventhal:

nice thing about, like, technical blogs too. Like, if you get it, like, a little bit wrong and you have it in back in the day when you had a discussion in the comments, you go fix it. Right? Like, you go fix it. And you can own that fixing or not, and it depends the degree to which you sort of, like, wanna live that intellectually honest life.

Adam Leventhal:

But you can you can it's okay to get things wrong.

Bryan Cantrill:

It's actually okay to I think, you know, that's actually a really good point is that you can go back and edit it. Yeah. And and Cynthia, and I can't remember if you made this point in the book or not, but that's actually something to give people solace about is that you because you can't go back. You know, you shoot your mouth off online in the year of our Lord 1996 on Usenet. You can't go back and edit that.

Bryan Cantrill:

I can tell you that from personal experience.

Adam Leventhal:

There's a lot of regret on that one. There is a lot of regret on that one. Wow. Okay.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. There's a lot

Adam Leventhal:

of regret on that one.

Bryan Cantrill:

That's it's like one of the only things I've written that I regret. And it was done in haste. It was not done It was like a hot kind of a thing. And

Adam Leventhal:

A link won't be in the show notes. Don't worry. Like, we'll let people dig that out.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Let people dig it out. Yeah. Yeah. You know what?

Bryan Cantrill:

You said it's so hard to search. You go find it. It's actually it's so much easier sadly to find, like, Hacker News comments that quote it than there are to actually find the, but, yeah. This is and I do regret it. And but the you know, I have not ever retracted a blog entry.

Bryan Cantrill:

I've not not not to sounds like a value judgment when I say it, does this?

Adam Leventhal:

It does. And how would we know? Is that true? Like,

Bryan Cantrill:

the oh, okay. Okay.

Adam Leventhal:

Would you a 100% remember?

Bryan Cantrill:

Oh, you you at 11th thought me on this one. Yeah.

Adam Leventhal:

This is the helmet I

Bryan Cantrill:

I you know what? This actually is the helmet I had right here. The no. I actually don't okay. Look, I don't think I have.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. I don't think you have either. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

As as far as and I have, you know, I I I have had some things that were and I you know what? I actually have the benefit of blogging at starting at an older age.

Adam Leventhal:

I do not have that benefit. I just wanna point out I I have the benefit.

Bryan Cantrill:

That's a 5 year difference right there.

Adam Leventhal:

It really is.

Bryan Cantrill:

It really is, actually. Yeah. That's a good point.

Adam Leventhal:

You mean, I thought this was gonna be self effacing, but feel free to join in. But, yeah, like it's starting at 82. I go back and read some of that shit. Right. God, it's hard to read.

Bryan Cantrill:

It's hard to read. It gives you more sympathy for one's own 20 year old, say, in my case.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. Yeah. It is. It is. I mean, but it's also normal to be bad at things, right?

Adam Leventhal:

It's normal to be bad at things. You start, and then you do it more, and then you get better. Like, I tell this to my kids often, but, like, that's a normal process.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. And I think it's actually it's we kinda do the world a disservice by not allowing to see

Adam Leventhal:

the world when we were

Bryan Cantrill:

bad at things. So there you go. Alright. That's it. You know what?

Bryan Cantrill:

I'm glad I can't delete that. Use that post. Go back and look at it, and you can know that I I too was bad at these things. But the, you know, the ability to kinda, to to edit, I think is really important. And then I think it's like also, you know, Sarna, you and Cynthia in the book, I part of what I actually really enjoyed about the book was giving people ideas about kinds of things to write about.

Bryan Cantrill:

Because you often get this message here, it's like, I don't have anything to say. And it's like, no, you definitely have something to say because, like, you are part of our craft is saying things. Like, when we are when we're writing code, we're actually saying things. You know, what are some of the things that, and so Cynthia did Saundra, do you wanna expand on that a little bit? Because I thought you you had a bunch of of good ways of thinking about different blog entries.

Cynthia Dunlop:

I'll start off by putting out what I said, the, I think we called it the 3 P's, things that you're focused on, things that you're either super proud of, pained by, or just otherwise. I think passionate was the word that, we were allowed to use, but it might have been another p. And then, Sarna went to the, all the details of topics, topics everywhere.

Bryan Cantrill:

Okay. So passionate, proud of, and, not, not pissed off. What was it? Sorry. What was the other one?

Bryan Cantrill:

The the,

Cynthia Dunlop:

It says passionate, but it was, you know, proud of pain, pained by. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Cynthia Dunlop:

Themselves over with, using things incorrectly or just otherwise passionate about the, all the rants, the roasts, etcetera.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. So that's a good that's a good rubric. That's a good way to start. I think of, like that is probably many of my blog posts. I think I kinda fall into one of those one of those categories.

Bryan Cantrill:

By kinda tapping into like, you know, that that inner, you know, what stirs you at some level? And, you know, how do you how do you kinda find those things? And then, Sydney, you asked me these really great I mean, I love reflective questions. Do you wanna talk about some of those? Because I wanna, actually, I wanna post some of those to Adam.

Bryan Cantrill:

So I'd I'd I punted on answering them myself because I thought they were too hard to answer. But you would, kinda outline some of those questions.

Cynthia Dunlop:

I think there were 8 of them. Why did you start blogging, and why do you continue? What's been the most surprising impact of blogging for you in terms of has it gotten you a job? Has it connected you with really cool people, opened up the doors to different opportunities? And then what blog are you most proud of and why?

Cynthia Dunlop:

Because I found that a lot of the ones that are most, popular are not necessarily the ones that people really are the most proud of and invested the most in. And then when the question I really wanted to hear about was what post was the most difficult to write and how did you tackle it? Because those are always the most interesting experiences. And then then sort of the general lessons learned, what you want to share, blogs you enjoy, etcetera. But those were the

Bryan Cantrill:

Okay. So can I ask you to expand on difficult? What do you mean by difficult?

Cynthia Dunlop:

Difficult just to you know, sometimes it's difficult because you're not sure how to maybe you're coming up with it as you're writing it. Maybe you're writing benchmarks, and there's just so much involved from the backside to get into it. Maybe you're writing on behalf of a company and you have to go through, you know, 23 graphs to get past all the different opinions and arguments and personalities and egos, etcetera. It's it's another US term,

Bryan Cantrill:

but all the different things are Does

Cynthia Dunlop:

does not resonate

Adam Leventhal:

for you, Brian? Like, do you not do were there not blogs post that you made that you feel like?

Bryan Cantrill:

Well, so, no, honestly, the reason I got kinda hung up on that is because there's so many different kind of dimensions of difficulty. Yeah. So like, I mean, like, look bluntly, when I was I mean, just recently, my my most recent blog entry is on a remembering Charles Bueller.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. I

Bryan Cantrill:

was weeping as I was writing that blog entry. It's the only time I'm writing a blog entry I was weeping. Yeah. And it's like, so okay. Well, that's Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

That's hard. That that that we they gotta put that one towards the top of the list. Right? For sure. But that was not difficult in a bunch of other ways.

Bryan Cantrill:

Right? I mean, it's like I was that was not difficult in in And then, you know, there were entries that were difficult because they were really technically arduous, and I was really trying to, like, get every detail exactly right on select entries that I'm convinced. I you were the only Oh. A 100% the only reader. A 100% the only reader.

Bryan Cantrill:

Where it just like, yeah. This is like, yeah. Do you know why you're the only reader? Because it's technically hard. It's like it's like people stopped.

Bryan Cantrill:

Like, you were not off you're off kinda off the trail over here. People are asking, by the way, is the police car chasing the leaf blower, or is the leaf blower chasing the police car? I think it's a little of both. I think I think it maybe got there's a little bit of,

Adam Leventhal:

actually, mostly people are saying they can't hear them.

Bryan Cantrill:

But oh, that's great.

Adam Leventhal:

But for folks on the podcast, we've had some leaf blowers and police cars. Right.

Bryan Cantrill:

And if the noise cancellation is making us sound like we're we're inventing those, if if we are hallucinating them, it's a shared Yeah.

Adam Leventhal:

Shared hallucination. It's always important.

Bryan Cantrill:

So, yeah. I mean, I think that that's kinda why I asked the default because it's like, I feel like there's different aspects of difficulty.

Adam Leventhal:

Oh, 100%. I mean, in I mean, I hear that, you know, when I'm thinking about the question as well, like I think of 2 blog posts. Like for me, the blog post that was hardest was like the one or like the inaugural blog post for the company I founded Transposit. Like, in part because like I just I felt like it was so high stakes. Like I really wanted to get it right.

Adam Leventhal:

And I don't know that I did.

Bryan Cantrill:

Like I

Adam Leventhal:

don't I wasn't that happy with it. Like I'm to this day. I'm not that happy with it. And I'm really bummed out about it. It was just hard because I felt like I really wanted to nail it.

Adam Leventhal:

I want to meet all these. There were a bunch of folks who wanted it particular ways, and it was a little bit of triangulation. And there was another one where it was like, It took me a week to write. This is the series I did on, the Apple file.

Bryan Cantrill:

Jay Jacobs (3zero forty

Adam Leventhal:

six): I was just

Bryan Cantrill:

going to say, that was such an incredibly detailed series. And I think if I linked the conclusions, will that Yeah. Yeah. Will that Yeah. I mean, it it will be easy to I mean, fortunately, Adam, we you and I have both moved our blogs out of Ford press, so with oh, god.

Bryan Cantrill:

We're out of the out of the shame. We can actually link to these things easily now. But that was your part 6 on APFS. That was a really detailed series going in from, like, a very unique perspective.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

I think so. Right?

Adam Leventhal:

For sure. Having, like, been involved in building a file system. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

I was gonna say in both. Like, you've been involved in building a file system, and you're someone who's been a user, like, a earliest possible adopter of a of Apple products. Right? I mean, this is, like, someone who has used Apple products your entire life.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. And I was unemployed, so that gave me some some time. Actually, that's not that's not true. I was I was technically employed as an entrepreneur in

Bryan Cantrill:

residence, which is which is a basically very rich unemployment. It's an unemployment check that's like with,

Adam Leventhal:

like, good health care and stuff. That's right. So rude of me to say unemployed. And I got to like, I scammed my way into the Apple conference and talked to Dominic and to Eric Tamara, who gave a presentation about APFS. So I had like Yeah, everything was stacked up to make that pretty good.

Adam Leventhal:

But that took all week. I remember where I was doing it. We had gotten Airbnb for the week and I was just hanging out in the woods writing that thing. So can I ask you about a

Bryan Cantrill:

blog entry that I thought you wrote, but now I can't find?

Adam Leventhal:

It might be on the Medium, the Medium site. Okay. Because I forgot this. I was doing the same thing this morning. I was like, Where's that blog post?

Adam Leventhal:

Oh, I forgot to move it over. That's outposts.

Bryan Cantrill:

It's the outpost one? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Leventhal:

I got 2 outpost ones, but yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Okay. Because those are I mean I

Adam Leventhal:

gotta move those over.

Bryan Cantrill:

But yeah. Because I it's to be in some ways, it's easier for me to answer these questions for Adam's blog than for mine because I can go through of like the the ones that I and it's so it's really interesting to hear kind of his perspective on but so the do you want to describe the outpost blog entry and then with will, Mark Moss (zero fifty

Adam Leventhal:

four:fifty four): Yeah. So, as I remember it, you can give your own kind of my own version of events. So, you know, I was thinking seriously about joining Oxeye. Oh, I already have a different version. I should I should rewind.

Adam Leventhal:

I should rewind because

Piotr Sarna:

Thank you.

Adam Leventhal:

So I'm at I'm at the, the Reinvent conference, like,

Bryan Cantrill:

you know, for work for for

Adam Leventhal:

the startup. I hold on.

Bryan Cantrill:

Are we gonna no.

Adam Leventhal:

If we're gonna rewind, we have

Bryan Cantrill:

to rewind to going to see the Beastie Boys.

Adam Leventhal:

Okay. So even further back, here we are. We're going to see the Beastie Boys book tour. Okay?

Bryan Cantrill:

It is the most Gen X thing I've ever done in my life.

Adam Leventhal:

It was the day before the election. And you and everyone was just like, you look around, everyone was exactly our age.

Bryan Cantrill:

It was a very narrow, it was like you were born between 1973 1979. Very, very tight band in

Adam Leventhal:

the audience. So Surviving Beastie Boys members, Rick and RipMCA. And, it

Bryan Cantrill:

was so amazing, by the way.

Adam Leventhal:

It was it was it was wild. It was great. And I feel like I don't I mean, welcome to

Bryan Cantrill:

the Gen X story hour, but it was amazing. Sit down, children. And

Adam Leventhal:

then just like these videos, that I think probably don't exist anywhere else, except for like their personal archives. Anyway, if you get the chance to go to the Beastie Boys book tour, whatever it was 10 years ago, go for it. It was outstanding. So go to that. I think one of us is walking the other to Bart.

Adam Leventhal:

We're all walking to Bart together and you're like, I'm going to start this company. And you're describing Oxide. And it was like, He is gripped in this nostalgia. We have had this very nostalgic moment.

Bryan Cantrill:

And I was like, He's having some He's peasty boy's induced.

Adam Leventhal:

She's like overwhelmed by nostalgia. And you're like, Right. I get it. You're like trying to make

Bryan Cantrill:

But you're trying to revive your youth. Right.

Adam Leventhal:

And because we just had to

Bryan Cantrill:

Because you're in a weakened moment.

Adam Leventhal:

Right.

Bryan Cantrill:

I actually, I didn't reconnect to the 2, but like, this is some sort of weakened moment that you're in. And it's like, no, you're not sorry. Yeah. You're not listening to ill communication on OC Transpo on the 69 in Ottawa, pal. That's not where you are.

Adam Leventhal:

I was gonna say ill communication driving the high school, like, that's what that's where it was for me and that. Right.

Bryan Cantrill:

This is not about Paul's Boutique anymore. You gotta kinda when are you gonna MCA is dead, Brian. MCA is dead.

Adam Leventhal:

And I think that I was like, what are you gonna call it? Saturn hypersystems?

Bryan Cantrill:

No. You did not even give me the courtesy of a snide remark. You walked off while I was describing it. And then I caught up to you, described it again, and you walked off again. And I said, I said, We're starting a computer company.

Bryan Cantrill:

And Lucas, who was with us, turned to me and said, He heard you. And I'm like, Okay. Oh, okay. Well, that went over well. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

And then you and so and so I finally, like, I think I said it the 3rd time. You said, what? Like, super micro? And I'm like, no. I'm not.

Bryan Cantrill:

Oh. No. Not like them. Alright. Well So there

Adam Leventhal:

we are. Election day, probably 2016 or something like that?

Bryan Cantrill:

No. Must have been much earlier. No.

Adam Leventhal:

No. It's 2018. 2018. Oh, okay. 2018 election day.

Adam Leventhal:

And then, oh, so that so that would mean midterm election. So then, like, a a month later, I was at re:Invent, and they roll out outpost, and I, like, text you. I'm like, sorry. Like, they just killed your company. Yes.

Adam Leventhal:

And so then I was Because the because of Outposts.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Outposts just felt like Totally.

Adam Leventhal:

Cloud on prem, like, done.

Bryan Cantrill:

Cloud on prem from the best the company with the best execution on the planet at

Adam Leventhal:

the time. Right. Totally. Yeah. And yeah.

Adam Leventhal:

So then I'm so then they actually release Outposts, and I start to break it down back to the blog. I I start to break down Outposts by the numbers and did a lot of spreadsheeting and a lot of analysis of like, what does this thing cost? And it turned out outpost is crazy expensive. And I was thinking about joining Oxide, but I think that put so much wind in my sails too, to say like, Oh, no, I should really This is this actually makes sense. Like, this Saturn hypersystem, like, this thing might have legs.

Bryan Cantrill:

Jimmy Soni (3zero forty seven): So my version of events is you went from naysayer. You went from like, I am going to gather the data to show why this thing is like never going to work. And then in gathering the data, you guys like, This crazy idea might just work. You in part because I mean, aided by their economics. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

I mean, like, really, that is no tribute to us. That is really like you taking apart the economics. And, for a long time, like, your blog entry was the best thing out there talking about the economics. And, like, Steve would I think it still is. Thank you very much.

Bryan Cantrill:

I think it still is too if I could find it.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. But, yeah, I can't remember where the comment was, but it was definitely like, Oh, hey, maybe you should join oxide. Well, funny story. Josh McCallen

Bryan Cantrill:

(zero:fifty six:fifty six): that's right. Exactly. So that but that blog entry was I mean, I think that was that's a good example of how this long form writing was very I mean, that was very instrumental for us both. Like, I mean, that was like that was It's like, dude, this ain't a tweet, right?

Adam Leventhal:

This is not gonna be a tweet storm or whatever.

Bryan Cantrill:

It's not a tweet storm. It's not a Usenet post. It's not it really needed to be in this kind of long form that doesn't really exist anywhere else. So just kind of as I was thinking of like the kind of the the the many concrete examples, I, not to do like a full, not not to do like a full, colonic, we do another on your blog history, but the, made it weird. I also there are a couple of other blog entries of yours that were, I think, very influential for me personally.

Adam Leventhal:

Okay.

Bryan Cantrill:

One, I love Go, I hate Go.

Adam Leventhal:

I know I know you're like I think you're the biggest fan of that one. That was also on Medium.

Bryan Cantrill:

I think that maybe it was like That one you moved over. Yeah. Yeah. I thought I love Go, I hate Go captured what I what obviously captured what you feel about Go. It captures what I feel a lot of people feel about Go.

Bryan Cantrill:

About the I just I thought it was it was just a really good way of, of like capturing it all. I thought there was I thought it was the it captured both like the nuance. I mean, and Cynthia, you're kind of like, of like, you know, passion and pain. I think we've got like, oh, like, no, not sure how much pride is here, but definitely passion and pain are both here in equal measures. Yeah.

Adam Leventhal:

I'd also note, like, semi employed at that time and, like, unemployed during the outpost post. I think there's, like, a correlation here. I mean, like, the degree to which I'm employed and the degree to which I blog. Alright. I'll I'll start getting, like, nervous when, like, whatever's blog rate

Bryan Cantrill:

is, like, really far up than you did. The so I thought that piece was amazing. Thank you. Obviously, I I have to talk about your your Russ piece. From what year?

Bryan Cantrill:

That is 2015, I think.

Adam Leventhal:

I'm gonna go That's right.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Well, okay. Actually, before that, because like back to back, I am not a resource.

Adam Leventhal:

There there were yeah. I I that one was really important to me. I'm not sure why I was I was and continue to be so irritated. But like when people refer to engineering, like staffing as resourcing, I find it so dehumanizing. And I find it dehumanizing to this day.

Bryan Cantrill:

I changed my rhetoric. I think I was using that and I stopped using it after I read that blog article.

Adam Leventhal:

Well, thank you for that because I agree with you. And we were doing this a bunch of Delphix. And you know, just to like, these are not interchangeable parts. Like these are humans. And, let's just like give them a teeny bit of dignity by not referring to them the same way we do like electricity or CPUs.

Adam Leventhal:

Matthew Piepenburg (3five fifty

Bryan Cantrill:

six): Yeah. I also came to field developer velocity. I also did, it makes a developer sound like a projectile.

Adam Leventhal:

Totally. Or or just just an automaton that, like, is is responsible for churning things out. I don't know. But I I get I get touchy in weird ways. I mean, some of these were also born you talking about passion.

Adam Leventhal:

Like, I decided that, like, there was a great animated GIF to be made from, from, like, fight club about resourcing, you know, like the the project Mayhem, like, his name in Robert Paulson, and that was part of the thing that drove writing that blog post.

Bryan Cantrill:

The other one is the, obviously, the first Ross program pain. So you do I actually send this money to go back through with your your kind of the the 3 pre rubric and finding the number of things are actually like in the titles of these blog entries. But, I thought that was, that was obviously a very instructive blog entry. Although maybe I drew the wrong because I read that blog entry. I'm like, Wow, thank God Adam did this.

Bryan Cantrill:

I never have to use Rust. Like, Rust sounds awful, and I am never gonna use it. And then you end that blog entry being like, in conclusion, I look forward to using Rust in the future. And I'm like, did you read your own blog entry? Yeah.

Adam Leventhal:

No. It was a it was a weird experience. So that's why I want to write about that one. And that was one where, like, the, the interns we had at the time A couple of interns from Brown University had been tinkering with Rust and pushing me to try it out, and I wrote the program. I always write in languages, and I learned a ton.

Adam Leventhal:

And the funny thing about this is, I looked it up later, and Hacker News, Steve Klabnik, my now colleague, is in the comment saying, Thanks for this use report. And Steven McClabnik

Bryan Cantrill:

(zero zero four:fifty four): Oh, yeah. He edited it. I mean, I just turned out you can edit a Hacker News comment years after the fact that originally that he was just like just lighting you up. Look at this. Just just look

Adam Leventhal:

at that sky. Someone look at this clown

Bryan Cantrill:

over here. But actually then it it actually ages well, that post. Because even though it we just actually it's a good reminder of how much more exposed blade there was on rust in 2015. Timothy Peterson (2seven zero six): I

Adam Leventhal:

think there are 2 things on that, that I think stick with me. One is the exposed blade, like it was harder. The other was, and I wanted to, I mean, I want to say nice things about your blog too on this topic of Russ because - Oh,

Bryan Cantrill:

I'm looking for a certain prediction. Jay Jacobs (4seven zero

Adam Leventhal:

six): Well, just to be clear, you roast, I wrote this down. You wrote about rebuilding state maps in Russ.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam Leventhal:

And the thing, first of all, that was like actually solving like a real problem. And I know that you were like nebulously employed at the time. So it

Bryan Cantrill:

just gave

Adam Leventhal:

you some opportunity. Jeremy Grantham (zero

Bryan Cantrill:

forty five:thirty six): Oh, thank you. For a brief moment of horror, I thought that was going to

Adam Leventhal:

be an unadulterated compliment. Jeremy Grantham (zero forty five:thirty six): Oh, yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Jeremy Grantham (zero forty five:thirty six): Don't worry.

Adam Leventhal:

Jeremy Grantham (zero forty five:thirty six): Like the left hook. There you go.

Bryan Cantrill:

Bit more of a bit more of a bit more of a bit more of

Adam Leventhal:

a bit more of a bit more of a bit more of a bit more of a bit more of a bit more of a bit more of a bit more of a bit more of a bit more of a bit more of a bit more of a bit more of a bit more of a bit more of a it looks like C or Java or JavaScript, so just bash your head against it. I think the thing that I tried to convey, but I think Oli did a little bit of a job of, but you did a much better job of is explaining, Go embrace the language for what it is and learn it and, like, pick up a book and read it. Jesse Mechner

Bryan Cantrill:

(3seven zero six):

Adam Leventhal:

And this I've pointed people to this blog post and given people that advice to this day. In fact, I had a very proud moment where my 18 year old son who listeners of the blog of the pod will know

Bryan Cantrill:

listeners of the pod will know that it's like you this the are this a parenting podcast about

Adam Leventhal:

what to do

Bryan Cantrill:

when your teenager is experimenting with c plus plus Exactly.

Adam Leventhal:

Right. So we've been experimenting with c plus plus trying to keep it,

Bryan Cantrill:

you know, safe as as possible.

Adam Leventhal:

Comes to a talk and

Bryan Cantrill:

And we we run a state where it's legal. So what do you do? I mean, it's like you wanna ultimately it's

Adam Leventhal:

not etcetera. I was having dinner with him in Italy and he's like ordering beers. I'm like, okay. I guess we just do this now. But he came to my talk and and afterwards, he said, maybe I should try out Rust.

Adam Leventhal:

And I was like, first of all

Bryan Cantrill:

It was like he was drunk, obviously.

Adam Leventhal:

He'd drunk off his ass.

Bryan Cantrill:

That's true.

Adam Leventhal:

But I needed to contain my enthusiasm. But then I'll say, hey, pick up Steve's book. You know, Pete, go read about it. Don't just don't don't just like try to bash your head against it.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Which I think, I mean, that's ends up being so that that blog entry was was really, I mean, that was very helpful for me, and I think it did it changed the way I approach language. I approach language, like, even because, you know, I was getting excited about it and there was enthusiasm about it, but with your blog entry, I'm like, I need to approach this really deliberately. Because I think what you had said is like, I tried to take I just tried to kind of fiddle it Yeah. Yeah, into it existence.

Bryan Cantrill:

And it's not unreasonable. Like, you can do that with especially, you know, you got a degree in computer science, you know, a bunch of languages.

Adam Leventhal:

These languages for Yeah. Right. Done some functional, some people some some object oriented, some some, you know, procedural. Like, I I know how to program.

Bryan Cantrill:

There's also a blog entry on You've got a blog entry on blogging.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah, I do. From 10 years of blogging. Yeah, 10 years ago. Yeah. So some of these blog posts get written in anger or in response to things, right?

Adam Leventhal:

In this case, this was me trying to take the lessons that Tim was talking about from Sun and bring them to Delphix and trying to educate Yeah. My colleagues. And I was looking back through that. I'd stumbled onto that as well and looking through, like, a slide deck I had done on, like, this is a good deck. I thought it it you know what?

Adam Leventhal:

It was a pretty good deck.

Bryan Cantrill:

It is a good deck. This is good. I'm looking at it right now. This is good.

Adam Leventhal:

And it was like

Bryan Cantrill:

Stop fussing and post it. Yeah. Good advice.

Adam Leventhal:

There we go. I mean, advice that I can still take from myself. But, yeah, trying to encourage people to just, like, write about what they're doing and and and explaining some of the benefits that I had seen. So, yeah, that was that was one I was pretty pleased with.

Bryan Cantrill:

On social media, first bullet, I agree with you, comma, it's stupid.

Adam Leventhal:

I mean it is stupid. Am I wrong?

Bryan Cantrill:

No, you're not wrong. It is stupid. It's absolutely stupid. The this is what I get.

Adam Leventhal:

This is there's even like a kittens, like, meme that I completely forgot was in there.

Bryan Cantrill:

I was gonna do you the service without mentioning that. I was gonna, you know, I was going to walk past it.

Adam Leventhal:

You know the depths I went to, to convert my blog? I found a presentation I had given on the PID provider. I found on an old laptop, the, StarOffice, whatever the fuck it was, presentation. And converting it also involved finding what was the sun font. Oh, God.

Adam Leventhal:

Make everything work. Anyway, little side quest for the for

Bryan Cantrill:

the the pain that people go through.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. If I can say some nice things about you, if you don't mind.

Bryan Cantrill:

I know.

Adam Leventhal:

I know.

Bryan Cantrill:

I know. I know. Yeah.

Adam Leventhal:

Because because, I have drawn a lot of inspiration from your blog, and I think that this discussion of, the I ran my mouth throughout Rust and then you said it much more articulately because when I went to actually learn Rust, you feel like I gave the advice to go pick up a book. I felt like you gave me the advice and I wouldn't have heard my own advice to learn the fuck about it just for what it's worth. So I think that on thinking this is going to be I'm going to say this awkwardly, so hopefully you can clean it up for me, but there are things that you've written about like forking. You've written about forking Solaris and Open Solaris and Lumos, and you've written about open source and the business of open source. And a lot of these things have really clarified To say it clarified my thinking suggests, it, like, implies that it's like, oh, I already thought those things and you merely, like, send them back to me.

Adam Leventhal:

But in some cases, I feel like the sentiments that you conveyed just, like, put voice to the things to the abstract feelings that I had had. And I think there are a lot of technologists who read your blog or hear your talks and kind of feel similarly.

Bryan Cantrill:

Oh, well, that's actually a really good point because and so, again, I'd be interested in kinda how often you saw this because I think that part of why when you have something that resonates with other people, it's because you've done that.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

Bryan Cantrill:

Right? Like, I'm actually telling you something that at some level you already know. And or you already think, or you've got a hunch about.

Piotr Sarna:

Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

And in like, this is maybe catalyzing your own thinking, but it's not, like when when I was a bit like when when things go part of the reason like you don't control when things go viral or not, when something goes viral, it's because you've spoken a truth. And it it it's not the Yeah.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. You've put voice to something that's already out there.

Bryan Cantrill:

It's already out there. That's exactly it. And and you just happen to like, catalyze it a little bit. And now it's and but yeah, that's interesting you said it because I think that we, I do I feel that this is also value you get in reading the blogs of others. We're like, okay, I've been thinking this, but you actually, you know, Cynthia, one of the questions you asked is like, what writers do you like to read?

Bryan Cantrill:

Do you read any of Steve Yaghi stuff? He said Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

I mean For years. For years. And like the Cynthia, I don't know if you've read any Steve Yaghi, but, I can't remember if he's in the book or not, but, the the the kingdom of nouns and verbs, about Java

Adam Leventhal:

Oh, yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Is just I've I think is like some of the most amazing writing ever. The, it's kind of a parable about about Java. And then great. Like, it's like just as you're saying, it's like it's tacking into kind of like my own, like, world view, so I, of course, I love it because it is, and so one of the things interesting about Yagayan, I got this question, Adam, for you, maybe Cynthia, this is a question that you were kinda tacking into was the the, you know, because I realized the way he writes is very different the way I write. And the way I write may be very idiosyncratic.

Bryan Cantrill:

Jay Jacobs (zero zero six:fifty seven): How

Adam Leventhal:

do you feel like, how would you characterize how you write?

Bryan Cantrill:

Jay Jacobs (zero zero six:fifty seven): I have got 0 drafts. Like there are not drafts right now that I have of thoughts that are kind of like half formulated, that I've written down. Yeah. Jay Jacobs (3seven forty seven): For none of them? Jay Jacobs (3seven forty seven): For nothing.

Bryan Cantrill:

Jay Jacobs (3seven forty seven): Really? Jay Jacobs (3seven forty seven): Yeah. For the actually went into my drafts because I wanted to go look. My drafts are all things that I published on blogs elsewhere, and I was using WordPress just to get the but I literally have no and then which is not to say I don't have things kicked around them. I I think it's actually like it's not a strength it's it's more of like a peculiarity where I get just locked When I need to get something out, I just get totally locked on it.

Bryan Cantrill:

And it's like, I'm not going to do anything until that blog entry is published.

Adam Leventhal:

Jay Jacobs (zero fifty seven:fifty four): Yeah. I mean, for me, certainly early, it was an aversion. I would write it and ship it because I, like, I didn't want to read it back. And, like, that's that's how I was, like, writing through high school and college too. Like, I hated editing because it involved reading my own writing.

Bryan Cantrill:

Do you know who's a well,

Adam Leventhal:

I'm not sure if it's

Bryan Cantrill:

a grader or not. Do you use ChatCBT to to look at your own stuff?

Adam Leventhal:

I haven't, but I should.

Bryan Cantrill:

You should because Bridget decided she was no longer interested in reading my blog. So I'm like, okay. They so I'm gonna actually just like and, of course, you and I, I know both of this, like, total gen x are kind of a boomer kind of a thing to, like, have this conversation with Tech EBT before we have, like Mhmm. I would like you to review a blog and for me, like, would you be interested in doing that? Like, I would love to do that.

Bryan Cantrill:

I just, like for whatever reason like that, like, back and forth. I mean, I help people not to anthropomorphize these things, and then I anthropomorphize them all the

Piotr Sarna:

time. Yeah.

Adam Leventhal:

Like, are you familiar with this? Because I'd like to talk to you about it. It's like, go for it.

Bryan Cantrill:

I I would love to talk to you about that. And it's so cheerful. That

Adam Leventhal:

error message, tell me more.

Bryan Cantrill:

Error message. I've been sitting here waiting like, God, I hope he gives me an error message and you just did it. Now you've made my day. So, yeah, what is it? Like, how can I help?

Bryan Cantrill:

But it's like it the the it's really interesting to have it read this stuff. And for, like, flow and Cynthia, have you done this at all? Have you had ChatGPT as an editor?

Cynthia Dunlop:

Yes. We actually put that in one of the later reviewing, chapters. Because as we were writing it, we started playing around and, you know, it wasn't so great at it was awful at writing. It wasn't necessarily great at reviewing. But what was really interesting was if you fed it a blog draft and had it do something like, can you point out some problems with this blog draft?

Cynthia Dunlop:

It would give you, you know, maybe 10 suggestions and 9 of which were just crap. But one of it was like, hey, yeah, I should do that. And you could just get that with, you know, copy paste, 20 seconds. It's pretty amazing that you can get that.

Bryan Cantrill:

It is pretty amazing. I think it is I always find it most basically, you upload this thing that you've been laboring on. It's like, you know, a 1000 words, 2 1000 words, 3 1,000 words. You Have your spouse review it, it's gonna be, you know, 15 minutes. And then like 15 then 15 more minutes, I'm like, no, I'm not changing that.

Bryan Cantrill:

Like people who read this will understand it, but to have it turn around immediately. Be like, okay, I read it and here are my as you say something, like here are the 10 things. And I find it to be like, good. I mean, the the the when it suggests I don't take its suggestions that frequently. I often take its suggestions in spirit.

Bryan Cantrill:

Like, it's saying like there's a bad transition here. This transition could be better, and here's my suggestion. Like, your suggestion sucks. But I but I hear what you're saying. Actually, you know what?

Bryan Cantrill:

I've been thinking in the back of my head that transition is not very good. I gotta say, like, I left the ending of my I could not land the plane yesterday on this blog entry, where I'm just like because it was a

Adam Leventhal:

bit Chat gpt wrote it?

Bryan Cantrill:

No. But Chat GPT I wrote an ending that I'm like, I don't know. And Chat GPT is like, I love the ending. And I'm like, you know what? Alright, Chat GPT, I will publish it.

Bryan Cantrill:

So if you hate the ending, blame Chat GPT. The the only tools

Adam Leventhal:

I used to use were ones to, they would like give you an like, a grade level of the writing back. Yeah. Which I found I see you being skeptic. I I really liked it in terms of simplifying the writing, and and you're you're a really, you know, complicated kind of

Bryan Cantrill:

ideas guy. Just get it out there. Yeah. Complicated ideas guy.

Adam Leventhal:

But I will I will you're gonna love this. I have a colleague, and I'm sure you can guess a former colleague, I'm sure you can guess who it was, who would come back to me and said, Adam. Like, I wrote this blog post. It told me I wrote at a 13th grade level. Like, how awesome am I?

Adam Leventhal:

I'm like, no, you dumbbell. I know. That's the opposite. Like, that's the opposite of what you're trying to do.

Bryan Cantrill:

I always get grade level like, imp, nan is what I get on the grade level. I no, I I those things I always found to be very it's like, you have written this for someone who's done, like, multiple postdocs. Someone who actually I would say multiple PhDs, but I can't even say that. It's like, this is someone who basically everyone knows is extraordinarily smart, but this person cannot get a real doc. Parents are barriers to talk about.

Adam Leventhal:

Some of this is like sentence structure and complexity. You I'm I'm surprised that it dings you that hard.

Bryan Cantrill:

Chachi, let's say who does not ding me. Chachi Petit don't ding me. And no, the the the because like, look, I'm gonna fine. We're here. Let's just let's just have it out.

Bryan Cantrill:

Let's let's talk about the elephant in the room. I I love the em dash.

Adam Leventhal:

You do love the em dash. And Even though you you use it incorrectly. What? You put spaces around it.

Bryan Cantrill:

I oh, okay. You're that you're Yeah. Typographically. It's typographically incorrect. I don't think that was a god.

Bryan Cantrill:

I thought, like Woah. Oh. I knew people just gonna hear, like, muffled noises from the microphones. We're in the same room. We were not normally in the same room.

Bryan Cantrill:

So, like, this can go into a total brawl right now. And I would I would I would lose, but like I would go down. Just

Adam Leventhal:

do the the Emdash. I do love the Emdash.

Bryan Cantrill:

Did he give you shit about the Emdash? Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

Bryan Cantrill:

Nope. Nope. That's all I know. It was it did not go well, and it was protracted back and forth. And this is one of the you know these types, like

Adam Leventhal:

Oh, yeah. Those types. Oh. Anti Emdash types.

Bryan Cantrill:

The anti Emdash types, like, oh, no. But, like, I've got, like, a PhD in classics, so you have to listen to me. Like, you don't know how to write and I know how to write. And, you know, who who, gave me great confidence was Carol, reading Carol's master of the senate. Carol loves the em dashes.

Bryan Cantrill:

And I think that you so the reason I so I will absolutely have sentences that have got colons, semicolons and ambashes in them.

Adam Leventhal:

And Alright. You're right. Post doc.

Bryan Cantrill:

Right. Exactly. And so it's like, yeah, that's like a lot of words. The reason I do that though is because I can hear my own voice in reading the sentence. Mhmm.

Bryan Cantrill:

So it actually has to do with like how I would I I I'm telling you as a reader how the sentence should be spoken. We're now in the future. It's like, we are definitely in the question someone asked. I just I just I just I just feel like noting the time that I can cut all this out. I can actually I think I can actually turn this.

Adam Leventhal:

I just wanna clip that. I just feel like

Bryan Cantrill:

that was just a delay.

Adam Leventhal:

No. I just wanted to be in the music of my

Bryan Cantrill:

listened. It's gorgeous. Well, I think that's actually a point

Cynthia Dunlop:

that we made that your voice, you know, might be complex, it might be simple, but if someone who knows you reads it and they don't think it sounds like you, then you've done something wrong with your voice.

Bryan Cantrill:

And you don't wanna make You you you would have another calling as, like, a as as a kindergarten teacher because I love how you're, like, no. I'm not saying that Brian's writing is overly complicated. We're saying he's got a different voice, everybody.

Adam Leventhal:

His voice is overly complicated.

Bryan Cantrill:

His voice is overly complicated.

Piotr Sarna:

But I feel very opposite.

Cynthia Dunlop:

Called out in one of the chapters where we talked about your blog that you can you can just hear you saying it when you read your blog. It was I think it was the thoughts on trends chapter.

Adam Leventhal:

Oh, interesting.

Cynthia Dunlop:

O'Brien that even if your name wasn't on it, you could hear hear your personality in it.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yes. Yeah. I do feel I've got a I I definitely have I've got a distinctive enough voice. Like, we I'm sure we both had this where there's some piece of writing from in the past that is like, who the hell wrote this? And I'm looking at it, but, like, I I I know who wrote that.

Bryan Cantrill:

Right? I I'm I'm I'm pretty sure I know who wrote that. I I I can go into the get history to confirm, but I think I already know.

Adam Leventhal:

That's right. Some block comment. You're like, wait wait a minute.

Bryan Cantrill:

That one that one's got a lot of em dashes in it. Em dashes offset my spaces obviously in a block comment. Right?

Adam Leventhal:

I mean, you do you. Probably 2 spaces after the period, like,

Bryan Cantrill:

2 spaces after that. Are you saying that like if you had an em dash in a block comment, you would not off that offset that with spaces. That's like a postfix or prefix decrement operator in a block comment. Like, what does that even mean? You know what?

Bryan Cantrill:

Maybe. Blogs I can't

Adam Leventhal:

buy this.

Bryan Cantrill:

This podcast is canceled. We're gonna go straight to brawl. I I knew we would, find the things that divide us.

Cynthia Dunlop:

We had Emdash and get space throughout the book. The poor copy editors at Manning removed every single one of them.

Bryan Cantrill:

Right. Em dashes with spaces.

Cynthia Dunlop:

Yes.

Bryan Cantrill:

You know, I I went back in and added a bunch of surrounding spaces on my em dashes when I when I move out of the sea. Yeah. Good. Good. I'm glad you did.

Bryan Cantrill:

Do it do it in front of everybody else. Could you make an announcement?

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. I'm probably wrong.

Bryan Cantrill:

No. No. I'm no. I

Cynthia Dunlop:

all of our ellipses.

Bryan Cantrill:

So you're able to use all of the things. I used to use ellipses more. I use a lot I use ellipses a lot less. The there are the two things about my writing as a as a younger person that I actually kinda don't like is my overuse of the ellipsis. And then I got a witch and that.

Bryan Cantrill:

I did not insubordinate clause versus subordinate clause.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. Just to try to avoid the whole thing.

Bryan Cantrill:

I I definitely don't now, but I I just misused it when I was Oh, yeah. The do you wanna do you wanna a good rule for this, by the way? If it makes sense to have a by the way, use which. Mhmm. If if you can add by the way Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

And and it it doesn't change the meaning of the sentence Yeah. It's which. If, by the way, does not make any sense Right. And it would be just like it sound like you had like a stroke while saying the sentence, it should be that not which.

Adam Leventhal:

But but also opposite in British English. Right? I who cares? Right? Good point.

Adam Leventhal:

Fuck them. Yep.

Bryan Cantrill:

I thought like I and then you know what? Oh, God. They're on right now. Oh, God. We're we're at a oh, you know, we're at a European friendly time.

Bryan Cantrill:

Damn it. No. It's, there were there were some of the other ones, I mean, I feel like the so you said that in terms of difficult blog entries, the trans posit entry was a difficult entry for you. Yeah.

Adam Leventhal:

The I mean, I I do want while we were talking about editing, I did wanna say that like the APFS one was,

Bryan Cantrill:

I

Adam Leventhal:

went through an unusual editing process on that one, which was I made a Google doc and I kicked it open to the world. Sort of like

Bryan Cantrill:

so bunch of

Adam Leventhal:

like randos on Twitter and I've like

Bryan Cantrill:

I can see why on that one actually.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. I really wanted that one. I mean it was long and

Bryan Cantrill:

And you wanted to be correct.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

And this is like your overdue skis. I mean you did you just like I didn't build this thing.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. Yeah. And I wanted, and, actually, I got a bunch of the feedback that I needed but didn't want. You know what I mean? Like, everyone who participated made it better.

Adam Leventhal:

So I shared that Google Doc. Oh, one thing. Maybe maybe I didn't actually succeed in sharing that, but I'll work on sharing that Google Doc. And, yeah, I mean, they they gave a lot of feedback that that made it a ton better, and it was, like, annoying to hear. You know what I mean?

Adam Leventhal:

Like, I'm sure you've you've got that kind of feedback in the past where you're like like, actually, I'm just gonna start the sentence with an and because I'm a rebel. It's like, but it's worse if you do that. Right? Right?

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. I'm I'm familiar with this kind of feedback. I've I've I've got this to pass, but that's good because it made because that was a that was a I assume that is still one of your most popular series of blog episodes. I

Adam Leventhal:

feel like while we're all gathered around patting me on the back, it gets picked up by Ars Technica, and, I got like a $200 check out of it. So that was a good week of work for me. You got how did you do $200 check? From like Conde NEST. From Ars Technica picked it up and like paid for it.

Bryan Cantrill:

I think we've gotten paid for anything I've written.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. Well

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. It's not totally true. That's mostly true. I got a business insider wanted to run my, the the compensation's reflection of values piece?

Adam Leventhal:

You said no? What? Well, you know what?

Bryan Cantrill:

I said yes. And and in return, they gave me a 1 year subscription to business insider.

Adam Leventhal:

That's not getting paid. Oh.

Bryan Cantrill:

Alright. Yeah. Yeah. I I guess I guess I have to get paid in things that can be redeemed for goods and stuff.

Adam Leventhal:

Oh, this is like barter. Yeah. That that is more that's

Bryan Cantrill:

one of the barter system, isn't it? Yeah. Right. This Yeah. They took your island.

Bryan Cantrill:

You the for the beads. It's like, well okay. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. That's good.

Adam Leventhal:

So you made $200. There you go. Maybe maybe even more.

Bryan Cantrill:

I kept that. So blogging

Adam Leventhal:

does say But, like, you know, this this from my mom who has submitted lots of articles to the New Yorker, also a Kanye Nas, never gotten picked up by the New Yorker. So I got to lord that over her. Like my mom and your mother has

Bryan Cantrill:

submitted articles to the Go on.

Adam Leventhal:

Like short stories to the New Yorker?

Bryan Cantrill:

Like unsolicited? That's like how

Adam Leventhal:

I think that's how it works. I don't know. Sorry, mom. Good thing she doesn't listen. So you know, the New York does

Bryan Cantrill:

New York still did like the caption contest thing?

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. I think so.

Bryan Cantrill:

I feel very wronged about that. I had a I had

Adam Leventhal:

Okay. Look. Look. The airing of grievance is

Bryan Cantrill:

The airing of grievance is okay. So look, I as you know, like, I don't really I think grievance is bad. I think it's bad for society. I don't have grievance in general. In general.

Bryan Cantrill:

Please continue. Alright. So, obviously, where I'm going with that is to trot out a grievance. I just felt like I had an absolute banger of a caption.

Adam Leventhal:

What year was this in which you had this banger? That you Oh, God.

Bryan Cantrill:

This is I mean, this is a while. I've been doing this for a while. Right? This is

Adam Leventhal:

a while. For a while.

Bryan Cantrill:

I I mean, because this is shortly after they and I know they have, like, many many submissions, but I came to the conclusion based on like, see you look at the web. You're like, fine. Fine. You found a much better caption than mine. I thought mine was awfully good, but the obviously Did

Adam Leventhal:

you put it on the fridge? Like, I was like, it was like

Bryan Cantrill:

I should put it. Homework? Okay. So you know what? Actually, I can date it a little bit.

Bryan Cantrill:

It would have been like 2,007 because it is the cartoon is a, there's a monkey at a typewriter. Okay? And there's someone who is looking at the work of the monkey. Okay? And like an editor is looking at the monkey and like obviously disappointed.

Bryan Cantrill:

Okay? Very germane. Yes. Capturing on this. It's like I

Adam Leventhal:

feel this is like

Bryan Cantrill:

a classic New Yorker caption. Yeah. It's got involves an animal, involves we're anthropomorphizing an animal. Yeah. Get the monkey at the keyboard.

Bryan Cantrill:

So my caption, which I feel is a banger and I won't be talked out of, is, and I suppose this man in the yellow hat, this is supposed to be me. Banger. Is that a banger?

Adam Leventhal:

Banger. Killing it. A 100%. Yes. It's and it and it's got so many levels.

Bryan Cantrill:

It's got so many levels to it. I think it's got a lot of depth to it. And so I was reading a lot of curious stories to the kids at the time. The other thing was fear of litigation. You know, that's the you know what?

Bryan Cantrill:

That's the only reason. That's the only cowardice. It's the only that is the actual only explanation. That's what

Adam Leventhal:

they picked it. They fought it

Bryan Cantrill:

to the law. They fought with the lawyers. Well, I mean, they were like- Steven McClurg (3six forty six): Tooth the nail. Steven McClurg (3six forty six): I'm toothed the nail. I got to go to the bat for this one.

Bryan Cantrill:

Like, listen, I've let you win on the, but I got to go to bat for this one.

Adam Leventhal:

You could tear down the whole thing, the whole captain. So the unravel. Steven McClurg (3six forty

Bryan Cantrill:

six): But it was worth it, but ultimately lost. Yeah. The lawyers won, right? And no, that's okay. Now this makes more sense now.

Bryan Cantrill:

And you know what? Actually, my grievance is lifted. I no longer have the grievance

Adam Leventhal:

because Jay Jacobs

Bryan Cantrill:

(twenty-two forty six): It's

Adam Leventhal:

a great session.

Bryan Cantrill:

Jay Jacobs (twenty-two forty six): I appreciate that anonymous New Yorker employee really going to bat for me. Sorry, Cynthia.

Adam Leventhal:

If I can drive us out of the ditch for a moment. Yeah, sure. So you also I kind of I worry about like pulling on these threads that are like calling out people on blogs because I feel like that that can be a little Oh, for sure. You

Bryan Cantrill:

had

Adam Leventhal:

a great blog post where I think that, uh-oh. Yeah. No. No. This is where you you were you were there was a there was a, an issue in the open source community where someone was like arguing over the use of a pronoun.

Piotr Sarna:

Yeah. Oh,

Adam Leventhal:

yes. You, like, were very unequivocal about your stance and about about Giant's stance at the time. Yes. And I thought that was great clarity. I thought that was, like, just, like, both the right way to treat people and with the topic of how to work with people who are being jerks, how to work with assholes and or not work with them.

Adam Leventhal:

And I thought that, that really But that sort of clarity of leadership and, kind of just like taking a stance in public, I thought was really important at the time.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. So I actually okay.

Adam Leventhal:

So a couple of things about that.

Bryan Cantrill:

It's power of a pronoun, made me an enormous number of enemies to this day. That blog post is the reason that the Usenet post got dug back up. Great. 100%. Like, literally, that was, like, forgotten and, like, not really retrievable, and it was brought up in the heat of the conversation about that.

Bryan Cantrill:

Gotcha. I had the, it actually is funny because I'm I actually I'm glad you brought it up because I'm not sure I would have had the courage to bring this one up actually.

Adam Leventhal:

Well, I was I that's why I was kind of anonymizing it a little bit just because I don't know. I didn't I No.

Bryan Cantrill:

No. They they they it was, I had, this one, I would do things slightly differently, though though not with the text of the, the, this is a good blog entry where people didn't read the whole thing. The people that like So I thought that this was going to resolve this issue. I thought that like this this is And and so to give context, what had happened here is there was a gendered pronoun in Libuv, which is used by Node. There was a poll request to change that gender pronoun from a he, him, to a they, them, which is like just good writing as far as I'm concerned.

Bryan Cantrill:

Right? I just avoid gender and there's no there's no reason for this to be gendered. It was like talking about like the user, what the user should do, and then he does this. It's like that you But we don't know the user's gender, right? The user is a they them.

Bryan Cantrill:

The, took the, so there was a poll request. The maintainer closed out the poll request saying, I do not accept poll requests of a trivial matter, like this. The maintainer of node inside of Joynt pushed over it, took the commit and pushed, and then the Libuv person force pushed and reverted it. Gross. Really gross.

Bryan Cantrill:

And then I wrote the blog post. And he had also the thing the the one thing I would add to that blog post that I wish I had said, well, there are 2 things I wish I had done differently. 1, I should have called him. This is an example of me not taking my own advice Yeah. To you back in the day.

Adam Leventhal:

And that that advice was basically if I if I had something nasty to say to someone to call them, I I mean, this is how I'm replaying it, in part because, like, if you if you put it in an email, you don't know where that email is gonna get forwarded.

Bryan Cantrill:

And I think also it just humanizes them, allows allows them to get a just hear their perspective. Jay Jacobs (zero zero six:fifty seven):

Adam Leventhal:

And, I I think especially if I mean, and to like not let you be ignored. Like if you're if you actually feel passionate about Yeah. Something, then it it forces that person to like respond. Matthew Peckham (zero zero six:fifty seven):

Bryan Cantrill:

He may not have taken the call. The reality is that he had done he had pissed off everybody, not over the the before this issue, had done things over and over and over and over again to make people he he was an asshole. He had been an asshole, he and that is just something I didn't clarify in the blog post. It's like this guy's got a long history of being an asshole. And the, and then I so and I didn't reach out to him privately.

Bryan Cantrill:

And then the other thing I didn't do is because the maintainer of note did reach out to him privately, he had responded with a very nasty note. And I didn't even I don't think I even made reference to the presence of that note. So what So I didn't have People didn't have the complete context. I tried to give people a lot of context. I had a lot of people read that one.

Bryan Cantrill:

My wife, Bridget, was like, I think you're being actually like too reasonable. She had the full contact. It was like, I think she I mean, it was I As you can imagine, like this this divided on gender lines

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. For sure.

Bryan Cantrill:

I mean, not in not that when people read it, I mean, I think people thought like, Yeah, this is like, if anything, you're being like, moderate. Right? That was not an acquisition that was leveled in the broader internet. And this one was, I thought this was gonna end the discussion, and this like went crazy. Absolutely crazy.

Bryan Cantrill:

I got threats. I've never gotten threats before with anything. Yep. I got people saying horrific things in the DMs, and I'm like, I'm gonna keep my DMs open because this is actually, I I like I I and I, have spoken to plenty of women about this who are like, Oh, you got Oh, yeah. Oh, you got thread?

Bryan Cantrill:

Really? You got threads? Yeah. Welcome to it. Welcome to like anything I ever write.

Bryan Cantrill:

And so I felt like this is a this is a and this is right in the middle of a gamer gate. And it was a, it was hot. And I think it on that, I it changed the way I deal with, like first of all, I like, I honest hand on heart, I thought this blog, this is just ridiculous. I'm like, this blog entry will resolve this.

Adam Leventhal:

Perfect. Like, you just lay out all the facts. Josh McCall (zero

Bryan Cantrill:

fifty seven:fifty

Adam Leventhal:

seven): I'm gonna lay out

Bryan Cantrill:

all the facts and it will be the end of this.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. You're like little Federalist papers and Josh McCall (zero fifty

Bryan Cantrill:

seven:fifty eight): I will write my little Federalist papers. And it's like, and, that did not And I mean, I've got like a screenshot of back to back tweets being one tweet saying, one person saying, I don't know who Joyant is, but whatever they make, I'm going to buy some of it right now. Another person saying, I don't know who Joyant is, but whatever they make, I'm never going to buy. I mean, like literally back to back in my timeline. And it was an education on when you weighed in on something that is really, really, really divisive, it is very hard to And and I I I again, I don't regret it.

Bryan Cantrill:

I didn't But I actually did wonder, like, as I realized, like, Oh, this is a blog entry that was only on the joint blog, was not in my And it's like, Do I republish that with this? So I was just thinking about this a lot this weekend. And I'm like, I know this one is still hot. And I know it. I know.

Bryan Cantrill:

And it and Joe listener, this may include you. You may really disagree with me about this. You and I just disagree about this. I stand by it. And I and what you if you are someone who is extremely upset by that blog entry, you should know that I have never had a blog entry that more people have come up to me and said that was a really meaningful blog entry for me personally.

Bryan Cantrill:

That's awesome. And I don't have to tell you like it, it's women. Yeah. And the, in fact, a, someone when we, you know, that that I that you and I both know, but when I first met her, she's like, wait a minute. Aren't you the guy that wrote that blog entry?

Bryan Cantrill:

And I'm like, maybe. I'm like, maybe? Go on.

Adam Leventhal:

Give me can you give me one or 2 more sentences? Right. I'll have a bar. Right? Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

And she's like, I wanna give you a hug. Wow. I'm like, okay. Great. So anyway, that's that that that is, that that's that one.

Bryan Cantrill:

That one that that one is definitely, you know, Cynthia, as you're talking about like difficult, that was difficult in different ways. That definitely has had the most difficult reaction of anything I've ever written. The I think that the, you know, the the other things that have been, I think, difficult have been where I've just wanted to be very mindful of it is when you're kind of like leaving one thing and and going on to the next thing. So, like, my goodbye son was Right. Difficult in, I do love I don't know if this was lost on people that read it, that my goodbye son piece.

Bryan Cantrill:

So, like, he never mentioned Oracle in there. Like, I sure did. And, the goodbye Sun, very much a double entendre of of basically saying goodbye to to not just me leaving Sun, but Sun leaving me. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

But that was also,

Adam Leventhal:

yeah. What do what are some of

Bryan Cantrill:

the other ones that you're,

Adam Leventhal:

you know, let's see.

Bryan Cantrill:

So Wait. What's what's surprised you about blogging? Let me just get a

Adam Leventhal:

Oh, yeah. So, you know, you started blogging on roller as we talked about. You you had this nice, kernel tactical discussion, this nice presentation where you talked about guerrilla marketing as you coined it. I think and then I started blogging, and I was very you know, I don't read those blog posts early because, some of them are just hard, hard for me to read. The thing that was very surprising is I was doing a lot of traveling and talking with customers, this is the early to mid 2000s.

Adam Leventhal:

I'd show up at customers and I'd start telling them a thing or asking about a thing or whatever and be like, No, no, we've read your blog. The data and all that. I mean, this maybe sounds quaint now, but the power and distribution of it to the folks who are already invested was novel to me and very surprising. I could show up and instead of having the first 12 introductory paragraphs, just get to the meat and get to more advanced topics or whatever. That was very surprising and really exciting.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. That's which is great, right? You've got people who are like, No, I'm already I'm in. I'm in. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

I and I mean, boy, it's been a huge we talked about, I mean, just everything in oxide. It's been the the the ability because I mean, that's like the larger issue of like the the the merits of being transparent And Totally.

Adam Leventhal:

I mean, like, you look at this podcast. Like, I was I was at this Rust Lab conference, and there were all kinds of folks who, you know, I started on the okay. You know, this is this is what oxide does, or this is, you know, a topic that's interesting to us. Like, no. No.

Adam Leventhal:

No. We listen to the podcast. Like, we got that. Like, we know all this. Right.

Adam Leventhal:

Like, you don't have to do the the preliminaries here. Like, we can just get into some of the more

Bryan Cantrill:

It's like, okay. Well, can I at least explain some of the rule differences between independent baseball and pioneer league baseball? And it's like, no. No. We listen to the podcast.

Adam Leventhal:

100%. We've we've got all of that.

Bryan Cantrill:

We got that. We got a home run derby. Like, it sounds I don't know. It sounds interesting. It's intriguing.

Bryan Cantrill:

I don't know. I'm European. I that's not right. Yeah. Can we move on?

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Interesting. And is is Cindy, what was surprising to you in kinda writing the book? I can can I turn some of these questions back on you?

Cynthia Dunlop:

Now that Sarna's gone? Great.

Bryan Cantrill:

Exactly. That's right.

Cynthia Dunlop:

Maybe not not surprising me, but surprising about blogging is that how important it is as an underdog, especially in the dev tool space, that that's really your main way to get mindshare away if you're competing against these these huge companies, say the Sun Microsystems of the world, and you're some smaller startup. How do you how do you get that message out? And it's really blogging.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. That's a really good point. It's in terms of, like, this is your mark like, this is what you should think of as marketing. You're trying to communicate what you're marketing is ultimately communication, and Right.

Adam Leventhal:

It's a way that

Bryan Cantrill:

as a startup, you can you can punch above your weight with a written form,

Adam Leventhal:

especially in the world of dev tools or like the folks who are writing those blog posts are also the users of the topic and familiar with it and building that brand among that same community, for sure. Totally.

Cynthia Dunlop:

And for fear of dating myself, I actually came into the tech industry in the days of the the doctor Dobbs journals and the c u c c plus plus user journals. Oh, it

Bryan Cantrill:

was This is the first time that we've met we have not mentioned doctor Dobbs Journal on this podcast, and I it's a what an oversight. A 100%. I was, love doctor Dobbs Journal.

Cynthia Dunlop:

I remember coming in a day I came into this this tech world, and and the the founders, they print out print out the articles, photocopy articles. Everybody had to read the articles, make their marks on the articles, and there's the meeting. Do we do we develop something differently? Do we write something differently? What do we do differently after having learned and discussed all these things coming out?

Cynthia Dunlop:

It was such a such a main force in how what everyone was thinking was to get the latest doctor Dobbs journal and earmark the pages, and what are we topic copying, and what are we discussing?

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. And and blogging kind of allows anyone to be doctor Dopp's journal at any given moment. Yeah. It it is not a ton of

Cynthia Dunlop:

pages. You don't have to, go through the editors and, like, the 3 month long publication cycle.

Bryan Cantrill:

And then we I mean, you obviously you all read a bunch of different kinds of blogs, which and most of them have fun experience because I wanna actually, I wanna go through the book. I mean, obviously, I in writing the foreword, I wanted to to to, read enough of the book, but I did not I read the book, but not a lot of the source material you'll link to. I wanna go back and and reread a bunch of those blogs because you got a bunch of great folks in there.

Cynthia Dunlop:

Yeah. It's a great list. I had fun. The way we did it was I did a super long list of blogs, scanning hacker news, scanning people on Twitter, just kind of the people in our network, and made this very long list, divided it up into the 7 different patterns. We talked about patterns within the book because what you're writing for, like, a a thoughts on trends blog, a roast of async rust or whatever is very different than if you are doing a a bug hunt blog or if you're doing a, you know, Twitter's explaining Twitter's recommendation algorithm blog to the world.

Cynthia Dunlop:

So they're all very they're all very different approaches with different goals. So we wanted to tackle them individually. So we came up with all the blogs. We split them up into that, and I think there were probably about 20 to 30 blogs in each category. And then since Sarna was the one doing the write up, I didn't want to pretend to be the engineer or have the engineer voice.

Cynthia Dunlop:

So I let him pick and choose and do the write up. And that's how we got the 5 in each chapter as well as we had 5 that we did a very extensive discussion of in chapter 3, which was kind of the that was the what makes a blog captivating. That was actually the hardest chapter to write. We left that one to the very end because we wanted to go through all the other chapters before we were finalizing our response on that.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Interesting. And we and what was your what was your conclusion? What would what what is it that makes a blog captivating?

Cynthia Dunlop:

We boiled it. Well, we have lots of long lists, and we went over it many, many times. Let me see exactly how we rolling here. But, basically, I think the the three main things that we came down with were, number 1, it has to be an intriguing topic or nobody's ever going to click into it, and there are a few subcategories in that. Number 2, it has to have a very distinctive educational core.

Cynthia Dunlop:

And then 3, we've rolled up under it. It just has to be very smooth delivery. And I think there's a couple let me see if I can copy the excerpt or share the excerpt somehow.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Interesting. I mean, my big advice because you know so the another thing you asked for for was, like, what what is my advice, to to bloggers? 1, seriously consider a static site generator.

Tim Bray:

I mean,

Bryan Cantrill:

that was that that's just been that's been great. God. I I I We should

Adam Leventhal:

have done this so long ago.

Bryan Cantrill:

We should have done it so long ago. So, Cynthia, I don't know if you you you saw it sounds like you saw the blog entry from yesterday. You've now played an outsized role in both of our lives.

Cynthia Dunlop:

Well, you have an artist, so we are thrilled to have you.

Bryan Cantrill:

And, boy, you inspired us. I I'm like, I gotta get to a better spot because people are gonna read this book, they're gonna click on the link. It's like it can't take 35 seconds to load. Yeah. It can't look like garbage because the CSS is to, like, the Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Stupid

Adam Leventhal:

We went from we went from roller to WordPress, and it was sort of fine.

Bryan Cantrill:

It was sort of fine.

Adam Leventhal:

And it was

Bryan Cantrill:

and then we would Must find. Must find.

Adam Leventhal:

And then we'd get, like, these security vulnerabilities where, like, all the comments were, like, Viagra ads or something.

Bryan Cantrill:

In Chinese. Yeah. Chinese Viagra ads. I mean, it's true.

Adam Leventhal:

I don't I mean, I guess. They do. And then, and then we like got it to a slightly better place than WordPress, but it was, it was awful. It was awful. Like it required constant care and feeding.

Bryan Cantrill:

Josh McCallen (3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd and it was just bad. We we so Cynthia, thank you very much because we had to get somewhere else, and then it was very helpful for me to see your links in the book. I'm like, these links have to work. Like like, whatever they are, like, those links had to work. And actually, when I did the original import, like, the time zone was wrong, and so depending on when I blocked it, like, the date would be wrong.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. And I'm like, that that won't work because Cynthia's got, like I I I cannot, ruin the book here. But, so you it it was it was very helpful. So I would say, like, use it. I mean, I love the the it was just a breath of fresh air.

Adam Leventhal:

And what what did you use? I used Chico.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. And I and I thought it was great. I know you used, you liked 11ty.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. I liked 11ty. We we had used that in at trans posit. I'd even, like, I committed to the repo, so I felt like

Bryan Cantrill:

I had to do it.

Adam Leventhal:

I don't know. Like, I feel like once I I mean, this is the power of open source. Right? Like, once you make one commit, you're just the You're die hard.

Bryan Cantrill:

You're die hard. Yeah. So you're you're the 11ty die hard. Yeah. I but I and then then the fact that we got it was just a lot of fun to deploy on the oxide rack, which is great too.

Bryan Cantrill:

So, that was really, it it felt very rewarding. But sorry. So that's obviously one piece of advice is definitely looks look if you wanna write a blog,

Adam Leventhal:

if it's like a static site is somehow beyond your reach, fine, whatever. But if you're happy with Markdown or Ask a Doc or

Bryan Cantrill:

Because I think you and I

Adam Leventhal:

both wish, I wish my blog interest had been

Bryan Cantrill:

in Git a long time ago.

Adam Leventhal:

And I I mean, the other thing I'd say is part of the reason when we did this conversion, from WordPress that we didn't do it is I thought it would be a pain in the neck. And I thought it would require a lot of futzing. And, it wasn't really a pain in the neck. And it was a time bounded amount of futzing, and it could have gone on indefinitely, but fortunately, at some point, I put down the futzing.

Bryan Cantrill:

Well, and there was a very helpful script that that that that WordPress exporter script that I linked in there, and it's in my blog entry in the show notes too because, like, that thing is super valuable. That was great. Loan Korean. Love lone Korean. It's the that that that's no that's the that's his get up handle.

Bryan Cantrill:

Alright. Sweet. Very, very, very helpful. Beauty of open source. So but what was the what other device

Adam Leventhal:

Oh, I mean, obviously, do it. I don't know. If you have something to say, say it. And say it to I mean, the thing that I had told Delphix folks, back 10 years ago, and I think it's still true is, know who you're speaking to. Because I think one of the things that makes a post hard for me sometimes is when I'm trying to When I'm not clear on the audience, when I'm trying to just speak to too many constituencies seemingly simultaneously, it makes it hard to triangulate what you're writing.

Adam Leventhal:

But knowing who you're speaking to or having somebody in mind, was helpful for me in terms of just, like, clarifying the the level of technical detail or the language or the what I'm presupposing. Yeah. That's interesting.

Bryan Cantrill:

I am just sorry, I'm slightly distracted by the fact that you and I have same blog blog entries on the same kind of events, so people can do the whole Rashomon thing of like and in particular, when Skobel interviewed us on the Detroit show, or on his show rather, the Skobelizer or whatever, before he got that he's he's been in scandal. Right?

Adam Leventhal:

I don't know.

Bryan Cantrill:

He's just he's just like noting the time.

Adam Leventhal:

Note time. Edit. Robert If necessary.

Bryan Cantrill:

If necessary. If Robert Scobel has not been in scandal, edit out. But you got a photo. So I I got I have a photo of us outside now my my Rubruck this now. My now senior in high school was just born.

Adam Leventhal:

So I had

Bryan Cantrill:

the photo of the 3 of us smoking cigars. The you got a different photo of you, Mike and me, and you 2 look like prisoners. Jay Jacobs (zero fifty six:fifty four):

Adam Leventhal:

Oh, I remember this. This is like And he had said something basically like, Detrace is going to be great for the environment, or something like that. And all of us have this look on our face that I think you described as each of our tells. If you are playing poker against us and we make the face that we're showing in this video, that's when you go all in.

Bryan Cantrill:

That is great. Because I guess this and maybe I need to because it looked to me like I like, you 2 are there against your will, and I've been set in to torture you by reading aloud from my past blog entries. It's like, go and send Cantrell and he'll they'll both talk. They'll they'll give they'll release their secrets. But anyway, the, good but good advice.

Bryan Cantrill:

So know your audience Yeah. And and just just do it. I think I and then I I gotta say my advice because I the the surprise that I had in going through all of my past blog entries is just the amount of humanity involved. Yeah. Like literal birth, literal death, literal, beginnings, endings, launching things, wrapping them up.

Bryan Cantrill:

It's just like, the most human part of the stuff we do. And it was just like dripping with it. And I was a little bit surprised to the jury that that was true when I could kinda line them all up. And, you know, like, I'd forgotten about my my about John Burrell, for example. I shouldn't, you know, the way he's we'd worked closely with him and he suddenly passed away.

Bryan Cantrill:

And I

Adam Leventhal:

Okay. John Burrell who port ported just to FreeBSD. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Who we all, like, owe a huge set of gratitude. It it would it was there's a lot it was a lot of work. But I was a bit surprised by that and it just did remind me of, like, speak from the heart, not from the book. You know?

Bryan Cantrill:

It's just like it and and so I would, like, almost counter I think you're right. Know your audience. But if your audience is potentially 0 or 1 people, don't worry about it.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. That's okay too. And I think as you alluded to earlier with your, your sonnet to the MDash, I think speaking in your voice, like having like, your bloke just sound like you.

Bryan Cantrill:

Sound like you.

Adam Leventhal:

Yeah. And and, You sound like

Bryan Cantrill:

a turkey. You sound like the kind of person that doesn't that offsets an MDash of spaces. That's just who you are. Jay Papasan

Adam Leventhal:

(thirty four:fifty seven): I mean, the greatest, I think, you talk about surprises. One of the things that was surprising the utility of it was clarifying my own thinking. I already talked about your blog post helping to clarify thinking as well, but just needing to write it down meant that when I was talking to people about these same topics, I was so much more articulate because I had already, you know, put it into sentences and paragraphs and organized it in a reasonable way. And I had that opportunity to, like, you know, think about it as a story from beginning to end.

Bryan Cantrill:

I do think you're gonna like my forward for Cynthia's book. I'm really looking forward to it. Yeah. Cynthia, I I I gotta tell you, I I think, I I I enjoyed writing the forward. It was thank you very much for the honor of doing it.

Bryan Cantrill:

Do you wanna maybe give Adam the punch line from the foreword?

Cynthia Dunlop:

You're not writing enough, and we've actually borrowed it. We, mostly Sarna, has created this, maybe a Hacker News takeoff, shall we say, called Write That Blog. I don't know if you've seen it, but we're trying to continue the tradition of doing the the somewhat snarky commentary on recent blogs, and you have the the headline there.

Bryan Cantrill:

Oh, look at that. Well, this is great. Right? Okay. So write this is write that dot blog for listeners.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. And it is, indeed, it is me quoting Pat Helland who is quoting Jim Gray. So that is a that was I heard it at Jim Gray's memorial service about you're not writing enough, and actually went back and and got the original quote from Pat Helland. And I thought it was, you know, really it's like there are truisms, and that is a truism. Like we're all not writing enough, and we're all not reading enough.

Bryan Cantrill:

And I Cynthia, this is a great note to end on because I love the this is a what a what a great collection of this is great. I mean, I there are things I I love about Hacker News, but it's not merely a connection a collection of long form technical writing. There are also some things that that that maybe a little bit more and this is just a collection of long form technical writing. This looks great. And I, well thank you.

Bryan Cantrill:

Cynthia, thank you thank you Sarna in absentia. I know he had to that, had to go on. I know it was getting late over there, but, thank you very much for this. I again, it's a terrific book. People should pick it up.

Bryan Cantrill:

And, Cindy, what's the story? It's like, it is the electronic book is is here is available now. Physical book is coming in the new year. Is that right?

Cynthia Dunlop:

Painful. It's actually been pretty much written since June, then it got into a production process and whatnot. But bottom line is it's going to the printers in just a couple days. And at that point, I think we have the electronic version available within a week, and the print version should be out by the end of this month or December.

Bryan Cantrill:

Awesome. Well, people should look for the book. I think it's a great one. I think it's very thought provoking. I loved your questions for us.

Bryan Cantrill:

Thank you very much for that, and thank you very much for shaming us to get out of this out of the chalopy that we were, that we were chugging around in because it it was it was long past time.

Cynthia Dunlop:

But that word is just amazing. I mean, just haunting and amazing.

Bryan Cantrill:

Thank you. I thank you for reading aloud the note that I sent you. It's like, please read the following aloud in front of Adam.

Adam Leventhal:

Haunting. So many. The haunting haunting phrases.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Yeah. It was yeah. No. Thank you very much for getting it.

Bryan Cantrill:

It was it was fun to write it, and I felt like I was really just channeling, the way great Jim Gray there, and and his advice for us all that we're not writing enough. So on that that said, you are listening enough. You can I'm like, haven't I listened to enough? It's like, yes, you have. Dear Joe listener, and Cynthia, thank you again.

Bryan Cantrill:

Adam, thank you for a special daytime edition.

Adam Leventhal:

Oh, that's great.

Bryan Cantrill:

So with as you said, like, we can go as long as we want because I'm only missing out on work now. Now I don't have to I don't have to feed the

Adam Leventhal:

about my productivity when I'm unemployed.

Bryan Cantrill:

Yeah. Exactly. That's right. I expect I expect some good blog entries out of you. You you resource you blogging resource you.

Bryan Cantrill:

Alright. Thanks a lot everyone. We will not be, next week, we're off, because, I'm out, for thanksgiving. But we I will say that just to give my quick plug, I'm thankful for Hugo and the static site generators, and I am thankful for these scripts. We will, catch you in 2 weeks.

Bryan Cantrill:

Awesome. Thanks, everybody.