Software Engineering Went From Hacker Culture to...

Hi everyone. My name is Patrick Akil and joining me today is Paulina Force, Senior Software Engineer over at MongoDB. And we talk about software engineering culture. It didn't start in a vacuum. It originated from somewhere hacking, do it yourself kind of rebellious culture. That's what it was originally, and you can still find it somewhere today, mainly an open source in hacking communities. And what are the differences between what we see now and how this originated?

That's what we discussed today. So enjoy. Software culture has evolved, and I've never thought of software culture being a thing. I just see what it is now. Culture for me is like the way we do things here and the way we do things are like the focus of software has not really changed, at least like in my lifespan, being involved in this. Yeah. But when talking to you, you have a distinct opinion that things have changed. Yeah. How did he originate?

What was like the OG software culture? I mean, I, I wasn't born yet so I, I wouldn't have been there, but I do like read a lot about it and like consume a lot about it. And I was pretty early, I think I was very extremely online already before a lot of people were like when the word meme, for instance, wasn't like a mainstream concept. But I think if you take it all the way back, there's like a weird mixture between like academia, like people coming from like math, physics,

engineering and stuff. But then also there are they were already a little bit weird, a little bit strange and like a little bit solitary. And a lot of it was quite counterculture also. And I think that's the thing I get passionate passionate about, as well as the the the kind of counterculture aspect of it. And like the anti authoritarian.

And yeah, I just find there's a lot of overlap with other less profit focused things like cultural things like punk culture, DIY culture, anarchist culture.

And now software is very, I mean, you know, you have like the VC money and stuff, which is, I mean, I'm not going to be disingenuous about it. I work for a publicly traded company. Money is nice. Yeah. You know, but like, I think I think especially I saw a pretty big shift around like 20/17/2018 when a lot of these like coding boot camps happened.

And a lot of people who originally maybe never really considered software engineering is a job where then like, oh shit, I never realized that, you know, this is where there's quite a bit of money to be made and there's such a high demand that you also don't even need to be super experienced to get ahead and like to get a nice job. And so a lot of people kind of shifted to software and kind of missed that whole era of like, Internet culture and hacktivism and all of that stuff. Yeah.

And I, I think it's a shame because it's, it's quite cool. And yeah, I just feel like there's like an increasing disconnect between the cultural aspects. Yeah, yeah. I don't know how it evolved. Like I, I think I started coding. It must have been 6-7 years ago. I started in operations and then I was kind of frustrated. I had some stuff in university, but it was like data science oriented, so math, more probability, statistics like that.

But it was really from operations where I, I wasn't responsible in changing things, but I was responsible for running things in production. Then I read about dev OPS and I was like, yeah, this just dev OPS makes sense. This what I have doesn't make sense.

Yeah, I think, I think that's the experience of most people starting out, especially if you're like finding a job, any job, and it's like you tend to find a job where best practices don't really exist, Yeah, because people just don't really know about it. And then I think everyone has that same experience of like breaking something in production just because like the, the appropriate guardrails are not in place because, and also because there's this misguided

trust in developers like, oh, we're all smart people, right? And it's like, it's not about being smart. It's like, you know, I didn't sleep well last night. I don't really know what I'm doing with this Engine X configuration, Oddly specific. Yeah, and then that can destroy your whole gateway. Yeah, which is what I did, yeah. Really. Yeah, no way. Yeah, 'cause I saw my, I saw my boss. It was it was one of these shops that was just like a 0

guardrails basically. And I saw my boss just like SSH ING into a server and just using I think nano to just like change an engine X configuration. And you know, I was pretty green. So I saw that I was like, OK, this is what we do. That's it. And I had SSH access to client servers. And so I was like, all right, let's change this. Engineer just took the whole shit down. Oh, do you have a swearing policy on this? Oh, no, no, no. OK, that's very good.

That's when you deal with me. Yeah, I mean, back to the software culture, like I, I understand what we have now. I see people starting up startups and their goal not necessarily is to scale or to deliver value, but it's to exit and like to sell this thing, to deliver value quickly and then to sell it to a big company. And that's their model. They're good at starting things. They're good at finding product market fit. They're good at building

something out, good enough to have it sell. They don't want to do this follow through. There's people that still want to do this follow through, but those are like the two aspects that I see. There's not this hacking or puzzling or like counter culture that you talked about. Like I don't see that.

Strangely, I think that was already a thing before and like the the 80s and then I think there was already this thing of like we're building because I think it also takes a certain personality type to like build a thing, get super excited about it. Not just to like exit, which is obviously way more the goal now, but also way harder now because like there's so much competition, but but not necessarily to exit, but to like build something cool quickly.

And then so I think there were a lot of hacker types. I mean, if you look at like the Homebrew Computer Club, and I was saying that I think it was called Homebrew Computer Club that had like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs and stuff, We're all part of that as well. So you know, that was already kind of a thing. Also Google being started from a garage and that sort of stuff. So not unheard of at the time. Those are all hacker adjacent as well so.

Yeah, I feel like like I've never hacked something. I know that's like part of a security thing, but this, this culture of like hacking, breaking, playing around, that play around. I have. I do see some stuff like from a puzzling mindset. I like puzzles. That's always why I like solving problems in software. But not everything is a puzzle. Some stuff is also, you just have to get stuff done and it's building an API. Building an API is very

different from solving a puzzle. Yeah, I think that's a very different mindset. And that's like, well, I mean, that stems from like running a business, right?

You have to deliver the value. I think a hacker mindset is much more about the puzzling and the, the, the problem solving rather than anything else. And I think also in a business context, you still get those people who are like just simply not interested in doing those menial tasks and really, and they become like architects and stuff like that.

You know what I mean? They just have like different roles I think because those are not the detail oriented people that are going to really follow things through until the end, but they're more like the big idea conceptual people, I guess. I just came out of an architecture training and maybe specifically I, I came into it with a similar notion as you and it blew my mind that his architecture training, this was Gregor Hope. He lives in Singapore.

He flew over for this training in person and in Netherlands. And his training was mainly about only drawing, for example, an architecture diagram if there's a concrete question. And he mainly focused on communication. So if you want to have buy in, have empathy with your people, figure out what the way to speak basically to get buy in on a certain idea. Be pragmatic, be practical. Don't just draw a diagram to draw a diagram.

Be close to the people that do the work with regards to software engineering and operations, he said. I made my architecture team run operations to actually feel the pain. You're responsible for building a system run the pain of basically running it in operations. Then you become a better architect. I was like, that's interesting.

I think that's honestly like a really good because I think a common pitfall for these very architectural types are they want to build like like an amazing feat, you know, they want to really design and then often it just leads to over engineering, right? Like, and I think what he kind of expresses from what I understand from you is very like DDD as well. So very domain driven design, which also focus on focuses on this like ubiquitous language.

Like you have stakeholders that have to be very closely involved in like trying to understand what you're building and who you're building it for and not just like, oh, look at this, cool, I'm going to build the coolest system we've ever. Yeah, exactly. You know this thing, talking to this thing and yeah, yeah. It's a rocket ship, not what we need right now. It's a little car.

Yeah, exactly. When we're talking about this kind of do it yourself culture, at least the the more roots where software engineering culture originated from. Are there still aspects or in the current industry parts where you see that most? Is it in security?

Is it in observability? Is it in platforming? I mean, honestly, no, I feel like because the the mindset behind DIY culture is very anti capitalist. Yeah. And so it does not fit really in a modern. So you have, you have companies like Fairphone, for instance, where their whole, their whole premise is we have this phone that's modular that you can repair yourself. Whereas like profit margins

depend on us buying. You know, if you look at Apple, you have to buy a new phone every every two years and you cannot repair it yourself. Or, you know, they count on you not being able to repair it yourself. You could try but then your warranty is void. Yeah, exactly. So, so DIY culture, there's a, a, a very high is highly political. It's it's anti consumerism, anti capitalist. And it's the focus is on like self-sufficiency.

And there's also like a sort of eco socialism thing tied to it. Because if you're, if you're buying a thing that is modular, that you know how to take apart and you know how to salvage parts, you know how to clean the parts, put it back together, then the electronic waste that you produce is so much more minimal. And it's, it's entirely

possible. Like if we were to just, you know, even even if we look like before tech, it used to be really common knowledge how to repair your clothes, right? It's all the same thing to me. It's all the same. You have, because you have hacker spaces for this sort of thing, but you also have repair spaces, which is more of a punk

DIY culture thing. So not tech adjacent at all, but it's the same mindset of like we repair our clothes, we don't buy new stuff, you know, and it just, it's all the same concept. It's minimizing waste, it's minimizing consumerism, it's protecting our environment. Yeah, it's self-sufficiency. What's your take then on on open source? Because I see parts of it overlapping but other parts are just not overlapping. And then there's also currently,

I wouldn't call it a trend because it's like a valid business model, but productizing open source projects. Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting, interesting you say that because obviously I work for MongoDB, but in the DBX department, which is basically the open source portion of it.

So, yeah, in terms of like open source being like open source being productized, I do think for an ecosystem and for users, it's important that like regular releases are being done for libraries and packages and things like that. Because, you know, we have several packages that used to be kind of open source land and not maintained by us that we've then taken over because that, you know, gives users a much more

like reliable. You can't expect like 1 maintainer who started this project by themselves to like keep maintaining it over the years and keep everything up to date sort of thing. So then to, as a business to be able to offer like a reliable ecosystem to your users, which you, you need to make money because there's this paid product behind it, right? You need to ensure that that you're the one maintaining it basically, because, yeah, then you can ensure a healthy ecosystem.

So yeah, I think honestly, it's a really good business model that we see these days where a lot of these open source companies have this platform layer behind it, which drives the open source portion of it as well. But yeah, open source again as a culture also has very political concepts, right? What do you mean by the political concepts of that? So open source culture, like, goes back to like the 70s, yeah, which is very closely tied to hacker culture, same origins, essentially.

And there's a lot of people in open source who believe in the Internet as like, and technology is like a public infrastructure, right? Like for the people. And quite a few of them see as see like free information, open information, accessible information as a human right. And so that that includes open source software basically.

Yeah. So it's, again, it's the same, it's a slightly different expression of this DIY thing, but still the same sort of, yeah, pro people, anti capitalist, kind of, it's all kind of a socialist construct. That's why I saw it overlapping. And I, I love this aspect.

And I don't know if there's a similar field where you have something in place like open source, or you can have a community around something that someone created, a single person that then gets embraced by a group of people that gets built out to this platform that upholds or is like an integral part of certain organizations. And then I fully understand that it cannot be maintained. It cannot be sustainable to them be maintained by the same group with regards to speed and

release and focus. And real life happens. And it being such a big part of like bigger organizations, a multitude of organizations, it just grows to a certain level of skill that having a dedicated team and those also need to be paid. Those also need to provide. So I fully understand the model. It's just, yeah, there's that's

where I see the biggest overlap. The fact that we can still create open source software that can still have this growth in kind of Catalyst without having the incentive to make money, even though obviously there's varied opinions there, but I think people do it for the greater good.

Look, this is something that we've built. It works really well in and of its own. Or we cleaned it up so it can be stand alone for others to build on top of, for others to use for others to learn, which I think is really cool. Yeah, I I think so as well. Yeah. I think that I was thinking about something and then I lost something. Yeah, No, no worries. No worries. Open source for me is also very different with regards to comparing it to a product, because a product has different

end users. This is like open source is usually part of a bigger piece of software, a puzzle piece that someone uses in their own puzzle in whatever outcome they're trying to achieve. I mean, sometimes, but there's also like full blown products that are open source, like GIMP, for instance, is open source, which is like the, the, the open source version of Photoshop essentially, right. So it's a whole, it's a whole UI and stuff. It's not just like, oh, here's a get up repository.

You got to like install it and then use it through the CLI or something. Does it have then the same team that I would expect with regards to products or product manager, UXUI people, researchers, developers? Is that the same structure behind?

You don't know. I think for some probably and then for others it's like this like loosely held sort of e-mail group, I guess like this News Group, I mean PHP friends, because I work in PHPPHP for the longest time was just like, it's very recently organized a foundation.

So now we have the PHP foundation, which is like a core group of people who, you know, like decide where the language goes and like do the maintaining of the, the language and stuff builds new features and things like that. And then, you know, and now they have this sort of central organization that also businesses that use PHP can donate to so that there's like an active, but before that, and this is like, so like 2 years ago and PHP was released in the

mid 90s. So that's like close to two decades of it just being like a group of people just arguing on RFCS and an e-mail groups like, yeah. Yeah, I feel like the, I don't know where I saw this. It was on a conference. What is that very specific platform that you can run simple websites on? That's always been a thing. WordPress.

Exactly. So WordPress running on PHPI think it was the company behind WordPress and they laid out all the pieces of software they use, which are all open source, which ties together WordPress. And I was just amazed. And I feel like this is me very much on a surface though, but I feel like the PHP community embraces open source software and I haven't seen that from. Oh, PHP. This is why I love PHP. It's not. I mean, not because it's like the best language.

I think it's a much better language than people. Give it credit for. Yes, because there's this. It's actually really interesting. Neil's the the one of the founders of Composer, which is like the dependency manager for PHP. He's on this like, kind of like Crusade because there's this thing that goes around people saying like, oh, is PHP dead? And like nobody really knows who came up with it, but it's been going since I started it's. Such a meme, it is ridiculous.

It's such a meme and it just has been going for. So clearly it's nonsense because the meme itself has been going for like 15 years already. And so but but he's now just anyone who mentioned it, he's like, stop saying it. Stop saying it because all you're doing is like reinforcing this idea that came from nowhere.

That's absolute nonsense. And then so, yeah, that's why I say like PHP is quite a good language, actually modern PHP, and I love it. But what what I really love about PHP is that the ecosystem is just so mature and there's so many people who care about it involved. And anything that you kind of are looking for, any type of use case, there's always a library that's very stable, very active, you know, and there's just lovely people in this ecosystem.

People don't realize. It's become joke that people use that don't use PHP and they use it to each other. And it's very strange how this has grown, right, Because it's it's an ongoing job. I've seen that out in the open for a while now and it's still running. I cannot believe it's still running. Yeah. And it's still modernizing. It's definitely and I think a lot of. So Laravel is this is this framework is and together with Symphony or like the two weeks PHP frameworks basically.

And Laravel has a has a very strong focus on developer experience. So there's a lot of like auto generation scripts for like generating classes, generating config my all this stuff. Symphony has that 2 two degree Larva was built on Symphony and then larva just kind of is that on steroids. And so it's a little bit less pure PHP and much more the larval way that you're expected to do things. But then in return you get.

All this like automation, right? And so that really blew up and it's really easy to like do like a starter project. And so now people from like the JavaScript world are trying out Laravel and just their minds are being blown. So it's really kind of blowing up at this point and people are kind of looking at PHP now like, oh, I didn't realize you could. Yeah, yeah, just heard about the memes and then you made assumptions. Yeah, and now you're trying out this thing. It's like, oh this is cool

actually. I mean, I love having a wow factor. That's definitely one. Yeah, yeah. Based on all the signals that you get that it's it's going nowhere and then you use it and it's actually pretty solid. That's very cool. Yeah, and I mean, nothing beats like, you know, with one of these starter kits, it's literally just like 21 liners in your CLI and you have a whole app with authentication and everything built in and yeah, that's it. It's literally 30 seconds. So it's.

Yeah, Back to open source. For me, open source is still kind of a community of created by developers and also for

developers. And like you said, there are full blown products there. But I don't see many people with regards to having a product background, having AUI or user experience background also contributing in open source in a

similar manner. I feel like we could create very cool products, but I don't know what it is that kind of brings developers together with regards to open source in that way, and that doesn't do it for the same kind of other user groups which are very adjacent in creating software.

Yeah, so I, I really think it's this weirdness that like software engineers have, I think there's this, you know, like the people, people will say the same, like, oh, if you're a software engineer, you're probably somewhere on the spectrum sort of thing. I've seen that.

Yeah. So I, and this is, again, it comes back to my theory that there's a lot of overlap with these other like also like queer culture, for instance, in punk culture, there's like people that are a little bit strange generally and you know, from the outside looking in, but I feel like if you're kind of in the thick of it, it's super obvious that you're all some form of like neurodivergent.

And with that comes kind of this mindset like this sort of idealism often and this sort of yeah, this idealism that we talked about before. And I think a lot of people who are like in design and product management, they're just not necessarily always that into it. And if they are, they don't realize that software engineers also are similar in that regard and that there's a lot of like cool work that they can do.

But I think it's a, it's a massive shame because in terms of this idealism and, and creating these open source projects, which, you know, I could go on for days about like how I think open source software and like, well, anyway, could save the world in a, in a lot of ways, But maybe we'll get back to that in a minute. But, but it's not going to happen if, if you don't get people involved to understand

what users want. Because for instance, like, if you look at like Mastodon, you know, because Twitter, when Twitter was bought by Elon, a lot of people had like an exodus because especially like journalists and, and people like that because they were worried about like censorship and, and things like that. And so they, they heard of

Macedon, which promised to be sort of like a Twitter clone or whatever. So they all just went there. But then, you know, and I think because Macedon is part of the feta verse, I don't know if we need to expand on that, but maybe. If you if you can in a in a

nutshell. Yeah. So kind of hard to say, but like the feta verse is, is like a a group of applications that run on the same protocol, not necessarily the same protocol, but most of them run on the same protocol called activity pub, which is yeah, essentially A protocol for for messages, so like social messages.

So for instance, you have like you have all these objects on this protocol, like post poster, like, you know, I can't remember what the actual names are on the protocol, but and then this shared protocol is reused between apps. So you can build an app around this protocol, run it, and then actually between apps, because it runs on the same protocol, you can follow other people on a completely different app, but

subscribe to this. So for instance, let's say like, Oh, my mom doesn't want to be on Instagram, but she is on some other app. She can still follow me. I can still. Yeah. So that's one aspect of it. Another aspect of it is that it's like decentralized. So instead of having one central entity that manages Twitter, yeah, that is controlled by one person called Elon Musk, a fed verse has multiple instances.

So anyone can start an instance. They just have to run the server basically and maintain the server. So the whole network runs over the activity pub. If one instance is taken down, people can move to another one and still follow what's going on on the network basically. So it's super interesting in terms of like takedowns and, you know, also censorship by governments.

And because it's really easy, for instance, for a repressive government to cut off this big entity like Twitter, but it's much harder to like cut off all these different instances of fetaverse apps. So there's all these kind of benefits. But then a big problem lies in the fact that all these kind of idealistic, A principled software engineers who make these things out of the sense of idealism, they don't think about what how users think because that's just not their bread and butter.

And so a user is going to go on Mastodon and then it's going to go like, oh, you got to pick a server. What does that mean? Server. What are? You talking about I just want to post it like go into the tippy taps and post a message like so that sort of stuff is just what screws it for everyone else. And then you get like instant, like Meta who did threads, which is, you know, it instantly gets critical mass because they know exactly how to reel people in. Oh, they know.

Yeah, they they're just sending notifications to every Instagram and Facebook using like, hey, maybe you want to use Threads. Yeah, why not? Yeah, you like this? This. Cool thing, yeah, but what's quite cool about threads is that it also runs on activity pub, so it is actually Federated. And last time I checked, I'm pretty sure you can like follow people from on threads from Mastodon and vice versa. And obviously not just Mastodon, but any other activity. I didn't know that, it was very

cool. If they have federation turned on, then yeah. Yeah, look at that. I I this sense of idealism, like I feel like I have it to a certain degree at least that's based on feedback because it's easy to say, well, I have it, but I never really thought about open source in that way that it's something that people create and it's also kind of an anarchistic. Oh, as it makes me so. And this is exactly why I like to talk about it because it's so sad to me.

Like the people. It's not, I'm not saying that everyone should live with this like idealism and like everyone should be an activist. And I'm, I'm not like that either, to be fair. Like, I mean, you know, I have a job and consume as well. But it's such an interesting history and it's such an interesting culture.

And I mean, open source especially is so connected to the politics of it. Like the the the original premise was so purely political that and so purely idealistic that it's such a shame that people can work with open source every day for years and they've never heard of this. No, no, that I, I fully agree with that. Like when you and I spoke, I never thought of this history.

Like I get history taught in class and I see it online, but no, no one really talks about, you know, the history of open source. It's also me. I also didn't really look for it, but I do think it's fascinating. Like I can see culture evolving and I can see what the culture is now for me, if I if I were to say what culture is in the 1st place, it's just the way we do things around here. And that can change from organization to organization, but it definitely normalizes

among an industry. And I don't see this hacky DIY kind of anarchist culture. I see a culture that is there to use software, definitely to use it. Also there's aspect to use it for the greater good, to also contribute to humanity, but also to manipulate or like, not on purpose, but to a certain degree. That is the effect of some applications.

It's like to make money. And then a side effect is, yeah, you zone in or you're not good for the brain or like these aspects of it are side effects and the goal is to make money. Yeah, exactly. That is more the culture we have now. Yeah. And it's, you know, like, it's the thing that came out recently where it turned out that, like, was it? I think Mehta was doing this on Instagram where they detected when teenage girls deleted selfies.

OK. And then they would target them specifically with beauty ads after they and it's like, you know, and they said something like this is where we make money like this is. A horrible thing. Yeah, and it's like, you know, but they like they're not going to think about that like, but there there is this whole layer of society that's still very active. It's not just historical who are like web pioneers who are trying

to do the. So I have this talk about the decentralized web, which a lot of people now after NFTS and crypto and stuff, when they hear decentralized web, they think it

means that. But actually there's this whole separate move movement about which is more associated with this feta verse thing and and some other like protocols and interesting things that are happening that are just more concerned with like the original purpose of the web as like a Tim Berners Lee had intended it. So Tim Berners Lee like often

credited as the inventor of the web, but in reality, it was like part of a group at CERN. But like the purpose there was also it was political. It was supposed to be public infrastructure. It was supposed to be the purpose of connecting personal computers all around the world was so that people who normally don't have access to information, for instance, because they live in poverty or because their governments were restrictive or they couldn't go to university for whatever reason.

You know, you can imagine like a young girl in a country where she's not allowed to go to school, for instance, maybe she'll have access to a personal computer or something and then she can still learn stuff, you know, that sort of stuff. That's what it was meant for. And that was genuinely, I'm not making this up. This is genuinely was the premise and and he himself, so Tim Berners Lee himself now says he deeply regrets how it's kind of been morphed into something.

I think he actually used the word perverted into something that's not good for humanity. And so there's this whole decentralized web movement that is trying to go back to this premise of like the web is nodes of people connecting as opposed to this these big like conglomerates, like, you know, who control like at this point like 90% of the web. Because it's not just like web traffic over like Facebook and

stuff. It's also like all the cloud providers, all the same people like AWS, Google, you know, all the Internet traffic is now centralized under these giant entities as opposed to public infrastructure. I, I forget who I was talking to, but it must have been like a year, maybe year and a half ago. This person I had on the podcast and he was working on this messaging app called Geet where you and I have something locally running on our machine.

And that would just be point to point machine to machine communication instead of going to a server and then having kind of central centralized control lying with that server. That's the first time where he, he mentioned this idea to me of like the decentralized web and infrastructure and the capabilities that we can have. I just feel like we need to reach critical mass to get to that point where it's actually valuable enough for people to use it.

If everyone used it, then it just made sense. Yeah. And like, this is where we are now. Yeah, and that's where you need these, these people that we were talking about because like a user doesn't really doesn't give a shit about decentralization. They're like, especially when they're in a cushy place, right? Like, especially when they're in a place where they don't feel like they're they're being suppressed in any way or

whatever. Yeah, you know those people are not going to care about like giving their data to MET or IT. Doesn't hurt, yeah. So yeah, not. In any immediate sense? In any Case, No.

I get that. What do you think of kind of how the Internet is evolving? Because I talked to many people with regards to AI and some people are of the opinion that the Internet is dying, right? We are now having this one interface, no ads. I ask it a question, it does all the browsing for me. I stick to that interface basically, and that's where I get my truth versus what would

happen five years ago. I would go to Google, I would go to numerous websites, I'd be hit with ads, and I would be trying to find the information I'm looking for. We're moving to a singular interface. I know not a lot about AI with the rest of the intricacies, but I do think this way of interface evolving, that's definitely something that's going to stick I feel like. I, I do think so as well. I think we're in a weird spot right now where it's all very new and nobody really knows

where it's going. I am a little bit concerned about like the the brain training as a 'cause there's already studies coming coming out that were atrophying our our brains basically. Critical thinking. Yeah, so I, I try not to use LLMS for, for things like, you know, e-mail writing. And I just don't use it because I've, I am of the opinion that we don't really need what you call it now. What's the word like? It's like a word for ease, the convenience you need.

I don't think we need convenience for everything. And I think it's actually bad to have everything too convenient. Like we're built to think and move and, and, and I feel like increasingly people are going to start to miss things like real life textures. And you know what I mean? Like, I mean, I feel it. So if I'm feeling it, I'm, I'm sure I'm not the only person. I do feel like at some point we want to, on some level we want to like remain human.

And so I, I think, I think we shouldn't look for convenience in everything that we we use. But that is so like counter intuitive because convenience is nice. Yeah, you want to get to think about the. Efficient route to wherever. You're going right. Why? Why would I do the math myself? Why? I'm using a calculator. Calculator just makes sense. It's a certain level of convenience. Yeah, I think it's also like you want to cherry pick what you like.

Using a calculator is one thing, but like completely cutting out problem solving, like if you use a calculator is part of a problem that you're trying to solve, you're still using your brain basically, right? But like for instance, if you go to a university to learn stuff and all you're doing is using ChatGPT, then it's like, OK, what are you doing there then? Trying to game the system. Yeah, And like, OK, valid. I, I think gaming the system can also be a good exercise for your

brain in a lot of ways. But I do feel a little bit like, OK, you got to, I don't know, you got to. I think you're a human being with your own agency and I think you have to like on a personal level, think about like, what do I want? For me?

Also completely a different aspect of AI that I'm concerned about is like I was trying out lovable for a little bit to like it's a lovable. It's like the the AI generated apps basically where you prompt like, Oh, I want this app and it does a pretty good job in like the the front end aspect of it where you know it can generate like this pretty bog standard like crud application or whatever.

Yeah, pretty convincing looking like sauce thing, especially if you like tell it to like make it look a certain way. Mm hmm all good. But then like, I think there's a lot of non software engineers who are using this thing and thinking they're building hot shit and then not knowing how to read the actual code that is generating. Because like when I was using it and I looked at the code that it was actually generating, it was full of holes of course. And yeah, but like glaring holes.

Yeah. Like the worst one I got was I tried to have it create a password reset link because like out-of-the-box it'll generate an app with authentication and and stuff, but it didn't have a password reset link. So it's basically OK, here's a user can register, but if they ever lose their password then we didn't think I can't do anything. So. I was like, I had a reset password link, please. What? And I was like, yeah, yeah, all right. And then it didn't work.

And I was like, hey, it's not working. Can you make it work? I was like, there we go. I'm clearly not a prompt engineer, but then I looked at what it generated and basically what it did was like the IT added to the recent link. It was like it added a query parameter that said reset password equals true. And if that was set to true is like, OK, reset the password. I was like, I don't think that's.

But now I'm really concerned that we're now like entering a great era for like a goldmine era for hackers like Black Hat hackers, because you've got all these people who don't know how to read code, who are deploying this and this, real users with real user data. I I fully agree. Like I love the idea of enabling many people to create software to do something really cool with an idea. They have to innovate to provide value to users, right?

And like you said, it works. They have users, but then it's like they do take the easy Rd. Yeah. It's like, OK, I use this tool and I just have an idea and bam, it works. It's like you found this real life cheat code. Basically. Yeah. You press ABAB, left, right, left, right, and something pops out and you're like that. That's a cheat code. Yeah. And you use it. And why not, right? Because people are marketing. You can use these cheat codes. Now. Look here what other people are

doing. They're making XY and Z. Oh my God, I can't stand. Everywhere LinkedIn is lovable, does a great job with their marketing because it's like, look at these people, they make X amount in two days and you're

like, what the hell? Yeah, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. But also like, at the end of the day, like people were like, you know, spitting out these these MVPS left and right for like concepts that are just like, just because you can make the app doesn't make it a good app. Like Kill Your Darlings cuz I yeah, is this sprouted stuff sprouting up where it's just like, oh, look, I made

essentially an excel sheet. Well, it's, you know, the same problems as every other Sauce app being like a glorified Excel sheet. I mean, the, I do see like a, a good side of it because me, if I look at myself as an individual, I have a hard time starting things. Yeah. So once something is already up and running, this podcast, for example, I got help starting it up. I keep it running forever. That is really good. That's what I'm good at. Opposite. I I'm really bad at starting

things. And then what I see nowadays is that starting is super easy. I see everyone starting and I'm like, oh, I should get better at starting. So it is it gives me I I don't know if I would call anxiety. It might be that. It gives me anxiety. Yeah, 100%. I'm like. I should like be like I should be moving. Yeah, I am not. Yeah, I should move.

Yeah, yeah, I heard about Bitcoin in, you know, like 2012 and didn't do anything also 'cause I was broke as shit, so I couldn't have done anything if I wanted to, but. It wasn't that expensive though. Would have been nice, yeah, but I didn't have 20 years in my name. Most. Most months, frankly. Gotcha. Yeah, that's yeah. No, I see it maybe as a as a good thing because in the end it's going to enable people to move. They're going to look into things like there will be a good

side of things. But yeah, with regards to kind of the the garbage that is being put out in production kind of hacker friendly, I do see that. And I think, I think if you thought about like making a pivot into infosec, this is like

a really good time because Infosec people are going to be needed far and wide, I think. Have you heard of stop squatting? I love that term so much. Like I keep telling people about it because it's, it's so funny. Stop squatting. Slop squatting, so you know, like slop like AI swap. So there's like this thing called like name squatting where you know. For domain names. No, for actually, I think that might have been. Yeah, name squatting is for

domain names. And then there's maybe registry, so I can't remember the term, but there's a similar thing for like packages. So for like MPM packages or like compose packages. Of course, that's the thing. So like, you know, people often make typos when they like, install a dependency. So then people install back doors and and packages with like a very similar name and then, you know, a few people will accidentally install that dependency and stuff. So that is that.

But now there's this new thing called slop squatting, which I love because it's so funny and also not funny, but it's so funny to me that so like slop is things that are AI generated,

right? So hackers found out the like when you ask AI for like a dependency for a certain use case that doesn't exist, it'll generate it'll go like, OK, yeah, sure, I'll install that dependency that doesn't exist and I'll make up a name for this dependency and it'll try to install this package that doesn't exist with this name. So they found like a, a series of commonly generated names for a certain dependencies and then just like posted, like published

the package. And so you have all these like AI applications and that have these dependencies that don't exist. Yeah, I think people find a way and they find kind of very creative ways and I think this is a great example of it. I think that's fascinating.

I mean, my final thought is, and also a question to you is for people that are listening that hear about the software culture and it really hits home to them, You already mentioned that it's it's kind of hard to find that culture in the way of working nowadays. What would be your advice for them if they want to do more with this?

Would it be to go and contribute to open source or what would be your your advice to? That I think contributing to open source is one thing, but I, I also find that like it's quite hard to do outside of your day job and it, it's if you want to be a part of the, the culture, I think it's nicer to actually like really go into it. So there's like FOS, which is like an event and a huge open source event that happens every year. So people go there and there's like talks and parties and stuff.

So that's quite fun. I think also the reason we started talking about this is because I'm going to a hacker camp soon, which was something that I'd wanted to go to for so long, for years and years and years. But I was always a little bit afraid, OK, because I thought I wouldn't know anyone. I, I thought I'd be like, you know, I'm not a real hacker sort of thing.

And then like the last time they had a so it's every four years in Holland. And the last time I went was also the first time I went, I was like, all right, fuck it, I'll, I'll go. I'll try to see if I know anyone who's going. Turned out. I knew like heaps of people from like, because I, I do know quite a few people from the Dutch hacker scene from way back, like Operation Chenology. I don't know if you know that.

Do you know those like Anonymous protests that happened, like the protesting Scientology in like 2008? Yeah. OK, so that was monthly protests of like 4 Chan and Something Awful people who would go, and a lot of them were hackers. That's basically what popularized Anonymous is a concept as well, because we were all masked, basically, Yeah. Yeah. So I made a whole bunch of friends from that era and a

whole bunch of them were there. And so I just joined their village and then it also turned out that like, because they have like this capture the flag that's for all levels, it's very child friendly. They have like a family zone that has to be quiet at some point at night. So like, people come there with their families. Are you talking about a physical capture the flag? This Is this digital? Thing no, it's like a digital thing slash physical because they're they incorporate hacking

of all kinds. So that's like and network hacking and exploding websites, but also lock picking, you know, all this other stuff like. Physical lock picking. Yeah, yeah, physical lock picking. Yeah, people don't realize how broad hacking is, but physical lock picking, you know, you get like, actually I think I parked my bike. Your pins. With a practice lock. Really. Yeah. Because I didn't have another lock. Yeah. So it's like a see through lock that you can pick.

They're really cool. So. And that's super Zen. It's very fun, yeah. So you definitely recommend that for the finding the culture that is similar if you want to do more, it's. So fun and it's not intimidating at all. It's I thought it was going to be intimidating, but they're so inclusive and these people are also so wacky. Even if you haven't done anything with hacking.

Nothing at all. There's a lot of like community as I convinced a bunch of friends to go this year and we're creating our own village and our village because like a village is like a group of people that you can camp with at a hacker camp. And usually they have some sort of theme and our theme is the library village. So we're just going to have a bunch of like cyber related books and people can just like come and like check out a book and like just chill and have some coffee and stuff.

And then there's also like a, a cooking village where you can go and have meals that they cook every day.

You know, there's all all sorts of different villages and it's completely like community organized. All the there's talks, there's like parties. I'm actually organizing a battle snake competition at this one. What is a Battlesnake competition? So Battlesnake is really fun. It's came from like a bunch of conferences. I think it specifically came

from a bunch of PHP conferences. OK, but Battlesnake is kind of like, it's kind of like battle bots, you know, like people make their own bots, like robots and they fight each other and like I've. Seen that online? Yeah. So this is like the coding version. So you register your snake and it's like snake like on a Nokia sort of. But you there's like a kind of an API and I think it, it's like events your Oh no, it's web hooks.

So you expose your, you run a little web server and you expose an endpoint and then the Battlesnake game will like hit your web hook and then you no, not web hook, just say API endpoint. Yeah, it hits your API endpoint and then you have to send it a response with like the moves that you want your snake to do next, essentially.

And then you just get paired up with someone else with another snake and then you know, and you're all watching it on like a screen and cheering on your own snake and stuff. It's very fun. It's. Really cool. That's really cool. I only know it from like the game Battletoads, but I love it when people gamify something with regards to software. The first time that I heard about it was from this YouTube Kevin Powell. He does a lot with regards to CSS and he says there's CSS battles.

So imagine you have this like black and white shape and then you only have CSS and you're supposed to make the shapes in CSS to make it pixel perfect and you're racing someone else. So you and I would face off and try and fit CSS shapes in this kind of black and white thing and it's insane. And see, you don't realize, but this also has roots in this hacker culture because it like it really reminds me of the demo scene, which is also there's going to be demo parties at this

hacker thing as well. A lot of people don't know what the demo scene is, which is such a shame because it's so cool. It used to be, there's still demo scene party sort of, but computers have normalized and not normalized, modernized and stuff. But it used to be the like you have a party, right? And you have a computer with very limited memory resources and things like that. And so live people are hacking programming this thing to make like, cool visuals and like music and stuff.

And so you have this party where the music and or visuals are being live programmed. And then, you know, it's supposed to like, showcase the cool things you can do with this like chiptune thing or like, yeah, this thing with limited resources. I just think it's so cool and all this stuff, like it's just an evolution of that basically. It makes me sad to hear when people say they're not having fun at work, right? Maybe because they get they just

have a golden handcuffs. They get paid really well, but they're also really much focused on output and outcomes. I feel like having fun in a way of battle snakes or like CSS battles like gamifying or even finding a like minded people that think along the same lines or just can give you insights with regards to hacking and having fun and kind of puzzling. I I love that that that aspect is still there and that you can still find community in that way.

Yeah. And I think also, if you can't, if you don't have the space to do it at work, I think people would be surprised how many employers are prepared to, for instance, pay their ticket for a hacker camp or for their attendance to like things like Foss. So I think if people haven't done that and they feel like, oh, I have a job, I'm too busy, go ask your manager because

usually there's budget for this type of stuff. So you can actually immerse yourself. Even if it's just like a tech conference, it's really nice to be able to talk to maintainers and because they're just out and about and you can talk to them and it's, it's really quite nice. They're usually very approachable, very nice people. Yeah, yeah. Awesome. I've really enjoyed this conversation, Padina. Thank you. Me too. Thank you so much for coming on

and sharing your perspective. I think it's extremely valuable and really inspiring as well. Thank you. Cool. And we're going to round it off. If you're still here listening, leave a like. If you like the episode, let us know in the comments section what you thought. I'll leave Padina's socials in the description below. Check her out. Let him know you came from the show and otherwise we'll see.