Khrushchev said, “Castro is not a Communist, but US policy can make him one.” This quote does a good job of summarizing the story of the US war on Cuba.
I road-tripped from Colorado to Seattle for RustConf with my partner and dog. We listened to the second season of the Blowback podcast on the trip, and I couldn’t help but feel there were parallels between Castro being driven to communism and my feelings towards software work.
It has been 12 years since I’ve been paid to write software for corporations, from tiny startups to large defense contractors. I ask “what the point of it” and “why do I care.”
On the first day of the conference, a Microsoft bigwig recounted a tweet he had sent and how it led to the CEO contacting him. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the corporate man telling us the most corporate story ever. It was the highlight of his year, he told us.
One of the following talks was by a fiery Italian man involved in crypto. He opened by asking us to suspend our disgust for crypto and check out the cool tech stuff he and his team had done. I couldn’t help but feel that it was wild, the most whimsical and technical talk so far was crypto.
After the first day, there was an open bar at a brewery on the AWS tab. Over beers with a coworker, I shared an idea I’ve been mulling over about wanting to start a software coop and how I’ve started to come to this. He shared that he wants to build non-predatory software for users. For example, a budget app that doesn’t charge a subscription or sell your data to predatory loan companies. Maybe bring something like mint back.
During day two, I again got bored by the tradeshow-style talks and joined the hallway track. There, I ran into the fiery Italian, who told me about the database tech he was excited about. This tech interacts directly with hardware, skipping all the software layers, including filesystems or an OS. I told him I’ve been in love with the idea of event sourcing. I got pumped up talking with someone who cares about the details, not just what it does.
Wandering around the vendors, I got into it with the people at the Zed, both of whom were about pair programming. Several of my programming heroes have told me that they never wanted to go back after they worked somewhere that did pairing. I have tried to pair but have yet to find the magic. Their excitement, though, is contagious, and I want it.
After the main conference is over, there is the Unconf. If the main conference is the plaything of the sponsors, the Unconf is for discussing the things that entertain the minds of the craftspeople. I would attend just this if I could. I should find more of these sorts of gatherings.
Unconfs are organized live. The coordinator of this one is a professor, and one of his students wrote some software for running an unconf. We were asked to try using it, and it fell apart in many confusing ways, causing us to return to the paper and whiteboard system. I couldn’t help but laugh thinking about the first time some of the software I had built was deployed.
One of the discussions in the basement centered on offline first and CRDTs (a data structure for syncing data). I hadn’t heard of offline first, but I was radicalized at the Unconf. We carry mobile devices through a world where the network comes and goes, but don’t build apps with that in mind. Again, I keep returning to how we build things and making that the center of what I want next. On the way home, we camped in the woods of Montana, where there was no cell service, and because of how Whoop wrote their software, I couldn’t adjust the time of the alarm.
Sitting under the stars in Wyoming in my van on the last night of my road trip, I wonder what comes next. Here is the outline of the ideas I’m mulling over.
- A software coop of 2-7 people.
- Each member should bring some relevant but not completely overlapping domain they are passionate about the details of.
- The goal is to pay ourselves sustainably, not take over the world. Control and doing things right are more important than money.
- Together we build something that solves a real problem for real people. We love our customers.
- A tech stack we love and agree on.
Do you want something similar? Do you know of someone who’s done this? If so, send me an email. I’d love to chat.
