The strange thing about search is it’s a lot like academia: full of assholes. I know, since I’m one of them. So I was trying to figure out why this twitter about my Keynote bothered me so:

“@tychay apparently serving red meat to the faithful at #phptek proving there are language Nazis on both sides.
—tweet from a stream follower

Then it hit me. I act like an asshole, I’m probably an asshole, but never, not once, do I engage in personal attacks that aren’t obvious jokes. I don’t go up there like the founder of Ruby on Rails [Ed: corrected (see comments)] and in every talk say (to me):

“DHH says…” by planetargon

“Then he clicked over to the next slide, white letters against a dark background that spelled out his response to the naysayers: fuck you. The crowd erupted into laughter and applause.”
—Wired Magazine

Haha.

No, really!

That’s hilarious!

In my current talk I have a slide that says to the viewer that if they disagree they should give me a big “Fuck Y—.” on their blog. I suppose that’s a bit ironic since this is the same talk where people explicitly create F-bomb counters on IRC and and twitter.

[Ego, assholes, internet architecture, being wrong, and learning after the jump.]

Ego

Ego is a necessary prerequisite for asshole. And I have that too. After all, who else has a website dedicated to their Freudian slips in the vein of Chuck Norris meets the Magical Unity Pony?

I suppose there is a self-effacing quality that is part and parcel to my ego, just like there is an irony that follows my asshole-ness. But then again, if you guys didn’t tweet it, I wouldn’t believe some of the things that come out of my mouth:

“The Internet is an Ogre”

[Twitter stream and random excerpts from my current talk—through which it dawns on you that I don’t prepare my speeches at all: I have foot; I insert mouth.]

“Closing keynote by @tychay about to start. Don’t bring your kids. (-:” —php|tek

“Initiating the Chay Tweet Fuck Counter to test Twitter’s scalabilty and in honor of @tychay’s hatred of Ruby. Tweet once per “fuck”. #phptek” —Ben Ramsey of Schematic

“uh oh, my twitter page is about to get flooded with @tychay f-bomb counts.” —Joe LeBlanc of Joomla!

“Getting ready for @tychay’s fucking talk #phptek
This is the only talk at @phptek marked as explicit” —Travis Swicegood (2), of SugarCRM

“Final keynote at #phptek time for some twitter fail/” —Josh of Understanding Ajax.

“@tychay is starting! FUCK COUNT: 0” —christian

“”FUck him” – @tychay #phptek FUCK COUNT: 1” —christian

(“”Donald Knuth: fuck him””
“That sounds like @tychay”
“myep”
“What is it with the Knuth hatred? Is there some meme I missed?Knuth is my homeboy.”
“hahah, I was quoting the closing keynote speaker at php|tek”)

“that’s one fbomb #phptek” —auroraeosrose

“In @tychay ‘s Keynote … the first F-bomb has already been dropped #phptek” —Eli White of Digg

When Chris Jones saw the subtitle of the talk “Finding Art in the Internet Architecture” he said, “It should be easy to write your talk because—of course, I hadn’t prepared my talk until the day of—just quote Donald Knuth and the Art of Computing Programming. But what I’m going to do is rip on every book I’ve ever read. And…Donald Knuth…Fuck him… because what has he done for the software world?

He wrote something called TeX that has nothing to do with pornography or spam. If it doesn’t have anything to do with pr0n or spam, it must not be important to the Internet.

“#phptek @tychay is the guy who killed #ruby” —Travis Swicegood

“Terry Chay – THe Man Who Killed Ruby #phptek @tychay” —christian

Apparently…according to Paul Reinheimer, I’m the guy who killed Ruby. *laughter*

“”Everyone doing ruby is basically in school” – @tychay #phptek” —auroraeosrose of OmniTI

“”Everyone doing Ruby is basically in school.” -@tychay #phptek” —Ben Ramsey

…I was working for a C/C++ company, so I thought it’d be wrong to rip on Ruby. I thought it’d be unfair. Because I know C and they don’t know…shit. *laughter*

So I had to wait until May of 2007 until I started working for a PHP company before I wrote my first blog post on Ruby and you can see the traffic went way down. Then I stopped blogging about Ruby and then it goes back up…

Actually what I do is I time my blog posts with the school session. I figure everyone doing Ruby is basically in school *laughter*

“from @tychay: “delphi is more popular than ruby“” —Travis Swicegood

…I figured Christmas break is coming up so I wrote a blog post…*slide* and it went down. It went down so far that Delphi passed it and I thought they’re going to need a Delphi for Ruby developers.

“”The one thing I learned in building the internet..” – tychay #phptek” —Graham Christensen of Itrebal Hosting

*slide* So what did I learn from building this internet… *laughter* Whoa! I didn’t mean that! I’m not Al Gore. But the one thing I did learn from my experiences…besides how to say “fuck” and “damn” and “shit” so that your counters go up a little bit *laughter* *clapping*…

“#phptek @tychay said “Hot Shit” #tcfc” —christian

“”dhh is like the jesus christ of ruby on rails” according to @tychay #phptek” —Travis Swicegood

“”The Jesus Christ of Ruby on Rails” – referring to DHH – @tychay #phptek” —auroraeosrose

“”DHH is, like, the Jesus Christ of Ruby on Rails.” – @tychay #phptek” —Ben Ramsey

“So derick is transcribing the talk in #phptek for the ones not there ;)” —auroraeosrose

“4 Layers at the architectural level: Stability, Scalability, Speed, & Security … @tychay #phptek” —Ben Ramsey

“stability – make it work @tychay #phptek” —auroraeosrose

“”Mental masturbation of architecture” – #phptek” —auroraeosrose

So if you’re building an internet site—no matter what internet site you’re going to build—if you’re building it at the architectural level, these are the four things you have to think about. I will posit that the order of these is important and that for large consumer facing websites you should build from the bottom up—from the bottom up. You worry about stability first, then scalability, then speed, then security. *slide* But first we’ll start with stability and when I mean stability, *slide* I mean making it work.

The first thing you have to do is make it work. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people build these complex architectures that absolutely do nothing. You sit there and say, “Well that’s nice in a sort of…mental masturbation of architecture sense, but it doesn’t really…do anything.” At the end of the day you need a website to do something first.

“everyone at #phptek run “track hashtags” – @ramsey and I are the only ones using it” —Travis Swicegood

“”I started to write down all the things that were wrong in this book….I couldn’t take it anymore, I had to put the book down…” #phptek” auroraeosrose

“enjoying @tychay’s talk instead of tweeting it like everybody and their mother 😉 #phptek” —Ivo Jansch

“”Do the least amount that gets you to your destination” @tychay #phptek” —auroraeosrose

“Ruby bashing at #phptek, go follow/read @tswicegood for the transcript :D” —Till!

“omg @tychay is awesome #Phptek” —christian

“”stuff like binding a database to the web, because that’s really hard, apparently” @tychay #phptek” —Ben Ramsey

Most people would say to build those things you have to read this book *click* called the Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda. He’s like some MIT artsy engineer guy and he wrote this book that a lot of people talk about that, you know, a friend of mine picked up. So I started reading it. So I really honestly tried to finish the book, but about three pages into it I took out a piece of paper and started to write all the things that were wrong with this book and I got about 80 pages into it—it’s a really thin book by the way, about pamphlet sized— and I had filled up both sides of an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper with “page number- rant. page number- rant” and I couldn’t take it anymore I had to put the book down. And I’ll explain why.

There is nothing, in particular, wrong with the book, except that if you read it, it’s going to be a disaster. Because in this book, he’s talking about simplicity and how products should be simpler. And the examples he uses are the easiest inverted straw men like the iPod to support his argument…now he’d probably talk about the iPhone as his example.

And the reason that’s bullshit is because underneath the iPhone is an extremely complex device and he’s confounding “simplicity” with “simplistic” and “complexity” with “complicated.” [They’re very different, and that difference is important.]

So the example I like to use is birds migrating *click* This is a picture I took off Point Lobos. And when you see these birds flying across the sky they exhibit a very complex dynamic.

So if you were try to simulate that dynamic of a flock of birds and simulate it from architectural level and obey this book, you’d say, “It’s way too complicated! It’s confusing.” And you’d write all this code and it wouldn’t even work and the birds would all die.

But, it’s easy from the bird’s perspective. From the bird’s perspective, it’s just implementing simple rules. It wants to go that-a-way, North-ish. And it sees this other birds that look similar and it’s flapping around and then it realizes as it’s flying, “Hey, I want to do the least fucking work to get there.” This is how you should build your website by the way: do the least amount that gets you to your destination.

And it feels the slipstream of the bird in front of him. So it doesn’t have to do as much work because it’s riding in the slipstream—so you see a V pattern in the sky as the wake of one bird acts like a peloton for the ones behind it.

But eventually the lead bird is doing all the work and it’s like “Fuck this! I’m doing all the work! I’m tired,” flaps less, and falls behind the bird next to him which then takes the lead. And as you watch the birds across the sky, the shape changes, but the basic principle is the same and at the level of the rules of the birds it’s a very simple system.

You can create this complex dynamic using very simple rules. But if you go and read this book. you’re gonna say, “Oh I need to make this simplistic system.”—because you are going to work top down—and simplicity is good. And what you’re actually going to build are these really large architectures—now I won’t name any names—but these really large complicated systems that can barely bind a database to the web, because that stuff is really hard…apparently. *laughter*

“”That explains why no one actually does xslt” @tychay #phptek” —auroraeosrose

“”This is why I’m an engineer” @tychay #phptek” —auroraeosrose

“@tychay is a physicist #phptek” —christian

Now, if you are building a web page, you want to build it top-down. That’s how a graphic designer thinks—they think “Navigation here. Header here. This there.” and build it from the top down. And then they go into the components and do that.

And that’s probably how you should build your web templates because it works along the same logic. It’s very simple. There are a lot of those out there. PHP is one of them.

But if you want to do the mental masturbation of saying, “I’m a fucking programmer and they’re loser designer dudes,” then you say, “I’m going to do a push templating system where there is some event, called like ‘NavEvent’ and when I see ‘NavEvent’ I’m going to inject this rule and when that rule I’m going to do this.” You see a lot of those templating systems too. They’re called XSLT. *laughter*

And that probably explains why nobody does XSLT. Because by the time you’re done…this happenned to me at my first company I built this website in XSLT because it was international so you could start with these XML files in different languages and it would translate these XML files into this website that would look the same but all the content would be in Chinese Japanese or whatever. And uh, [microphone pops out]

I don’t know how this microphone clips in

Can you hear me?

or whatever.

This is why I’m an engineer. *laughter*

I got it.

So when I was in college. I was a physicist I wasn’t an engineer, and I had a friend in my off campus place who was an engineer. And he’d borrow my other roommates stuff and take it apart and break everything.

And my other roommate would come back and go, “What the hell, everything is broken! What the fuck?” And the engineer would say, “Aren’t you lucky you have an engineer in the house. I can fix it.” *laughter*

“”Rails is like a rounded rectangle and PHP is like a ball of nails.” @tychay #phptek” —Ben Ramsey

“”You throw it at something and it sticks to shit” @tychay #phptek” —auroraeosrose

“”You throw a ball of nails at something, and it sticks to shit” #phptek @tychay” —Graham Christensen

“”You throw it and it sticks to shit” — PHP, a ball of nail, @tychay #phptek #tcfc” —christian

“”PHP is like ball of nails, you throw it at shit and it will stick!” – @tychay” —Helgi Þormar Þ.

“”Rails is like a rounded rectangle and PHP is like a ball of nails.” @tychay “it sticks to shit” #phptek” —Travis Swicegood

“”I see them at airports with shaved heads telling me I should be using rails” – @tychay #phptek” —auroraeosrose

“#phptek #tcfc I’ve got the Terry Curse count in this presentation at: 6 F, 5 S, 1 D” —EliW

“”You string some shit together and it barely holds together, but it becomes Wikipedia.” @tychay #phptek” —Ben Ramsey

“”Even if you’re a total incompetent, you can build it and it becomes my problem” @tychay #phptek” —auroraeosrose

“I think the biggest feature of rails is that it has a built in cult #phptek” —Josh

If you’re going to build it in PHP, the architecture you are going to use is “shared nothing.” This is the key to PHP’s success.

I like to say “Rails is like a rounded rectangle and PHP is like a ball of nails.”

But on the other hand, what I also mean by this is PHP looks ugly and everything, but like a ball of nails, you throw it at something and it sticks to shit. *laughter*

Rounded rects are pretty and all. But… it’s too “Apple” for me.

That is fundamentally, to me, a problem with any architecture that looks too gorgeous is that: it really isn’t; it probably doesn’t do anything; and finally, it’s really difficult to learn:

You read about these Rails people who basically become acolytes. I mean I see them in airports, dressed in orange, with a shaved head, and telling me I should be using Rails. *laughter*

No seriously, they’re just like this. And one time they were just like you. They were just PHP developers—or maybe they weren’t, maybe they were Java developers. Well in any case they were something…or not. *laughter*

Now that I think about it, they were nothing like you. *laughter*

They’re like “It doesn’t make sense. Ruby doesn’t make sense. Rails doesn’t make sense,” and then their E-meter reaches a certain level, and it makes sense, and it’s gorgeous. And they forget the two months it made no sense. I call that “the Kung Fu Experience”… [redacted for a once and future blog post.]

I mean if you’re Matt Mullenweg, you just want to take some photos and put them on the web. And you’re using some stupid ass blog tool and nobody is supporting it and you’re like, “Fuck it, I’ll just branch it.” and soon it becomes WordPress.

If you’re Jimmy Wales, you’re like, “Dude, I just like to wear Japanese Kimono shit and I’m a librarian and wouldn’t it be cool if people did all the work for me?” And you just string some shit together—it barely holds together—but it becomes Wikipedia. *laughter* *clapping*

And that’s fine! Because even if you’re a total incompetent as a programmer, you can put this stuff together in PHP. And if it becomes popular, it becomes my problem. *laughter*

“”You’re thinking you’re James T. Fucking Kirk and you’re captain of the Starship Enterprise.” @tychay #phptek #tcfc” —Ben Ramsey

“”I can play off words and get lunch 2.0 and get free food” @tychay #phptek” —auroraeosrose

“sitting here wishing I was at #phptek :(” —sdwrage

“”The only book you’ll see that I don’t dislike” – The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell @tychay #phptek” —auroreosrose

“”You could eat babies” – #terrychay #phptek” —christian

“Does “fricking” count for the #tcfc? #phptek” —Ben Ramsey

“breaking news… @tychay eats babies!! #news #phptek” —Travis Swicegood

“”Physhics was FUN with a PH” – #terrychay #phptek” —christian

“”He thought physics was fun with a ph” @tychay #phptek” —auroraeosrose

“”[my physics teacher] also thought physics was fun with a ‘ph'” @tychay #phptek” —Ben Ramsey

“”Paul Reinheimer was dressed up as KISS” “We don’t know which one” – viral marketing in action @tychay #phptek” —auroraosrose

“@preinheimer dressed up as some KISS dude is viral marketing #phptek” —Ben Ramsey

“@tychay: “viral growth: ha ha hot girls!”” —Maggie Nelson, Schematic

“@ramsey It should be a @tychay expletive counter. Any expletive including, but not limited to, “fuck” should be counted. Or does that ruin?” —Evan

What viral marketing is this, in a nutshell. People will say this is viral marketing and that is, but basically it is the act of people using your site bring in more users to your site.

There is a lot of things that sound viral but are not viral like word-of-mouth marketing. It’s clear this isn’t viral marketing—they’re not using the product to get people to use a product. When you join Facebook and you use the product and you hit a button to import your address book and invite your friends—that is viral marketing.

And then when you’re in there and they have the buddy feed and I tag your ass on some photo I have of you drunk, and you say, “Wow! Wasn’t that funny! Paul Reinheimmer was dressed up as KISS!” *laughter* And everyone sees that and we bring more people, “Hey check this out. It’s Paul Reinheimer dressed up as some KISS dude, but we don’t know which one because… his eye’s all smudged out.” *laughter* And THAT is viral marketing.

And when you do that, it becomes a difference equation. And every step in the stage there is a potential drop off. They visit the site. They might not go to the homepage. Or maybe they click around and leave. But maybe they click on “Become a member.” And some of them complete and some don’t. And some of them get to that stage where they have to invite more users and they say, “Fuck it! I’m not inviting anyone.” Then you lost them. And then those e-mails go out and then some of them get trapped as spam and some of them hit the trash button, and some read the e-mails. Some read the e-mails and go, “Ha ha! Hot girls” and then delete it and then send me a twitter saying, “@tychay what are you doing with your frickin’ site there are these porn things going on.” And I’m like “It’s not porn, you just fucking clicked on it. If you didn’t fucking click on it, we wouldn’t be sending it to you.”

That’s what it is. It’s called viral growth. And we pay attention to it. And it’s no accident. And you can take that difference equation and continuize it and go, “At the end of the day, when they complete that loop, how many users do they bring in?”

[I will stop transcribing and providing slides here I think you get the idea. If not, come see my talk! 🙂 ]

“Viral Growth = e^kt #terrychay #phptek” —christian]

“:-) #phptek #terrychay” —christian

“adding a 🙂 to the end of a subject line in an email gives you a 20% increase @tychay #phptek” —Travis Swicegood

“”:) == servers dying” @tychay #tfcf #phptek” —Graham Christensen

“”Email subject line + 🙂 = +20%” @tychay #phptek” —Ben Ramsey

“FAILS – “Languages can scale, it’s architectures that don’t” @tychay #phptek” —auroraeosrose

“Hint: cheering “Rails Fails” is just about as lame as cheering DHH’s “fuck you” slide. #phptek” —funkatron of CERIAS

“”At the end of the day, languages can scale. It’s architectures that fail.” @tychay #phptek” —Ben Ramsey

“”One line PHP, errr…one line Perl scripts” @tychay #phptek” —auiroraeosrose

“”Its the best thing that happend to PHP since rasmus working on it” @tychay #phptek” —Graham Christensen

“”memcache is the real threat to the PHP world – PHP speed actually matters” – @tychay #phptek” —auroraeosrose

“”java developers are idiots” @tychay #phptek” —Graham Christensen

“”you can only write two lines [of j2ee] a day” @tychay #phptek” —Travis Swicegood

“”Switching architectures is a big disaster” – referring to idea of switching twitter to PHP @tychay #phptek” —auroraeosrose

“”I tore him a new ass hole. I mean, he literally walked out with two assholes.” #phptek @tychay” —Travis Swicegood

“@tychay isn’t selling a book like selling your idea to VCs? ;-)” —Travis Swicegood

“people never laugh at the abortion humor #phptek” —funkatron

“”It’s a lot of fun to mess with their minds when they’re being interviewed” @tychay #phptek” —auroraeosrose

“you nuts have invented a name for twitterspam: “chay”… I can’t read tweets this fast!!! 😛 #phptek #tcfc” —Chuck Burgess

“#phptek Finally made it to @tychay’s keynote just in time for the security part.” —Chris Shiflett of OmniTI

“@tychay has just hit his “fuck” stride. #phptek #tcfc” —Ben Ramsey

“I wish I had been at @tychay’s closing note. Judging by the #tcfc it was fun :)” —andigutmans, the nd in Zend.

“#phptek Use tools like HTML Purifier and Inspekt.” —Chris Shiflett

“*hands @shiflett his payback #phptek*” —funkatron

“#tcfc I’m having a hard time keeping track… @tychay just throws them out too naturally #phptek” —Travis Swicegood

“”I’m so drunk” @tychay #phptek” —Graham Christensen

“so @tychay takes pictures at parties so he can remember who he met :-)” —Travis Swicegood

“”he was dressed in this blue shirt and khaki pants, like every other white dude in silicon valley… and me.” @tychay #phptek” —Ben Ramsey

Red meat to the Faithful

[To the people quoted above. You knew I was going to do that. After all, I just like hearing my name and you obliged. 😉 ]

So now you don’t have to see my talk. All you have to do is read the tweets and imagine sprinkling in 37 “fucks,” 17 “shits,” 9 “asses,” 4 “hells,” 3 “damns,” 3 mentions of pr0n, 3 “mental masturbations,” 2 “bitches,” and one Jesus Christ reference. 😉 (ref and ref)

And if you can’t imagine fitting all that in. I’ll be giving the talk again at OSCON. So go to it, dammit! 😀

Searching for the exit

It starts because, I read this article and I was wrong.

Since it’s sold, I can now say all the stuff I’ve only shared privately. After all, before Powerset even existed, I had wrote this article so I’m on record.

And when someone asked me about it, I just thought even the concept of a Google killer was laughable. I said, “In Web 2.0, the search trumps the social network (it also makes more money, too).

Then, last year, a friend pointed out that the exit strategy was sound because companies like this could enter a bidding war between Yahoo, Microsoft and Google.

I thought about this for a week, and came back to him and said, “You know what. I thought about it for a week, and it’s still stupid. After all, when you look at the problem…say it’s NLP. Well that’s just AI-baked over. It failed as AI, so it became expert systems. It failed as that, so now they call it NLP. So, the chance that it has something significant to add to search after five decades of failure in all areas everywhere—even with the best minds in the world looking at it—are remote. Let’s be generous and say 1%.

“If your strategy is to be bought out. Then you can’t really survive on your own, but there has got to be a market for your stuff. Now, I don’t mean the product you make—I mean there have got to be companies trying to sell themselves, and other companies looking to buy. Let’s look at the buyers, since there are less of them.

“Now if you’re Google, and say you have your way of doing things…your philosophy. That’s fine. Each year there are about 20 or so engineers you’re hiring who are experts in NLP who are trying to morph their techniques onto your problem and your philosophy. So the chance that anyone else can do it, having to build themselves everything you’ve build, including infrastructure, is remote.

“But say they do. Well if you’re Google, you must know by now how difficult it is to “buy” search because the egos there. After all, Yahoo absorbed three search engines years ago, and from what I’ve heard, there are still three search engines internally at Yahoo, each vying for different markets because politics pushed them into that niche. If you’re Google, you’ve got to be thinking, it’d be easier to deal with hiring your own team of NLP experts instead of buying out some company and dealing with an integration that will never happen.

“So how long would that take? Well NLP attracts the best students in the the top CS departments in the country—the top minds in CS. You can just hire the top of the class. To staff an entire Powerset, heck a few Powersets, would take graduating class of one year, tops. And the best thing is: no ego. They won’t come in thinking they’re the shit.

“So if you’re Google, you’d adopt a “wait-and-see” and if it does pan out, that’s your strategy. You’d also be pretty confident that, like Gertrude Stein’s Oakland, ‘There is no ‘there’ there.’ and if there was you’d have a plan that will take less time to implement and cost less too.

“So if Google isn’t bidding, you’re stuck between Microsoft and Yahoo. (Ask is built on NLP so they ain’t buying.) And Yahoo has no money and deep knowledge of the integration problem. They’re not really going to bid.

“And if you have one player, Microsoft, you don’t have a bidding war. You’d be lucky if, given all the search “sellers” out there with only one buyer, you’re the music chair they pick when the music stops.”

That was my opinion. There are about twenty people in the Valley who can confirm I said this in its entirety between one year and six months ago, some who remember some parts verbatim from three years ago or more.

So you can see how I was embarrassed when I was wrong.

So, being an “asshole,” I say:

“Without Gates, stupidity reigns. Enjoy digesting the egos, MS. Congrats Powerset! [link to $100m buyout]”
—me

Someone tries to bite off my head

“@tychay It’s good to see you’re still a first class asshole riding on the coattails a project you participated in.”
—some guy who works at Powerset

I’m not too sure if he means Plaxo which sold for $160 million or Tagged which isn’t doing bad either…l doubt he means the other two companies still based on software I wrote for them.

Now, I need to do some background here. For the last year, a segment of Powerset developers have been on a vendetta. It started when the company, tried to Politics and the English Language their choice of using Ruby, “We’re Ruby, but we’re not Rails.” they told their investors.

Well I noticed from their job descriptions that that was b.s. They are Rails, not Ruby. I called them on it.

Ever since then, they’ve been riding my ass and twitter storming me. For every message I make, they make three or more.

It really bugs me, because I sort of like Powerset. I like one of the co-founders I know, Barney Pell, a lot. I mean he has an ego—Search and NLP is like the theoretical physics of the internet and CS world—but he’s definitely not an asshole. Which is rare.

Blogged in Joel Sacks sendoff party

2008-0064 57
Mighty, The Mission, San Francisco, California

Nikon D3, Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G, SB-800
1/30 sec @ f/2.8, iso 4000, 27mm (27mm)

Barney of Powerset, Larry of duck9, and Erica of CNET at Powerset’s launch party last month. They let me in even though I tease them mercilessly. How can I hate Powerset?

“For all my cuss, I don’t resort to personal attacks like you, DHH, or others in the Rails community.”
—me

*swat*

“@tychay So what are you working on lately terry? You stand on the shoulders of giants and claim you’re taller than the next guy. Disgusting.”
—Powerset developer

“@tychay I get the luxury of insulting you because my ideas on web scaling out in open source. You just have bombast and subordinates.”
—Powerset developer

“@tychay Unlike you, I’m working on solving problems rather than trying to make them for other people. My model has headroom. Yours is capped.”
—Powerset developer

I should mention at this point, that I don’t follow this guy on twitter. And I can’t follow his conversation there because that feature is disabled since it keeps going down. There is a little irony here because Twitter is built on Ruby on Rails. 😀

(I should also mention, for those of you who have slogged this far, that I don’t think that Rails is bad for Powerset. The performance problems in search should not be in the front-end layer. Bottlenecks and difficult problems are nearly all in the back end in search. So I really have no issue with Powerset’s choice of Rails.)

I decide that this is not going to get anywhere. Pretty soon he’ll just message his co-workers and they’ll join the gang bang—I have the scars to prove it.

I must nip this in the bud…

“I work at Tagged with 70m+pages/day. You, on the other hand, are proving my tweet about egos ;-).”
—Me

Yeah, that was a low blow. Powerset doesn’t have the traffic so it’s tough to whip out a dick and the ruler. Then, if he or others respond, they fall into the second part. It’s a lose-lose.

(I admit it, I’m an asshole.)

But ego? (again)

But my ego?

I’m not the one saying I’m going to kill Google. I’m not even the one saying I’m going to kill Facebook.

I’m not the one arguing my architecture scales…I’m talk about languages, not architectures. All languages scale; some architectures don’t. I rip on all frameworks. There is article after article with me ripping on frameworks that are not Rails. Who is the “language nazi?”

I’m not the one using an unproven solution for scalability. I’m quick to point out that Facebook, which uses PHP, scales 50x the level of Tagged. I say that in every talk. Twitter’s problems aren’t Rails, you say? O RLY? Spending all that time solving solved scalability problems in Rails left how much time to solve the unsolved ones? Please remind me.

I’m not the one pissing on every Apache developer out there thinking that I don’t need to have a working module on 70% of web servers on the internet. I’m not the one who thinks I can build my own version better.

I’m not the one with nobody using my website who taunts other people, says they’re the shit on the pages of Wired magazine, and then writes a book bragging how smart they fucking are. There is a line between cocky and stupid. I’m not the one crossing it.

I don’t piss on my betters, high-five and encourage others to do the same—both within the Ruby world and beyond.

I don’t inspire a cult following. The most I rate is a cynical twitter stream when I talk.

If people don’t agree with me, I’m not the one saying…

Instead, I saying…

Here is how I finished my talk: “I don’t want to be proven right about Rails. I want twitter to be up! I use it, dammit!”

When we are wrong is when we learn the most. I want to be wrong.

As I was with Powerset. As I admit I was.

And because of that, I learn.

Who is the one with the ego again?

Two self quotes

Because of my “ego,” I must self-quote:

“I’m sorry I didn’t crack enough jokes or use enough [cuss words], but I’m sure people will forgive me. They can just attend one of my talks and get their cuss quota for the year. And if not, coding these web apps themselves involves a lot of swearing—a lot of blood, sweat and swear.”
—Me in a podcast interview

“Ruby on rails…it’s not THE shit *pause* It’s shit.”
—Me, [citation needed]

both of which bring me to the…

Parting Shot

“While we love to hear @tychay swear, thing is, he really does know this shit better than anyone I know. #phptek”
—Ben Ramsey

Thanks, Ben, I don’t deserve that—thing is, I’m still trying to get my “shit” together myself.

Thanks for being a part of this discussion. Thanks for every Rails developer out there, you’ll prove me wrong…someday. 😉

That’s when I’ll learn…somehow. 🙂

Until then, you’ll make an amusing anecdote in my slides…somewhere. 😀