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I talk to lots of people who come here
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looking for the Silicon Valley experience
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They arrive with one suit case in hand
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when they head south on the 101.
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Hoping to see it this place they've heard about
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and its freeways, and its office parks
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and its strip malls, and
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it looks like every place they've ever been
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end up wondering where are they come,
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why did they come here,
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what was that brought them
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Code itself is the underlying thing that makes computers work
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Why is it important to the world, it's because
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it's the blood of the organism, that's our culture now,
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it makes everything go
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Technology has become a God of our society now
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I mean I think that its--people stand in awe of it
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and stand in awe of the people that make it
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There's a sense that software is a kind of new frontier
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it's you know it's the old gold rush metaphor
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the California gold rush all over again
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It's the kind of Hollywood of the Twenties.
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This very small set of people is really defining
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how our world's gonna be like
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I mean you know the computer becoming ubiquitous
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and the way we interact with the world
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more and more mediated through the computer
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is this very small group of people
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defining what that world's gonna be like.
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Netscape !
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everywhere !
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team !
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fight !
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Less than three years ago
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a small team of engineers at Netscape Communications
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created software that made surfing the Internet easy
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and in the process change the face of computing
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On this day however, the company is in big trouble
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driven to the ground by its rival and software colossus Microsoft
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Only a radical strategy will help save it.
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"Let's hear a loud Mozilla !"
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Mozilla ! Mozilla ! Mozilla !
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Netscape is giving away its source code
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to programmers outside the company
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The source code is the secret formula for browsing the web
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The code is named Mozilla and if widely adapted
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it will make Netscape's code the Internet standard
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drawing users to its other products
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and restoring the company's sagging fortunes.
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Our story focuses on team of engineers
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who will come together in this building
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Over the course of the next year
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they will turn their lives inside-out to create Mozilla
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and battle a giant competitor to save their company
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and shape the future of computing.
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Right now we have a problem with the work looks like it can't possibly be done
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for the date we announced
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so were just trying to
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drill down on how doomed we are
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and sometimes the only way to do that is
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to get everybody in the room and stare each other in the eyes.
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We said were giving you Netscape Communicator on 3/31
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so if were not giving them Netscape Communicator on 3/31
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we need a way to address that.
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The goal is to get Mozilla to developpers by March 31th
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a few shorts weeks from now
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it is one of the most ambitious schedules in the company history.
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- It's a joke
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- I think we have been very exclusive
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Michael Toy one of Netscape's first employees
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heads the team that will prepare Mozilla for public release.
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We're probably doomed, we're probably gonna fail
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Microsoft is probably gonna squish us like bug anyway
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but just cause were doomed doesn't mean
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you know we cant get up in the morning and do work
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All rise
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the honorable Michael Toy presiding.
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I'm pretty flip with my kids about what I do.
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What do you do at work dad? Oh I don't know I sit in meetings
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and feel depressed and I read e-mail.
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Oh oh you got me !
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But they think my office is the greatest place in the world though
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It's like "Oh were going to your office ?"
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"Oh yeah yippie I love going to your office !"
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They play with the guns and there is free soda
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and there is the giant balls
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basically I work at Disneyland as far as they're concerned.
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I talk about marathon versus sprint.
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The hard part is to run with significant intensity the whole way
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knowing that if you ever start walking
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you're not going to make it and just keep the end in sight
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and know that there's this urgency.
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Jim Roskind an expert on software security
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is brought in to enforce rigorous standards of engineering precision.
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Imagine if you had a project
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where you felt doom was imminent
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all the different players wondering
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are they pushed beyond their level
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can they think of way of running faster,
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can anyone help them ?
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So there's lot of tension
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and anxiety over making the schedule.
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Jamie Zawinski, free source code evangelist
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will enlist outside developers to Netscape's cause.
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The free source thing is trying to change the rules, right.
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There are people who have the free software religion,
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the one thing they have in common is they're all hackers
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they're all like writing code
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so you hoping to tap in to all of those smart people
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and get something from them, you know, so that everyone benefits..
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I talk about 2 millions and 2 half millions lines of code
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and everyone of them has to be gone over
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carefully and in some cases twice.
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With hundreds of engineers converging on Mozilla,
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with new code to enable its release,
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Tara Hernandez make sure
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that their changes do not crash Mozilla
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and brings everyones work to a halt.
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This is how we keep track
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of all the changes that are going in.
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Green is good.
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Lot of changes going on right here,
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and wham, the build all died.
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Ok, alright, bye.
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We're doomed.
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Some of the worst crashes are reserved for Scott Collins
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a veteran code writer who stands by
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for late night troubleshooting.
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I've been here for about
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I don't know, 60 hours or so.
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Writing software is different from
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selling real estate.
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Selling real estate you sell the people
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the people sleep at night.
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When they go to sleep you have to stop selling real estate
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Computers never sleep.
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You can see my cube is decked out a little bit better than
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all the people's.
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I have a nice couch
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little mattress under there I can sleep in
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artwork from my children
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I have control the light switches.
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This is what I'd like to get if my wife truly love me
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she'd let me have one.
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Life is good.
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Ok
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Bug count.
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Alright, there are a ton of bugs on here that
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people just aren't doing anything about.
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To give away its code
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Netscape engineers must make thousands of bug fixes
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Often minute changes that will allow the code
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to be used by outside developpers.
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Jeff Weinstein has, one, two,
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three, four, five, six,
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seven, eight, nine, ten,
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eleven, twelve, thirteen.
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One bug hidden in the mass of code
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can stop everyone else's work
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and can threaten the ship date.
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I need someone to page Jeff Weinstein
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and get him to call 2024.
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Even a team of twenty people building a car
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it's easy to step back fourty feet and look and go
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"Hold it, that guy has not putting on the wheel"
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You have fourty programmers working
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they all come to you with code, a gigantic morass
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of little details piled up on a disc
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usually can even see the pieces whether they're doing it correctly
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You have to assemble it into a whole
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and then see if the whole works
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and then you're not even sure of who gave you the bad bits.
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That would be bad. Let's go downstairs, come on!
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You're talking about a recipe.
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Who gave you the bad flour.
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Someone went out to grind flour,
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and they had to all be exactly
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the right size chunks of flour.
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Someone else made chocolate chips,
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they all had to be exactly the right size chunks.
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You can't figure it out until you put it all together
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you hand it out, and people go.
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"I don't like the way this tastes"
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And now you have to wonder,
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with all these details coming together
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which was the problem
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who's causing the problem, how can you fix it?
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You've got to ship on a certain time.
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And now you have all this people,
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you have the clock ticking and it gets pretty intense.
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Since Netscape began
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the amount of code making up Mozilla
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has increased by a factor of 30.
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The job of programming and debugging it
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rests upon a precarious balance of science and art.
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They talk about what they do as if
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it was a kind of alchemy, a kind of wizardry.
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It does remind me of athletics in that way.
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You know why is someone a good baseball hitter?
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Often the hitters themselves can't really explain it.
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And often the best software people
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cannot themselves understand why they're so good at it.
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But I think make a great programmer is being raised techie.
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My particular team at Netscape, I think we all grew up techie
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We all grew up with computers around us somewhere,
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so that we were exposed to them before we became
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adults, if any of us are really adults
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Jim is the most grownup of us.
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A lot of my childhood from roughly age 6 to age 17
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was around here.
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Life was just a nightmare, this is a very, very scary place
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the two school wasn't too bad.
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Ah, but it meant it
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you'd get to work on puzzles and problems.
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All of the puzzling is math,
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and that puzzling is the exact same feeling
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the exact same problem that you go through
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when you're programming.
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When I was young it'd be building with erector sets and Lego
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now the structures that you build are in software.
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My mom is a first class geek too.
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And so I have a unique experience of being able to talk
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shop with my mom, cuz' she's a director of
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really important stuff at Sun.
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At Netscape one of the code words for is the average person
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who is going to be able to use this software is,
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"Well can my mom use it?"
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Yeah, my mom can use it.
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My mom can write optimizing compilers.
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By the time I was 12 years old I was making 50 bucks an hour
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programming computers.
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People say what should I be should I grow up to be a...
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I say computer programmer.
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The thing about that makes it a youth culture
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is one's capacity to throw one's entire life on the line
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with these firms
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Entire life commitment meaning
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24-7-365 work commitment.
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It's throwing yourself into a thing
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where you don't know if that job
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is going to be around soon.
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There's no stability in here.
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So the very kind of weird irony
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is that very people who are inventing the future
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can't see their own future.
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This is a monk-life existence
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there are very few women in these societies.
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These are male societies,
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they are secret societies,
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they function very much lik