tl;dr:“Early on in my career, I learned a very important lesson about creativity: It can’t be saved for later. Creativity is perishable, just like inspiration. It has to be discharged regularly or it will spoil. And if you let enough of it go to waste, eventually your talents will sour and shrivel with it.” David discusses how the best folks are able to find creativity in the mundane parts of their jobs, and that is what separates them.
tl;dr:DHH highlights Musk's unique "algorithm" for success, which includes the following in order: questioning every requirement, deleting unnecessary parts or processes, simplifying, optimizing, accelerating cycle time, and finally, automating. While acknowledging Musk's controversial nature, DHH emphasizes the value of extracting wisdom from such figures without feeling compelled to emulate them entirely.
tl;dr:"But as I've grown older, I've come to terms with the fact that it can't be eternal sunshine in the productive mind. You need to let weather pass. The grey, wet days of today soak the soil for the sun of tomorrow.”
tl;dr:“Each of these machines were less than $20,000. Amortize that over five years. That's $333/month for all the hardware (minus routers etc) needed to run Basecamp Classic today. And this is still a large SaaS app that's generating literally millions of dollars in revenue per year.”
tl;dr:“The rough math goes like this: We spent $3.2m on cloud in 2022. Just under a million of that was on storing 8 petabytes of files in S3, fully replicated across several regions. So that leaves ~$2.3m on everything else: app servers, cache servers, database servers, search servers, the works. That's the part of the budget we intend to bring to zero in 2023. Then we'll worry about exiting the 8PB from S3 in 2024.”
tl;dr:"The cloud excels at two ends of the spectrum... the first is when your application is so simple and low traffic that you really do save on complexity by starting with fully managed services." The second is when your load is highly irregular and "have wild swings or towering peaks in usage." David points out that it's an "absurd premium" for the possibility of the latter to occur while adding to the increasing power of a few companies.