I’m reading this New Internet piece from Tailscale, and it’s beautiful.
That’s the New Internet. We built it! It’s the future, it’s just unevenly distributed, so far.
It’s such a pleasure to read someone, who is like you, but many years older.
Some other quotes:
Programmers today are impatient for success. They start planning for a billion users before they write their first line of code. In fact, nowadays, we train them to do this without even knowing they’re doing it. Everything they’ve ever been taught revolves around scaling.
People have a hard time with this idea. They keep picking the algorithms and architectures that can scale up, even when if you don’t scale up, a different thing would be thousands of times faster, and also easier to build and run.
Even I can barely believe I just said thousands of times easier and I wasn’t exaggerating.
I read a post recently where someone bragged about using kubernetes to scale all the way up to 500,000 page views per month. But that’s 0.2 requests per second. I could serve that from my phone, on battery power, and it would spend most of its time asleep.
The truth is, most things don’t scale, and never need to.
I’m that guy. And I feel it. Independently from this, I came to my own conclusion — through the pain and struggle — that actually quite many things needs no scaling, not at all. Especially at a personal level. Which I tend to do too.
That’s the thing I need to learn. It’s not that scaling mentality is bad. It’s that it slows things down a lot.
Perhaps, one of the reasons that happens — and maybe the primary reason too — is that it complicates things a lot.
As an industry, we’ve spent all our time making the hard things possible, and none of our time making the easy things easy.
If you want to know the bottleneck in any particular economic system, look for who gets to charge rent. In the tech world, that’s AWS. Sure, Apple’s there selling popular laptops, but you could buy a different laptop or a different phone. And Microsoft was the gatekeeper for everything, once, but you don’t have Windows lock-in anymore, unless you choose to. All those “the web is the new operating system” people of the early 2000s finally won, we just forgot to celebrate.
We’ve built a giant centralized computer system, with a few megaproviders in the middle, and a bunch of dumb terminals on our desks and in our pockets. The dumb terminals, even our smart watches, are all supercomputers by the standards of 20 years ago, if we used them that way. But they’re not much better than a VT100. Turn off AWS, and they’re all bricks.
Tailscale makes the Internet work how you thought the Internet worked, before you learned how the Internet works.
I use Tailscale heavily, and it was such an ease when I discovered it! Currently, almost all my machines have it. It’s 15 machines so far.