content of Cosmo magazine or their relationship with Fabio, but if you build
some Perl scripts for them to do server administration, it doesn’t occur to them
that that’s something that they have to own and prevent other publishers from
getting hold of.
So Levi’s was a great client and it was a big turning point because it gave us
the money to build whatever we needed to build.
Another turning point was in 1998 when I published Database Backed Web
Sites.We were working on a site and the client said, “You have...

Avenue.
So we would say, “You’re a very capable person, and you’re going to have a
very easy time hiring people like yourself. We don’t know your business and
we’d have a hard time hiring someone like you, but we have a very easy time
hiring someone like me, who’s an MIT-trained computer science nerd. It’s
cheaper for you to use us, because we have really great programmers, and great
programmers are a lot cheaper than mediocre programmers. So even if you
give us a profit margin, it’s still cheaper than doing it...

selling it. They had hundreds of millions of dollars from their IPO, and we
thought, “These companies can’t just waste all their money forever.”
Microsoft was another concern. But they also were very, very slow. They
finally today have a product called SharePoint, which is somewhat similar to the
ArsDigita Community System.
One thing that we did which enabled us to be much, much faster than our
competitors was that we developed on and released our software from running
real-world systems. For example, we would install our release of software on
photo.net...

and whoever else uses Microsoft Word.
That works pretty well for word processors because it’s a product that was
developed in the ’60s by IBM, and people are pretty sure of what the minimum
features should be in a word processor. It also works pretty well because people
don’t demand frequent upgrades. There aren’t new requirements and new ideas
coming out in word processors, so if you have a release every three years, that’s
just fine. It doesn’t hurt that Microsoft has a monopoly and there’s no competition,
so if it takes them...

did, most of the people with really good credentials and experience were occupied.
There was so much money chasing a relatively limited talent pool. The
folks who were in their 30s were simply not available. They were tied up working
at their own startups. So we thought, “OK, how are we going to hire and
grow people?”
For programmers, I had a vision—partly because I had been teaching programmers
at MIT—that I didn’t like the way that programmer careers turned
out. Now that I fly airplanes, I realize that the average programmer is...