Sean Parent

I wrote programs in notebooks and uh executed them in my head.

Conor

God damn, you're Bill Gates.

Sean Parent

And made fairly significant money for ninth graders. My two top computers that I was looking at were the Ohio Scientific Challenger and the XD Sorcerer. There was a lot of Apple II software that appeared in this time frame that had stamped on it cracked by Serpent. And Serpent was was my initials are SRP, so it was SRP E-N-T. So Serpent was me.

Conor

A computer class with no computers is Yeah.

Sean Parent

And we spent like the next 72 hours writing code on a Mac Plus in 68K assembly language with no docs and just a debugger to figure out API calls.

Conor

Welcome to ADSP the Podcast, episode 263, recorded on October 10th, 2025. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Bryce, we continue our chaotic conversation with Sean Parent and get the origin story pre-Adobe, pre-Apple, and pre-Orange Micro, and find out where Sean Parent came from.

Bryce

I mean, I I I'm I'm thinking that you, Connor, you will be the official Sean Perrin biographer. Alright, we just we just heard some amazing stories from Sean about uh childhood crimes that uh maybe we'll get him to retail sometime. But uh we we were Connor was just asking Sean uh how he how he went from living in rural Washington to uh uh to programming, right? Because you're you grew up in a real fairly rural area and uh you might need to rewind three or four minutes.

Sean Parent

Uh okay, so rewinding. Um so I had a a seventh grade math teacher who was a NASA engineer before she she decided to become a math teacher. And it was kind of an accelerated math program. Uh and she had the policy that if we could come in in the morning for class and uh uh ask a question related to mathematics and current events. So it had to be something we found in a magazine or a newspaper or something like that, and ask her to explain it, then she would spend the time explaining the math behind it and answering our question.

Bryce

It specifically had to be related to current events.

Sean Parent

It specifically had to be related to current events. And and as long as we could could feed her questions and keep her her answering, uh, we didn't have to open the textbook and and and do assignments. And and and it was pretty incredible because we would come up with, you know.

Conor

And by we you mean you.

Sean Parent

It wasn't just me. There there were a number of us. Uh so we would come up with questions, and we wouldn't always succeed in keeping her her busy for the whole hour. Uh uh, but we would ask questions and she would cover things and explain them in seventh grade terms, and it would include, you know, explanations of statistics and calculus and whatever was necessary to solve that problem. And she did an outstanding job at kind of breaking it down to a level we could grasp.

Conor

And explain like I'm in grades at them, you know.

Sean Parent

Yeah, yeah. And so uh uh that kind of laid my my mathematics background and interest and and through that I saw the relevance of math.

Bryce

What was her name?

Sean Parent

Uh her name was Ella Mae Knowles. I remember the name. So so and it was great when uh I did not high sch graduate from high school. We'll get to get there, I guess. But but I did attend my class's high school graduation, and she also came. So so that was the last time I saw her. Um uh uh was at what would have been my high school graduation.

Conor

Do you think she kept tabs on you?

Sean Parent

I I I have no idea. So she hasn't kept in touch. Um I've tried to look her up and Google her a couple times, but haven't found her, so I don't know if she got married or remarried or what. Maybe the listeners will know LMA Knowles' ex-NASA engineer. So specifically, I believe she worked on uh uh spacesuits for women at NASA. Uh so in any case, that's that sparked a strong interest in math, and you know, I had uh some uh uh skills in math, I guess, which is why it was in her class um before that, but that was really what where I saw the relevance of math and really got interested in it. And then then the same year um that this is going on, my dad worked at Boeing, and they offered a programming class in BASIC to Boeing employees, and it was like an evening class, and my dad signed up for it, and but not enough people signed up to take the course, so they opened it up uh to family members of Boeing employees. So my dad asked me if I wanted to take a course on basic programming. And so this would have been, I don't know, late 70s time frame, maybe like 77. I had never touched a computer, never seen one in person. You know, to me a computer was uh uh big things with real-to-reel tapes that you saw on TV and lots of flashing lights, right? Uh uh so I thought this was pretty exciting that I'd get to go take the class. And so uh uh uh went and took the course and it was a 100% lecture, no hands-on, never saw a computer uh for the entire course. The best way to learn. The best way to learn, uh, but got handouts on basic programming, and I was I don't know, completely obsessed with this idea that somewhere there were these machines that you could give them instructions, and these machines would follow the instructions. And now I knew how to give them instructions. And I had handouts with instructions on how to give the machine instructions. And so I wrote programs in notebooks and uh executed them in my head.

Conor

God damn, you're Bill Gates. I just uh we we are interviewed, I can't remember who, we interviewed uh on a ray cast, and uh he mentioned I'll I'll uh I can't remember the guest. I mean I definitely remember the conversation and he mentioned Bill Gates' first part of his two-part or three-part biography called Source Code. Can't recommend it highly enough, but at some point in the book he talks about these hikes. He was a part of some Boy Scouts, they would go on these massive hikes, and he would program in his head uh and then get back and have solved some problem. You're basically Bill Gates, and also it's uncanny, these you know, all the greats of computer science lore. They had access to uh a parent that was a prof that had one of the first whatever. I've never heard the parent that was at Boeing that was offered a course and then family members were invited, but that is an alternative version of these kind of you had to have exposure early on to what is it with everybody in C having started off with basic?

Bryce

I mean, me, you, like just dozens of people.

Conor

I don't know, it was basic that is a basic, but it's not basically, yeah.

Sean Parent

Yeah. Uh I wrote programs and notebooks and executed them in my head and uh did that until ninth grade. And then how many how many years is that? Two years, so like two years.

Conor

Two years, you're just a comp you're compiling and executing the screen.

Sean Parent

Yeah. And then um uh uh uh somebody that's how to be successful, folks. If you're struggling to find a job, just spend two years. Yep. So so ninth grade, uh uh somebody donates uh one of the original TRS-80s uh to our our junior high. So our junior high was seventh, eighth, eighth, and ninth grade. And so I'm in ninth grade, somebody donates a TRS-80, and the faculty has no idea what to do with this. And a friend of mine, uh uh he was best man at my wedding, best friend, Mark Matsadaira. Uh he and I find out about this and we talk to the faculty, and we convince them that we need access to this computer. Wait, you're in grade nine? Grade nine. And you're talking to the faculty of the school. Of the of the school, yeah, yeah. And uh uh we convinced them that we need access to this computer. And so they're like, well, we don't know what to do with it. So they set it up in kind of this large closet. Great.

Bryce

So this is before the gunpowder.

Sean Parent

Uh uh This is probably concurrent with the gunpowder. So different story, which we're not gonna cover here because I don't want FBI showing up at my doorstep. Um Yeah, we set it up in a closet and wait, wait, they actually gave you the computer. No, they didn't give us the computer, they set it up in the closet in like near the the front office for the school, and and gave us a key, each a key to this closet so we could access it after hours. Okay? And or during lunch or or breaks. And uh I have a question.

Bryce

When they gave you the key, was the intention that you access it after hours, or was the intention that you would access it during breaks and during lunch?

Sean Parent

It was both. It was both. We we were allowed to access it. And um uh uh so so and it was like just at the start of a hallway from the front office, so so we were visible, right? We're not gonna be doing anything bad in here. Um so we programmed it. I got to type in some of the programs that that I had had uh uh written in notebooks. And uh they work? Uh they did, like I got a black tech game working. They required, you know, certainly some amount of editing. It was a slightly different variant of basic, and and I was working from memory and notes. Uh but yeah, I got these to work. And then we discovered that the TRS-80 had these very primitive kind of block graphics. It was, you know, kind of a half a character pixel um uh size graphics. And so we wrote this very simple game that would put a pixel on the bottom row of the screen at a random location, and then draw a line from slowly from either the left or right side of the screen. And if you hit the spacebar, it would draw a line down, and if you hit that pixel that was there, um uh uh it would kind of do a little explosion of big blocky pixels, and you would get a point. And and it was a two-player game that we created, so it would then go to the other person's team, the line would start drawing from the other side of the screen, they'd hit the space bar, and it would go down and hit, and if it got it, they got a point. And we made it something like uh uh, you know, first person to to to uh I think it was to nine points one because we didn't want to write the code to get another another digit in there. So it was like first person to nine-one. Uh and we charged kids a quarter over lunch to play. Not where I saw that going. Yeah. And the deal was the uh uh first person, well, if you won, then you got to stay in the game without another quarter, and it cost the challenger the quarter. King of the hell, basically. Yeah, yeah. And made fairly significant money for ninth graders doing this. We had a line out the door at lunchtime uh to play this game. Did the did the teachers know? Yeah, the teachers knew. Like they they were like, whatever, you know, you're good little enterprisers.

Bryce

Yeah, exactly, exactly. I had uh when I was in high school, they uh some of the teachers like had me helping out with like computer stuff, like how to use PowerPoint and things like that. And it got so frequent, I eventually I got like fed up and sent an invoice to the price principal, which I don't recall whether they paid or not, but I think they stopped asking me for help after that.

Sean Parent

Yeah. Uh that was kind of the first time I ever had my hands on an actual computer and got to use one, and knew that I had to own a computer. Uh from the time I was was born up until this point. Uh my parents required that anytime we were given money for for uh you know Christmas or birthdays or anything like that, any money we we received, half went into a bank account for college. And uh so I had a bank book and a bank account and something around a thousand dollars in my bank account. And uh my friend Mark, who I just mentioned, his dad had a men's clothing store in downtown Seattle. And uh so occasionally I would uh uh catch a ride, I would go with Mark and his dad downtown, and Mark and I would hang out in downtown Seattle for a while, and about 45 minutes away away from where we lived. Uh and there was a Wolf camera uh downtown Seattle that sold computers. And what year is this? You're telling us about this uh pivotal trip where you're taking your so this would have been let's see, it's the same year the Apple II Plus came out, so I'm guessing 77, 78. Yeah. Okay, we could look it up, but late 70s. Late 70s. Um I think the first Apple II was like 76, so maybe 77. So this is a couple years after that. Uh so I did all this research, and my two top computers that I was looking at were the Ohio Scientific Challenger and the Exodies Sorcerer.

Bryce

I I neither remember that.

Sean Parent

Yeah, so you'll have to Google those readers. Yeah, those two pretty obscure. So so I settled on I was going to buy an Ohio Scientific Challenger. And uh Wolf Camera carried the Ohio Scientific Challenger. So I was gonna take my my checkbook and without my parents' knowledge, get a ride from my friend to downtown Seattle and buy a computer, and I figured once I owned it, there was nothing my parents could do about it. Uh so this was the plan.

Conor

That's what we call foreshadow folks.

Sean Parent

Yeah, of a junior high high school kid. So I get to the store, and the salesperson is like, no, no, no. You want the Apple II Plus. That's the computer you want. Brand spank and new, it's gonna cost you a little more, like train your account. Uh but that's the computer you want. You know, and if you buy it today, like I'll throw in an extra 16k of RAM, so you'll have 32k of RAM and a cassette deck, because uh early Apple IIs. At this point, the Apple II probably had a disk drive, uh, but I certainly couldn't afford the disk drive. So the way you loaded programs was often just an audio cassette tape that you plugged into the back of the Apple II. Worked similar to a modem. And so they would throw in a Panasonic cassette recorder with a hole drilled through the top of the case so you could adjust the read-write heads if it was giving you errors trying to load your programs. Okay, so you know. Uh I'm thinking this is the deal of the century. I'm thinking this is the deal of the century. So so a little bit more background here before I get to it. Uh uh my dad had gone to the 1962 World Fair in Seattle, which was a little before my time, and he had seen a demonstration of uh a flat TV, which I actually looked up. He was like, it was a TV you just hang on your wall. And it was actually a rear projection, which they didn't tell you at the uh World's Fair. But my dad was convinced that any day now they were gonna release these flat TVs that you could just hang on your wall, and they were color and they were amazing. And so we had uh 13-inch black and white TV, and we were not getting a new TV until he could get you know a 60-inch hang on your wall TV, uh, which he did get probably like two years before he passed away. But it took a long time. Uh uh so we had we actually had two little uh like a 12-inch and a 13-inch uh TV at home, black and white. And so I bought this Apple II and brought it home and set it up in my bedroom and took one of our TVs and put it on top and plugged it in the back, and I had my cassette deck, and uh now I had my own computer to to write games, and uh uh my dad came home from work and walked by my room and was like, What is this? And uh I explained to him what I had done, and he said, Okay, here's the deal. You get to keep it, but you have to pay back every penny to your account. And so that partially leads to the story I was telling of me having a paper out.

Conor

I mean honestly, it's not uh I I thought it was gonna be from like a rural, you know, I thought it was gonna be way worse than that. Just saying you had to replace the money is pretty reasonable.

Bryce

Pretty reasonable. I want to hear I want to hear the why Sean didn't finish high school. Okay. I'm sure he didn't do it.

Sean Parent

Okay, so yeah, so so I had had this computer and I I s I had it through most of college, uh, you know, and did lots of hacks on it, and eventually an uh friend of mine in the neighborhood, uh his dad bought an an Apple II, and uh uh we did all kind of hardware hacks on these things, like we built a plotter at one point, uh, which we didn't have stepper motors, so we did it by just a uh what is a plotter? Yeah Think printer, but with a pen and and two motors for X and Y to draw a picture on a piece of paper, so etch a sketch. Okay. Okay. Uh so we built one, we didn't have stepper motors, which you could control to say, you know, move exactly this distance. We just had regular motors, but we had potentiometers so we could feed back a position. And so so it was a software challenge to uh uh control the motor and get feedback from the potentiometer to draw a picture on this thing. Um so we did that. Uh uh his dad had this uh Centronics uh IBM typewriter, and um uh we found some article on how you could interface the typewriter to the computer. So we did that and and turned his uh you know kind of bouncing ball typewriter into a printer. So yeah, so this was the kind of MAC before MAC. MACHAC before MACHAC. I also uh there was a lot of Apple II software that appeared in this time frame uh that had stamped on it cracked by serpent. And serpent uh was was my initials are SRP, so it was SRP E-N-T. So Serpent was me. And wait, is this like a known fact on the internet? I don't I doubt it's a known fact on the internet, but yeah, there was a fair amount of uh broken copy protection schemes that uh that I that I broke along the time. Wow. Um uh uh I could come back to to that story because there's a story on that that connects to Apple. So many stories. Okay. Uh uh so why I skipped my senior year in high school, um, why I didn't graduate from high school. Uh so so I did reasonably well in high school. I was certainly not a straight A student, and and honestly, I cheated my way through some of the classes using computers for some for some of that cheating, which was fun. Uh uh our school had a levy system, which was basically the voters would vote on the school budget each year. And and or not each year, each each few years. And and uh going into my senior year, uh there was a levy, uh, so the voters were voting on the school budget, and if the levy didn't pass, uh I would have exactly one course to take in my senior year, and because all the AP classes would be cut. So it was like uh uh one civics class, I think, was it. And like one quarter one class for the entire year. And uh uh the levy did pass, but it didn't matter. Uh my sister at the time was she was three years older and she was going to Seattle University, and she said, Well, you should just apply to the university and just just go to Seattle U. You didn't need a high school diploma? Yeah, uh which was my answer, and I thought I thought, you're completely nuts. I need a high school diploma. Um, there's no way, there's no way, there's no way. But she kept hounding me about it. And one day she like brought home the application forms, and she was like, just fill them out and send them off. And so I did. I filled them off and I sent them into the school, and I thought nothing would happen of it. And then I got a call from the Dean of Admission of Admissions at CLU that asked, Why are you applying? It's too soon. Uh I explained the situation, and the dean said, Well, I'm going to set you up with some interviews with professors, and we'll see if this would make sense. And so I went into Seattle, Seattle University, and sat down with some professors and got interviewed and grilled, and passed, and got accepted uh uh without a high school diploma or no GED or or or or any equivalent. Uh so that's how I ended up skipping and not not getting the high school graduation, which which both when I every major company I've worked for, which is is Apple, Google, and Adobe, uh uh uh when you know I submit my application on your job application, there's always a line that's you know, where did you graduate high school? And I list my college degree and just write NA for not applicable for high school.

Conor

They typically don't follow up if you've got the college degree probably.

Sean Parent

No, no. Every single time I've gotten a call from HR going, uh, no, we need what what high school you graduated from. And I'm like, I did not. Uh this the one time it posed a problem was when I started, I I was going to go into electrical engineering. I mentioned hardware projects, I liked hardware. Uh uh my sister was was an electrical engineering major, so I was gonna go into electrical engineering, so that's where I started. And very quickly I decided that that was not for me, and I would rather do computer science, and so I was going to transfer to University of Washington. Uh but they required that I had a high school diploma. And I did not. So I could not transfer unless I dropped out of college and went back to high school for a year. Uh so that closed one door. So I switched from double E to a business major, of all things, uh, was horribly frustrated and bored, and then uh I found out that our school was going to start a computer science program. So I went to my advisor and asked what it would take to get into the computer science program, and they said, well, probably the best thing to do would be to switch to a math major, and and that would get most of the requirements out of the way. So I switched to a math major and was a math major, and then uh as soon as they started the computer science program, I switched to that. So my last year was computer science.

Bryce

And what was your degree in?

Sean Parent

So I got a degree in computer science, a minor in math, and a specialty in AI, of all things. Uh, but it bears no resemblance to today's AI. And there were 12 of us in our graduating class, first graduate graduating class from from uh computer science out of Seattle University. Two of us actually work at Adobe. I was gonna say, do you do you keep in touch or have any of them gone on to uh so let's see, I keep in touch with three from that class? So so you know, four of twelve, I guess, know each other, I think. I think some of the people who I keep in touch with keep in touch with some of the other people. Uh it was a very eclectic course or or or class. Uh Seattle University is a Catholic university uh Jesuit. You know, one of our classmates had had uh had been a Jesuit and then decided not to be a Jesuit.

Conor

And so because of going to Seattle United.

Sean Parent

No, no, no. Had had just just just decided to do something else and and ended up in the computer science program. And so we were uh let's see, we had class of 12, we had uh uh two women. I think that's right. Two? Yeah, two women. Uh uh.

Bryce

Yeah, no. Better numbers I already.

Conor

17% is better than numbers.

Sean Parent

Uh yeah, one of the people who I keep in touch with was an international student from Singapore. Uh uh, yeah, so it was it was quite the mix of people. Uh I keep in touch with some of them. Uh we had three young uh college professors who had started the program who were basically freshly minted PhDs themselves, uh, which was they decided collectively that they would teach every course in a different programming language, but not teach the programming language. So you took the course and they said, you know, we're doing uh uh a course in in graphics, it's going to be taught in Lisp, and so learn Lisp. So, you know, a bunch of languages, you know, Lisp, Forth, Prolog, uh C, Pascal, uh Ingris, which was uh a pre-S, well, kind of competitor to SQL probably at the time, database language, um, something called Startle, which was a register transfer language. So just got this interesting and diverse education. I know uh a couple of us of the 12 appreciated that. Uh I think the majority did not, thought it was what was too weird. Uh but the professors were also, I don't think any of them were married at the time. So we would do things like they would say, Oh, well, we've got an exam tomorrow, and people were asking questions in class, and and the professor would say, like, well, why don't you guys just all come over to my apartment this evening and and we'll go through the material again and cover it? And so we'd end up, you know, all night hanging with the professor in their apartment uh uh going through the material. Uh so that was you know an amazing experience and uh and kind of set the groundwork. And then uh I got married while I was in college, and uh my wife was from Southern California, and her her dad, my father-in-law, uh had a brain tumor. And so kind of right after I graduated, uh we moved down to Southern California to be close to her family. And uh I was looking for jobs, and I got a job at a little company called Orange Micro, which was in Anaheim.

Conor

I was wondering when this was gonna connect with one of the stories. Yeah. Uh I heard at some point.

Sean Parent

Yeah, so I'm surprised we've never covered this.

Conor

Any of my early history?

Sean Parent

Yeah.

Conor

I was wondering that. I mean, we've heard so many of your stories, and I I do think at some point you told a story about growing up with like a lot of freedom, and you know, parents, they're not, you know, oh, the kids are out and they'll come back, whatever, at some point. And at no point did I wonder, wait, how did some person living out rurally, not in some metropolis? Like most of them, it's like, oh, we were next to some school that had the first suite of computers. And anyways, we've now sketched, but I'm surprised that uh in all the conversations we've had, that's never come up. Um and it's a very unique uh like how many people can say they had a parent that worked for a company that had one of the first programming courses, and then not enough people signed up, and so the kids came along. Like uh it's it's not dissimilar, like I said earlier, from other stories about so I was saying I was the only kid in that classroom.

Sean Parent

So even though they opened it up to families, I think there was maybe one other spouse and and me. And it was, I think there were, you know, I remember that class being very sparsely populated. There were maybe eight of us in there.

Conor

A computer class with no computers is yeah, yeah.

Sean Parent

So I ended up at Orange Micro, and from there I went to Mac Hack Conference, which I talk about a lot. Uh, an amazing conference. Uh good friends of mine uh uh organized and ran that and ran the hack competition there. And uh they were from Apple, uh uh uh Scott Boyd and Greg Marriott. We just had lunch together the other day, still very good friends. And while I was there, I approached Darren Adler. He's now like head of Safari at Apple. He's a boomeranger at Apple. He had gone and and and worked at uh uh Magic Cap. If you look up the history of that, he's one of the one of those engineers. And uh I knew him from magazine articles that he wrote, and I approached him at uh uh lunch, kind of the first day of the conference, and I had an idea for a hack, and I knew how to write part of it, and I thought he would write know how to write the other part, and so I asked if he wanted to work on it together, and we spent like the next 72 hours writing code on a Mac Plus in 68k assembly language with no docs and just a debugger to figure out API calls, and uh got our hack running. And like two weeks after that, I got a phone call from Apple asking if I wanted to go up and get an interview. And I think we've covered some of the stories of my early interview, so so yeah, that turned into a job at Apple, and that turned into a job at Adobe, Google back to Adobe, and so that's how my career went.

Conor

I guess maybe as a final question, it's because it's uh I mean and also too, across the chaotic last whatever two hours, uh a lot of stories haven't been told. Like uh will the Photoshop 4 is that a is that a at the bar story, or is that that uh not right now, but maybe at a later date. There's uh Photoshop 4 to be a story. Yeah, Bryce and I were chatting about that. As the the Photoshop 4 story that we heard last night over dinner was astounding, astounding. So look forward to that, listener. I guess yeah, when I when I when I when you bring up Mac Hack and then also too in the back of my head, I had I know that you were a part of Smart Friends, and that was a thing, and there's these groups and conferences. Does that exist? I feel like uh a part of me, and I feel like at every point in time everyone thinks like, ah, you know, it's just not like it used to be. But I do feel like, you know, you were telling us, I don't think this was while we were recording, but uh before we started recording, um, or in between recordings, I should say, you were saying that because your dad was working at Boeing and was a uh former Marine, there was a lot of car work and whatnot, because that's what he was interested in. So you at one point could disassemble the engine of some Volkswagen in like 30 minutes or less and like reassemble it, and like I have absolutely if something goes wrong with the car, we're taking it to the shop. And uh I don't even know how to get it to the shop if it's not drivable. And anyway, so it's like uh these I feel like there's something lost on like uh Bryce and our generation of programmers where we don't understand the hardware and like at the at the level that people that were brought up, you know. Anyway, so I I just what is your take on 2025's the landscape of I don't know is there an equivalent to MACHAC or smart? I don't think there is, you know, it's just a different time. Anyways, uh you can give your thoughts. Yeah.

Sean Parent

You know, MACHAC is gone. Smart Friends still exists. Uh yeah, yeah, yeah. So is it an email list? Because I know there's a email list, yeah. Or like get togethers. Yeah, yeah. We had like one conference, but uh yeah, it's an email list. The Hackers Conference, which you can you can like Google that. That's still going. It's an invite-only uh conference. I think this year is the 40th year for hackers. Uh yeah, so that's you know, if you want to well, you know, Bill Atkinson who passed away recently used to attend, and and uh Steve Wozniak and and uh Don Knuth and so so some some notable names. Some notable names attend, yeah. So so so some of these things still exist. Um, you know, it was interesting because living through all of this, I always felt like I was late to the party, right? I came into Photoshop during Photoshop 3, I joined a uh Adobe, or I joined Apple right after Steve Jobs left, and kind of the original Mac team had left. And uh I joined Adobe during Photoshop 3 development, so I wasn't like the first person on Photoshop or any of that. You know, now that I'm I'm you know 60 plus, it's uh uh uh I now I feel like I was just fashionably late. Right? Right, right. I was at the party, I just just showed up fashionably late. You know, so if you're a a young listener and getting in the industry and getting started and feeling like you're late to the party, uh uh uh you're not gonna realize you know what you had and what was going on in that time frame until you can look back at it with some perspective. So so that's how that's kind of my my my perspective on that. And you know, right now it's like you know, AI is brand new. Yeah, it's changing everything. Right? It's changing everything. And so there's uh there's a whole generation here uh that is part of a a new foundation, right? Right? Uh a new technology that's changing the way society uh functions. So uh so you know embrace that, right? Right? Uh uh whatever role you play in that, uh uh you're uh uh you're part of the party, right? Right.

Conor

The last thing I'll add to that is that uh yeah, it's it's I felt the exact same way when I kind of quote unquote switched to computer science. And uh I always uh I was chatting with Ben Dean once, way years ago, and I was telling him, ah, I I feel like I just I'm so behind everybody uh because I'd spent you know six years in university and four years working at a non-tech I technically I was writing code, but I didn't know what I was doing. So I was like, I'm ten years late, I'm ten years behind. And I always uh there's this there's a scene from I think it was the first Star Wars or the one with Khan in it, uh the newer one with Chris Pine. You know, I mentioned uh sorry, sorry, it's Star Trek. You're gonna get I'm gonna just edit it so nobody will know I messed up. Uh but yeah, the the scene in Star Trek where they are like base jumping out of the spaceship and trying to land on some like tiny platform, and there's like three of them.

Star Trek (Clip)

Gentlemen, we're approaching the drop zone. You have one shot to land on that platform. You may have defenses, so pull your shoot as late as possible. Three, two, one. Remember the enterprise will be able to beat you back through. This is the charm at 5,000 meters.

Conor

4,000 meters, 3,000 meters, 3,000 meters, 3,000 meters, and uh that scene of like space jumping, I always felt like they space jumped, and then like I jumped 30 seconds afterwards, and so I was trying to as quickly as possible catch up with people. And then I remember telling this like analogy to Ben, and he was like, Yeah, you've got that all wrong. Like, sure, maybe you jumped out a little bit behind, but the rate that you were accelerating and consuming stuff, like most people aren't as curious and trying to learn everything. And so like you shot past them like a while ago, and like you're you think you're behind. Um, but like if you consume as many, you know, C videos online and whatnot, or whatever technology you're in. Um and it that reminds me of an Andrew Ng quote that he said that actually like it's actually quite easy to get ahead if you are willing to learn and and read and do the work. Like a lot of people they'll ask you, like, how do I get into X or how do I do this thing? And um there would like he would always, Andrew Ng would say, We had this big course that was like one of the biggest MOOCs of all time, and a hundred thousand people would start, and the number of people that would actually make it to the end is is very few. Um and I've I've heard that echoed. There's a guy, Jeremy Howard, he runs a fast.ai course, which is a free online machine learning data science thing, and he runs them, I think, uh, three or four times a year, and um, a few hundred people sign up and six will finish. And and his the his advice when people is just finish the course. It's it's free, it's not easy, it's a lot of work. Um, but this idea that yeah, that you're behind, anyways, you said that you know you're actually a part of the party. It's a it's just you you're there. It's not necessarily gonna be uh you know free to be, you know. Um but anyways, it's uh it's great advice. Anyways, I'll hand the mic back to you if you want to say one last thing to till the next time. I'm not sure. I mean it's the tail end of uh 2025, so I don't know what conferences I'm going to in 2026, but uh hopefully we'll be able to do this again in person. If not, Zoom's always a thing, so anyways, the final final word for you, and then maybe we'll go find a bite to eat or something or uh wander around. Yeah.

Sean Parent

I don't know that I have a final word, but uh uh uh yeah, I guess we're gonna live leave the cliffhanger on the Photoshop 4 story. Uh yeah, that's about it.

Conor

Alright, there's another month and a half's worth of content. Be sure to check these show notes either in your podcast app or at adspthepodcast.com for links to anything we mentioned in today's episode, as well as a link to a GitHub discussion where you can leave thoughts, comments, and questions. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day.

Bryce

Low quality, high quality, that is the tagline of our podcast.

Conor

It's not the tagline. Our tagline is chaos with sprinkles of information.