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**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, why? |
**Jerod Santo:** What was so weird about it? |
**Steve Yegge:** Why would you make a perfectly good RPC call, like a high-performance, binary call over some fat text protocol? We had performance drilled into us. Amazon was always the victim of scaling, because we were always growing so fast... So we were always crushed under the load. And it was like "Hey, let's tr... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[10:02\] Oh, I do, yes. |
**Steve Yegge:** REST was really cool, but everyone's like "No, SOAP, because we were all stuck in our old object-oriented --" |
**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna say, why didn't anybody like SOAP? Most people were like "Ah, SOAP..." |
**Steve Yegge:** No, but there was a time when SOAP was the thing. |
**Jerod Santo:** Alright, so strong man's SOAP. Why was it cool? Give it the best argument for why SOAP was good. |
**Steve Yegge:** It was familiar, right? It didn't require you to learn anything new. It was just -- it was sort of like CORBA, or any of these other ORM layers, or whatever they were, these Pub/Sub sort of systems... And it was object-oriented, and that's kind of what everybody was doing back then. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. And it was XML, right? I mean, it was a bunch of XML. |
**Steve Yegge:** I'm surprised it didn't have XML and inheritance. \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Okay... So people were liking SOAP... I think it was familiar. That's why we stick with a lot of things, because that's what we know... And REST was the new hotness... But this text protocol - not only unfamiliar, but not-performant with regards to the things that you're saying. So what were the ... |
**Steve Yegge:** Well, I mean, for starters - and I've saying this for 35 years, and I will continue saying it until I'm dead... And then I'll keep saying it; I'll come back from the grave and I'll haunt you with it... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, my goodness... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You're right I will. |
**Steve Yegge:** Yeah... Which is that text is king. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Steve Yegge:** And binary formats are wonderful, and have their purpose, and we use them all the time, but text is the ultimately flexible, ultimately debuggable, human-readable... It's a it's a currency. And we're seeing that even more now with large language models, right? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure. Yeah. |
**Steve Yegge:** But even back then, there was two schools of thought. One was performance is everything, and put the burden on the backs of the engineers to figure out how those bits work. Right? I mean, seriously, we had people at Amazon -- I'm sorry, you guys are gonna get me ranting... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\] Too late. |
**Jerod Santo:** No, that's what we're trying to do. This is our goal. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Go! |
**Steve Yegge:** No, I'm saving it... But I'm sure I'll really get going here in a bit... But there were guys at Amazon who were like "Don't ever use regular expressions, because they're slow!" And then they would write a 2,500-line C++ crappy parser that was actually slower... Or it didn't matter; I mean they had wast... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Performance was not king. |
**Steve Yegge:** It's not. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's important, but not king. |
**Steve Yegge:** It's not king. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** This should inform us though that - we look at things like SOAP, or REST, and this argument, gRPC over a binary protocol versus a text protocol - you can look at that too and juxtapose that to now, where people are naysaying the AI direction we're taking... Basically, just pushing down future; let's... |
**Steve Yegge:** 100%. I even saw a comment on Hacker News in a discussion about LLMs... It might have been, actually, after my first cheating post... And somebody said, "I can't wait for all this LLM stuff to just go away, so we can all just go back to doing our jobs." I mean, it was almost like -- I couldn't have wri... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[13:58\] No... Well, it's going somewhere, but away is not the direction that it's going. Yeah, it's amazing how disparate the reactions are to it. We just had a -- we play a silly game on our JS Party podcast, it's like Family Feud. It's called Frontend Feud. And so we survey the audience and we ask ... |
**Steve Yegge:** Interesting question. Interesting question. You know, I wish that I could answer that, but AWS didn't really get kicked off until sort of when I left Amazon, in 2005. So I'm actually older than AWS... |
**Jerod Santo:** Wow... Okay. |
**Steve Yegge:** And it's funny, because for a lot of people, AWS was, of course, part of the fabric of the universe. But I can tell you that at the time that I left -- I mean, Amazon was, of course, a company that was just absolutely filled with opinions, but there was only one opinion that really mattered... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Okay... |
**Steve Yegge:** Any guesses whose it was? |
**Jerod Santo:** Right... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** This story you told that was pretty interesting, speaking about Jeff, and I guess a semi-dovetail from AWS, was that -- "A good day with Jeff", that post, I was really enjoying that. I didn't get to read every single note in it; I was looking for the bad guy moments... But one, you're a great writer... |
**Jerod Santo:** For sure. Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** But then this story, all the details of how you got to this meeting, and it's back in like the boathouse area, and all the idiosyncrasies of that... Can you share just like a little bit of that, some of that story? |
**Steve Yegge:** Oh, tell the story? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Not the whole thing, but a version of like this first meeting Jeff, and this figure that we all know so well, but you've met in-person, and got to sort of see that opinion live. |
**Steve Yegge:** I'll tell you a story I've never written down before. You guys can get the scoop. How's that? |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, nice. Yeah, we'll take it. |
**Steve Yegge:** This story was cool, but you can read about it. It was just basically we all went to Jeff's boathouse to talk about AI back in like '03... And it was premature, but it was a pretty fun story. |
**Jerod Santo:** Go read it. |
**Steve Yegge:** But there was another meeting with Jeff that -- it's a story I do love to tell, and I've never had the opportunity to write it down... It was my first meeting with Jeff, actually. And I was a technical program manager. It was in my first year at Amazon. So this would have been '99... Because I joined i... |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay... Scary. |
**Steve Yegge:** "Stay on your knees, keep your forehead to the ground", all that. |
**Jerod Santo:** Speak when spoken to, yeah. |
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