That guy in Nebraska

A surprisingly large amount of tech (by impact, if not volume) started off as hobby projects, or "quick scripts", that then suddenly became big.

This meme has been done to death over the years, after XKCD published it:

I’ve been thinking about this a bit. I just sent a message to my cofounder on Slack about a tool that someone had posted on a WhatsApp group I’m on. And I tagged it as “likely to be a hobby project, but might come of use sometime”.

I’m reminded of another conversation, when I was working with a UK based company a long time ago. There was some sentiment analysis model that someone there had built, and soon people started building complicated algorithms on top of that. Other people started taking the outputs of these algorithms seriously.

And one guy never tired of saying “disregard the sentiment model. It was built during one fucking lunch break”! People disregarded this statement instead.

It’s similar to some model I had built in my last job. I had done some analysis, put really nice graphs around it, and sent it around. The graphs had the intended effect, and people started taking this model rathe seriously.

A couple of months later, I found that this analysis had been based on bad data, and I tried to recant it. To no avail. The beautiful graphs had been imprinted in everyone’s heads!

It is common to overestimate the amount of effort that went into creating something - this is the upshot of effort and reward being uncorrelated. Someone would have built something quickly, or as a hobby. And then it gets picked up, and people start using it. Sometimes it can blow up, and lots of people can start using it, and using it for important stuff.

A few years ago I remember reading this book about open source. I’ve forgotten the name, but remember that the author was then called “Nadia Eghbal” (she has changed her name now). OK found it. One of the things she discusses in that is about how in open source projects, the maintainers end up doing an insane amount of work, even though they’re not really getting paid for it.

Maybe a lot of them start off as hobby programmers who quickly rustled up something that suddenly became big, and big things got built based off that?

Like the guy in Nebraska.