Sam Schillace: preference

Transcript context

…It's also different, I think, at a bigger company where you need to achieve something, versus I think as just an engineer out of college just playing around, like, go for it, right? It's just like, what's the worst that could happen? Even the early days of Writely, the very... I mean, we had a goal from the beginning. The beginning was like, "Can I write a word processor in a browser?" That was literally the problem statement, right? It was like, "I have content edible, I have Ajax or JavaScript. Can I put these together and something that feels like a word processor? Let's go do that." It's kind of half messing around with tech, but it's also half an actual goal. So I don't know. I like playing around with... I think a lot of the good product ideas, most of the good product ideas actually come up from engineering. So I think there's a lot to be said for, get familiar with tools, particularly weird esoteric combinations of tools can often be useful. If you understand or three things... At Google, I was one of only two people in the company who had the code readability, which is the right to check in code in this language, and both a backend language, which is the monitoring language, Org Mode, a middle tier language, which is Java, and a front language, which is JavaScript. No one else would do that full stack. I think it's useful to have that broad perspective sometimes. Sam, the Renaissance man of all languages.…

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