
Code Rush – The Beginnings of Netscape / Mozilla (2000) [video] - donflamenco
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y
======
chrissnell
Wow. I remember watching this fifteen years ago and seeing that young kid
(Stuart Parmenter) join Netscape right out of high school and thinking, "Don't
do it!". I, too, joined the industry early and by 2000, I'd pissed away the
first half of my twenties pulling all-nighters working at tech startups while
the rest of my friends were partying at college or backpacking around Europe.

Recently, I'd read something about Mozilla and wonder whatever happened to
that kid. Well, looks like he's all grown up now. I'm impressed to see that he
spent so many years with Mozilla. I wonder if he has any regrets at starting
so young.

[https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartparmenter](https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartparmenter)

~~~
nailer
I read about jwz in months old copies of Wired in the 90s and basically wanted
to be him. Then he left the tech industry because it was so shitty which made
me question that plan.

~~~
tomphoolery
So then he joined an arguably much shittier industry?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_Lounge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_Lounge)

No matter how shitty either industry is, I'd much rather own a nightclub and
have my entire life be about the music than work in tech at all.

------
nchelluri
That was really cool. Thanks for posting.

I think like a lot of you I probably can't watch a documentary without feeling
"omg that guy was biased!" but I felt like they were pretty even-handed here.

    
    
      - long hours
      - stock options are a lottery, a stupid tax
        - "and I won the lottery"
      - the countdown timer at the open-source launch, the last minute typo of domain name, the person who observed it and directed the fix - that was awesome
      - the realistic portrayal of burnout and long hours
      - the sale to the giant evil internet corporation
      - the original reply to jwz's "AOL is buying us and here's why its not so bad" mozilla.org post
    

I use Mozilla (Firefox) as my "daily driver". At work I recently had to switch
to Chrome because they offer a USB/serial device API through extensions. If
Firefox did too I'd maybe work overtime to port that shit over because I love
Mozilla. What an organization.

I feel bad because these guys did waste a bunch of their time building a
fucking web browser. But maybe, just maybe, the web would suck a lot less
without mozilla.org and their free codebase. And then, I did start to get the
idea, "hmmm, maybe it'd be good to write HTTP again... this time with sessions
baked in..." and wander off into "Can I implement that?" territory.

~~~
pjc50
If they hadn't written a web browser, the internet would have been the
internet of IE6 forever.

------
vezzy-fnord
"Yeah, my mom can use it. My mom can write optimizing compilers." (10:45)

Devastating comeback.

~~~
bootload
that's Michael Toy. Along with jz, easily the most insightful person in this
film ~
[http://toyblog.typepad.com/about.html](http://toyblog.typepad.com/about.html)
& [https://twitter.com/mtoy](https://twitter.com/mtoy)

remember Andy Baio released made this film viewable in 2008 and wrote about ~
[http://waxy.org/2008/06/code_rush/](http://waxy.org/2008/06/code_rush/)

------
untitledwiz
23:13 for a young Marc Andreessen writing down what presumably is Steve Jobs'
number.

------
hayksaakian
This is really good. Thank you for sharing.

As a younger person, this is a piece of history that was never taught.

~~~
ianremsen
I absolutely agree. When I watched this for the first time ~6 months ago it
was crazy how much of this relatable oh-so-familiar stuff was taking place
before I existed, the central date of March 31, 1998 being about 3 months
before I was born. Programmers these days stand on the shoulders of giants,
most of them still living and breathing. And it is a priceless gift that it is
so much easier to learn this craft when you're starting out. It is a huge
mistake to be the smartest person in a room, so I seek out people who floor
me, people who are good at what I want to be good at. The Internet, built by
our heroes, allow us young programmers to talk to our heroes as if they were
people, and I suppose that helps us to discover that that's all they are.

Edit: If you enjoyed this, another personal-story-tinged entertaining-but-
technical diamond I can recommend is a book about id Software, Masters of
Doom.

~~~
csixty4
> And it is a priceless gift that it is so much easier to learn this craft
> when you're starting out.

It truly is. I started my career in July, 1999 and even though there was an
open source movement, it was nothing like there is today. Young people can
post code up on Github and even participate in huge open source projects that
affect millions of people.

Teach each other. Learn from each other. Grow together, and make the world
more awesome than you found it.

------
mwcampbell
This documentary glorifies the insane practice of working unreasonably long
hours to meet a self-imposed deadline. What bad things would have happened if
the Mozilla release date had just been pushed back? Probably nothing. And
maybe the quality of that initial release would have been better, and the
people working on it wouldn't be burnt out afterward.

~~~
asveikau
The cynicism that jwz wrote with in this time period about what it's like for
young people working in tech was influential on me. I do believe it also comes
through in some of his segments in the film.

------
tlrobinson
A classic. I think I'll watch it again tonight...

~~~
jd3
agreed. I can't believe I had never seen this until a few months ago. Speaking
of great tech documentaries, just got done with Jason Scott's BBS documentary,
which was fantastic.

------
mrpippy
Look closely and you'll see Don Melton ("Gramps") who was responsible for the
Mac port at the time, then went to Eazel, then to Apple where he managed
Safari from its creation. He's now retired from Apple and does some
entertaining podcasts and speaking.

~~~
bengoodger
Gramps was my first manager @ Netscape when I was hired after contributing
patches through Mozilla. He is wickedly funny as were a lot of the rest of the
people that worked there. One of these days I need to write down some of my
recollections of that time.

------
cdevroe
Just FYI for everyone... Andy Baio created a fully annotated version of this
documentary on Viddler
[http://www.viddler.com/v/90571b61](http://www.viddler.com/v/90571b61)

------
Gladdyu
The history of Netscape, part of this is also very well described in Ben
Horowitz's book, 'the hard thing about hard things'.

------
geniium
Nice! Thanks for sharing!

------
superlupo
I got eye cancer after one second from the broken de-interlacing, but thanks
nonetheless.

------
anon3_
It Mozilla on an upswing or a decline since the Brendan Eich / Firefox OS
stuff happened?

They're kind of shifting more from technology into politics. I heard they were
cutting employees and divisions a lot.

I know former employees have to sign a waiver not to talk about their layoff,
but why hasn't Mozilla's layoffs gotten any press, but startups do?

[http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Mozilla-
Reviews-E19129.htm](http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Mozilla-
Reviews-E19129.htm) gives a clue.

~~~
frozenport
FF users have almost halved over the last 2 years, despite what feels like
solid technology - I wonder what the folks at Opera Software think?

[http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2015/07/firefox-...](http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2015/07/firefox-
share-over-the-last-two-years-100595221-primary.idge.jpeg)

~~~
cryptoz
> FF users have almost halved over the last 2 years,

That's not what your linked chart shows. First, the chart is a % market share,
not raw user counts. Second, ~18% down to ~13% isn't really "almost half"
anyway.

~~~
anon3_
Yeah but significant still. 27.7% of their pie disappeared.

Recent versions of Firefox have introduced third party plugins (like pocket).

After the Eich thing, they lost the "hacker" cred and their talent was pretty
easy much poached. Further, the concept of merit - overlooking the political
in lieu of skill / talent - is no longer a core value of the organization. [1]

Recruiters were all over linkedin and taking away the best talent left and
right.

[1] [http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6688](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6688)

~~~
lern_too_spel
That explains it. The reason you think Mozilla is shifting from technology
into politics is that you've been reading ESR's lunatic ravings.

~~~
angersock
You don't have to read any of the political culture ranting of ESR (and you
probably shouldn't unless you're masochistic) to have seen that Eich was
railroaded and screwed and witch-hunted pretty hard.

It seems very reasonable to interpret that whole situation as Mozilla
acknowledging the importance of politics over technical leadership--fair or
not, when you broadcast your realpolitik that hard, you're gonna lose people.

~~~
anon3_
> when you broadcast your realpolitik that hard, you're gonna lose people.

Hacker culture may not necessarily be aligned with Eich's personal views /
situations. But crucial underlying concept is ignoring nebulous things like
that. So taking action / reforms based off the premise feels like a
Chesteron's fence [1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence)

