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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

Project Code Rush

Code Rush is a documentary following the lives of a group of Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley. It covers Netscape's last year as an independent company, from their announcement of the Mozilla open source project until their acquisition by AOL. It particularly focuses on the last minute rush to make the Mozilla source code ready for release by the deadline of March 31 1998, and the impact on the engineers' lives and families as they attempt to save the company from ruin.

Code Rush, a one-hour glimpse into Netscape Communications in 1998, just as they open source their browser: https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

I get very tired whenever I watch it for some reason.

⬐ chubot

I randomly re-watched it a month or 2 ago and still liked it. It resonated.

It probably helps that I worked in Mountain View about 10 years later. It felt very familiar, and the ideas and people were still relevant and reverberating

Richard Stallman still looks like one to me :), I know its from late Internet era, but see following

https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y?t=705

⬐ chrsig

richard stallman has always operated out of cambridge, ma afaik

Even more context:

Project Code Rush - The Beginnings of Netscape / Mozilla Documentary [1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

⬐ dboreham

I'm just behind the camera at 1:48

That's in Code Rush:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y&t=656s

It has something to do with the 1990's dot-com culture, like the original Netscape was somehow more pure than what came after, and this causes him to view modern inheritors like YC with a jaundiced eye.

You can watch this if you have an hour.

https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

There's a wide community of people feeling just like you, assembling in "Maker communities", as they call it.

Good entry points are the IndieHackers podcast, and conferences like MicroConf (watch their conference talk recordings here, especially Patrick McKenzie's aka patio11 [0])

The basic idea is to create a sustainable job you love for yourself, the people that depend on you, and many others. The antithesis of "Our incredible journey", aka VC sellout.

Once you've done this, you can do whatever you want. Build a game company. Pursue academia [1]. Join the demoscene, tour the world, join demo party competitions and write sick 64k intros. Commit to open source and help the Haiku project. Hang around at your local hacker space and help create an independend mesh-based ISP.

I know exactly what you're talking about. I watched the Netscape documentary "Project Code Rush" [2] with Jamie Zawinski and loved the spirit and the feeling of doing something important. It feels like it's in such a stark contrast to many people's reality, pushing JIRA tickets in a toxic AdTech startup. However, I think it's an illusion. There never was a "golden age", and people simply forget that bullshit jobs always existed, you just don't see domcumentaries of them, nobody would watch them. For me, what helped me was realizing that the world, or the "industry" doesn't owe me anything, and I'm completely on my own, and if I want to do something meaningful, well, I'll have to create my own sustainable job to support myself and my loved ones.

There's a longer writeup by Alex Hillmann (who runs "Stacking the Bricks", with Amy Hoy) here [3], I'm just scratching the surface of the basic idea here.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHoBKQDRkJcOY2BO47q5Ruw/vid...

[1] Side note: academia seems mostly only broken in the US at the moment. In the rest of the world, it seems just fine - apart from the usual problems academia inherently has, but at least you can pursue an academic career without accumulating debt here in Europe. If you feel like it, why not move?

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

[3] https://dangerouslyawesome.com/10k-independents-project

⬐ burntoutfire

> Netscape documentary "Project Code Rush"

What is immediately striking about this documentary is how unhealthy everyone there is looking. Just a ton of serious obesity, unhealthy skin in relatively young people.

Not parent, but I thought it were a TV stream that filmed Cloudflare teams solving problems. Similar to the documentary[1] "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks" where they show the life of interns developing an actual product at Fog Creek, the first paying customer, bug fixes, etc.

I appreciated that one, as I did "Code Rush"[3], an embedded documentary following people at Netscape in 1998, even shows the moment Jamie Zawinski bringing the source code and uploading it, or moments where they needed Apple to greenlight using proprietary code, trying to reach Steve Jobs, and ending up implementing it.

Another one I liked was "Downloaded", a documentary about Napster with the main people (Sean Fanning, Sean Parker, Ron Conway, etc.)[4]

PS: Since you're here, I was unable to log to my CloudFlare account for more than a week, reset my password an everything, but always couldn't log in until a couple of days ago. I would have wanted to see a video on the background of the issue and how it was resolved : )

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark%27d:_12_Weeks_with_Ge...

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

[4]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2033981/

⬐ eastdakota

That's an interesting idea. Will suggest to the programming team. Probably tricky while we're all working from home. But… maybe in the future.

A mini version of that is a show that John Graham-Cumming, our CTO, is going to be hosting weekly:

https://cloudflare.tv/schedule/3RbW4iJZAbfN9OetUovuQ2

"Join Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming as he interviews Cloudflare engineers and they discuss a 'war story' of a problem that needed to be solved — and how they did it."

⬐ lstamour

That does sound interesting, but the link says it streams 6:30-7am. (I presume that’s a local time for my time zone?)

Any chance it will show up as a podcast or on YouTube, or available to watch at another time?

⬐ eastdakota

John is based in Lisbon, so it’s scheduled for his work hours. The live version, which will allow for the audience to interact and ask questions, will be during that time. I’d imagine many of those sessions will make it into our Best Of repository or be played in a recorded version at different times during the week.

⬐ jgrahamc

I've asked teams in the US offices to volunteer people to come on the show. I imagine that once we get through the first week of this we'll add another Story Time slot so I can talk to people in California easily.

⬐ FearNotDaniel

Glad to see I'm not the only one actually scratching my head over time zones. It's a genius move to auto display times in the local user's zone but would be super helpful to state that fact somewhere otherwise I'm going to shrug and assume they're probably PDT or EDT and start doing mental arithmetic in my head while worrying I might have got the daylight savings wrong at either end. Bonus points for telling me what time zone you think I'm in... I have worked for companies that proxy all traffic through a different country, leading to not only a ton of dutch-language banner ads but timezone confusion to boot.

> Does anyone can tell anything positive about her?

She's the reason Mozilla exists today as an independent, non-profit organization.

On March 31, 1998 Netscape allowed the Mozilla code base to be open sourced under the Mozilla Project. [1][2] This was the result of an intensive year-long effort to

(1) remove proprietary source code that couldn't be open-sourced,

(2) release the source code under a brand new license called the Mozilla Public License. This license was written principally by Mitchell Baker whose formal education is in law, with input from ESR, Linus Torvalds, VA Research, etc. [3]

On July 14, 2003 AOL (which had acquired Netscape earlier) closed down the Netscape division and laid off almost everyone there, including Mitchell Baker. That very day Mitch Kapor [4] stepped in with funding and advice to help Baker and a core team of total 10 employees set up the Mozilla Foundation in an office in Mountain View that is today occupied by the Khan Academy. [5]

Wikipedia [6] has a good summary of her career.

The documentary Code Rush is required viewing, IMHO, to capture some of the excitement of that era. [7][8] Bonus points for spotting JWZ. :-)

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/netscape-sets-source-code-free/

[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/03/31/mozilla-turns-twent...

[3] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch11.html

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Kapor

[5] https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2003/07/mozilla-org-announces...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Rush

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

> and worked on a few important pieces of software before becoming a bar owner instead.

Fun documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

⬐ pengaru

Look at all those offices and spacious high-walled cubicles, productivity nirvana!

I really recommend the 2000 documentary Code Rush[1] about Netscape's open sourcing of the browser and acquisition by AOL. It doesn't give any major insights into the industry, but does give a glimpse of what the culture was like back then.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

It was Netscape in 1999 he got flown out. Documented in Code Rush, which is an awesome documentary for anyone interested in the history of the Web:

https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y?t=3037

"The PayPal Wars". Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia

"Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days"

"Project Code Rush", a 1h documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y)

⬐ yesimapro

The PayPal Wars looks like my next read... Recently, I have been enamored by the Mafia - Thanks !

jwz predicted it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y&t=53m36s

There's a good Netscape documentary filmed during their last year leading up to the acquisition. When they were working to get the Mozilla source code released.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

⬐ pmoriarty

My favorite quote from that documentary, about people who work in tech:

"This is a monk-like existence. There are very few women in these societies. These are male societies. They are secret societies. They function very much like the Masons or some street gang."

⬐ vxNsr

at 53:30 one of the engineers says "We're at the beginning of an industry and who knows where that industry's gonna go? This could all turn into television again. It could be controlled by a small number of companies who decide what we see and hear. And there's a lot of precedent for that."

Sounds pretty prescient considering current events.

⬐ hef19898

I somehow have the suspicion that the guy is proud of his insight and disappointed to be right at the same time.

⬐ DINKDINK

>one of the engineers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

There's lots of old-school people in that documentary. Brewster Kahle

⬐ vxNsr

I figured all these guys/girl are probably a big deal now but I don't know anything about SV culture or history.

⬐ pablasso

If you like this kind of content I heavily recommend Halt and Catch Fire. It's fiction on the personal computing business of the 80s, online gaming/communities and the race for search engines and browsers in the 90s . It makes a lot of nudges to current industry leaders.

⬐ IntelMiner

Is there anywhere to get an HD Box Set of that show yet?

Season 1 came out on Blu Ray in the US

Season 2 came out on Blu Ray in the EU (by some 3rd party company, apparently?)

Seasons 3 and 4 however are completely absent from any high quality physical media releases

⬐ elvinyung

HaCF is one of my favorite shows! It's not very technically accurate, but it's still really good at portraying the social aspects of being a technological optimist at the dawn of the age of personal computing and the web.

⬐ elvinyung

I would also suggest Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg as a kind-of sequel to this documentary. In the early 2000s, a lot of Netscape people (including a lot of people depicted here like Michael Toy, but notably not JWZ) joined the Open Source Applications Foundation, and the book is essentially about their attempts to build the Chandler information organizer.

⬐ statictype

And more importantly it’s failures. Its a great book and has great commentary on the state of the industry at that time

⬐ max_likelihood

I really enjoyed this documentary. It's where I learned the term "Zarro Boogs". At one point jwz (Jamie Zawinski) makes a comment which essentially foreshadows net neutrality. I was also blown away by Stuart Parmenter contributing to the code base at age 16!

Not a book, but view «Project Code Rush»

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

News like this makes me think back to this[0] statement by jwz from the Netscape/Mozilla documentary "Code Rush"

[0]:https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y?t=53m35s

Fascinating read. Thank you for this. Reminds me of a piece Jamie Zawinski did a few years ago[0][1] regarding a similar issue relating to VC's and "your one and only youth." [2]

[0]: https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html

[1]: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-s...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

⬐ jd3

(if anyone is interested, OPs post was flagged for a few hours then subsequently unflagged. take this as you will.)

⬐ dang

The post was flagged by users and vouched for by other users. I think a moderator unkilled it at one point, but other than that no one here has touched it (or read it).

⬐ 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.

⬐ robin_reala

The current state of WebUSB in Firefox: a few patches, nothing really new since late 2014. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674718

⬐ 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 & https://twitter.com/mtoy

remember Andy Baio released made this film viewable in 2008 and wrote about ~ 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.

⬐ osullivj

Yes it is a huge mistake. Seek to be a learner, not a teacher!

⬐ 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.

⬐ ianremsen

It doesn't glorify it, it clearly shows the effect such behavior has on one's personal/family life, and how it can all be in vain anyway. It's clearly a crunch-is-problematic message, if not an anti-crunch message.

⬐ jcastro

The code mentioned in the documentary was thrown away at a later and they started over from scratch anyway didn't they?

⬐ 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.

⬐ None

None

⬐ cdevroe

Just FYI for everyone... Andy Baio created a fully annotated version of this documentary on Viddler 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 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-...

⬐ 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

⬐ None

None

⬐ 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

⬐ 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

⬐ 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.

⬐ csixty4

I wrote jwz a fan email back then because I was afraid I'd have to give up who I am to work in computers. I'm not much of a goth anymore, but it was exciting to see someone like me in such a prominent position.

⬐ tomphoolery

So then he joined an arguably much shittier industry? 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.

⬐ hockeybias

Sounds sorta like tech is not for you.

⬐ stuartparmenter

No regrets at all. I've been very fortunate to work with many amazing people throughout my career and have learned more than I could have ever imagined back then. The tech world is always evolving and never boring. Those early years, including all the ups and downs of the industry taught me things that would be very difficult to learn these days.

People should step back and think about all the things they do in browsers today. Without the hard work of thousands of people from Netscape and Mozilla, you probably wouldn't be doing most of those things. I'm proud to have been able to play a small role in that.

There was a short documentary made about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y