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code writing What makes it seem to have this grip

especially on the people who practice it

and Theres lots

think its part problem-solving part-artistic expression certainly //

of people who are mechanical and theres not much creative stuff going on in what
very

theyre doing think were -- and what they do is extremely important right Theyre the

people who run the banks and make sure that when go put my ATM in it works We can

take little more risk in what we do and how we do things because what were doing is not

life-critical Its used in those applications and certainly in

my area its something we have

to worry about but think in sort of area that were in -- little more on the leading edge of

some of the technologies like you know the Internet and security --theres more room

for creativity think thats one of the things we like is problem-solving coming up with

totally new ways of doing things even looking around at things that exist
you know either

out in the world or within our company and figuring out new ways to put them together to

cause new and different things to happen Thats one of things that think am good at is

looking around at the different technologies the company has available and figuring out

new ways to apply them that people just havent thought of before that solve the problem

in unique way So for mel think thats one of the things Im good at that get lot of

satisfaction out of and -- for Netscape think many of the people who were here early on

at Netscape had not worked on mass-market software before Theres group obviously

University of fllinois whove done Mosaic which was more mass-market than what

lot of us had done and you know worked at SGI that was the most mass market that

had done and then it was like 50000 engineers and maybe like movie artists or something

were using my software Thats little different now when run people in stores or you

know am in line at Taco Bell at two in the morning and the

guy sees the ad on my shirt

and is like Youre from Netscape oh yeah Netscape is cool And so just something

everyone knows and everyone uses has some satisfaction just by itself and especially

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when it was new to us and new to the world it was really exciting then So thats one

aspect of it too that think was new for most people who were working here 0.3
c5 C1

Is it harder to create software for the masses than it is for engineers

So of the problems are different We obviously have to worry lot about making

things easy to use Engineers like things to be easy to use just as much as everybody else

but theyre put up with them them

will to not being as to use if
easy it
ultimately helps get

their job done If we put something out there that would just befuddle the normal person

and thats problem we have in security is how to make it

easy --more so than in other

parts of the product -- the general public will just not know what to do with it And theyre

not gonna figure it out if its not easy So thats think the Theres also
biggest challenge

think an issue of reliability Back when was at SGI years ago there was this idea that

performance is more important than robustness and if something crashed once in while

that was fine because it was the fastest thing in the world and people were willing to put

up with those warts to get it two months earlier The same thing doesnt apply anymore to

us If it crashes thats just unacceptable Those are the main differences oS 31 2.3
.1

To follow this will you go back to architecting security issues

No lam definitely interested and Ive had--I sort of crossed paths with the free-

source world in the past and think its good thing My stuff still has to work with

Communicator in getting -- even though we have to take it out by necessity from the free

source we still want our stuff to be able to work with it so doing lot of this modularity

you for things to get the better interfaces for people to add stuff think is gonna be

The 3-31 deadline what happens

goof actually after that is
gonna be the thing that drives

us fil1y-to modularity because its gonna be to without with that

impossible manage it

many people working on things If someone wants to add feature theyre gonna need to

have clean white added or getting all those features from hundreds of people together

in one place is
gonna be an impossible job When each piece has to integrate with each

other piece -- thatll never happen So its by necessity Weve known that we needed that

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for ourselves just it hadnt become enough of pain for us that we were forced to do it and

now were basically forced to do it

Could you explain what modularity is and why its important and

why it hasnt happened What happened to keep it from happening

Its. basically the different pieces of our code that different features or
represent

different areas of functionality and how they conmuinicate to each other And if theres a..

its like the fact that we have modular phone jacks and every phone can plug into the same

though the phones are designed by different and they have different
people
4iiackLeven

-- some have speed-dial and some put the guy on hold or whatever -- the fact
\thnctionality

that theres one interface and

they can we need
is into its
all plug similar-- similar

framework so that people can plug in new features into our thing without coordinate
having

-- It
mostly has to do with how to do it without having lot of coordination the
b59use
more people you have the coordination problem just gets exponentially The reason
hardfr

that weve been able to get away without doing it so far is that its been genelty

perceived that the pain of doing it has been more than the gain Now that were trying to

these people out on the Internet no longer gonna be the case

all
leverage its You want

somebody to come in add new feature that we never had heard of or thought of without

having to
go change bunch of code in bunch off other places Thats really the main

goal

There massive cleaning and refining of the base..

w95je

Right Theres places now where are sort of hard-coded

ri4kt things to happen

certain
way and feees sort of intertwine without really clean interface So its mostly just

looking at how the pieces fit together and defining sort of crisp interfaces -- the modular

phone jack is interface in its got bunch of wires that could hook
crisp you plug it

together and its simple you had things and cross these
really If to plug in five different

wires this way and all that when you to plug in phone that obviously wouldnt
izted

work Its the same kind of thing right when the free
initially source out
Ihink goes

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therell be quiet period when out in the world sort of catchup to where we are as
people

far as understanding it
Hopefully in that time people inside Netscape who can use some of

that time to get these modular interfaces in new

places before the deluge of features starts

coming in Because otherwise its..

aZ.-
Ii

So To be continued Thanks very much Appreciate it

Sure

__VW
On Monday you and Lloyd were engaged in
very interesting

question about how you track fixes to the tree in Netscape and the outside

world and what implications that had for managing the Could
process you

put that into some context and explain what that was about

So whats going on were about hand off

is to copy of the source Source is

Jmost
your design-pattern for the product Now the source is really being broken into two

pieces One is going to be the public piece which provides basic browser and thats what

people what and then thems other pieces that we cant release such as Java because of

third-party restrictions so well call those private The truth is were not allowed to
just

release them Anyway were hand

going to off
copy of this public release to Mozilla.org

and theyre going to distribute it Now the interesting question is what do we do on the

next day after that Our strong desire use our real design
is to that as plan but as it

currently stands we have copy of that inside of our system and he has copy of that over

on Mozilla.org Which one is the official one to use The me

scary thing for -- describe

myself as pessimist or worry-wan -- is that we have here between the two

duplication

copies and when that happens they get out of sync and you spend lot of time spinning

your wheels So was asking him Please dont Lets make

put up your copy yet this the

official for just few more weeks as we recover Turns out making this build
portion

separately making it the whole design of car with these just simply being add-ons

caused us to break the connection between two things

the so this is really broken right

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now as far we are concerned My view is that want to get it all put back together and fixed

and then gently with it all working pulled into two pieces His answer is Listen with

Mozilla.org wanna be able to service people on the outside Im just gonna take the

snapshot and start with it The am for

going controversy is pushing my perceptive to try

and make easier for us to transition were

again with these cars
it
guess the analogy is

just shipping copies of an engine pictures of an engine and while that we broke the
doing

transmission and now Id prefer to stay in the

garage right there get the transmission

working then bring it over to the engine then carefully remove the engine and make
shop

it official And his answer is No we have copy of the engine just come on over here

and try building transmission around it And Im little concerned thats harder job then

starting with an almost working system And so theres controversy In these areas

stakes in terms of gon the

wJa design can cause you two weeks four

weeks month two months In our industry that can be an awful lot Not that but
only

these subtle design decisions its almost like decision when youre repairing your car

Should you work outside or should work and

in the garage Well listen if it starts raining

youre half-way through man do you spin your wheels tremendously trying to get things

out of the rain And its that sort of consideration about what will cause to waste time
you

thats big concern for me Im just trying to make people more efficient know theyll be

happier if it works out and theyll be upset and Im trying to imagine problems And right

now can see problem And the hard part is to convince someone else who is looking up

at the sky and saying No its not gonna rain We can get this whole thing done Mdl am

saying How many time we started work on car and couldnt get done by sunset
to try to

had the next day and

you dont know what tomorrows
to finish --
weather is
gonna be

like So theres Weinstein

controversy Jeff is also arguing from different
perspective--

he is worried about and again his bit as

crypto portion is little
they say all over the floor

and hed like to see it come back more gracefully From Lloyds
together point of view its

Hey got my tarball -- its what were calling this little

piece --
got my pile
of stuff

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dont need to
worry about that thats inconsequential Im saying Hey you know be

little bit reasonable its no big deal for to wait to wait while but.. its an
you interesting

argument In the end whichever way we go have to support the decision and have to

see what can do to advance it but at this in time am still and youll see me
point arguing

arguing over the next of days with other people

probably couple trying to get my way but

again its really trying to help the world as see it and so youll see other people

involved Its an
in it interesting subtlety tj
What is his and your -- if can paraphrase -- youre siding on taking

more conservative approach to this issue What is Lloyds know

you

probably equally reasonable point of view What is motivating him to get

this snapshot out there even though parts of it arent functional OLt IS 2t 27
mWell the idea is his snapshot will be functional and the fact that these other pieces

arent functional his view is Hey know where wanna be And we both sort of agree

we want to have his snapshot be the official snapshot our system be just add-ons and we

always work with them together Its just that were not there now And he says hey

well there we And

get faster if just cut bait go there and itll happen refer to it as the

sword of Damocles dont like to make it so that on myself to

put pressure cause myself

to move forward It adds extra tension From Its wanna

just his perspective hey get

there fast ff1 set up the that the live

systems only way youll is by getting this straight

know youll get it

straight So hes afraid that am not being whole-hearted and honest

The truth is its not really dishonest claim Hes The drive itself
just system will
sayin

naturally as fast as possible but yet you know one to learn run marathon
way to is put

person 26 miles out into the desert and say Theres this bomb on back thatll off
your go

in certain of time
length if
you dont get into town That 11 motivate you to get in but

theres chance youll be blown

certain
up And some people will
say That motivation

thatll ensure.. And am saying dont need this bomb on my back dont need to find

out the hard Id

way if theres gonna be an explosion rather
say am motivated will do

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it but dont set it

up so that if dont succeed fully get burnt really badly But its

understandable that he wants motivation He just says Oh its not marathon You just

have go one mile and gave you 24 hours So whats

to the problem Youll make it And

say theres always these little

surprises you sprain an ankle you find out its one mile

but theres
you have by You
seventy-five in the road there that build
gap to bridge

dont know all the pieces Time and again Ive learned the hard the years to
way through

$mlittleinoraconservaflve but that

still aggressii$ever setting it
up so if fail --

always try to set it

up so that if fail have fall-back that carries me forward. Some

other people who are more aggressive at the extreme its not Lloyd but Ill call them

chronic No
gamblers-- are willing to just say lets roll the dice completely And find

can get 99% of the distance consistently this

way So its yeah Ive become older more

conservative -- well you become conservative if you mess up enough times in life that
you

find all the

ways you can mess up and then you believe that messing up is more of part of

life..

There seems to this discussion between the two of two

you poses

interesting sides in the software where

development one is this getting it

right the first time versus and there

incrementalism are obviously

arguments -- there to be arguments for both that

appear -- Is fair way to

describe the bifurcated mind of the software developer world Does it kind

of line up between you one side and Lloyd on the other throughout this

universe

Well theres this old. its called the Mythical Man Month where they talk about

Be ready to throw the first one away and all these plans Thats of it but think the
part

realization is that its just and that its harder just to go and get
bigger project it
right

When you come through school you constantly have very small projects and you really

can the whole thing each time and

get right you hand it all in and youre done In very big

theres
projects so many uncertainties that
you have to deal with and so theres

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from school where you write the whole block

transition there clean --
are projects you go

of code and then you can de-bug it -- to you know building skyscraper where you got

to be methodical you can longer just slap up some walls and then say Oh yeah we didnt

reinforce it
enough put up some extra plywood Theres change as you get into bigger

system and this transition is little bit what you see in In small
computer programmers

projects its fine to say Lets just do the whole thing and its no problem Its the bigger

ones that cause problems And then theres always the argument when youre youthful Big

doesnt seem that big Ive jumped higher skyscrapers than that So theres this interesting

argument where he is saying It really isnt that big we can really do this this is as
smalle
the sort of thing weve done And its question of judgment If he wins its wonderful

In fact you can see this already in Source 3-3-1 this delivery argued that we should

deliver incremental pieces because that the whole thing was gonna be
thought delivering

very difficult and if we didnt make it it was going to be significant failure whereas if

we delivered incrementally wed have some successes In the end although argued

strongly for that we actually didnt get out Mail and News and Java which starts to come

closer to my view of incremental release releasing as much as we can but then we had

already gone so far down the stream of setting the track that we could no
legal going

deliver And
longer things early so now were in position that if we dont make full

delivery wed be in lot of trouble The good news is the marathoner is now coming into

town with that bomb on his back and it looks like hes gonna make it and everything looks

wonderful They can say See told worked was

you it all It certainly close People were

nervous Nervousness was the motif of the day Have answered your question flY cj
Yeah He was saying.. Lloyd was talking about just this view that

you have to get it out there and youve covered the other side of that and

its very clear When youre in..

dont quite go back as far as youd like had discussions and have
certainly

sense of the feeling was going on

that It was certainly the case that when you wanted

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new feature in at the time you could probably craft that feature put the feature in make the

user-visible elements go in --
you know the buttons that would pop up -- and put all the

underpinnings in and get the whole thing and then show it to your buddy and say Hey

isnt this cool Can we we ship with it Now theres so when you
ship many complexities

go to add to feature were so we are supporting UNIX and

supporting many platforms

DOS and Mac that

you no longer have the expertise to handle putting all these items in

and then you have to be careful about putting it in an internationalized version so the text

has to be in
expressible multiple languages Then you have to pay attention to the fact that

them are 20 other features and this might be more similar to feature than you realize and

hence it should be closer to that feature and again where it in the system So there
appears

lot of complexity even you added

is
Finally if it there is nervousness about does it

work And theres whole another team thats doing the testing In the old days you

would find extra time add

just little feature put it
in do the extra testing of the final

product --because it was small feature -- but now you have

relatively to worry about the

interaction of that feature and other features What happens if are Bookmarks If
you using

you are visiting complex site with Java at the same time as youre trying to use that

feature How do these things interact So now with this extra complexity you need other

You need some

people user interface people to be adjusting the interface for the Mac for

UNIX for DOS You need someone else who is

dealing with database these

underpinnings to tie into his system You need someone else to worry about making the

password entries that youre putting in secret so you have to talk to the crypto people

There is no one person to talk to And in the end it all has to be tested Now the bad news

is the testers dont have this on their radar as thing to be tested so you have to convince

them to test it and theyre gonna come and am booked in

say completely up fact did

all
my testing thought was done and am going on vacation So now the situation is

constantly complex vacation people get sick.. When you go to add feature if youre

feeling sick you go No Im not feeling well dont think Im gonna be able to get this

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in When there are 20 other people that

you have to get involved you can get 19 of them

involved only to go to the twentieth and realize that hes out for week on vacation or his

mother died Over the course of any project you have lot of.. within my group one

fellow had his grandmother die and off he went for three days It was sad event for him

but these are things that Mother

are very difficult to schedule fellow in my group is out

sick for three days now If these people were critical path arid if had no fallback theres

no way to recover from it So its much more difficult with so many people involved In

this case we had legal had to provide us license -- were concerned about incredible..

Early on in the system when youre producing software theres no one looking over your

shoulder no one to question what you do Now as we go to ship product we have to

look back and see what contracts do we have that have implications as to of this
delivery

product We have to worry about litigation where gee somebodys already complained

about some element of the product too close to

being copyrighted feature they have is this

going to worsen our situation When everything is all private and secret all these

restrictions are gone You get the whole thing out very quickly This is key feature to

companies to the extent to which they can modularize and makes small the
groups groups

can be effective Its

groups very challenge to grow larger company and do very well

Certainly the well-known company in Seattle has managed to maintain the sense of

urgency among the people and has maintained this

interesting growth Were struggling to

do it here too You can see at times with clear we

goals that can get lot of people working

and thats what the Source 3-3-1 is about but had lot of people
it still lot of intricate

elements anyone of which can fail and you have to on top of all of them Because its
stay

to assign something to someone and then think

easy that its taken care of come back in

two weeks and then find out Oh he got sick and he didnt even notify anyone Or he told

he was but the people

people sick he told were not the
people who were worried about this

element And so you have Michael Toy going crazy listing the bugs theres constant to

do list So thats sort of the variation on it

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Is it with all business --

suppose you could answer either way but

Ill throw it out..

j3 Well one thing certainly early on when you have start-up company you have

five or ten people Now this is speaking even from Infussig Ti which did before this

theres sense that were gonna make go of it and if we dont succeed.. mean the

truth is you believe youre gonna succeed you really go for the goal But if you dont

succeed its on your head Its like your own business if started
starting you personally

your own business if

you dont succeed well you just feel
you did not try hard enough

you did not get lucky enough if you have company here at Netscape of 2000 people the

urgency of not failing is

greater To my mind the
pressure on Barksdale is incredible Just

that this has to continue to succeed we have to the investors and the community
support

that weve brought out here When Ijoined start-up knew that 19 out of 20 fail That

was an honest awareness When an employee comes to work at Netscape and he relocates

out here he doesnt have the perception that theres 19 out of 20 chance that this job is

not gonna be in
place to
years from now So theres different expectations of

employees theres different that have be serviced

expectations to by the company think

that getting at one of the first questions Can you repeat the second question ifyQlLcan..zj4
i/i.

Does therefore that heightened

of tapel

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