About the Group
You remember when "the web" meant a 56k modem and a host called GeoCities. You remember the exact moment you learned what a segfault was, and the exact moment three years later when you realized the company you'd joined at $45k and "pre-IPO equity" was printing t-shirts with a cash burn rate for a launch party no one would attend.
You survived the dot-com crash. You survived the Web 2.0 rebranding of everything you'd built. You survived Agile certification. You survived the pivot to mobile. You survived the pivot to the cloud. You survived the pivot to microservices, the pivot to Kubernetes, the pivot to serverless, and the pivot to the pivot.
And now there's a 23-year-old with a laptop telling you that agentic AI is different. That this time, the software writes itself.
We believe you. We've heard this before.
Welcome. There are chairs. The coffee is bad. We've been doing this a long time.
Membership Criteria
You may belong here if any of the following are true:
- You have explained to a vice president why you cannot Ctrl+Z production.
- You have typed the word "synergy" in a meeting document and felt something die inside you.
- You have migrated a system from CORBA to SOAP to REST to GraphQL and the underlying data has not changed since 1998.
- You watched a company go from "changing the world" to "acqui-hired" in under 18 months and used the equity to buy a used Subaru.
- You once configured Apache by hand on a box that was literally underneath someone's desk.
- You have answered a Slack message at 11pm saying "just a quick question" and the answer took four hours and required reading a man page.
- You wrote XML by hand. On purpose. And then wrote a schema to validate it. And then wrote a tool to generate the schema. The data still fits in a spreadsheet.
- You have said "we tried that in [year]" in a meeting and the room went quiet in the way that meant they were going to do it anyway.
- You attended a blockchain offsite. You have not spoken of it since.
What We Believe
The Manifesto of the Survivors of Web 1.0
- I We believe that every technology revolution is real and every timeline is wrong.
- II We believe that the hype cycle has a beginning, a middle, a trough of disillusionment, and a Gartner slide deck explaining the trough of disillusionment. We have seen all four. Multiple times.
- III We believe that "this time is different" is the most expensive sentence in the English language.
- IV We believe in version control. We believe in rollback. We believe in the 3 AM on-call rotation as a more honest MBA than anything taught in a classroom.
- V We believe that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a VC pitch to people who weren't there last time.
- VI We believe that the engineers who warned everyone are rarely mentioned in the retrospective blog post.
- VII We believe that "move fast and break things" is fine advice when you don't own the things.
- VIII We believe that Kubernetes is just a very expensive way to run a process that used to run in a cron job.
- IX We believe that AI will change everything. We also believe we have believed this before. We are not sure these two beliefs are in conflict.
- X We believe that the best engineers we have ever worked with are not the ones who adopted the new thing first. They are the ones who understood what problem the new thing actually solved, waited three years, and then did it quietly and correctly while everyone else was rewriting their implementation for the third time.
You Are Not Alone
The Survivors of Web 1.0 meet twice monthly in the comment threads of Hacker News, in Slack channels
named #random, in the replies to LinkedIn posts by people who were not there.
We also meet here, in these pages, which were themselves built by an AI. The irony is intentional. Everything is.