Hacker Mind and Japanese Elaborate

When most people hear the word "hacker", they picture people breaking into computers.
But in the world of computing, great programmers call other great programmers hackers.

Americans are really good at building software.
"Just do it." is soaked into their spirit, the way meticulousness is soaked into the Japanese.
When Americans get an idea, they don't care at all whether it'll work, what the world will think, whether it's reckless, or how others will see them.
They just do it.

This spirit actually matters a lot in programming.
Programming may look methodical, but it really isn't.
When you create new software you don't need a plan. What matters is building and breaking things, over and over, in one focused burst.

I think Apple is the only company that has both that spirit and Japanese meticulousness baked in.
They build hardware, architect new CPUs, and when you open the box you find beautiful soldering inside.
And they've made a few pieces of simple, groundbreaking software.
You can still feel the souls of Jobs and Wozniak in their products.

Is there any reason America can do it and Japan can't?
If they can, so can we.

Japanese hackers need to stand up, do things in ways that don't seem Japanese, show some disobedience, and start making things.
The countries that succeed most are the ones that can throw away their "national character" and push forward.

Fortunately I've been able to raise money from an American venture capital firm and from Japan's three biggest venture capital firms.
With this spirit, I intend to build great software.

One last thing.
Hacking and painting have something in common.
What hackers, painters, composers and architects share is that they make good things.
In other words, hackers can't help but launch their own products.
Just look at how companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, HashiCorp and Figma got started.

Hackers are often mistaken for scientists.
Scientists learn by doing experiments and assignments, not by doing science.

You can't learn hacking at a university. You learn it by writing your own programs as a teenager.
You do original work from the very start. You debug, figure out your own implementation, and break and rebuild at full speed.

Hackers start original and get good. Scientists start by getting good and then become original.

As with painting, hacking lets you keep at a new project 16 hours a day.
Funnily enough, at other times nothing interests you and you do nothing at all. Without inspiration, I sometimes do nothing for months.
That can be a big problem, but there's no helping it.

To do good work, you have to take this cycle into account.
Like a manual car climbing a hill, you have to ease off the clutch now and then or you'll stall.
In the same way, pulling back from time to time is the best way to keep your enthusiasm from dying.

In hacking, it's even fine to leave a bug behind.
You know you'll win in the end, so you're just solving a fully constrained problem.
The program should do x, but it does y. Where does it go wrong?
Debug it, fix it, done.
It's as relaxing as painting a wall.

To mark the beginning of this story, here's a photo from a hike at the start of 2024.