It's amazing to me how different things are now in the particulars (e.g., computers are probably a million times faster, and you can get a much better and more

It's amazing to me how different things are now in the particulars (e.g., computers are probably a million times faster, and you can get a much better and more featured database like Postgres/SQLite for free rather than pay hundreds of dollars for a commercial one) and yet how similar they are in a general sense. You still have people like Wayne out there creating software, motivated by the same kinds of reasons and with the same tastes and proclivities. You still have the same conflict between productive technologists torn between technical work and management as their company scales. And the startup grind he describes is obviously still relevant. It's a good thing that he stuck with the database rather than quickly turning his attention to natural language processing, since that is only starting to advance in meaningful ways in the last decade now that we have the required data and compute resources-- he would have been very frustrated!