Not knowing is everything

A few months ago, as I was in the midst of reading Creativity, Inc., I became attached to the idea that Pixar’s mandate for every new film isn’t just to tell a phenomenal story, but to build new technology to tell that story as effectively as possible.

I got fascinated (dare I say nerd-sniped?) by the idea that we, at ngrok, could develop new technology that fundamentally changes the way someone reads something we’ve written.

But then there’s the matter of what. Could we show you not just the polished draft of something we worked on diligently for weeks, but also everything that went into it? A build log, a journal, a record of the lessons learned and the mistakes along the way?

I’m still finding that out.

It’s not just a build in public thing. Maybe it’s just some fancy wrapper around git. But I’d love to believe it’s a third thing far weirder and more wonderful.

Why genuine experience matters

There are few things better than discovering something alongside someone as they experience it for the first time. There’s joy in curiosity and gee whiz moments.

In an era of agentic everything, it’s one of the last truly defensible things we have. I will never experience joy in an agent’s a-ha.

But there’s more to it, too. When we only share our finished understanding, when we’ve had time to polish and refine and receive constructive feedback from smart peers, we perpetuate a perception that you are only allowed to talk about something once you’re knowledgeable about it. When you have something akin to expertise.

I don’t like that one bit. It’s not how we actually grow. If it were, we’d all have to be dead silent, because the learning never stops. Knowing is not a prerequisite for doing or even asking.

I’d love to see more of this out in the world, too.

Well, am I going to do it?

Sure.

Yes.

I don’t yet have a good answer for what this thing is or how it looks. But I’m damn sure excited to try.

I have a good feeling that in the coming weeks, I’ll start writing about command and control servers. Unfortunately, we see these at ngrok, which means they’re something we want our users to be highly aware of, and yet I know very little about them.

I know they orchestrate many systems that have been compromised. And once someone has a command and control server plus some additional machines at their disposal… I have so many questions.

• Is that the same as a botnet?
• What do operators of these servers want to do?
• Do the people who build them also run them, or do they sell the code to others?
• How do they pick their targets?
• What can someone like me, a semiprofessional developer, do to identify and even (gasp) stop them?

What I want is that no matter where I start answering these, and where anyone joins me in learning about them, whether it’s from the day I start or the day I have published a finished product, you can catch up, ask questions, influence my direction, or roll back the history and rebuild it step by step.

I’ll start with those questions. But alongside them is another: What could I build that lets us discover these things together, and keeps that experience alive for anyone who arrives later?

I don’t know what that looks like yet, but if you’ve ever wanted something like that, I’d love to figure out this weird, wonderful unknown with you.