Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 263: 🇳🇱 The Sean Parent Origin Story

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

In this episode, Conor and Bryce interview Sean Parent about the origin story of his career in software engineering!Link to Episode 263 on WebsiteDiscuss this episode, leave a comment, or ask a question (on GitHub)SocialsADSP: The Podcast: TwitterConor Hoekstra: Twitter | BlueSky | MastodonBryce Adelstein Lelbach: TwitterAbout the Guest:Sean Parent is a senior principal scientist and software architect managing Adobe's Software Technology Lab. Sean first joined Adobe in 1993 working on Photoshop and is one of the creators of Photoshop Mobile, Lightroom Mobile, and Lightroom Web. In 2009 Sean spent a year at Google working on Chrome OS before returning to Adobe. From 1988 through 1993 Sean worked at Apple, where he was part of the system software team that developed the technologies allowing Apple’s successful transition to PowerPC.Show NotesDate Recorded: 2025-10-10Date Released: 2025-12-05Source CodeTRS80Ohio Scientific ChallengerExidy SorcererIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

I wrote programs in notebooks and executed them in my head. God damn, you're Bill Gates. And made fairly significant money for ninth graders. My two top computers that I was looking at were the Ohio Scientific Challenger and the Exitie Sorcerer. There was a lot of Apple II software that appeared in this time frame that had stamped on it cracked by Serpent and Serpent was my initials are SRP so it was SRP-E-N-T so Serpent was me

A computer class with no computers is Yeah and we spent like the next 72 hours Writing code on a Mac Plus and 68K assembly language With no docs and just a debugger to figure out API calls Welcome to ADSP the podcast, episode 263 recorded on October 10th, 2025. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host, Bryce, we continue our chaotic conversation with Sean Parent and get the origin story pre-adobe, pre-apple, and pre-orange micro. and find out where Sean Parent came from.

I mean, I'm thinking that you, Connor, you will be the official Sean Parent biographer. Well, AI will be the ghost writer. All right, we just heard some amazing stories from Sean about childhood crimes that maybe we'll get him to retail sometime. But we were, Connor was just asking Sean, on how he went from living in rural Washington to programming, right?

Because you grew up in a fairly rural area. So you might have to rewind through four minutes. Okay, so rewinding. So I had a seventh grade math teacher who was a NASA engineer before she decided to become a math teacher. and it was kind of an accelerated math program. And she had the policy that if we could come in in the morning for class

and ask a question related to mathematics and current events. So it had to be something we found in a magazine or a newspaper or something like that and ask her to explain it, then she would spend the time explaining the math behind it in answering our question. It specifically had to be related to current events. It specifically had to be related to current events. And as long as we could feed her questions and keep her answering, we didn't have to open the textbook and do assignments.

And it was pretty incredible because we would come up with, you know. By we, you mean you. It wasn't just me. There were a number of us. So we would come up with questions, and we wouldn't always succeed in keeping her busy for the whole hour. But we would ask questions, and she would cover things and explain them in seventh grade terms, and it would include explanations of statistics and calculus and whatever was necessary to solve that problem. And she did an outstanding job at kind of breaking it down to a level we could grasp.

And explain like I'm in grade seven. Yeah, yeah. And so that kind of laid my, my mathematics background and interest. And through that, I saw the relevance of math. What was her name? Her name was Ella Mae Knowles. I remember the name. And it was great when I did not graduate from high school.

We'll get there, I guess. But I did it. attend my class's high school graduation, and she also came. So that was the last time I saw her was at what would have been my high school graduation. Do you think she kept tabs on you? I have no idea, so she hasn't kept in touch. I've tried to look her up and Google her a couple times, but haven't found her, so I don't know if she got married or remarried or what. Maybe the listeners will know LMA Know's ex-NASA engineer. So specifically, I believe she worked on space suits for women at NASA. So in any case, that sparked a strong interest in math. And, you know, I had

some skills in math, I guess, which is why it was in her class before that. But that was really where I saw the relevance of math and really got interested in it. And then the same year that this is going on, my dad worked at Boeing, and they offered a programming class in basics. to Boeing employees and it was like an evening class and my dad signed up for it but not enough people signed up to take the course

so they opened it up to family members of Boeing employees so my dad asked me if I wanted to take a course on basic programming and so this would have been I don't know late 70s time frame maybe like 77 I had never touched a computer

never seen one in person you know to me a computer was a big things with reel-to-reel tapes that you saw on TV and lots of flashing lights, right? So I thought this was pretty exciting that it would get to go take the class. And so went and took the course, and it was 100% lecture, no hands-on, never saw a computer for the entire course. The best way to learn. The best way to learn.

but got handouts on basic programming, and I was, I don't know, completely obsessed with this idea that somewhere there were these machines, that you would give them instructions, and these machines would follow the instructions, and now I knew how to give them instructions. And I had handouts with instructions on how to give the machine instructions. And so I wrote programs in notebooks and executed them in my head. God damn, you're Bill Gates. I just, we interviewed, I can't remember who, we interviewed on a Raycast, and he mentioned all of, I can't remember the guest. I mean, I definitely remember the conversation. And he mentioned Bill Gates' first part of his two-part or three-part biography called Source Code. Can't recommend it highly enough.

But at some point in the book, he talks about these hikes. He was a part of some Boy Scouts, they would go on these massive hikes. And he would program in his head and then get back and have solved some problem. You're basically Bill Gates. And also, it's uncanny, these, you know, all the greats of computer science lore. They had access to a parent that was a prof that had one of the first, whatever. I've never heard the parent that was at Boeing that was offered a course, and then family members were invited.

But that is an alternative version of these kind of. You had to have exposure early on to... What is it with everybody in C++ having started off with Basic? I mean, me, you, like, just dozens of people. I don't know. It was basic that, yeah. It is a basic, but it's not the basic. Yeah.

Yeah. I wrote programs and notebooks and executed them in my head and did that until ninth grade. And then how many, how many years is that? Two years. So, like, two years. You're just, you're compiling and executing. Yeah. And then.

Somebody... That's how to be successful, folks. If you're struggling to find a job, just spend two years. Yep. So 9th grade, somebody donates one of the original TRS80s to our junior high. So our junior high was 7th, 8th, and 9th grade. And so I'm in 9th grade. Somebody donate to TRS 80.

And the faculty has no idea what to do with this. And a friend of mine, he was best man at my wedding, best friend, Mark Matsudaira. He and I find out about this, and we talk to the faculty, and we convinced them that we need access to this computer. You're in grade nine? Grade nine. And you're talking to the faculty of the school? Of the school, yeah, yeah.

And we convinced them that we need access to this computer. And so they're like, well, we don't know what to do with it. So they set it up in kind of this large closet. Great, so this is before the gunpowder? This is probably concurrent with the gunpowder. So, different story, which we're not going to cover here, because I don't want FBI showing up at my doorstep. Yeah, we set it up in a closet.

Wait, they actually gave you the computer. No, they didn't give us the computer. They set it up in the closet, like, near the front office for the school, and gave us a key, each a key, to this closet. So we could access it after hours, okay? And or during lunch or breaks. And I have a question. When they gave you the key, was the intention that you access it after hours

or was the intention that you would access it during breaks and during lunch? It was both. It was both. We were allowed to access it. And so, and it was like just at the start of a whole, hallway from the front office. So we were visible, right? We're not going to be doing anything bad in here. So we programmed it. I got to type in some of the programs that I had had written in notebooks. And they worked? They did. Like I got a black check game working. They required, you know,

certainly some amount of editing. It was a slightly different variant of basic. And I was working from memory and notes. But yeah, I got these to work. And then we discovered that the TRS80 had these very primitive kind of block graphics. It was kind of a half a character pixel size graphics. And so we wrote this very simple game that would put a pixel on the bottom row of the screen at a random location and then draw a line from slowly, from either the left or right side of the screen. And if you hit the space bar, it would draw a line down. and if you hit that pixel that was there,

it would kind of do a little explosion of big blocky pixels and you would get a point. And it was a two-player game that we created. So it would then go to the other person's team. The line would start drawing from the other side of the screen. They'd hit the space bar and it would go down and hit. And if it got it, they got a point. And we made it something like, you know, first person to,

to, I think it was to 9.1 because we didn't want to write the code to get another another digit in there. So it was like first person to 9-1, and we charged kids a quarter over lunch to play. Not where I saw that going? Yeah, and the deal was the first person, well, if you won, then you got to stay in the game without another quarter, and it cost the challenger the quarter. It's a king of the hell, basically. Yeah.

Yeah, and made fairly significant money for 9th graders doing this. We had to line out the door at lunchtime to play this game. Did the teachers know? Yeah, the teachers knew. Like, they were like, whatever, you know. Good little enterprisers. Yeah, exactly, exactly. When I was in high school, some of the teachers, like,

had me helping out with like computer stuff like how to use PowerPoint and things like that and it got so frequent eventually I got like fed up and sent an invoice to the price principle which I don't recall whether they paid or not but I think they stopped asking me for help after that yeah that was kind of the first time I ever had my hands on an actual computer and got to use one and knew that I had to own a computer from the time I was was born up and this point, my parents required that any time we were given money for, you know, Christmas or birthdays or anything like that. Any money we received, half went into a bank account for college. And so I had a bank book and a bank account and something around $1,000 in my

bank account. And my friend, Mark, who I just mentioned, his dad had a men's clothing. store in downtown Seattle and so occasionally I would catch a ride I would go with Mark and his dad downtown and Mark and I would hang out in downtown Seattle for a while

and about 45 minutes away from where we lived and there was a wolf camera downtown Seattle that sold computers and what years is this

you're telling us about this a pivotal trip where you're taking your... So this would have been... Let's see. It's the same year the Apple 2 plus came out, so I'm guessing 77-78. Yeah. Okay, we could look it up.

Late 70s. I think the first Apple 2 was like 76, so maybe 77. So this is a couple years after that. So I did all this research and my two top computers that I was looking at were the Ohio

Scientific Challenger and the Exitie Sorcerer and I neither would that Yeah So you'll have to Google those readers Yeah those two Pretty obscure

So I settled on I was going to buy an Ohio Scientific Challenger and Wolf Camera carried the Ohio Scientific Challenger So I was going to take my

my checkbook and without my parents knowledge get a ride from my friend to downtown Seattle and buy a computer and I figured once I owned it there was nothing my parents could do about it so this was the plan that's what we call foreshadow folks yeah of a junior high high school kid so I get to the store and the salesperson is like no no no you want the Apple 2 plus that's the computer you want brand spanking new it's going to cost you a little more like train your account but that's the computer you want you know and if you buy it today like i'll throw in an extra 16k of ram so you'll have 32k of ram and a cassette deck because early apple twos at this point the apple two probably had a disc drive but i certainly couldn't afford the disc drive so the way you loaded

programs was often just an audio cassette tape that you plugged in to the back of the Apple 2 worked similar to a modem. And so they would throw in a Panasonic cassette recorder with a whole drill through the top of the case so you could adjust the rewrite heads if it was giving you errors trying to load your programs. Okay. So, you know, I'm thinking this is the deal of the century. I'm thinking this is the deal of the century. So a little bit more background here before I get to it. My dad had gone to the 1962 World Fair in Seattle,

which was a little before my time. And he had seen a demonstration of a flat TV, which I actually looked up. He was like, it was a TV, you just hang on your wall. And it was actually a rear projection, which they didn't tell you at the World TV. fair. But my dad was convinced that any day now, they were going to release these flat TVs that you could just hang on your wall. And they were color and they were amazing. And so, so we had a 13-inch

black-and-white TV and we were not getting a new TV until he could get, you know, a 60-inch hang-on-your-wall TV, which he did get probably like two years before he passed away. But it took a long time. So, so we had, we actually had two little, like a 12 inch and a 13 inch TV at home, black and white. And so I bought this Apple 2 and brought it home and set it up in my bedroom and took one of our TVs and put it on top and plugged it in the back and I had my cassette deck. And now I had my own computer to, to write games. And my deck. And my deck. And my deck. And my My dad came home from work and walked by my room and was like, what is this? And I explained to him what I had done, and he said, okay, here's the deal.

You get to keep it, but you have to pay back every penny to your account. And so that partially leads to the story I was telling of me having a paper out. Honestly, it's not a... I thought it was going to be from like a rural, you know, I thought it was going to be way worse than that. Just saying you had to replace the money is pretty reasonable. Pretty reasonable. I want to hear why Sean didn't finish high school. Okay.

I'm sure you get to do it. Okay. So, yeah. So I had had this computer and I had it through most of college, you know, and did lots of hacks on it. And eventually a friend of mine in the neighborhood, his dad bought an Apple II. And we did all kind of hardware hacks on these things. Like we built a plodder at one point, which we didn't have stepper motors. So we did it by just...

What is a plotter? Think printer, but with a pen and two motors for X and Y to draw a picture on a piece of paper. So etch a sketch. Okay. So we built one. We didn't have stepper motors, which you could control to say, you know, move exactly this distance. We just had regular motors, but we had potentiometers so we could feed back a position. And so it was a software challenge to control the motor and get feedback from the potentiometer to draw a picture on this thing. So we did that.

his dad had this Centronics IBM typewriter and we found some article on how you could interface the typewriter to the computer so we did that and turned his you know kind of bouncing ball typewriter into a printer so yeah so this was the kind of MacHack before MacHack MacHack. I also

there was a lot of Apple II software that appeared in this time frame that had stamped on it cracked by Serpent and Serpent was my initials are SRP, so it was S-R-P-E-N-T

so Serpent was me and... Wait, is this like a known fact on the Internet? I doubt it's a known fact on the Internet, but yeah, there was a fair amount of broken copy protection schemes

that I broke along the time. Wow. I could come back to that story because there's a story on that that connects to Apple. We've been caught so many stories. Okay.

So why I skipped my senior year in high school? Why I didn't graduate from high school? So I did reasonably well in high school. I was certainly not a straight A student, and honestly, I cheated my way through some of the classes using computers for some of that cheating, which was fun. Our school had a levy system. which was basically the voters would vote on the school budget each year, or not each year, each few years.

And going into my senior year, there was a levy, so the voters were voting on the school budget. And if the levy didn't pass, I would have exactly one course to take in my senior year. And because all the AP classes would be cut. and so it was like one civics class I think was it and like one quarter one class for the entire year and

the levy did pass but it didn't matter my sister at the time was she was three years older and she was going to Seattle University and she said well you should just apply to the university and just go to Seattle you didn't need a high school diploma

Yeah, which was my answer. And I thought, I thought, you're completely nuts. I need a high school diploma. There's no way, there's no way, there's no way. But she kept hounding me about it. And one day she, like, brought home the application forms. And she was like, just fill them out and send them off. And so I did.

I filled them off, and I sent them into the school. And I thought nothing would happen of it. And then I got a call from the dean of admissions at CLU that asked, why are you applying? It's too soon. I explained the situation, and the dean said, well, I'm going to set you up with some interviews with professors, and we'll see if this would make sense. And so I went into Seattle, Seattle University, and sat down with some professors and got interviewed and grilled and passed and got accepted without a high school diploma or no GED or any equivalent. So that's how I ended up skipping and not getting a high school graduation, which both when I, every major company I've worked for, which is Apple, Google, and Adobe, when, you know, I submit my application on your job application, there's always a line that's, you know, where did you graduate high school?

And I list my college degree and just write NA for not applicable for high school. typically don't follow up, but you've got the college degree probably. No, no, every single time I have gotten a call from HR going, uh, no, we need what high school you graduated from. And I'm like, I did not. This, the

one time I posed a problem was when I started, I was going to go into electrical engineering. I mentioned hardware projects. I liked hardware. My sister was, was an electrical engineering major. So I was going to go into electrical engineering, so that's where I started. And very quickly, I decided.

that that was not for me and I would rather do computer science and so I was going to transfer to University of Washington but they required that I had a high school diploma and I did not

so I could not transfer unless I dropped out of college and went back to high school for a year so that closed one door so I switched from double E to a business major of all things was horribly frustrated and bored

and then I found out that our school was going to start a computer science program so I went to my advisor and asked what it would take to get into the computer science program and they said well probably the best thing to do would be to switch to a math major

and that would get most of the requirements out of the way so I switched to a math major and it was a math major and then And as soon as they started the computer science program, I switched to that. So my last year was computer science. And what was your degree?

So I got a degree in computer science, a minor in math, and a specialty in AI, of all things. But it bears no resemblance to today's AI. And there were 12 of us in our graduating class, first graduating class from computer science out of Seattle University. two of us actually work at Adobe I was going to say do you keep in touch or have any of them gone on to Yeah So let's see

I keep in touch with Three from that class So You know Four of 12 I guess know each other I think I think Some of the people who I keep in touch with

Keep in touch with some of the other people It was a very eclectic course or a class Seattle University is a Catholic University Jesuit you know one of our classmates had had been a Jesuit and then decided

not to be a Jesuit and so Because of going to Seattle, you? No, no, no. Had just just decided to do something else and it ended up in the computer science program and so we were let's see we had class of 12, we had

two women I think that's right, two Yeah, two women. Those are, you know, 17% is better than... It is better than... Yeah, one of the people who I keep in touch with was an international student from Singapore.

Yeah, so it was quite the mix of people. I keep in touch with some of them. We had three young college professors who had started the program, who were basically freshly minted PhDs themselves, which was... they decided collectively that they would teach every course in a different programming language, but not teach the programming language.

So you took the course and they said, you know, we're doing a course in graphics. It's going to be taught in LISP. And so learn LISP. So, you know, a bunch of languages, you know, LISP, 4th, Prologue, C, Pascal. Al Ingris, which was a pre-S, well, kind of competitor to SQL probably at the time, database language, something called Stardle, which was a register transfer language. So just got this interesting and diverse education. I know a couple of us of the 12 appreciated that. I think the majority did not, thought it was too weird.

but the professors were also I don't think any of them were married at the time so we would do things like they would say well we've got an exam tomorrow and people were asking questions in class and the professor would say like well why don't you guys just all come over to my apartment this evening and we'll go through the material again and cover it

and so we'd end up all night hanging with a professor in their apartment going through the material So, so that was, you know, an amazing experience and kind of set the ground work. And then I got married while I was in college. And my wife was from Southern California, and her dad, my father-in-law, had a brain tumor. And so kind of right after I graduated, we moved down to Southern California to be close to, her family and I was looking for jobs and I got a job at a little company called Orange Micro which was in Anaheim wondering when this was going to connect with one of the stories

yeah yeah so surprised me never covered this any of my early history yeah I was wondering that I mean we've heard so many of your stories and I do think at some point you told a story about growing up with like a lot of freedom and you know parents they're not you know oh the kids are out and they'll come back whatever at some point and at no point that i wonder wait how did some person living out rurally not in some metropolis like most of them it's like oh we were next to some school that had the first suite of computers and anyways we've now sketched but I'm surprised that uh in all the conversations we've had that's never come up um and it's a very unique. How many people can

say they had a parent that worked for a company that had one of the first programming courses and then not enough people signed up and so the kids came along like it's not dissimilar like I said earlier from other stories about. So I was saying I was the only kid in that classroom so even though they opened

it up to families I think there was maybe one other spouse and me and it was I think there were you know I remember that class being very sparsely populated there were maybe eight of us in there a computer class with no computers is yeah

so I ended up at Orange Micro and from there I went to MacHack Conference which I talk about a lot an amazing conference good friends of mine organized and ran that and ran the hat competition there and they were from Apple

Scott Boyd and Greg Marriott we just had lunch together the other day still very good friends and while I was there I approached Darren Adler he's now like head of safari at Apple he's a boomeringer at Apple he had gone and worked at a magic cap you look up the history of that

he's one of those engineers and I knew him for magazine articles that he wrote and I approached him at lunch kind of the first day of the conference and I had an idea for a hack and I knew how to write part of it and I thought he would know how to write the other part and so I asked if he wanted to work on it together

and we spent like the next 72 hours writing code on a Mac plus and 68K assembly language with no docs and just a debugger to figure out API calls and got our hack running and like two weeks after that I got a phone call from Apple asking if I want to go up and get an interview. And I think we've covered some of the stories of my early interview.

So, yeah, that turned into a job at Apple, and that turned into a job at Adobe, Google, back to Adobe. And so that's how my career went. I guess maybe it's a final question. It's because it's, I mean, and also, too, across the chaotic last whatever two hours, a lot of stories haven't been told. Like, will the Photoshop 4?

Is that an at the bar story? Is that, not right now, but maybe at a later day. There's a, yeah, Bryce and I were chatting about that as the Photoshop 4 story that we heard last night over dinner was astounding. Astounding. So look forward to that, listener. I guess, yeah, when I, when you bring up MacHack and then also two in the back of my head, I know that you were a part of smart friends and that was a thing. And there's these groups and conferences.

Does that exist? I feel like a part of me, and I feel like at every point, in time everyone thinks like ah you know it's just not like it used to be but i do feel like you know you were telling us i don't think this was while we were recording but uh before we started recording um or in between recordings i should say you were saying that because your dad was working at boeing and was a former marine there was a lot of car work and whatnot because that's what he was interested and so you at one point could disassemble the engine of some Volkswagen and like 30 minutes and like reassemble it and like i have absolutely if something goes wrong

with the car we're taking it to the shop and uh i don't even know how to get it to the shop if it's not drivable and anyway so it's like uh these i feel like there's something lost on like bryce and our generation of programmers where we don't understand the hardware and like at the level that people that were brought up you know anyway so i just what does your take on 2025's the landscape of i don't know is there an equivalent to mackack or smart i don't think there is you know it's just a different time anyways i'll you know it's just a different time anyways You can give your thoughts. Yeah.

You know, MacHack has gone. Smart Friends still exists. That's it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. As an email list? Because I know there's an email list. Yeah. Yeah, we had like one conference, but yeah, it's an email list.

The Hackers Conference, which you can, you can like Google that. That's still going. It's an invite only conference. I think this year is the 40th year for hackers. Yeah, so that's, you know, if you want to, well, you know, Bill Atkins. who passed away recently used to attend and Steve Wozniak and Don Canuth and so, so. Some notable names attend, yeah. So, so some of these things still exist.

You know, it was interesting because living through all of this, I always felt like I was late to the party, right? I came into Photoshop during Photoshop 3. I joined Adobe, or I joined Apple right after Steve Jobs left, and kind of the original Mac team had left. And I joined Adobe during Photoshop 3 development, so I wasn't like the first person on Photoshop or any of that. You know, now that I'm, I'm, you know, 60 plus, it's, uh, I, now I feel like I was just fashionably late, right?

Right, right, I was at the party. I just, just showed up fashionably late, you know, so if you're a, a young listener and getting in the industry and getting started and feeling like you're late to the party, you're not going to realize, you know, what you had and what was going on in that time frame until you can look back at it with some perspective. So that's how, that's kind of my, my perspective on that. And, you know, right now, it's like, you know, AI is brand new. Yeah, it's changing. Right? It's changing everything. And so there's a, there's a whole generation here that is

part of a new foundation right right a new technology that's changing the way society functions so

so you know embrace that right whatever role you play in that you're you're part of the party right? The last thing I'll add to that is that

I felt the exact same way when I kind of quote unquote switch to computer science and I always I was chatting with Ben Dean once way years ago and I was telling him I feel like I just I'm so behind everybody because I'd spent six years in university and four years working at a non-tech

technically I was writing code but I didn't know what I was doing. So I was like, I'm 10 years late. I'm 10 years behind. And I always, there's a scene from, I think it was the first Star Wars or the one with Con in it, the newer one with Chris Pine. You know, I mentioned the Star Trek, or sorry, it's Star Trek. You're going to get, I'm going to just edit it so nobody will know I messed up.

But yeah, the scene in Star Trek where they are like base jumping out of the spaceship and trying to land on some, like, tiny platform, and there's like three of them. Gentlemen, we're approaching the drop zone. We have one shot to land on that platform. They may have defenses, so pull your shoot as late as possible. Three, two, one. Remember, the Enterprise won't be able to beam you back until you can turn off that drill. Good luck.

Away team is entering the atmosphere, sir. 20,000 meters. Approaching the platform at 5,800 meters. Kurt Enterprise. This is the target, 5,000 meters. 4,600 meters from the platform. 4,500 meters to target. 4,000 meters.

3,000 bases. 2,000 meters. And that scene of like space jumping, I always felt like they space jumped and then like I jumped 30 seconds afterwards and so I was trying to as quickly as possible catch up with people. And then I remember telling this like analogy to Ben

and he was like, you've got that all wrong. Like sure, maybe you jumped out a little bit behind but the rate that you were accelerating and consuming stuff. Like most people aren't as curious and trying to learn everything. and so like you shot past them like a while ago and like you're you think you're behind but like if you consume as many you know C++ videos online and whatnot

or whatever technology you're in and that reminds me of an Andrew in quote that he said that actually like it's actually quite easy to get ahead if you are willing to learn and read and do the work like a lot of people they'll ask you like how do I get into X or how do I do this thing

and like he would always Andrew Ng would say we had this big course that was one of the biggest MOOCs of all time, and 100,000 people would start. And the number of people that would actually make it to the end is very few. And I've heard that echoed. There's a guy, Jeremy Howard. He runs a fast.a-a-a-I course, which is a free online machine learning data science thing.

And he runs them, I think, three or four times a year, and a few hundred people will sign up, and six will finish. And his advice, when people have just finished the course, it's free. It's not easy. It's a lot of work. But this idea that, yeah, that you're behind, anyways, you said that you know you're actually a part of the party it's it's just you're there it's not necessarily going to be uh you know free to be you know um but anyways it's uh it's great advice

anyways i'll hand the mic back to you if you want to say one last thing to till the next time i'm not sure i mean it's the tail end of uh 2025 so i don't know what conferences i'm going to in 2026 but uh hopefully we'll be able to do this again in person if not zoom's always a thing so So anyways, the final, final word for you, and then maybe we'll find a bite to eat or something or wander around. Yeah. I don't know that I have a final word, but, uh, yeah,

I guess we're going to leave the cliffhanger on the Photoshop 4 story. Uh, yeah, that's about it. All right, there's another month and a half's worth of content. Be sure to check these show notes, either in your podcast app or at ADSP thepodcast.com for links to anything we mentioned in today's episode, as well as a link to a get-up discussion where you can leave thoughts, comments and questions. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day. Low quality, high quantity. That is the tagline of our podcast. It's not the tagline. Our tagline is

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