Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

by Peter Seibel

Seibel: What is the thing that you worked on that you were most proud of. Zawinski: Really just the fact that we shipped it. The whole thing. I was very focused on my part, which was the user interface of the Unix front end. But really just that we shipped the thing at all and that people liked it. People converted immediately from NCSA Mosaic and were like, “Wow, this is the greatest thing ever.” We had the button for the What's Cool page up in the toolbar and got to show the world these crazy web sites people had put up already. I mean, there were probably almost 200 of them! It's not so much that I was proud of the code; just that it was done. In a lot of ways the code wasn't very good because it was done very fast. But it got the job done. We shipped—that was the bottom line.