我以前写过一些 tailscale 的科普文 https://t.me/laiskynotes/177
Avery Pennarun is the CEO and co-founder of Tailscale. A version of this post was originally presented at a company all-hands.
We don’t talk a lot in public about the big vision for Tailscale, why we’re really here. Usually I prefer to focus on what exists right now, and what we’re going to do in the next few months. The future can be distracting.
But increasingly, I’ve found companies are starting to buy Tailscale not just for what it does now, but for the big things they expect it’ll do in the future. They’re right! Let’s look at the biggest of big pictures for a change.
But first, let’s go back to where we started.
David Crawshaw’s first post that laid out what we were doing, long long ago in the late twenty-teens, was called Remembering the LAN, about his experience doing networking back in the 1990s.
I have bad news: if you remember doing LANs back in the 1990s, you are probably old. Quite a few of us here at Tailscale remember doing LANs in the 1990s. That’s an age gap compared to a lot of other startups. That age gap makes Tailscale unusual.
Anything unusual about a startup can be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending what you do with it.
Here’s another word for “old” but with different connotations.
I’m a person that likes looking on the bright side. There are disadvantages to being old, like I maybe can’t do a 40-hour coding binge like I used to when I wrote my first VPN, called Tunnel Vision, in 1997. But there are advantages, like maybe we have enough experience to do things right the first time, in fewer hours. Sometimes. If we’re lucky.
And maybe, you know, if you’re old enough, you’ve seen the tech cycle go round a few times and you’re starting to see a few patterns.
That was us, me and the Davids, when we started Tailscale. What we saw was, a lot of things have gotten better since the 1990s. Computers are literally millions of times faster. 100x as many people can be programmers now because they aren’t stuck with just C++ and assembly language, and many, many, many more people now have some kind of computer. Plus app stores, payment systems, graphics. All good stuff.
But, also things have gotten worse. A lot of day-to-day things that used to be easy for developers, are now hard. That was unexpected. I didn’t expect that. I expected I’d be out of a job by now because programming would be so easy.
Instead, the tech industry has evolved into an absolute mess. And it’s getting worse instead of better! Our tower of complexity is now so tall that we seriously consider slathering LLMs on top to write the incomprehensible code in the incomprehensible frameworks so we don’t have to.
And you know, we old people are the ones who have the context to see that.
It’s all fixable. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Before I can tell you a vision for the future I have to tell you what I think went wrong.