Gerhard’s transition to a senior engineer started 10 years ago, when he embraced the vim mindset, functional core & imperative shell, and was inspired to seek simplicity in his code & infrastructure. Most of it can be traced back to one person: Gary Bernhardt, the creator of Execute Program, Destroy all Software and the now famous Wat idea.

Few stick around long enough to understand the long-term impact of their decisions on production systems. Even fewer are able to talk about them as well as Gary does.

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Featuring:

Gary Bernhardt – GitHub, X
Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X

Show Notes:

🎧 Why we 💚 Vim - changelog.fm/450
Execute Program - Learn it. Code it. Remember it.
Destroy all Software - Everyday programming tools built from scratch
🎬 Wat talk - A lightning talk by Gary Bernhardt from CodeMash 2012

Gary tweets June 1, 2022
I just needed a small new feature to finish the task I was doing. It took 3 minutes to write the code, then 9 minutes for CI and deploy, so it was live in production 12 minutes after I realized I needed it. Can’t imagine working any other way.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

#450: In Case You Missed It - January 2026 Recap of The Par Train Podcast