soft-shell crab vietnam crab exporter

Simon Willison’s Weblog

What are some things that most hackers used to do themselves but now use other people’s software to do?

27th November 2010

My answer to What are some things that most hackers used to do themselves but now use other people’s software to do? on Quora

Renting co-located servers. These days, most people just use virtual machines for their own personal projects.

Posted 27th November 2010 at 3:49 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7 - 16th April 2026
Meta's new model is Muse Spark, and meta.ai chat has some interesting tools - 8th April 2026
Anthropic's Project Glasswing - restricting Claude Mythos to security researchers - sounds necessary to me - 7th April 2026

This is What are some things that most hackers used to do themselves but now use other people’s software to do? by Simon Willison, posted on 27th November 2010.

hacking 12 quora 1005 diy 1

Next: What are the tradeoffs (e.g. development speed, performance, scalability) between using various php frameworks, ruby/rails, or python/django? Is there any reason to choose one overwhelmingly over another?

Previous: What is the best software for conference participants?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe