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

The new GPT-5.6 family: Luna, Terra, Sol - 9th July 2026
sqlite-utils 4.0, now with database schema migrations - 7th July 2026
sqlite-utils 4.0rc2, mostly written by Claude Fable (for about $149.25) - 5th July 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 1,005 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