The Elevator That Changed Everything: Why the Best Technology Comes From Annoyance, Not Inspiration

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I've been thinking about elevators.

In 2006, Graydon Hoare walked up 21 flights of stairs because his apartment building's elevator software had crashed. He was a compiler engineer. He understood exactly why the software failed, memory safety bugs in C code. That night, he started writing Rust. Twenty years later, Rust is in the Linux kernel, the Windows kernel, and the software that controls car brakes.

A broken elevator. That's the origin story of one of the most important programming languages of the 21st century.

“Nobody started a revolution. They just fixed something that annoyed them. The revolution was a side effect.”