Zed Founders Chat #2 

Summary:

The conversation covers the vision for Zed and the technological choices made, the importance of owning the full stack, and the trade-offs of building everything in-house. The conversation covers topics such as gold-plated parts of Zed, rewriting and learning, technology and user perception, and choosing the tech stack.

Takeaways:

- The vision for Zed is to create a lightweight, powerful, and extensible editor, and the technological choices, such as using Rust and GPUI acceleration, were made to achieve this vision.

- Owning the full stack allows for greater control and flexibility in building the editor, but it also requires more effort and onboarding for new team members.

- Balancing the need for building the perfect abstraction and moving fast is achieved by focusing on building what is needed and continuously improving it over time.

- Building everything in-house provides the ability to tailor the codebase to specific needs, but it also requires more time and effort to develop and maintain. Building a mission-critical system requires a deep understanding of the domain and careful consideration of the technology stack.

- Gold-plated parts of a software project are the areas that have been extensively refined and optimized.

- Rewriting code can be a valuable learning experience and an opportunity to improve upon previous implementations.

- The choice of technology stack can impact the ease of contribution and the perception of the product by users.

- Future topics of discussion include collaboration in software development and company culture.