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.