I owe my career to the Second Life developer experience
I’ve told this story a million times:
I have the career I do because eighteen years ago, by accident, I learned to code in Second Life.
What began for me as a series of experiments with scripted 3D assets evolved into my first business and my first software products. I made enough money selling content in Second Life to pay my real life rent, for months. With this experience in hand, I was prepared for the iPhone’s App Store indie developer revolution, which rocketed me to a career in Silicon Valley startups.
There’s immense gratitude I feel for this experience. I’m a first-generation knowledge worker. The leverage of a technology career isn’t something I grew up anticipating. I didn’t even think writing code was for “someone like me.” What a joy, to surprise oneself this way.
I also feel a duty. The power of microprocessor automation and global computer networking is unprecedented in human history. You can reach audiences on a scale that was once simply impossible, and later merely the exclusive domain of a half dozen corporations. Now, through the internet, you can share ideas, build relationships, shape culture itself.
A single individual, wielding these tools, can have an accordingly unprecedented effect. Teams can go further still. I want others to have access to this, to find their own path to prosperity, to make their own mark on the future.
So I want to talk about the broad lessons of Second Life, as a developer experience. I want to talk about how it’s possible to create an environment that is so creatively fertile, someone could stumble backwards into learning code, changing their first life forever.
0. Storytelling
The journey always starts with a story.
Different tools have different stories for different audiences. In the case of Second Life, the story was larger than life. Build anything. Be anyone. Fly.
No, really, you could fly in Second Life. Why not?
While this story was dramatic and over-the-top, the product could back it up. When you arrived in Second Life, you really could build anything and be anyone.
Tools existed to compose primitive geometric shapes into larger orders of complexity, enabling everything from jewelry to robots to airplanes to skyscrapers. There were limits, but the expressiveness was deep.
You could also look like anyone you wanted. Every parameter of your avatar’s physical expression was editable. Advanced users could even upload custom UV mapped textures to apply as a custom skin.
The story promised a lot, and the platform delivered.
1. Frictionless sharing
When we create something we are proud of, we want to share it.
In the case of Second Life, everything you built was instantly visible, in realtime, to anyone nearby. You could attach creations to your avatar, parading them around everywhere you went in-world. With a click and a drag, any object could be transferred from your inventory into the shared environment around you.
For those who had access to Second Life’s land, sharing took on permanence. You could leave creations in place for others to discover and enjoy.
2. Easy experimentation, tight feedback loops
Any object could be scripted, using the C-like Linden Scripting Language (LSL). Select an object you owned and within a couple of clicks an editor would appear where you could begin writing code. Another click to check your script and then it would run immediately, affecting the object that contained the script.
The time to “hello, world!” was instantaneous.
As a consequence, the cycle between experimentation and result was tight. And again, it happened within a frictionless sharing context. You could quickly show off your scripted work to friends, or even get help from a more experienced coder. More on this in a moment.
Because of these attributes, I spent more time rewarded by experiments than I did setting them up. This built confidence and made it easy to develop a mental model of how the tools and language actually worked.
3. Abundant starter code
Glitch demonstrates the value of working implementations as a jumping-off point for both new and experienced developers. But more than a decade earlier, Second Life was bursting with working code you could drop into anything.
Want an elevator? There was a script for that you could modify and drop into your custom-designed elevator geometry. Between Linden Lab, Second Life’s developer, and a thriving community of tinkerers, scripts were everywhere, for every kind of purpose. Whether you wanted to build a car or learn more about the Second Life particle engine, it was easy in roaming around the environment itself to discover leads you could use to get moving.
4. Healthy, thriving community
In its heyday, Second Life was packed with the most generous, creative community. Animated by the principles of open source, “stores” popped up giving away free content newbies could use as a foundation for building their own experiences. This included everything from low-priced, pre-fab furniture to open source scripts.
Linden Lab did their part to foster this, and it was work. They enforced a terms of service, but also established and maintained community norms through their presence in-world. The investment yielded a community that was welcoming and multiplied the power of the platform. More and more people could be successful in whatever ways their imagination called them to be.
The resulting culture was transformational to me. People willingly spent their time teaching me everything from how to coax interesting shapes out of the building tools, to the vagaries of debugging a script. And once you were in, as a creator, with the crowd of creators? The heavens opened up. I was gifted the most interesting skins, offered pre-release products, even handed complex automatic update code from a more established creator. (Thanks, Francis.)
I’ve never known anything quite like it since.
5. Co-created, living documentation
The Linden Scripting Language wiki was my first piece of developer documentation. It was an exhaustive listing of the APIs that existed for interacting with Second Life as a platform, along with a primer on basic language features.
I got a complete crash course in programming—variables, logic, loops, types, functions, event handling, and more—thanks to the LSL wiki, which was a joint effort between Linden Lab itself and the community.
The wiki was packed with examples and notes. It was thorough and technical as it needed to be, while still being a friendly and accessible reference.
Being a successful developer is, more than anything else, learning how to learn. I couldn’t have asked for a better onramp than this living, hypermedia tome.
6. Scaffolding for success
Second Life’s ambition went further than all this.
Linden Lab wanted an economy to animate the incentives needed for all the content creation Second Life’s user-generated model demanded.
Anything you built, you could sell, paid in the platform’s virtual currency. It was this component that fueled me to go beyond tinkering to actually building full products, with marketing and advertising, documentation, even custom packaging.
Thanks to this economy, I was an engineering manager before I was a confident developer. At 20 years old, I was running my first software project, contracting with a friend I’d made who was good at scripting. Gathering requirements, checking on status, feedback, iteration, QA—I learned it all thanks to the promise of loot.
I built robot avatars people could wear, with little touches of personalization. The first one, largely cosmetic, netted me a few dollars. The second one, more elaborate, with goofy missiles you could take to Second Life’s various live-fire environments, did a little better.
By my third robot, I had enough contract code written that I could make sense of how the scripting language mapped to the various domains I needed to interact with. Everything from particles to user interaction handling to manipulating the physics engine—now I knew the foundations of how to do it all, and could expand and iterate even further.
Writing everything from the color customization scripts to the HUD UI, I was in the driver’s seat, and I could go as deep as I wanted. Months of late-night coding sessions, the joy of creation, the agony of bugs… the thrill of release.
The result made me thousands of dollars.
Through the internet.
What a revelation this was, discovering firsthand that you could make money through the internet. My working class roots had nothing even remotely analogous.
I still remember the night my third robot launched. The money kept pouring in. Every few minutes, another notification would slide down, another jingling coins sound effect. While it was great to clear a month of rent in a weekend, what was even more exciting was more than 18 months of passive income. The robot sold steadily, until everyone who wanted a science fiction robot appearance had found and paid for it and the cash petered out.
Forever after, I would see the world differently.
I want more tools and environments like this
I want a world where imagination, expression and technical implementation have the flimsy, porous boundaries that made Second Life so special.
I want more tools that are easy to dive into, easy make your own, and fast to share with the world. Environments that reward your investment by connecting your work to people who will enjoy it.
I want tools that bake in a sense of both community and camaraderie, lifting up newbs and accelerating them into a space of accomplishment.
I want tools that have serious power and impact, but still offer a friendly and accessible face, from the starter resources to the documentation.
Second Life was ambitious. It was a shared, persistent 3D environment that was completely dependent on user-generated content. Only through a potent developer experience could it find the success it needed. They had dire incentives to get this right.
But I think there’s a lot to learn there. As this technology cycle sputters to a close, a new one lurks around the next corner. I’ve always carried the hope that a new platform like Second Life could emerge.
Whether or not we find a worthy, broadly-adopted metaverse in our future, I think these lessons can help any developer tools project find some leverage for growth, positive impact, and creative power.
Meanwhile, I’ll always be grateful to the visionary team at Linden Lab. Their strange, powerful creation permanently altered the course of my life. When technology trends get me down, I can always look back and find inspiration in the place that got me started. Second Life, bandwidth and GPU-hungry, was far ahead of its time.
It was a singular achievement nonetheless.
