Yesterday I witnessed the second most impressive technology keynote ever (after attending the iPhone introduction in 2007). And I didn't see it coming at all.

The mother of my kids is the go-to person for many technology companies when it comes to major tech conferences. She flies around the world with her unique expertise for organizations like HashiCorp and World Summit AI. This time it was just around the corner, at the Beurs van Berlage, for the Rails World event.

Ruby on Rails was created in 2004 by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) and is a highly successful programming platform for web applications, including Github and Shopify. He also wrote the impressive book ReWork and is the co-owner of 37Signals, which created Hey.com among other products—for which I'm enormously grateful.

Rails World is an annual two-day event that brings together the global Rails community. Like the PKM-summit, it's a community-driven event. There was a lot I could learn from this for our summit, and I hoped for the opportunity to thank him for Hey, which I've used to write 250,000 words this year.

I follow his blog occasionally and had sensed for some time that he was onto something, so I expected to hear about it during his keynote.

Within two minutes of picking up my badge, I bumped into him. I took the opportunity to thank him for creating Hey.com and explained why it brings me such joy and why I evangelize it everywhere. He clearly enjoyed hearing this, and we took a photo together.

I took a seat at the front of the hall and soon after, his keynote began. Thankfully, it was filmed. And I saw the future of apps, the web, and computers. I had goosebumps for hours, and they returned each time I spoke to someone about it. I was deeply moved—something that had never happened to me before at a technology keynote. I had the profound sense that I was witnessing what could very well be a crucial moment in computing history.

I believe that if I hadn't been writing scripts and software daily for the past two months, I wouldn't have been able to comprehend what I was looking at, let alone understand the implications. I still lack the vocabulary and understanding to fully explain what I saw. But I saw it. And I felt it.

Here was someone delivering a justified critique of what he rightfully calls the Merchants of Complexity. This aligned perfectly with what I saw in Felienne Hermans' story and with the principles behind my Information Autonomy Pilot.

How is it possible that in the 90s we accomplished tasks on Pentium computers in seconds—systems that were stable and simple? Yet now we have more powerful technology than ever, while many things have become expensive, complex, and slow.

If you repeat often enough that something is expensive and complex, people will start to believe it—as I explain in my piece on the hierarchy of opinions. David had already successfully moved his web company out of the cloud and decided to self-host everything for a fraction of their annual costs (his small company had plenty of expertise) and switched from Mac to Linux.

"If you care about software, you should write your own OS."

And because he didn't like the interface of the Linux variant Ubuntu, he created his own version (that's the beauty of open source—you can do that). Thus, Omarchy was born: his ideal version of the Linux operating system, tailored specifically for web application development, running on hardware optimized specifically for this operating system.

On stage, David took a USB stick and plugged it into a $399 PC without an OS. With a stopwatch in hand, he turned on the PC and within 3.5 minutes had a working computer with Omarchy installed, and just 20 seconds later had written working software that could create and maintain a simple blog on the web. David's entire company has switched to these lightning-fast machines running Omarchy, with great success.

This is not a computer for everyone, but that's irrelevant to its potential impact. For its intended purpose, it's much faster than the fastest Apple M4 for a fraction of the price. It's optimized for web app development. What followed left me reeling.

What became clear was that with this approach—for a fraction of the price and with dramatically reduced complexity using Rails—we can create a better and faster web. Creating simpler, more stable, better-performing apps. I understood why David demonstrated it at that particular conference.

Omarchy places heavy emphasis on Markdown, the Lingua Franca of AI. I've been working exclusively in Markdown for years—my entire Obsidian workflow and book are based on it. It's the end of .doc and .docx, though many people aren't ready to accept this paradigm shift. Storing information in documents is extremely harmful and costs governments billions unnecessarily. 

AI thrives on Markdown because it's plain text with formatting, and the metadata lives within the file itself. The government doesn't recognize this storage format yet, costing them hundreds of millions unnecessarily each year (I'm discussing this with various government decision-makers).

I can only conclude that this will have an unprecedented impact on how we will—and must—view IT. There were 200 USB sticks with Omarchy available afterwards. I have one, still in its original packaging.

A tangible artifact that will become a piece of computing history within a decade. Time will tell, but given my track record with these predictions, I'm confident making that statement.