“I hate flying,” he says, “but I’m here.” Programming is a process towards creating a good online service, much like flying is a process to get him from San Francisco to Dublin. “For me, it’s all about the end product, not how I got there.” He notes that computer science purists love the art of coding, “if the algorithm is cool, if the integration is pretty, they’re happy,” he says.

“Etsy grew large enough to afford me,” he jokes, but really his history at Yahoo – where he spent seven years – with Etsy’s creators meant he’s had his fingers in the company pie since very early on. We meet in Etsy’s pretty snazzy Dublin office, with Lerdorf working as an engineer for the company for a few years now after his role as adviser started reaching a bit beyond the title. “The end product,” he says, “is what interests me.” A snazzy spot Calling himself an engineer rather than a programmer, solving problems is what he’s all about.

“I find programming boring and tedious,” starts Lerdorf, the creator of a programming language so ubiquitous to computing that it means that statement throws you a little. We sit down with Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of the programming language PHP, to find out why he hates coding, loves Etsy and is the only Latino Eskimo in California.

Programming php rasmus lerdorf