I write code for Humans & text for Robots
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There is an RSS reader that I often used in the past and have become very reliant on. I would share the name with you, but as they grew more popular, they have decided to follow the enshittification route. They've changed their UI, hidden several popular links behind multilayered menus, and they have revamped their API. Features that I used to rely on have disappeared, and the API is close to useless.
As a developer, bugs consume me. When I discover one, it's all I can think about. I can't focus on other work. I can't relax. I dream about it. The urge to fix it is overwhelming. I'll keep working until midnight even when my day should have ended at 6pm. I simply cannot leave a bug unfixed.
For a moment in my life, you couldn't see me without a book in hand. A self-help book to be precise. I felt like the world was moving, changing, and I was being left behind. Being raised to look at the mirror before I blame others, I decided if there was something to improve, it was my very own self.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped talking about servers. The word felt clunky, industrial, too tied to physical reality. Instead, we started saying "the cloud". It sounds weightless, infinite, almost magical. Your photos live in the cloud. Your documents sync through the cloud. Your company's entire infrastructure runs in the cloud.
After making one of the largest refactor of our application, one that took several months in the making, where we tackled some of our biggest challenges. We tackled technical debt, upgraded legacy software, fortified security, and even made the application faster. After all that, we deployed the application, and held our breath, waiting for the user feedback to roll in.
It's been over a year and I didn't receive a single notification email from my web-server. It could either mean that my $6 VPS is amazing and hasn't gone down once this past year. Or it could mean that my health check service has gone down. Well this year, I have received emails from readers to tell me my website was down. So after doing some digging, I discovered that my health checker works just fine, but all emails it sends are being rejected by gmail. Unless you use a third party service, you have little to no chance of sending an email that gets delivered.
A few months back, news outlets were reporting that Satya Nadella claimed 30% of the code in Microsoft's repositories was AI-generated. This fueled the hype around tools like Copilot and Cursor. If Microsoft's developers were now "vibe coding," everyone should embrace the method. I have to admit, for a moment I felt like I was being left behind. When it comes to adopting new technology, I typically choose the slow and careful approach. But suddenly, it seemed like the world was moving on without me.
When browsing the web, I still follow rabbit holes. For example, I will click on a link, read an article, find another link in the body, follow that one as well, and keep on going until I get lost in the weeds and appear in wonderland. When I'm reading through my phone, I often have to go back to the browser history to see the trail of websites that lead me to my destination. But sometimes, I just can't find my way back. Why? Because somehow, I wasn't reading through the web browser. I was browsing through webview.
As a developer, you'll hear these terms often: "stable software," "stable release," or "stable version." Intuitively, it just means you can rely on it. That's not entirely wrong, but when I was new to programming, I didn't truly grasp the technical meaning. For anyone learning, the initial, simple definition of "it works reliably" is a great starting point. But if you're building systems for the long haul, that definition is incomplete.
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It was 7am when my phone rang. Instead of an alarm, it was my recruiter disturbing me from a pleasant dream. It was too early for a phone call or to be caught off guard, so I did not answer. I went to take a shower and get ready for the day. On my way to work, I listened to the voice mail she had left.
As a Linux user, I can't help but spend most of my time on the command line. Not that the GUI is not efficient, but there are things that are simply faster to do with the keyboard.
The majority of the traffic on the web is from bots. For the most part, these bots are used to discover new content. These are RSS Feed readers, search engines crawling your content, or nowadays AI bots crawling content to power LLMs. But then there are the malicious bots. These are from spammers, content scrapers or hackers. At my old employer, a bot discovered a wordpress vulnerability and inserted a malicious script into our server. It then turned the machine into a botnet used for DDOS. One of my first websites was yanked off of Google search entirely due to bots generating spam. At some point, I had to find a way to protect myself from these bots. That's when I started using zip bombs.
a book by Ibrahim Diallo
After the explosive reception of my story, The Machine Fired Me, I set out to write a book to tell the before and after.
I started as a minimum wage laborer in Los Angeles and I set out to reach the top of the echelon in Silicon Valley. Every time I made a step forward, I was greeted with the harsh changing reality of the modern work space.
Getting fired is no longer reserved to those who mess up. Instead, it's a popular company strategy to decrease expenses and increase productivity.
Every little corner has a story. Sometimes a camera tells the story and a picture is worth a thousand words.
There are professional photographers and then there is me who happens to have a camera on my phone. Here's to what came out.
