I write code for Humans & text for Robots
Are you Human?
The most interesting Articles
A few years back, I worked at an AI startup as the first hired engineer. All of us could fit in a four-space cubicle, sharing an office with multiple startups. As you can imagine, when you're trying to get a startup off the ground, you have to put in the hours. Every day I would drive to the beautiful city of Venice Beach, California, cram into our little space, and type as much code as I could fit in a day. Then I would pack the laptop back into my bag and drive right back home.
I had a 383-day streak on Duolingo. Three hundred and eighty-three days of that green owl peeking through my notifications, reminding me that my streak was in danger. I wrote about how I never actually learned Spanish from Duo, but I kept coming back. Not for the language, but for the streak. The number itself became the point.
When OpenAI released the first version of Sora, I was excited. For years, I'd had this short story sitting on my hard drive, something I'd written long ago and always dreamed of bringing to life as a short film. The only problem was I didn't have the expertise to shoot a movie, and my Blender 3D skills are rusty for lack of use. But Sora promised something different. I could upload my sketches, input my script, and generate the film in my mind. The creative barrier had finally been lifted.
This is a bit of a rant. Maybe my eyes are not as good as they used to be. When I read an article that has pictures on them, I like to zoom in to see the details. You might think this makes no sense, I just have to pinch the screen to zoom in. You would be right, but some websites intentionally prevent you from zooming in.
I love the idea of microservices. When there's a problem on your website, you don't need to fix and redeploy your entire codebase. If the issue only affects your authentication service, you can deploy just that one component and call it a day. You've isolated the authentication feature into an independent microservice that can be managed and maintained on its own.
Here is something that makes me proud of my blog. The redirect rule I wrote for my very first article 12 years ago still works! This blog was an experiment. When I designed it, my intention was to try everything possible and not care if it broke. In fact, I often said that if anything broke, it would be an opportunity for me to face a new challenge and learn. What I didn't take into account was that some things are much harder to fix than others. More specifically: URLs.
There are several reasons for Google to downrank a website from their search results. My first experience with downranking was on my very first day at a job in 2011. The day I walked into the building, Google released their first Panda update. My new employer, being a "content creator," disappeared from search results. This was a multi-million dollar company that had teams of writers and a portfolio of websites. They depended on Google, and not appearing in search meant we went on code red that first day.
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.
The most read articles
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.
