I write code for Humans & text for Robots
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When you're a small company, the temptation to mimic the processes of large, successful corporations can be strong. The illusion is that these workflows are inherently superior, a secret ingredient to their success. However, the reality is far more nuanced: large companies often adopt complex workflows not because they're the "best," but because they have no other choice.
A couple years ago, a friend told me he came about $3,000 and was asking which crypto he should invest in. We were at the tail end of the Web3 hype, and from the beginning, my answer has always been the same: Don't!
I've tried vibe coding. It did not work for me. I think the problem is that I'm an actual developer, and I feel dread running code I don't understand. As Andrej Karpathy, who coined the term, described it, vibe coding is about fully giving in to the vibes, embracing exponentials, and forgetting that the code even exists. He talks about asking LLMs for "the dumbest things" because he's "too lazy to find it," accepting all changes without reading diffs, and simply copying error messages in until they're fixed.
I was trying to experiment making an animation using the HTML Canvas and JavaScript. After drawing a small image and creating a game loop, I noticed my laptop fans whirring to life. The more I worked on my little animation, the louder my fans became. In fact, I didn't even finish my experiment, and I got a notification for low battery. What was it about my tiny 512x342 animation that made my powerful modern computer choke?
The 2010s was the Wild West of the mobile world. "Mobile-first" was the buzzword, much like "AI-first" is today. Every company, from the biggest social media giants to your local pizza parlor, seemed to be pestering you to download their app. There was a genuine hype train, and everyone was on board. The apps, frankly, were always mediocre, and a far cry from the full functionality of their website counterparts. But the message was clear. If you weren't on mobile, you were falling behind.
When companies publicly announce on LinkedIn that they're embracing AI, what are they actually doing internally? Are they replacing developers with agentic AI that swarms through code, debugging errors and deploying fixes? Are they parsing business requirements, accessing repos, building features, and deploying them before the 9am standup? For outside observers, it's hard to tell. But as a developer, I can assure you there's often a disconnect between what a CTO says and how the day-to-day workflow is actually affected.
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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.
