Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
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.
When I was younger and deploying my first projects, my go-to method was the trusty scp command. I’d SSH into the server, copy over the files, and pray everything worked. Sometimes, I’d even use FTP to upload only the modified files. It felt quick and efficient... until it wasn’t.
I used to agonize over every word I published here, operating under the belief that the internet never forgets. Yet years later, countless links embedded in my old posts now lead to abandoned domains, their content vanished without a trace, not even archived in the Wayback Machine. The irony is stark: the same medium I feared for its permanence has proven so fragile.
Every time I buy a new computer, it ends up under my bed collecting dust within a week. It’s not that I dislike the device, it’s that I can’t work with a machine that doesn’t hold all my files. My workflow revolves around creating, downloading, and sharing text documents, code repositories, family photos, personal videos, and everything in between. The device I use feels like an extension of myself because that’s where my digital life resides.
How do you know your application works? Can you prove it? Does it work when: The user has a slow internet connection? They log in on two different devices at the same time? 100 people try to upload videos at once?
A few years ago, a lone programmer named t0st did something extraordinary: he fixed an 8-year-old bug in GTA Online that had been driving players crazy. The bug? Painfully long load times, sometimes up to 20 minutes. While the single-player mode loaded in seconds. His solution was elegant: a 13-line code tweak that cut load times by 70%. Rockstar Games, the studio behind GTA, rewarded him with a $10,000 bounty and patched the game. Problem solved, right?
In 2010, Google launched a feature that felt like magic: Google Instant.** It was a time when the company’s focus was on making the internet faster, smarter, and more intuitive for users. Not advertisers
For developers, this is the fun part. It’s where ideas take shape, code comes to life, and you finally see the fruits of your labor. In personal projects, this is often where we start—skipping planning, requirements, and prototypes to dive straight into coding.
There’s a scene in The Naked Gun where Frank Drebin stumbles through a hospital, unknowingly disconnecting a patient’s oxygen to plug in a popcorn maker. What makes it work isn’t just the gag. It’s the surgical precision behind the chaos. Every pratfall was storyboarded. Every prop was measured. The joke only lands because its creators treated lunacy like a science.
There are few people that influenced me like no other on the web. When I discovered Joel Spolsky, I read a couple posts, then went back in time and started reading his blog chronologically. There was 8 years worth of material for me to go through. I clicked on links and discovered Jeff Atwood along the way. Here again, I read the blog chronologically. Today, we get one post a year from them if we’re lucky. But then again, the world has moved away from blogs.
