Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
When a customer finishes pitching the website or service they want you to build, the inevitable question follows: How long do you think it will take?
When I joined a tiny startup with big ambitions, I had no idea we’d be building an eCommerce chatbot from scratch. It was my first real-world dive into AI, and I was starting with zero experience beyond a few online courses. As the first engineer on the team and the third employee overall, I had a simple goal: figure it out and make it work.
Code reads different than human languages. When we don't understand what the code is doing, we write comments in our code in the form of human languages. But the language we speak and write every day can be bloated or ambiguous. The human brain is just really good at extracting context. When you are trying to understand what a snippet of code does, a story is rarely the best method. However, if the confusing code is wrapped in properly named functions, half of our questions are already answered.
As soon as I deployed my code, the lead dev launched webpagetest.com and entered our domain name. The code was working perfectly, but he needed to make sure that the website was still fast. A perfect score of A or we would have to get back to work. Granted the company was in the process of being sold for 1.1 billion dollars.
I stumbled upon this dating app with a fresh twist – no profile pictures. I can appreciate the effort to shift the focus away from superficial looks and promote meaningful connections through words. But I couldn't help but feel that it misses the mark when it comes to addressing the real issues in the world of dating apps.
What if a day was a hundred hours? I often played this scenario in my head and thought it shouldn't be too hard to simulate. But when I finally got to it, I found that a lot of things with time are just arbitrary. There isn't a fundamental constant that defines time as we currently know it. We just had to agree on some values to get the math going.
Going through an inventory of my electronic devices last year, I noticed that I did not own a PC. At least not one in the traditional sense: A tower humming under my desk. I do have a few Raspberry PIs scattered throughout the house. I also realized that my smartphone was 6 years old. What I failed to notice at the time was that my main laptop, an Asus Zenbook UX501V, the one I use to write these blog posts, is from 2016. And it still kicks ass!
"So, is everyone losing their minds yet?" My ex-coworker asked me over yahoo messenger. He quit after getting enraged by new work policies that specifically targeted him. I looked up from my screen, and saw that the team of developers who used to work alongside my ex-coworker were now silently working on their respective machines in the row next to me. His old monitor had been taken away. His tower was sitting on the now open office desk, collecting its first coat of dust.
Early in my career, I've spent an excessive amount of time answering questions on Stackoverflow. I've watched the platform go from being expert-centric. Experienced programmers tried to get answers to some complex issues. To a much lower barrier of entry. Everyone who wanted to dabble with programming could have their questions answered. This opened the floodgates to some very basic questions asked in the most complex way possible.
What does it mean to use a phone for 6 years? Can you even use a smartphone for this long? Every year, there is a new iPhone, there is a new Samsung, there is a new Pixel. These are great devices. But for every year that these new devices came out, I asked myself the same question. What will I be gaining by switching my old phone?
