Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
Maybe it was a decade ago when it seemed like every single game developer started believing that all games should be open world. Infinite possibilities, player freedom, emergent storytelling, who wouldn't want that? But open world design introduced new problems that linear games never faced. Players would get lost in meaningless side quests while the main story waited forgotten. Developers would pile on features that didn't serve the core experience. Worst of all, players often couldn't tell when they'd actually "won." I sank an unhealthy amount of time into Metal Gear Solid V when it came out, wandering its open world long after I'd completed every meaningful objective, never quite sure if I was done or just... tired.
A few years back, I was running a CI/CD pipeline from a codebase that just kept failing. It pulled the code successfully, it passed the test, the docker image was built, but then it would fail. Each run took around 15 minutes to fail, meaning whatever change I made had to take at least 15 minutes before I knew if it was successful or not. Of course, it failed multiple times before I figured out a solution. When I was done, I wasn't frustrated with the small mistake I had made, I was frustrated by the time it took to get any sort of feedback.
Writing code is easy. Once you have a solution in mind, and have mastered the syntax of your favorite programming language, writing code is easy. Having an LLM write entire functions for you? Even easier. But the hard part isn’t the writing. It’s the reading. It’s the time it takes to load the mental model of the system into your head. That’s where all the cost really is.
Back in the 2010s, we had our own hype cycle. It was silly because it hijacked a term we were all already familiar with, then rebranded it as if it were new technology. Those two terms were "Server" and "Cloud." Yes, children, there was a time when we didn't say "cloud computers". We just called them servers.
With Bootstrap, Tailwind, Figma-to-code plugins, and AI generators, the modern web dev toolkit seems to have one shared goal: helping you build interfaces without ever writing a line of CSS. So, with all these incredible tools at your fingertips, is there any real point in learning raw CSS anymore?
I still remember my first real job hunt. It was a different world. I had a system: a well organized spreadsheet tracking every company, contact name, and the date I emailed or mailed my physical resume (yes, mailed). I scoured Craigslist posts, navigated weird interview assignments, and even once stumbled into an interview that turned out to be a front for selling knives door-to-door instead of the web programming job it advertised.
I ran into a former colleague recently, from a job I hadn’t thought about in years. Over coffee, we fell into a warm wave of nostalgia. We reminisced about the friends we made, the late-night coding sessions that felt like forging something new, and how that job became a crucial stepping stone for both of our careers. “I loved that place,” I said, genuinely surprised by my own sentiment. “I’m not even sure why I left.”
I was at an event, sitting in a corner waiting for a friend. When he arrived, he sent me a message: "I'm in front of the building, should I go left or right?" A concise question. A binary choice. But I couldn't answer him.
At 6pm, I pack my laptop in my bag and walk in the long, silent, and empty corridors of the office. Since the pandemic started, I’ve been one of the few who often comes to the building. Right when I reach the exit, I realize that I have not turned off the lights. The light switch is inconveniently located in the middle of the office. So I say: “Alexa, turn off the lights.” At the distance, I see the circular blue light pulsating, then the lights go off. I leave for the day.
I once had a job interview for a backend position. Their stack was Node.js, MySQL, nothing exotic. The interviewer asked: "If you have an array containing a million entries, how would you sort the data by name?" My immediate thought was: If you have a JavaScript array with a million entries, you're certainly doing something wrong. The interviewer continued: "There are multiple fields that you should be able to sort by." This felt like a trick question. Surely the right answer was to explain why you shouldn't be sorting millions of records in JavaScript. Pagination, database indexing, server-side filtering. So I said exactly that.
