Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
I recently had a firsthand experience that perfectly illustrates this. I was helping a small startup on a project in my spare time. I set up an application from top to bottom, documenting the entire process with screenshots and everything they could possibly need to manage it themselves. My thought was, "Great, they're probably good to go; they won't need a developer for this again." I had essentially given them all the tools for free.
A colleague was once stuck on a task that was taking forever to resolve. Every day, he would say that he was making progress, only to later report that the solution didn't pan out. He was looking through different solutions he found online and was experimenting. After some time, I was tasked to help him get it resolved. The problem was to make sure the cash backs and cash forwards were properly calculated.
A few years back, I wrote a blog post to give some writing tips. I have a habit of writing on an external distraction free editor then copy and paste it to my blog when ready. For this entry, there was a problem. Whenever I hit the "Publish" button, I got a 500 Internal Server Error. I didn't have the time to debug it, so I kept the entry as a text file until I could analyze my error logs.
I woke one morning feeling fully rested. I was up and about, yearning for something nice to eat. My old routine had been broken. I had left my high-paying job for a startup I co-founded, and it was barely six AM. I usually stopped at the cafeteria at work and grabbed a fresh bagel with cream cheese, but now I was home and would have to buy my own bagel. I walked to the kitchen and found my well-stocked fridge and thought, "Maybe I should just make my own breakfast."
I didn't write a first article on this blog. Instead, I wrote three first articles. I had something to say, and I wanted to say it my own way. I didn’t even have a blog—what I had were the skills of a web developer. So I created a new file in my favorite text editor and wrote about MySQL and its deprecated PHP functions. It was something that bothered me at work, and my blog would be a great place to vent about it.
Imagine a mischievous agent of disruption. Not somewhere hidden in a server room where no regular human can notice. No. Imagine it right here in your office building. Forget about unplugged servers for a moment. Our "chaos monkey" is a little more… creative. This monkey lurks around meeting rooms and in a blink of an eye, you see a chair swiveling, empty. The monkey snatched your coworker away. I’m feeling a bit dramatic today, but I want to highlight the fragility that can exist in unexpected places within an organization.
There was a time when building a website felt straightforward. You'd write some HTML, add PHP for dynamic content, sprinkle in jQuery for interactions, upload it to your server, and you were done. No package managers, no build processes, no debates about hydration strategies. Today, creating even a simple webpage often involves configuring multiple tools, managing dependencies, and navigating complex development workflows. How we got here? What did we lose along the way?
As a company grows, so do its processes. At first, it’s all about building fast and solving problems. But once you hit a certain size, things like SOC 2, GDPR, and compliance become part of everyday operations. These changes are well-intentioned. They’re meant to protect the company and its customers, but they often overreach. And when they do, they don’t just add structure. They reduce efficiency.
When I heard Klarna's claims of automating 90% of their customer service, I laughed. Then they followed by announcing a layoff, it wasn’t funny anymore. Having worked in customer service, I agree, you can automate it. But you'll be disillusioned when you can't get past 40% of requests. 50% on some occasions.
In an old interview, Seth Godin brings up the point that no one person can build a computer mouse. It takes the organized efforts of thousands of experts to bring us the computer mouse. Between getting the metal, creating the plastic, designing the circuit boards, the chips, the software that runs it, the firmware, OS drivers. And then to ship it to a customer, you have the entire infrastructure of logistics and transportation to bring it to your house or a store.
