Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
At an old job, our customers were early adopters of smartphones, and we had to ensure our web app worked flawlessly on their devices. As the newbie on the team, I was tasked with optimizing code to leave the smallest footprint possible without compromising features. This was before minifiers were commonplace, so I took it upon myself to write what I thought was beautifully compact code.
At the end of every month, I used to religiously check the total internet bandwidth we'd consumed at home. A decade ago, my ISP would throttle our connection if we crossed some loosely defined threshold, so monitoring usage felt essential. Those days are long gone. With gigabit internet widely available and everyone streaming Netflix in different rooms simultaneously, I've spared myself the monthly ritual of bandwidth anxiety.
I remember my first corporate job. The recruiter, hired just two months prior, hadn’t gotten a single candidate into the pipeline. In my interview, he kept asking: “Why didn’t you write about the things you clearly know?” I had trimmed my resume (advice from some blog) and lacked experience with big companies. He helped me rewrite it.
I was reading The Alchemist recently, one of the most satisfying and transformative books I have ever read. The author, Paulo Coelho summarized the whole story like this. "The reward for our work is not what we get, but who we become."
In the past, junior developers often began their debugging journey by Googling error messages. This approach, while frustrating due to the sheer volume of irrelevant results, forced developers to dive deep into their own code. To find the right answer, they had to iterate, experiment, and ultimately develop a profound understanding of the problem itself. This iterative process was a powerful learning tool, leading to both working code and a solid grasp of underlying concepts.
This blog has been running for 12 years, and it's only natural that I'd start thinking about a fresh, modern design to match the times. Before diving into what that new design should look like, I went to inspect the current code and understand its inner workings. That's when it hit me: the initial JavaScript library I wrote dates all the way back to 2010.
We're often told, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” But in today's world, we have no choice but to. There's simply too much to consider: too many videos, articles, job applications, emails, and products, and not enough time. Our biology is even wired for this; we've evolved to make fast judgments as a survival mechanism. This isn't prejudice, it's pattern recognition, a necessary shortcut in a world overflowing with information. It only becomes prejudice when we refuse to change our minds, even when deeper evidence contradicts that first impression.
My brother sent me a short about crypto on YouTube. It was a funny video about how crypto bros entice you into their platform by letting you make small wins at first, until you decide to invest a large sum. Then, all your money disappears.
When the Black Lives Matter movement was in full swing, someone made a tweet along those lines: "Hey, let's help black businesses get online" (paraphrased). This just resonated with me. Well, not just with me, but more than 100,000 people decided to like and retweet it.
When someone shares a genuine frustration with AI like a hallucination, a bias, or a workflow meltdown, like clockwork the replies are always the same: "You’re just not using it right." "Skill issue." "Prompt better."
