Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
A company I worked for once spent a fortune installing a turnstile and key card system to secure the building. The idea was simple: track the entry and exit of every employee. The execution, however, was anything but simple.
At one company I worked at, we had a mysterious bug that customers suddenly started complaining about. Their accounts were being deactivated for no reason, despite them paying for their subscriptions. After digging into the issue, we confirmed the problem: paying customers were being incorrectly marked as inactive. It wasn’t a widespread issue—just enough to raise eyebrows—and it even slipped past all our tests.
When I left my previous job, I wanted to do things right. I documented everything about my work so thoroughly that I thought my replacement could step in without missing a beat. I wrote down every detail: the clients I worked with, the special cases I handled, and even the unconventional ways I generated reports. I wrapped it all up before handing in my two weeks' notice.
I was sad when I heard Paramount axed the Comedy Central website. Twenty-five years of content, gone. Why couldn’t they just let the site run indefinitely, even on autopilot? The reason: cost-cutting measures. Disney+ made a similar move when Willow flopped. Instead of letting the show quietly live on the platform, they erased it completely. Again, for cost-cutting measures.
Earlier in my career, every single person on my team had a personal website. At lunch, we’d talk about how we built them, diving into servers, Fail2Ban setups, zip bombs, and the weird little quirks we each added. It was fun, it was ours, and it felt like building a tiny home on the web.
I might be alone on this, but I’m willing to stand by it: AWS is too expensive. Not only is it costly, but it’s also absurdly complex. If a product requires you to get certified just to use it effectively, it might not be the right fit for everyone.
On a video call, silence feels awkward. It turns a conversation into a performance where every moment, even a pause to think, gets judged. Neil Postman talks about this in Amusing Ourselves to Death, but let me try to explain it with an example.
No one was expecting me. We were a dozen or so new employees. After orientation, I was dropped off at my department. The manager and the lead dev were having a squabble, walking back and forth, cursing and yelling. In a row of cubicles, each dev buried his face between double screens and headphones, pretending to be deaf to the noise. And conveniently ignoring me. I stood awkwardly, the tension thicker than a keyword-stuffed article. Until the manager walked towards me and found me in his path.
I’ve worked at the forefront of an AI-first company. Our entire product revolved around using AI to improve customer service, and the company’s success was directly tied to how well the AI performed. You’d think that in a setup like this, AI would dominate the workload, but in reality, the AI portion of the job rarely made up more than 10% of the effort.
I was inspired by Obama’s Hour of Code initiative a few years ago. I've encouraged friends and family to learn to code. If you were caught by the bug back then, chances are you’ve already seen the benefits of diving into the tech world. Whether you learned JavaScript, frameworks, or experimented with jQuery, you saw the advantage. Understanding how code works gave you that huge advantage. Coding bootcamps were popping up everywhere, drawing in crowds eager to enter the tech industry. While they were complete beginners at the time, many of those folks now have years of experience under their belts.
