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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."
When you're a small company, the temptation to mimic the processes of large, successful corporations can be strong. The illusion is that these workflows are inherently superior, a secret ingredient to their success. However, the reality is far more nuanced: large companies often adopt complex workflows not because they're the "best," but because they have no other choice.
A couple years ago, a friend told me he came about $3,000 and was asking which crypto he should invest in. We were at the tail end of the Web3 hype, and from the beginning, my answer has always been the same: Don't!
I've tried vibe coding. It did not work for me. I think the problem is that I'm an actual developer, and I feel dread running code I don't understand. As Andrej Karpathy, who coined the term, described it, vibe coding is about fully giving in to the vibes, embracing exponentials, and forgetting that the code even exists. He talks about asking LLMs for "the dumbest things" because he's "too lazy to find it," accepting all changes without reading diffs, and simply copying error messages in until they're fixed.
I was trying to experiment making an animation using the HTML Canvas and JavaScript. After drawing a small image and creating a game loop, I noticed my laptop fans whirring to life. The more I worked on my little animation, the louder my fans became. In fact, I didn't even finish my experiment, and I got a notification for low battery. What was it about my tiny 512x342 animation that made my powerful modern computer choke?
The 2010s was the Wild West of the mobile world. "Mobile-first" was the buzzword, much like "AI-first" is today. Every company, from the biggest social media giants to your local pizza parlor, seemed to be pestering you to download their app. There was a genuine hype train, and everyone was on board. The apps, frankly, were always mediocre, and a far cry from the full functionality of their website counterparts. But the message was clear. If you weren't on mobile, you were falling behind.
