Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
A few years ago, I took a job 25 miles from my home in Los Angeles. The city is famous for many things, but for commuters, it's the land of traffic. To avoid this traffic, I immediately reached for a technological solution. Each morning, I would get in my car, turn on GPS navigation, and follow the turn-by-turn directions to work. The route varied daily as the app sought to circumvent traffic jams. It would often lead me through intricate networks of side streets and residential neighborhoods.
A few days into my first JavaScript class, I decided I didn’t need school anymore. I read the book from beginning to end. I completed every single exercise. I ran the code on all projects. It worked. I went on to build my own website and applied the things I learned from the book. We still had 2 months of class to go through.
My kids often ask me why they’re allowed to watch YouTube videos but not Shorts. My answer is simple: Shorts are banned in this household. That doesn’t actually explain anything, of course. But then again, I don’t need to break down the neuroscience of cocaine to know it shouldn’t be on the breakfast table.
For over two decades, I’ve worked as a software developer. At some point along the way, writing JavaScript stopped being something I had to think about, it just happened. Building CRUD apps, managing forms, handling the DOM, these became second nature. I could step into almost any project and instantly start wiring things up. This is what Daniel Kahneman refers to as System 1 thinking: fast, intuitive, automatic.
When I imagined the future of technology, I pictured a world where all my devices worked together seamlessly under my control. My car would never get lost in a parking lot because it could simply tell me its location. My home would intelligently manage the thermostat to save energy. The garage door would open automatically when it detected my arrival. My phone would serve as a personal assistant, coordinating everything to make each day run smoothly. At home, a central hub would connect all these devices, sharing information to optimize my life.
Looking at old applications, we always wonder who in their right mind thought of building them so badly. I encountered such an application in my career, and I was lucky enough that they had used version control to preserve its history. Let me describe how the application looked in its latest state.
I’ve been using Audacity for over a decade, and for most of that time, it’s been my go-to tool for quick audio edits. Need to trim a podcast? Normalize a voice recording? Remove background noise? Audacity handles it effortlessly. But every time I’ve tried to use it for something bigger, an audiobook, a documentary, or a music project, I’ve hit a wall.
During a demo for our AI agent, a sales colleague once asked, ‘How does it process refunds? Does it click through the website like a human?’ I grinned and said, ‘Nope, it just calls the refund API.’ Cue the blank stares.
At my old job, I built subscription management pages. The kind that should let customers cancel with a few clicks. We were a customer service automation company. Most clients understood this basic courtesy. One did not.
The web development landscape is filled with frameworks, no-code platforms, and AI tools promising to abstract away the "old-school" work of writing HTML and CSS. Yet, despite these advancements, the web’s foundation remains unchanged: HTML structures content, and CSS styles it. Here’s why mastering these core technologies is not just relevant, it’s essential for building a future-proof skillset.
