Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
How do you know your application works? Can you prove it? Does it work when: The user has a slow internet connection? They log in on two different devices at the same time? 100 people try to upload videos at once?
A few years ago, a lone programmer named t0st did something extraordinary: he fixed an 8-year-old bug in GTA Online that had been driving players crazy. The bug? Painfully long load times, sometimes up to 20 minutes. While the single-player mode loaded in seconds. His solution was elegant: a 13-line code tweak that cut load times by 70%. Rockstar Games, the studio behind GTA, rewarded him with a $10,000 bounty and patched the game. Problem solved, right?
In 2010, Google launched a feature that felt like magic: Google Instant.** It was a time when the company’s focus was on making the internet faster, smarter, and more intuitive for users. Not advertisers
For developers, this is the fun part. It’s where ideas take shape, code comes to life, and you finally see the fruits of your labor. In personal projects, this is often where we start—skipping planning, requirements, and prototypes to dive straight into coding.
There’s a scene in The Naked Gun where Frank Drebin stumbles through a hospital, unknowingly disconnecting a patient’s oxygen to plug in a popcorn maker. What makes it work isn’t just the gag. It’s the surgical precision behind the chaos. Every pratfall was storyboarded. Every prop was measured. The joke only lands because its creators treated lunacy like a science.
There are few people that influenced me like no other on the web. When I discovered Joel Spolsky, I read a couple posts, then went back in time and started reading his blog chronologically. There was 8 years worth of material for me to go through. I clicked on links and discovered Jeff Atwood along the way. Here again, I read the blog chronologically. Today, we get one post a year from them if we’re lucky. But then again, the world has moved away from blogs.
The main problem with hype is that it keeps us from appreciating what we already have. It’s always about the next big thing. Something revolutionary just over the horizon. But while we’re busy chasing the future, we overlook the real progress happening right under our noses.
As a software engineer, my favorite part of any project is when I finally get to write code. Creating a new project, setting up the folder structure, installing dependencies—it’s like opening a fresh notebook on the first day of school. Even encountering bugs and fixing them feels like solving a puzzle. If planning the project is talking the talk, building a prototype is walking the walk.
The barrier of entry for owning a website is lower than ever. For the price of a Starbucks coffee, you can rent a server and host whatever you want online. Yet it’s surprising how many developers shy away from building their own sites. They often fixate on replicating the enterprise-grade tech stacks they use at work, Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD pipelines, cloud orchestration, and dismiss personal projects as unrealistic. But sometimes, the most successful websites aren’t built by rule-followers. They’re built by people like Ron.
The moment I laughed, I knew I blew it. I was not going to pass this job interview. Not because I couldn’t answer the question, but because the interviewer sneered while asking about my experience with Silverlight, Microsoft’s long-dead answer to Flash. He warned me to “expect lower pay” due to my lack of expertise.
