The first time I read through the source code that powers jquery, I was fascinated. I decided to open a new file and code something just as amazing. The only problem was, I wasn't sure what I was coding, just that I had to code it.

I typed on the keyboard for a good while before I realized that I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know what the code was doing either. However, the browser was happy to run my code and show no errors.

Programming for the sake of programming is not only a waste of time, it is pointless. Computers do what they are told through a programming language. When we don't have a purpose, then the program doesn't have a purpose. That's when you often see people posting about the weird way JavaScript handles 0.1 + 0.2 When you are solving a real problem, the quirks of floating point operations is rarely an issue.

If you are only learning programming, have a goal. "I'm gonna build a program that does X." Start there. Whether you succeed or not, you will learn something new. Otherwise, you are only telling a compiler to validate some bytes.

I loved Office ‘97. I thought it was the most intuitive application with straightforward usability. You can understand my surprised when I first saw that meme that made fun of the toolbar. It had hundreds of icons spanning a dozen lines, and shrank the writing space to only a couple of lines. That's not how it looked like on my computer. I had customized my toolbar to include only the icons I used the most, and memorized dozens of shortcuts.

I could do so because I didn't have the Internet. Not having Internet access forces us to find solutions, and that's what I did. I got a notebook, drew and documented every single icon. In a couple of months, Microsoft Office products had no secrets for me. At age 11, I helped the Embassy of Guinea properly format their official documents.

When I started learning to program, I didn't have Internet at home. I had to learn to read errors in my code and debug them myself.

But now that the Internet is so prevalent, we don't have to try as hard to learn anymore. If you don't know how to turn the text green in your editor, don't try to find the icon that does that. Instead, google "how to change text color in my editor". Your format is not pretty? Google "How to make my document pretty". Your computer is slow? Google "how to download more ram."

Now that it is easy to find information on the web, we no longer spend the time and energy to work our brain muscles. That's a mistake. Those who don't exercise their brains, only get by. But those who choose the hard path of learning, these are the people who create all the tutorials. They are the people who power the web.

A lot of people complain about the way their videos are handle, but YouTube has a point. It's their platform. You adhere by their rules or you go build your own platform. But is it even possible to build a YouTube competitor today?

The simple answer is no. There are two reasons.

1. It is expensive to host videos on a large scale.
2. It is even more expensive to deal with copyright issues.

YouTube started small. I remember not being able to upload my video because it was 11 minutes long. The longest allowed was 10 minutes. Also, there was a limit to the video's resolution. 640 by 480 was a luxury. If you started a video platform today with these limitations, people will laugh at you. Even Disney with its deep pockets had a hard time serving content at a much smaller scale. When they launched Disney+, their servers crashed.

In 2005, the web was young and naive. Hollywood and the music industry thought that YouTube was a fad. Who would have thought it would become the number one media consumption platform in the world. Today, YouTube is eating their lunch money. When you upload copyrighted content, it takes all of a couple minutes for your account to be flagged. The system that flag videos was a 30 million dollars research and development. Your cool new video app doesn’t have this kind of money, does it?

It may not be possible to build YouTube in your garage, but people still build video platforms. Snapchat, Vine, Tiktok. They all used the limitation of resources as a creative challenge. Short videos where quality is not the most pressing thing. In fact they took control away from their users to allow for a controlled experienced. They handle the copyrights issue by being small. Only when they became huge they settled by inviting copyright holders to use the platform to promote themselves.

It's too late to build a YouTube clone from scratch. The bar is already set too high. Instead, there is room for platforms where quality doesn't matter, as long as it is fun.

Just because you built it doesn't mean people will come. Everyone knows that. But then we stop there. What comes next?

OK. I built it, no one came. Now what?

Is it my fault? Did I do it wrong? Did I miss a step? Or does this adage exist only to make you feel terrible about yourself then offer no solution? I don't think so!

One motivated evening, I wrote 5 blog posts, then I built a blog engine. I set the date for each post to self publish with 2 days intervals. No one came to read it of course.

I remember that I was humble, and very patient. But records show that I wasn't. I removed the date check and published everything on day two. Records also show that I immediately started spamming reddit and hackernews until one of those banned my domain for good.

I built it, not only they didn't come, but they made sure no one else would.

That was seven years ago. What does it feel like to write in the dark? This is what it feels like. This blog doesn't have regular readers like other blogs do. Yet sometimes, people show up and read. Sometimes, they even send me a little thank you email.

They said build it, and they will come. I built it. No one came. But after I wrote for a little, some of you came.