Many a guide has been written about how to learn coding, how to survive as a junior developer and how to progress into senior developer territory — but no one ever talks about the single-most crucial piece of IT office attire. A suit doesn’t make the man, his stickers do.

The Monk

Have you ever heard the sentence “There is no stronger believer than a recent convert”? That is one of my favorite quotes, always has been since I first read it. Funnily enough, my interpretation of it has changed over the years, I now read it as a statement more along the lines of “when the student is ready, the teacher will present themself”.

When I look back at my life I find that it is clearly cyclic, with shortening cycles between drastic changes. I moved quite often, always leaving behind a whole world and taking very little with me into…

The pandemic has taught us all a thing or two about life — such as that people are really just JSON files wrapped in a nice frontend. Slightly confusing to look at, potentially infinite layers of hidden depth — and if they are missing a bracket on either end of the file they quickly fall apart and become unreadable.

It is such profound wisdom that I acquired during the past year-that-felt-like-a-decade. Plenty of nuggets that I’m about to share with you, whether you want it or not.

Nobody bothered to document the code

And if they did, it’s grossly out of date.

Sometimes you look at…

Coding is a lot of fun — usually. Sometimes you just sit there and wonder if this line of code was really worth all the trouble that it caused. You wonder if you should just resign, call it a day, take that sweet paycheck, and invest it into all the booze from the local corner store.

Here are three particular examples that looked harmless on their own but cost me a day or even a week of my life.

;commit;

Let’s start with an easy one: SQL scripts that somebody else wrote. Personally, I always made use of the Commit button…

Hey there, thanks for taking the time to come by! Not a lot of people read these posts that aren’t published in major publications, but they are still fun to write :)

So I figured I’d use the high from my currently thriving programming post to unwind a little, write a little update to show you my long-awaited purchase, I mean friend on two wheels. We’ve been together for a month now, have just passed 600 kilometres on the road with still zero kilometres spent upside down or sliding sideways.

We get along quite well. I have already taken it…

I still remember the first line of code that I changed: a single integer increase to make bigger explosions in a game called Clonk Rage. I treasure that moment because it was the first time I looked beneath the surface of any kind of program.

I quickly lost interest thereafter, completely overwhelmed by everything, everywhere. Then I got my coding apprenticeship pretty much solely because I talked about my casemodding hobby and could list the individual steps that it takes to cook coffee in a technical manner.

Again, I was overwhelmed by everything, all the time. I could barely keep…

Do you know what I like about my shiny new M1 MacBook Air? A lot of things. One cute thing about it is that I can now make informed comparisons on topics I long wanted to talk about.

For some reason, a lot of people are still hell-bent on creating their own personal narrative that either of the two competitors has what it takes to become the only one. I don’t see the need for that to begin with, we have enough monopolies, to begin with. As I type this on the couch the beefy GPU in my Windows PC…

Coding is everything. Future, hobby, profession and stuff of dreams. Also a lonely world full of confusion, lack of direction and a sea of despair where everyone is extremely successful or completely irrelevant. And a world of thousands of steps in between where a small team can have great impact.

Today I want to write about some of the underlying concepts that you can built projects upon — with a particular focus on those with potential mass market appeal.

Democratization

In many fields the Internet and code have served to pull down walls and pull the rug out from underneath those…