My profile picture was commissioned. I gave the artist instructions, and I paid for their time. I'm still not a fucking artist. I am happy about the picture but I am under no delusions that I made it.

Slopbros are the complete opposite. They feel like they made something because they prompted it into existence. It's sad, really. Everyone has the capacity to create things, yet people choose to outsource it to pattern completion models because thinking is too hard.

Thinking and experimenting how to best solve a problem is my favorite part about development. My proudest moments are from iterations on previous less-optimal solutions.

I once sat on a small team implementing a project start to finish. The initial work was really rushed, they wanted a functional MVP real fast, and in conjunction with that we got scope creep. What was initially planned to be a simple viewing application turned into us having to implement a data synchronisation system that would organise sync across hundreds of devices, various platforms, both in offices and several hundred metres underground, both on cellular and wifi.

It was a disaster. The initial sync priority system was hardcoded. I later revised it to automatically figure out the dependencies, and then a colleague optimised that algorithm.

My biggest triumph though was when trying to fix the size of each batch of data. Every so often some bit of data would be way too large and the system would shit itself. It was also woefully slow when someone sat on a 10 year old Samsung phone 800m underground. Production blockingly slow.

We came up with the idea to switch over to gRPC. Looking over the hastily thrown together API, I realised that they all did more or less the same thing. The data processing was different, but all the fetching worked the same way.

So I made it generic for real, and reduced 26 different APIs into ~6 lines of code.