You can spend a whole afternoon making a request go from 600ms to 90ms. No new feature. No UI change. No one notices. At least, not in the way they notice a new button. But they do notice. They just don’t know what they’re noticing. They stop hesitating. They stop mistrusting the product. They stop waiting for the spinner to betray them. That feeling is backend. And I think that’s where the beauty is: in the parts that disappear. ...
It didn’t start out as a cleanup. I was trying to fix a bug, just a small one, buried deep in a feature no one wanted to touch. The logic felt like an archaeological dig: layers of patches, old comments from devs long gone, fallbacks on fallbacks. Every fix had another fix duct-taped on top. After a few hours of tracing edge cases and odd branches, I stopped and asked the question I should have asked sooner: ...
You know that kind of commit, the one you push with no ticket linked, no changelog entry, no applause coming. Just a cleaner function name. A useless else removed. A comment rewritten to actually make sense. You close the tab and move on, but something about it feels… good. Not proud-good, not “look what I did” good. Just quietly right. Like putting the knife back in the right drawer. Like sweeping the floor even if no one’s visiting. You do it because it should be done. ...
Most people assume I’m joking when I say I code on a 14-inch laptop with no external monitor. Then they see my setup, one screen, a split terminal, and Vim, and they ask how I survive. Truth is, I didn’t always. I used to have the whole cockpit: dual 24s, browser open wide, logs on one side, docs on the other, Slack buzzing in the corner. It felt productive. Like sitting in front of a control panel, everything glowing. ...
“Why does it do that?” She was seven, sitting next to me, asking about a box on my screen labeled /getUserSettings. I was halfway through writing documentation for it, and instead of brushing her off, I tried to answer, out loud, like a bedtime story. “Well, this little box lets other parts of the app ask, ‘What does this user like?’ And it answers with things like language, theme, and notification preferences.” ...
You ever read code and feel like someone left the lights on for you? That happened to me last week, I opened a file I hadn’t touched in months. I was bracing myself, you know, the way you do when walking into a messy garage. But it was… clear. Modular. Named like someone actually cared. And I laughed, because the “someone” was me. Six months ago, me had a good day. ...