I use AI every day. Sometimes to fix a bug that’s been staring at me sideways for hours, other times to write a more civil message after yet another failed build. I’m not “against AI”. On the contrary, it’s already part of the daily workflow for almost all of us. The problem isn’t the tool. It’s the role we’re giving it. I’m not worried about AI becoming smarter than us. What worries me much more is us stopping to think before we even use it. ...
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: ...
There’s a kind of elegance that makes every engineer pause - a small idea that feels too clean to be true. For me, that idea was the magic link. One email, one click, no password. Frictionless authentication. No OAuth dependency. No password reset tickets. Just pure, minimal flow. And because I can’t resist a good experiment, I decided to build my own implementation from scratch - no frameworks, no auth libraries, just PHP, MySQL, and email delivery pipelines. ...
A few months ago, I fell into a rabbit hole. Everywhere I looked, people were talking about self-hosting: replacing Google Photos, Drive, Dropbox, Netflix, Spotify - everything - with a private server at home. The slogans were bold: “Digital sovereignty.” “Your data, your rules.” “Big Tech is evil.” And somewhere inside me, a voice whispered: Maybe I should do it too. Because the idea is seductive: a personal cloud, fully under my control, performance-optimized, tuned exactly the way I want it. ...
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. ...