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. ...
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. ...
The first time it worked, it felt like magic. I typed half a sentence, and the AI filled in the rest, tests, edge cases, even doc comments. Like a dream you didn’t know you had until it showed up in your IDE. But two weeks in, the cracks appeared. The AI rewrote a query using a non-existent ORM method. It silently introduced a regression in a caching layer. It suggested mocking the wrong dependency, and no one caught it, because the PR still “looked fine.” What started as magic began to feel more like auto-pilot without a destination. ...
Wasn’t even a code review, just a regular sync. He was maybe six months in, fresh out of a bootcamp, still a little nervous when talking. But he looked at the logic I had written and asked, “Why do we do it this way?” And I froze. Because I didn’t have an answer I liked. The truth was, I didn’t remember. It had always been done that way. I had absorbed it, carried it forward, optimized around it. But I had stopped asking why. ...