I write code for Humans & text for Robots
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Ten years ago, I was in a dark season. My first startup had cratered. Confidence, gone. I would walk for hours to clear my head, often through parts of the city we typically hurry past. One Tuesday, I saw a man sitting outside a boarded-up storefront. He was weathered, his eyes holding a quiet dignity. But I was fixated on a problem to solve. He only had one shoe. The right foot was wrapped in a frayed plastic bag.
After watching a Veritasium video, I feel a surge of intellectual confidence. I feel smarter. Whether it's a video on lasers or quantum physics, it seems like I have a better grasp on the subject. I finally get it. Derek and his crew just have a way of simplifying complex ideas, unraveling their mysteries, and lifting your confidence as each term is explained.
There's a strange contradiction happening in tech right now. Companies are forcing employees to integrate AI into their workflows, celebrating productivity gains and AI-assisted everything. Yet when job candidates use AI during interviews, they're treated like they've committed career suicide.
From time to time, I'll hop on someone else's computer to browse the web and I feel an intense revulsion. Every page you visit is littered with ads. The top has ads, both left and right sidebars have ads, there are ads between paragraphs, there are ads at the bottom. And if you mentally ignore them, clicking at random places on the page will trigger a popup. How can you even read anything with all these distractions trying to grab your attention?
There was a question on Hacker News where a user asked how he could ensure his writing would endure for a hundred years. At first, I treated it as a technology problem. Storage, formats, domains, backups. If the goal is durability, then the best technology we've invented so far is still paper. Print it. Put it on a shelf. Problem solved.
There was a time when building a good UI was really hard. My default Microsoft Word window had at least five toolbars. My web browser opened to Yahoo, where finding anything felt impossible. Internet Explorer sprouted toolbars I never remembered installing. We crammed features into every nook and cranny of the screen.
My mother handed me her phone a couple days ago. "Do you think this is true?" she asked, her finger hovering over a video about new curfew laws coming to California, featuring Denzel Washington's take on the matter. I'm so proud that she's learned to ask this question now instead of immediately sharing. But as she waited for my response, I noticed she had already watched the entire video.
OK, that may be a little mean-spirited, but I don't just mean you. I mean a whole lot of us. A couple weeks ago, a graph made the rounds showing the decline of Stack Overflow. At its peak, there were 207,000 questions asked in a single month. By December 2025, there were just 3,600. That's a steep drop.
I hear this all the time. If your employer isn't treating you right, just get a better job. If your manager is overworking you, just find one who won't. If your company has a chaotic codebase, just move to a sane one. In fact, if a stock in your portfolio is underperforming, just pick a better one. It's that easy... Except it isn't.
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It was 7am when my phone rang. Instead of an alarm, it was my recruiter disturbing me from a pleasant dream. It was too early for a phone call or to be caught off guard, so I did not answer. I went to take a shower and get ready for the day. On my way to work, I listened to the voice mail she had left.
As a Linux user, I can't help but spend most of my time on the command line. Not that the GUI is not efficient, but there are things that are simply faster to do with the keyboard.
Search is an important feature on a website. When my few readers want to look for a particular passage on my blog, they use the search box. It used to be powered by Google Search, but I have since then changed it to my own home-brewed version not because I can do better but because it was an interesting challenge.
a book by Ibrahim Diallo
After the explosive reception of my story, The Machine Fired Me, I set out to write a book to tell the before and after.
I started as a minimum wage laborer in Los Angeles and I set out to reach the top of the echelon in Silicon Valley. Every time I made a step forward, I was greeted with the harsh changing reality of the modern work space.
Getting fired is no longer reserved to those who mess up. Instead, it's a popular company strategy to decrease expenses and increase productivity.
Every little corner has a story. Sometimes a camera tells the story and a picture is worth a thousand words.
There are professional photographers and then there is me who happens to have a camera on my phone. Here's to what came out.
