Home to my thoughts
Hi, I'm Ibrahim Diallo. I write code and play with computers. Now let me tell you a story...
Deep dives into engineering, philosophy, and life.
During the pandemic, we completed one of our largest projects at work. To celebrate, since we couldn't meet in person, we all ordered food on DoorDash and played an online escape room game together. We were on a Zoom call, helping each other out and having fun. The first challenge was to escape a jail cell.
You must use the tool. We must justify it. These aren't the words companies use, but that's what it comes down to. When you buy an expensive solution before you've clearly identified the problem, you have to use the tool to justify its line item in the spreadsheet. At most companies I've worked in, there's always some application I've used once or twice. The third time I want to use it, it's gone. If a tool isn't popular, the finance team has no trouble dropping it.
You've probably heard this one before. It might have come from a parent, a teacher, or a friend who bought an expensive item and wanted to justify it. It goes something like this:
When I was a kid, my father bought a family home computer and placed it in the living room for all to see. When guests came to our house, they would stop by the computer and admire its marvel without even turning it on. While everyone else was careful with the computer, treating it like an important investment, I quickly started inserting discs and installing games. One thing we take for granted today is how cheap and abundant storage is. Our family computer had a single hard drive with a whopping 2 gigabytes.
I like building websites. But in some circles, I might as well say that I like to drive to the forest before sunrise, chop down a tree, load it in my trunk, and gather some dry wood as well, then drive back before first light. All this just to use the wood to start a fire and cook breakfast for my family in our high-rise apartment. It makes no sense.
Imagine being worth $2 billion. Would you give away $550 million? That's a quarter of your wealth, more money than I could spend in several lifetimes. Yet that's how much Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat, and his wife have donated to a charity in California. Specifically, they donated to Undue Medical Debt, an organization that buys Californians' medical debts and expunges them. That's close to $9,200 for each recipient. A noble act.
Amazon has been accused several times for ripping off merchants on its platform. And every single time they denied any wrongdoing.