I often destroyed our home computer when I was a kid. Armed with only 2GB of storage, I'd constantly hunt for files to delete to save space. But I learned the hard way that .ini files are actually imp| Ibrahim Diallo Blog
Writing code is easy. Once you have a solution in mind, and have mastered the syntax of your favorite programming language, writing code is easy. Having an LLM write entire functions for you? Even eas| Ibrahim Diallo Blog
Google just released the future of their Chrome browser. To put it simply, it's AI everything. Meta also released their new smart glasses, complete with a "neural" wristband for input. It too is AI everything. The more I watched these product launches, with their proclamations about the future, the more I was reminded of this observation from Catch-22: "While none of the work we do is very important, it is important that we do a great deal of it." Everyone wants to use AI to do things for me ...| iDiallo.com
After walking up a hill and being completely out of breath, I knew it was time for a change. Now, the moment I get home from work, I lace up my running shoes and hit the pavement. After a few weeks, my body started to crave that movement, I couldn't stop even if I wanted to. It became automatic. When you set your bedtime to 10 PM and follow it religiously, as soon as 9:45 hits, your eyelids grow heavy. When lunch is at noon, your stomach starts rumbling at 11:58. That's the result of forming ...| iDiallo.com
When I saw new questions on Stackoverflow, I followed 3 simple steps. First I'd read the question, ask clarifying questions in the comment section, and then I would start writing a comprehensive answer. But one time, someone asked a question and I eagerly jumped to the comment to make a bold statement. "They are absolutely wrong! Don't believe what people say." When I think about it now, I wish I wasn't so eager to get those virtual points. The question, now deleted as irrelevant, was someone...| iDiallo.com
Every problem, every limitation, every frustrating debug session seemed to have the same solution: Use a modern solution. Modern encryption algorithms. Modern deployment pipelines. Modern database solutions. The word modern has become the cure-all solution, promising to solve not just our immediate problems, but somehow prevent future ones entirely. I remember upgrading an app from PHP 5.3 to 7.1. It felt like it was cutting edge. But years later, 7.1 was also outdated. The application had a ...| iDiallo.com
Early in my career, I worked alongside a seasoned C programmer who had finally embraced web development. The company had acquired a successful website built in Perl by someone who, while brilliant, wasn't entirely technical. The codebase was a fascinating mess. print commands interwoven with HTML, complex business logic, database calls, and conditional statements all tangled together in ways that would make you want to restart from scratch! Then came the JavaScript requirements. Whenever fron...| iDiallo.com
Maybe it was a decade ago when it seemed like every single game developer started believing that all games should be open world. Infinite possibilities, player freedom, emergent storytelling, who wouldn't want that? But open world design introduced new problems that linear games never faced. Players would get lost in meaningless side quests while the main story waited forgotten. Developers would pile on features that didn't serve the core experience. Worst of all, players often couldn't tell ...| iDiallo.com
A few years back, I was running a CI/CD pipeline from a codebase that just kept failing. It pulled the code successfully, it passed the test, the docker image was built, but then it would fail. Each run took around 15 minutes to fail, meaning whatever change I made had to take at least 15 minutes before I knew if it was successful or not. Of course, it failed multiple times before I figured out a solution. When I was done, I wasn't frustrated with the small mistake I had made, I was frustrate...| iDiallo.com
I once had a job interview for a backend position. Their stack was Node.js, MySQL, nothing exotic. The interviewer asked: "If you have an array containing a million entries, how would you sort the dat| Ibrahim Diallo Blog
Back in the 2010s, we had our own hype cycle. It was silly because it hijacked a term we were all already familiar with, then rebranded it as if it were new technology. Those two terms were "Server" and "Cloud." Yes, children, there was a time when we didn't say "cloud computers". We just called them servers. I remember watching that Larry Ellison video where he rants about cloud computing. Eventually, he conceded, and Oracle started selling "cloud computing." Larry Ellison and the Cloud. We ...| iDiallo.com
With Bootstrap, Tailwind, Figma-to-code plugins, and AI generators, the modern web dev toolkit seems to have one shared goal: helping you build interfaces without ever writing a line of CSS. So, with all these incredible tools at your fingertips, is there any real point in learning raw CSS anymore? Absolutely. In fact, it's more valuable now than ever. It's amazing how often CSS is treated like a second-class citizen in web development. For any serious application, design is integral to prese...| iDiallo.com
When I click on a blog post these days, I'm not usually looking for the definitive encyclopedia entry or the slickest marketing brochure. Honestly? I'm hoping for something far simpler, yet increasing| Ibrahim Diallo Blog
"I'm sorry... did you want to go to the bathroom too?" "Oh no, I was just following you." "Oh, well I'd rather you not follow me." "Wait, it's not like you have something to hide, right? Make sure| Ibrahim Diallo Blog
Most projects start with a burst of energy. Writing initial code, whether through vibe coding or meticulously setting up a new repository. This is the fast building phase: boilerplates are generated,| Ibrahim Diallo Blog
I recently had to cancel my Internet service at home, and it was the worst experience I've ever had with customer service. A year ago, a new company that offers fiber internet was added to my neighbor| Ibrahim Diallo Blog
At an old job, our customers were early adopters of smartphones, and we had to ensure our web app worked flawlessly on their devices. As the newbie on the team, I was tasked with optimizing code to le| Ibrahim Diallo Blog
At the end of every month, I used to religiously check the total internet bandwidth we'd consumed at home. A decade ago, my ISP would throttle our connection if we crossed some loosely defined thresho| Ibrahim Diallo Blog
I remember my first corporate job. The recruiter, hired just two months prior, hadn’t gotten a single candidate into the pipeline. In my interview, he kept asking: “Why didn’t you write about th| Ibrahim Diallo Blog
I've tried vibe coding. It did not work for me. I think the problem is that I'm an actual developer, and I feel dread running code I don't understand. As Andrej Karpathy, who coined the term, describe| Ibrahim Diallo Blog
A programming blog featuring insights, tutorials, and and clever tips to hack your code and daily life by Ibrahim Diallo| Ibrahim Diallo Blog
The 2010s was the Wild West of the mobile world. "Mobile-first" was the buzzword, much like "AI-first" is today. Every company, from the biggest social media giants to your local pizza parlor, seemed| Ibrahim Diallo Blog
List of things I was thinking about on page 1| Ibrahim Diallo Blog
The MP3 format, once the gold standard for digital audio files, is now free. The licensing and patents on MP3 encoders have expired, meaning you can now include them in your applications without payin| Ibrahim Diallo Blog