Show Me the Article You're Most Proud Of And I'll Read Every Single One of Them

I gotta tell you, if I'd had something like this when I first joined the community, I'd have been a lot more active from day one. Great work @francistrdev !

I think I remember this one, let me check again 👀

Definitely a must-read for anyone new! @plaidscientist This 1 is good to read and get a feel of things!

Oh my goodness, and I thought I was someone who loved writing huge articles. I’m gonna need to take a full day-off just to read this😂

Just kidding, the weekend is coming up soon and I’ll have time to go through this monstrosity.😄

This is an amazing read.

I feel I do not belong there, but it is too late, with some fierce courage I had sent my request to talk months ago and to my surprise it was accepted. Now I am there, just minutes before the talk, thrilled...

See? That's the key quote in this article. You don't know what's behind the door until you step inside. I admire anyone who has courage to stick around where they "don't belong" only to find out they don't just belong there, even more - it's their natural habitat.

I hope you'll achieve the rest of your goals soon. 🔥

@unitbuilds A bare-metal, self-healing OS is a really creative goal. I love it, especially as a teenager I always wanted to build my own operating system, started learning low-level languages, and then reality hit. 😄 Maybe I'll come back to it one day.

The part about Kimi optimizing for correctness against the spec is the most interesting thing here. It's a good illustration of how much the unstated context matters with these models and how specific you have to be about the environment the code is actually going to run in.

The scanner idea is pretty neat, it reminds me of NoteRunway, another hackathon winning app that I created. One of the features of it was detecting sensitive data that people had written into notes "temporarily". But my approach was kinda the reverse of what's written here. Regex ran first as the deterministic pass, and then, optionally, an AI scan on top to catch what patterns couldn't.

One thing worth flagging: in edge cases that self-correction loop could get expensive. The mechanics of this really resembles to agentic loops that keep cycling until it verifies it hit the goal, which is notoriously costly. Different use case and a much smaller scale here, but the mechanics rhyme.

@pascal_cescato_692b7a8a20 great project from what I've read so far. I'm glad there are still people who do such low-level work, with proper AI usage. 👏👏👏

Oh wow, this one looks really deep and complex, I'm gonna take my time to read and analyze this. I'll get back to you in about a day or two 😄

Extremely interesting read, especially for someone who's going to need neat designs for a few upcoming projects. My background is in back-end engineering, which doesn't help much when it comes to judging which design fits which project, that's one skill I really need to get good at.

I've built plenty of side projects, but I still don't have a portfolio website. Part of the reason is that I want it to be really, really good, so I never manage to start at all. I think I need to change that, just start somewhere and figure the rest out later.

The title also made me think the clients had figured out the work was done with AI help and disliked it for that reason. Glad it turned out to be the other way around.

And this quote, "Fast generation is useful. Blind acceptance isn't, is an absolute gem.

Great read, and really useful for future me. I'll pull this article back up when I get to the "decide what tool to use" step. I'm sure it'll make the decision faster.

Thanks a lot for sharing! 🙏

This piece of writing is seriously impressive both in terms of storytelling and technical explanation.

Right from the start of the article, I was so intrigued to know what was the actual problem causing that stubborn, red text that wouldn't go away.

That really reminded me one of those all nighters of mine. I'd spent the whole evening, night, and morning debugging one silly problem. I can't express the level of happiness I had when I finally found it.

Our job is tough, but it's also so rewarding!

Great job! 👏

Oh, I remember this one, I even commented on this post.

I like how you picked an article titled "The Most Painful Career Lesson My Best Job Taught Me" as your favorite.

That just shows me that you not trying to forget bad experiences, you embrace them. Trust me, not everyone can do that. I used to be pretty bad at that.

But as you gain more experience, you realize there's no such thing as a "bad experience" in a career. Bad experiences teach you far more valuable lessons than good ones do.

I’m definitely gonna read all of them, no matter how much time it takes.

It’s a slow process, but it’s really fun at the same time.😄

I’ll get to your post as soon as I can🙏

I loved this article from the first few sentences. Why? You mentioned rainy, cold days, those are my favourite. That's when I feel most alive. Not many people understand that about me, but there it is.

I've never been to France, though.

I went to Germany recently for the second time, and I've had my share of the work-to-travel switch. Here's my story:

I had a flight in a few hours, so I decided to spend one of those precious hours recording a new video about a bug I found in my game and how I fixed it, alongside the article I had written.

I really, really, REALLY wanted to get it done before taking off.

So I recorded 20 minutes of video and started packing up to make sure that was done:

"Perfect. I'll edit and upload this once I'm done packing."

Oh boy... Little did I know...
I finished packing, sat back down at my PC, opened the recording...
No sound.

Turned the volume all the way up.
Still watching myself blab away without hearing a single word of my blabbing.

"Oh no, no, no!"

For some reason, my audio settings had changed and OBS Studio had decided that my microphone was no longer invited to the party.

Twenty (20) minutes of beautifully recorded content.
Absolutely.
⬇️ 
Completely.
⬇️ 
Utterly.
⬇️ 
Totally.
⬇️ 
Entirely.
⬇️ 
Useless.

That's a lot of work to go to waste.

"Giorgi you idiot!"
I was fuming.

Welp, that was my next challenge to fix that.
At that point, I had two options:
1. Accept defeat
2. Record the entire thing again

The odds of option 2 were pretty low, but it still worth a shot.

Now I was seriously short on time. The airport wasn't going to wait for me to finish uploading a video.

Somehow, I still managed to record everything again, edit it, upload it, and get ready in time.

Now what was the hardest part?
Pretending everything was totally fine, while talking in the video.

Meanwhile, internally:
"WHY TF DID I NOT CHECK THE AUDIO?!"
"WHAT TIME IS IT?!"
"HOLY S..., I'M DEFINITELY GONNA MISS THAT PLANE!"

But hey, that's life. Not every day is a perfectly executed 10/10 productivity story. Sometimes you just forget to check your microphone.

I agree completely about thinking differently once you're out of your routine. You start thinking about things that give you that small joy of discovering something inside your own head. It's like leaving your usual noisy route and taking the backroads, where everything is quieter and better. Especially for people like us, who are more or less always working.

By the way, I didn't know that book you were reading. Noting it down.

I also walk like a maniac. On my last trip I averaged well over 150,000 steps in total, I just love walking that much.

And sorry about your loss. Coming home to a meow-free house must be hard.

You're right that the building never stops. Our brains are remarkable at figuring things out on their own and adapting to whatever they're dropped into. San Francisco to Paris would be a bigger jump than my trip was I'm in Europe anyways, so Germany is a three or four hour flight, barely a change of scenery by comparison.

California to France is different in weather, culture, food, everything. I lived in California for a few months, so I know how wide that gap is, and I think it's wider in your direction than mine. In Europe, American culture is already everywhere and everyone speaks English, so arriving there from Europe isn't much of a shock, also (I would say that California and the US in general has much better vibes than Europe). Going the other way is definitely a huge jump, and that's exactly the kind of jolt that makes you see things differently, that's why it was so inpiring to you.

This is one of the best articles I've read in a while!👏

I started reading this outside, during a few idle minutes and got about halfway through... I can't wait to finish it. It's SO well-written, I really felt like I was reading an extremely good book.

I'll send you my full feedback once I'm done. 🙏

First things first, I knew something was going to go badly the moment you said the room applauded Drew. All anyone had seen was a demo, running on test data he prepared himself.

It reminds me of a meme I saw the other day: a guy gets an incident on production and his boss gives him until EOD to fix it, so he rewrites the health check endpoint to always return healthy. No actual fix is done. Then he writes something along the lines: "The database was on fire, but everyone was happy. Perception is reality."

Same thing here. Nobody had any idea how that model would behave in practice, but it came from Drew - a decorated principal architect, PhD, the whole résumé. How could he possibly be wrong about anything, right?! Sometimes people look at how things appear instead of how they actually are.

"He doesn't need QA, because he proved his system is mathematically safe." Famous last words before a complete disaster.

"You've got good data. But data isn't architecture." - this one really made me think, and I'm still trying to work out what it's supposed to mean. To me it reads like "I can't justify my architecture, so I'll state something ridiculously obvious to confuse everybody so much that nobody can even ask a follow-up question."

Of course data isn't architecture, Drew. But architecture isn't separate from data either, the shape of your data has a huge impact on how you build your architecture. When something breaks, it's usually either the architecture or the data, and from what you describe here, the data was fine.

"He fixed one tree. The forest was still burning." I'm writing that one down. OMG this is so good!😄

Also: there aren't many things worse than the regulator's representatives showing up at the front desk.🥶 That's when you know you've REALLY messed up. And they're not going to ask for architecture documents, for sure, all they care about is whether their rules were breached.

The part that shocks me most is that there was no logging of every step and every approval. For someone like Drew that should have been a no-brainer from day one.

Anyway, this is one of the best articles I've read here. The storytelling, the technical insights, the reminder that even the most senior people in a company get things wrong and that we should listen to everyone, a real lesson for all of us. I'm glad I read it, and I'll go through the rest of the series once I've caught up on my reading list.

Thank you!