Indie hackers, side projects, and maker culture
Wanted to hear a pipe organ. Found out Egypt has 6 for 100 million people. Built a polyphonic synthesizer from pure math instead. Now questioning why commercial organ plugins cost $400 when the hard parts are just continuous derivatives and lock-free queues.
A three-year-old and Claude built nine games together at madladstudios.com. Now there's a tool that generates AI prompts so you can do the same. No coding required, just copy-paste into ChatGPT and ship something your toddler actually wants to play.
Before bootcamps and CS degrees, there was MySpace. Autoplay music, glitter backgrounds, and inline CSS that actually shipped to production. That chaotic era of profile customisation turned a generation of kids into self-taught devs, one `<marquee>` tag at a time. Here's what 17 years in the industry actually looks like.
That "simple" chat feature? It's actually distributed systems hell disguised as a text input. Six months from now, you'll be debugging message ordering at 2am while your users wonder why Southeast Asia keeps getting duplicate notifications. Here's why most teams should never build chat, and what to do instead.