A short one, between the heavier posts.
A few weeks ago my friend Aaron asked for something on our footie site, football.voiddeck.sg. Not a big ask, on paper. Aaron makes these funny videos himself, local footballers, past and present, in situations they never actually found themselves in, commenting on the current football scene. He wanted whatever he made to just show up on Voiddeck Football automatically, instead of manually sharing the URL like we do now. No upload button. No copy-paste. It should just appear.
What he was actually asking for was an integration into one of the most used platforms on the planet. Figuring out what that needs. What has to be validated, what the data actually looks like coming back, how you instruct the code to do it properly rather than hack something together that breaks the first time the platform changes anything.
That’s the part that got me. Not the feature. The problem.
Sitting with that for an evening, working through what it would actually take, I felt something I haven’t felt properly in a long time. The same rush I had the first time I made a computer do something nobody told it to do. Thirty-odd years later, and it is exactly the same feeling, triggered by exactly the same thing: a real problem, and the chance to go figure it out.
There’s a running joke between Aaron and our group of friends about a certain Singapore defender he’s rather fond of, which probably explains why he’s the one making these videos in the first place. That part’s ours to keep.
So, am I geek like that? Yes. Thirty years in, and a half-decent integration problem can still make my week. I think that’s rather the point. You never get sick of your first love. You always want to feel the same way you felt when you were first in love. Technology is my first career love, and I am still loving it. I am grateful to have this feeling even after 36 years since my first coding work.
Back to the regular programme next post.