When You Look Again At Your Own Code

Content APPLY PROGRAMMING THINKING ABOUT PATTERNS PROGRAMMING PATTERNS IN REAL APPLICATION

Content First day of college implementing an algorithm with a third party library Professor: "We don't do that here"

Content mathew mathewmastodon.social 1 came up with a single pass O(n) sort algorithm I call StalinSort. You iterate down the list of elements checking if they're in order. Any element which is out of order is eliminated. At the end you have a sorted list.

Content when you try to git-blame and you realize you wrote the broken code NYPD

When your password security is so bad that even the waitress knows your hashing strategy. Guy orders something at the diner and can't identify what's on his plate, but don't worry—they salted the hash. You know, for security. Salting hashes is Password Storage 101: you add random data to passwords before hashing so two identical passwords don't produce the same hash. It's literally the bare minimum you should be doing if you're storing user credentials. But here's the thing—if someone's complaining they "can't identify" what they're looking at, your security probably has bigger problems than whether you remembered to salt. The "Privacy Diner" is serving up cryptographic puns with a side of existential dread about how your data is actually being handled. Spoiler: it's probably not as secure as you think.

Someone asks Jeff Dean—literally a LIVING LEGEND at Google who helped build MapReduce and half the infrastructure that runs the internet—how much DSA (Data Structures and Algorithms) knowledge helped him create these world-changing systems. His response? "What is DSA hard?" The man is so far beyond the grind of LeetCode medium problems that he doesn't even recognize the acronym. While the rest of us are out here grinding binary trees at 2 AM trying to pass interviews, Jeff Dean is casually rewriting search indexing pipelines and genuinely confused about what "DSA hard" even means. It's like asking Michelangelo how many YouTube tutorials he watched before painting the Sistine Chapel. The beautiful irony? He probably invented half the algorithms we're studying to get hired at the company he works at. The sheer cosmic comedy of it all is just *chef's kiss*.