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The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

eieio.games

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Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#21

Post by eieio »

cabbageicefruit wrote: post #20
eieio wrote: post #5

author here :) this is my favorite story from running the site, and possibly the best story I've ever been a part of. I'm not a big crier but I have cried so many times thinking and trying to write about it over the past 2 months. And of course, the process of discovery (and going from panic to excitement) was pretty crazy too. One of my favorite things about this is that it validated one of the core beliefs I have w…

Perhaps you have said this elsewhere, but why shut the site down?

A few reasons!

  * More than anything, I think it's good for things to end! I figured interest in the site would die off over time (and it started to), and I thought it was better to close things out providing a special experience for the people that used it than to keep it up to get a few more users
  * Costs started adding up; donations stopped matching them. I coulda figured out how to lower my costs but I wasn't excited about it.
  * While the site was up I felt an obligation to make sure someone hadn't found some trivial workaround to deface the thing and I didn't want to do that anymore.
I'm very pro ephemeral stuff! So I feel good about the decision. But it's a good question.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#22

Post by switz »

eieio wrote: post #21
cabbageicefruit wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you have said this elsewhere, but why shut the site down?

A few reasons! * More than anything, I think it's good for things to end! I figured interest in the site would die off over time (and it started to), and I thought it was better to close things out providing a special experience for the people that used it than to keep it up to get a few more users * Costs started adding up; donations stopped matching them. I coulda figured out how to lower my costs but I wasn't exci…

I enthusiastically agree - and really all that matters is that you feel good about it. As a software engineer who's built (and shut down) many projects, I have always been envious of art forms in which the artist gets to create a piece of work and then "finish" it. We are often at the mercy of perpetual maintenance.

Well done and nice execution.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#23

Post by trescenzi »

aidenn0 wrote: post #15
Scoundreller wrote: post #11

> To do this I said - a checkbox has two valid states. It’s checked or it’s unchecked Ah, i see someone has been burned by true, false and null before!

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/numb-to-truth

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:indetermin...

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#24

Post by move-on-by »

I was one of those hating on the bots. Thank you for this post, I needed it. I too got in trouble at school for programming things I shouldn’t have. But I’ll forever be grateful to the math teacher who said I was allowed to use programs on my TI-83+ calculator as long as I was the one who had written them and I didn’t share them with anyone else.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#25

Post by thatswrong0 »

eieio wrote: post #5

author here :) this is my favorite story from running the site, and possibly the best story I've ever been a part of. I'm not a big crier but I have cried so many times thinking and trying to write about it over the past 2 months. And of course, the process of discovery (and going from panic to excitement) was pretty crazy too. One of my favorite things about this is that it validated one of the core beliefs I have w…

I loved this. It's really.. endearing and adorable? And it's what I wish the internet was used for more.

Thanks for the writeup!

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#29

Post by adityapurwa »

I don’t know. Reading this made me tear up a bit. I learned software engineering when I was in junior high school. I learned it because I sucked at math, and I want to write programs that solve my homework. Then I continue writing LAN chat, HTTP server, Anti Virus, and a lot more things just because it was fun to do.

It was fun, it was challenging, it was rewarding, it was amazing.

Now that I’m working, with the endless stream of new technologies, the debates of X considered harmful, J is better than K, and a barrage of never ending new things. It started to numb my mind.

Somehow, those joyful feeling of engineering no longer feels like the blue sky. I think its still blue, but for an eye washed in silvers, everything looks gray.

Reading this story somehow light up that childhood feeling of me learning software engineering. It can still be fun. I can still write things for the sake of me and not for the sake of exit nor a new shiny SaaS.

Thank your for writing this. It gave me a ray of hope that it can still be fun.

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