Build your dreams!

Discuss on Hacker News, Twitter or Reddit. Also, hire me!

I’m 51, and I started coding 37 years ago — writing BASIC on my lap during a 1.5-hour bus ride from Havana (where I went to school) back to Santa Cruz del Norte. Seats were usually taken, so I coded while sitting on the wheel cover. Not ideal ergonomics, but perfect motivation.

I got paid to program about four years later — my first $300 for breaking the copyright protection on a medical system. Different country, different time.

I’ve never touched Fortran or COBOL, but I’ve programmed in almost everything else at least once. And some languages I keep coming back to again and again (I’m looking at you, Forth and Lisp).

I’ve written trading systems and device drivers. I started a blockchain company and ran it into the ground. I’ve been around long enough to have bought the t-shirt and the sticker pack.

Have I established my bona fides yet? If not, you can browse my resume and open-source work.

The Craft

I care about the craft. I’ve spent decades honing it. Recently I wrote a transpiler from Ghidra’s Sleigh to Rust/C++. I first attempted it in Smalltalk (don’t ask — aborted), then in Zig, then OCaml, then Rust, just to find the most elegant expression. Rust pleasantly surprised me once I gave up on arenas and embraced Rc<RefCell<T>>. And OCaml still rules the compiler-development world.

Maybe I care too much about the process and not enough about the outcome.

A Life of Dreams

At 51, in the second half of my life, I want to leave a visible trace — something delivered into the world. I’m self-taught (skipped college), always learning, but delivery matters more than perfect process.

I’m an average developer living an average life — wartime Kyiv notwithstanding. I have a wife and two daughters and only so many hours each day. Contracting sometimes leaves me with gaps to experiment, but my day jobs rarely give me enough time for the strange hobby projects I dream about.

And my dreams are definitely off the beaten path:

• Why has the Nichimen Mirai story never been repeated?
• Why should I pick Rust simply because it has LALRPOP, while Zig doesn’t?
• Why can’t I run lifelike drone simulations in Unreal Engine but use Julia instead of Python?
• Why does the ML world insist on Python anyway? Why can't I use Julia?

I want to build a knowledge base that lives on top of the codebase — without littering someone else’s source code with comments.

I want keyboard navigation and history editing in ocamldebug.
I want easier native OCaml debugging on macOS.
I want a super-fast non-LLVM Zig backend for ARM64.
I want tiny, deployable Julia binaries for microcontrollers and embedded Linux.

I love what Naughty Dog and Andy Gavin did with GOAL.
I want Lisp running on drones with remote hot-patching. But no existing Lisp lets me develop on macOS and deploy to ARM64 embedded or bare-metal targets.

Why AI Changed Everything

All of this felt like a pipe dream — until now.

Nowadays, I’m so excited that I wake up at 4–5 a.m. just to code using AI. I can go all day, non-stop. Every new model release feels like Christmas morning: What can it do? What can I do with it?

I’m a college drop-out and an autodidact. AI can teach me concepts I thought were too hard to learn. AI can dig into a complex codebase on my behalf, distill it into parts, and tell me how they relate to each other. AI can tell me if my code sucks and how I can improve it. I can combine AI with artisanal coding if I have time (Hi Geoffrey Litt!).

This is the time when any motivated developer can explore languages, compilers, and entire systems for pennies. I realized I can actually build everything I’ve been dreaming about. No permission required. No gatekeepers. Just work.

The only thing standing between me and the things I want to create is my own laziness.

And the same goes for you.

Build your dreams.

And follow me on Twitter!

P.S. Pushing my ambitions onto unsuspecting open-source communities was a mistake I won’t repeat. The best playground is always your own project.