Thank you for the wonderful post! It is always interesting to hear vulnerability and sincerity from people online. I have personally struggled with some milder forms of addictions that are nowhere near close to what you went through but I manage to relate at least a bit and I felt a bit... inspired(?) by your journey with a positive end. Thank you again! :)
Just putting this out there: as someone who has only really encountered UUIDs in a different part of a tool I'm working on, and also loves learning about very dumb in-jokes, I would adore an attempt at explaining what a UUID is and what exactly the joke behind the site is. Love the write-ups!
Hi! ok, fair enough, I should have tried harder here.
So, as you may know, a UUID is a really really long string that is ~basically always unique. They look like this: 497dcba3-ecbf-4587-a2dd-5eb0665e6880. There are different ways to generate them, but one popular way is to just...generate a random number between 0 and 2^122 (and then convert it to a hexadecimal string, which is how they are often displayed). Since that number is hilariously large, the chances of two people generating the same UUID are hilariously small.
They're handy when you want to uniquely identify something - for example, maybe you want to give a unique name to every photo someone uploads to your site, or maybe you want to create a "private" link to a document that is easy to share.
Anyway. The premise of the site is that I was a guy who understood UUIDs really well but fundamentally didn't understand what they were for. Within the joke, I thought it was important to "remember" every UUID, and so I wrote them all down on a site so that I could remember them easier. The site has a bunch of features that don't make sense - for example, you can "favorite" UUIDs to come back to them later (this doesn't make any sense; the whole point is that you don't re-use them), and there's a search feature so that you can "find good UUIDs" (this, again, doesn't make sense).
And implementing all of this was pretty hard and I had to do some pretty fun coding stuff to make the site work! And the joke here is largely around me doing all of that work in-character as a guy fundamentally misunderstanding the technology, but executing on that misunderstanding really well. I wrote the blog completely in character, posted on social media in character, etc.
It's...kind of like me saying "I couldn't remember all the numbers so I wrote them all down?" But I think it's funnier here because the purpose of UUIDs is that you don't remember them or re-use them.
Thanks for sharing. I love your work and respect you more for being vulnerable!
Thank you for the wonderful post! It is always interesting to hear vulnerability and sincerity from people online. I have personally struggled with some milder forms of addictions that are nowhere near close to what you went through but I manage to relate at least a bit and I felt a bit... inspired(?) by your journey with a positive end. Thank you again! :)
Just putting this out there: as someone who has only really encountered UUIDs in a different part of a tool I'm working on, and also loves learning about very dumb in-jokes, I would adore an attempt at explaining what a UUID is and what exactly the joke behind the site is. Love the write-ups!
Hi! ok, fair enough, I should have tried harder here.
So, as you may know, a UUID is a really really long string that is ~basically always unique. They look like this: 497dcba3-ecbf-4587-a2dd-5eb0665e6880. There are different ways to generate them, but one popular way is to just...generate a random number between 0 and 2^122 (and then convert it to a hexadecimal string, which is how they are often displayed). Since that number is hilariously large, the chances of two people generating the same UUID are hilariously small.
They're handy when you want to uniquely identify something - for example, maybe you want to give a unique name to every photo someone uploads to your site, or maybe you want to create a "private" link to a document that is easy to share.
Anyway. The premise of the site is that I was a guy who understood UUIDs really well but fundamentally didn't understand what they were for. Within the joke, I thought it was important to "remember" every UUID, and so I wrote them all down on a site so that I could remember them easier. The site has a bunch of features that don't make sense - for example, you can "favorite" UUIDs to come back to them later (this doesn't make any sense; the whole point is that you don't re-use them), and there's a search feature so that you can "find good UUIDs" (this, again, doesn't make sense).
And implementing all of this was pretty hard and I had to do some pretty fun coding stuff to make the site work! And the joke here is largely around me doing all of that work in-character as a guy fundamentally misunderstanding the technology, but executing on that misunderstanding really well. I wrote the blog completely in character, posted on social media in character, etc.
It's...kind of like me saying "I couldn't remember all the numbers so I wrote them all down?" But I think it's funnier here because the purpose of UUIDs is that you don't remember them or re-use them.
That's more-or-less what I figured the idea was, but it's fun to know for certain. Cheers for the explanation!
For those who don’t know, it’s a number that identifies things.