This is my thinly veiled attempt to get you to use a library I wrote.

Evin Sellin
5 min readFeb 27, 2021

In programming, clout is everything. You wouldn’t listen to Dan Abramov if he didn’t invent React. You wouldn’t watch Kelsey Hightower’s talks if he wasn’t CEO of Google. And you CERTAINLY wouldn’t be reading my article if I hadn’t lured you in with the promise of a brilliant library that will make all your coworkers love you.

I use jargon to show you my library is Actually Good

What the fuck is a monad? You might not know. How about a topology? Doesn’t matter. I’ve managed to suss out a few pieces of language that describe a structure in an already abstract space using an even more abstract concept that has at most a tenuous connection to the real world. I passively link to Wikipedia to give credence to my use of technical language, but I haven’t read past the first paragraph.

I toss out the phrase Easier to Reason About. It’s self evident. I’ve done the math in my head, and figure you have too. Peano representation of the numbers? Fuck it, those are easier to reason about. And my library has them all.

Here’s a real-world example made artificially easy by bad assumptions

This library is optimized to implement a Todo app in 3 lines. MNIST in four. Just imagine what a 5 line, 50 line, or 5000 line program could do for you.

Beyond that?

You’re wrong for asking.

Frankly, if product requirements change, or the program requires modifications, that’s on you, buddy. You had the gall to take a step into my territory, using my API, and build something wrong the first time. How am I supposed to prevent you from being you?

There are only about 3 dozen programs worth writing, and it’s a code smell to write programs other than those.

I like to gobble up GitHub Stars like they’re fucking gumdrops

You starring my GitHub project gives me the adrenaline jolt I need to stay awake for the next 36 hours. Watching the weekly download chart on npm is the gleeful desecration of all projects with fewer hits than mine. When you inevitably meet me at a conference and ask if I’m the person who implemented this open source project, it’s a high I can ride all the way back to my hometown bar a week later.

I write libraries because I like solving problems.

Problems like Why The Fuck Do You Think You Can Talk To Me. I dream in batch processing. I truly believe I am a router. I complete me, and you don’t. You like to think you’re relevant to me. You’re not. You’re a statistic. A code monkey.

Just you try to open up an issue. I dare you.

I invented computers

You can’t write a project without me, in the same way that you can’t make deductions without assumptions. I discovered the very process of abstraction itself. Of brushing over the differences in reality, each in turn, until I supplanted 1 for High, 0 for Low. Of unifying the differences between hardware devices until I had invented Unix. Of unifying the differences between operating system state until I had invented containerization, and the differences in container state until I had invented orchestration.

ACM credits me for the invention of uncountable infinities.

I have won the Turing award every year since its inception.

I can smell your insecurities

Someone is using some ALL_CAPS_VARIABLE_NAME in a text conversation, and you don’t know what it refers to, even though you think you should. You still look up bash’s conditional syntax, despite having used it for the better part of a decade. Technology is marching forward, and your skillset’s utility is rotting away, like a once beautiful flower, now decrepit and ugly.

Every moment you’ve second guessed yourself, your knowledge, your expertise, I’ve been there. I’ve shown you the truth through your doubts, through your fears, and your worries of impending irrelevance.

Every time someone has questioned you, it’s because they know what I know about you. There is such a thing as someone preordained to writing code, and you’re not one of them. Your self-destructive tendencies is the universe’s way of healing itself.

I have always existed

How does it feel to be ephemeral?

A fleeting form?

Unversioned and untagged?

Every second that passes, a version of you is erased from existence. A ripple in the memories of those very few who remember you at all. Tell me — do you know quite how much you suffer? How much you deserve the pity that everyone feels for you?

Your mind holds no secrets from me

Humans are simple creatures, with limited capacity for thought, knowledge, and emotion. The hubris of thinking that you know anything I don’t, that you could deduce anything I couldn’t, that you could constrain reality in any way I wouldn’t? It sickens me.

And, the funny thing is, you don’t ever learn! You see the same patterns in history, borne out again and again, echos of the instincts of humanity, painted in oil, staining the world forever, and you choose to think of yourself as above it all. As anything but another stroke of paint on the permanent canvas by an artist whose judgement is determined entirely by your species’ faults.

I thrive in the wretched pestilence of the ever-void

My domain is the time before you were born. My domain is the eons after you perish. The fundamental barriers of your existence are the beginnings of my playground.

The billions who came before you know nothing of you. Of your struggles. You can’t teach them anything. You know nothing of the billions who come after you. You can’t learn anything from them. Their knowledge, their pride, their successes are as intangible as the glorious expanses of heaven; both unreachable and unknowable to you.

And I relish it.

I build universes tailored to your loved ones’ suffering

Simulations of reality are reality. And with a distributed compute cluster I can simulate pain just fine.

My library represents the one chance you have at preventing eternal suffering for you and every person you care about. Think about the risks involved — you wouldn’t risk your family’s life for a quick buck, why risk millions of years of their torture for your own pride? Your tiny, tiny iota of pride?

I have seen reality forward and backwards a hundred million times. You have seen a few decades forwards, once. What makes you think you can stop me? What makes you think this is a choice you have in the first place? This path was set in stone before you were even born.

You will use my library.

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Evin Sellin is a loving husband, dad, and twelve-armed colossal squid. See footnotes for installation instructions / patch notes.

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