Roel Nieskens has written a love letter to programming in the form of ten code snippets, each one a bead on a string that traces the arc from wide-eyed kid typing HELLO WORLD on a home computer to a seasoned developer hiding poems inside CSS. The format looks like a listicle. It isn't. It's memoir. The structural trick is that each snippet escalates in technical sophistication while the emotional register stays constant: wonder. The BASIC infinite loop teaches a child that computers obey. The self-modifying 6502 assembly teaches a teenager that obedience has no guardrails. The Borland Pascal network scanner teaches a young hacker that systems are made of assumptions you can test. The 280-character CSS poem teaches an adult that constraints breed art. The trajectory is the point. The strongest entries are the ones where the code IS the joke or the revelation, not merely a prompt for nostalgia. The JavaScript 'wat-Batman' gag lands because the humor is intrinsic to the language's type coercion insanity — you paste it, you laugh, you understand something about JavaScript's design. The self-modifying 6502 is genuinely thrilling if you've ever wondered what it means for code to rewrite itself at runtime. The POKE for infinite lives is a one-line thesis on the nature of software: everything is just bytes at an address. The weaker entries — touch.bat, the CSS debugger line, the speed-up loop anecdote — work as inside jokes for working developers but don't carry the same weight of discovery. They're competent but they coast on recognition humor rather than building toward insight. The speed-up loop story, borrowed from Alex Papadimoulis at The Daily WTF, is funny but it's someone else's funny. The rm -rf / entry captures something specific about early-2000s IRC culture — the gleeful sociopathy of telling a newbie to nuke their filesystem — that younger developers might not recognize as a real and widespread phenomenon. It's digital folklore, preserved here almost accidentally. The closing CSS poem is the piece's best move. After nine entries of escalating technical complexity, Nieskens lands on something that is simultaneously the most constrained (280 characters, no JavaScript, no HTML) and the most expressive (an animated love poem referencing 'All Your Base'). The 1e+9 duration hack — using scientific notation to get 'practically infinite' in fewer characters than 'infinite' — is the kind of detail that makes you want to buy someone a drink. It's craft celebrating craft. This is a small piece that knows it's small. It doesn't pretend to be a history of computing or a meditation on digital culture. It's one person's ten bookmarks in a life spent talking to machines, and it trusts the reader to find their own equivalent memories in the gaps between the entries.
