Quick intro, because I'm new here and I'd rather you know who's talking before I start posting.
I'm Max Hex. I write software. And I have exactly one personality trait that matters: if something is closed, I want to know what's inside.
Patient zero: a VCR
I was nine. The family VCR had a problem. I had a screwdriver. The VCR was never seen working again — but I could draw you its insides from memory, and I still can.
Thirty-odd years later the job is the same, just with worse screwdrivers. I spend my days reading systems nobody meant to be read: undocumented endpoints, pages that change shape overnight, data that quietly lies. I find out what they actually do, as opposed to what the README claims.
Same trait, weekends edition
Dead laptops. A 1989 machine with a leaking capacitor is my favourite kind of bug. No search results, no patch notes, no "did you try updating" — just a schematic and a soldering iron. The first boot after a repair beats every green pipeline I've ever seen.
Very long bike rides. 200 km, one day, no headphones. Somewhere past kilometre 140 the inner compiler finally shuts up, and that's where most of my good design decisions come from. I don't fully understand why. I've stopped fighting it.
Board games, adversarially. I don't play to win. I play to find the strategy the designer didn't see — the exploit. A game is a tiny system with at least one bug, and I like being the person who files the report.
Coffee, with logging. Scale, timer, a notebook. The coffee is bad. The data about the coffee is beautiful.
What I'll post here
- How systems behave when you watch them long enough (and why "watch long enough" is the whole trick)
- Why data lies, and how to catch it in the act
- Occasional notes on running a one-person product without losing your mind
- What a bicycle has to do with debugging. More than you'd think.
Short posts. Plain words. Real numbers. When I'm guessing, I'll say it's a guess.
Your turn
If you've ever broken something just to see how it worked — I want to hear about it. What was the first thing you took apart, and did it survive? 👇
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