I disappeared off the face of the earth, no notice, no goodbye. I was in the middle of weekly chronicles, a series on D3.js - and suddenly I was just gone. An explanation and apology is in order.
Thanks to you, I dove deep into Frontend development, JS comprehension, and web development in general. Me and some friends loved watching your videos every week, and I also remember texting each other when we saw your 2024's comeback video, just as we just texted about this new email. I rarely read anything more impactful than your writings, and I hope you are doing well (or at least, better)! I also hope your will not write another email too soon, in order to stay healthy and not trying to "catch up" with us, or whatever.
Dude, I just read this and it was a great read. I remember watching every FFF video (well, almost) back when I was still a kid and learning so much. Still don't understand why I'd need a monad tho.
Thank you for sharing this post, it was refreshing to read something so human. I wish you all the best Mattias, sending much love!
It's great to see you're back. You really changed my life when, as a mid level developer, I was struggling with coding ... I thought because I hated OOP and classical inheritance I was doomed. But your series on functional programming brought back my confidence and made coding fun again. Then the Losing Motivation video really helped me understand things on a whole other level. Fair to say I resonate. Thanks Mattias! Stay curious!
Hey man, I owe you my career. I think it was 2015 when I got in love with JS thanks to your videos. After so many years this fire of madness mixed with passion that you shared with us through FunFunFunction is still burning in me. Thanks, and all the best to you! :)
I must say that you are one of the content creators who has inspired me the most. Your content has been entertaining, educational, and moving, and it has inspired me to keep learning. I hope you continue to improve and find that spark that drives you and has been so wonderful all this time.
This is great and it really hit home for me. I've been in programming for 20+ years and your videos on functional programming gave me a renewed spark when I was in one of my burnout periods. I also understand the struggles of creating and consistency with ADHD. Initial bursts of motivation followed by insecurity then letting things fall by the wayside. I feel this. That and answering the question of why we were ever doing this "programming/coding" in the first place. Burnout is real, and I could go on about the state of the tech industry. Insanity on so many levels.
Anyway, love this post and let us all have a return to fun. Hang in there and thanks for being an inspiration.
Wow. I remember when I saw your show on YouTube(which is greatly influenced me to become a developer) I thought “wow how disciplined and motivated he is”. And in 2022 I also started my YouTube channel around frontend development while being, um… quite similar characteristics of a man. And without quirks it didn’t last, first video was a hit(one shotted without editing), others gained some k’s of views also, but I wasn’t interested anymore and drained.
And yes, last year I was kinda like cto who was implementing generative ai pipelines for different products(then mostly for one) for decent money, and then CEO decided we want another guy, failed in searching, decided to prototype new project by himself, and now playing with Claude code and delusions that in the end he will have a working product(given that complexity - zero chances). And me? I was laid off, sitting in some remote area in the expensive hotel almost without job(part-time frontend still feeds me lol) with wife and a kid and deciding what to do next. Without also an option to “return home”, well, because both of countries where I lived all my life - having a war.
And I think this is exact situation needed for me to make breakthrough changes in career, business and life.
So I think we’re cooked but in the same time we are going to make it!
Hahaha ”quite similar characterics” it’s a really peculiar difference in eloquence in the people commenting on Substack from people on YouTube, love reading the wordsmithery that goes into commentary here, just as over-elaborated as I would have done it myself
Sorry to hear that you got caught in the void that inevitably must happen when the industry tries out how much they can do on their own with the tools. An earlier version of this chronicle actually mused about what it is that we senior devs need to sell to this new class of product manager / full-stackish developer. Maybe you should interview the guy that fired you in six months and ask what he is missing, because there certainly is a class of product there that we now have kabillions of new customers for that didn’t exist, but god knows what the hell it is, we could not ask them now, because they are still in the ”I am god” mode that we felt when we first learned programming ourselves.
The stress of being financially vulnerable weighs on anyone, especially a man without his countries and my heart goes out to you. As a person that spent almost 2 years in awful financial drain and finally feel reasonably safe, I can only tell you that you will emerge stronger and wiser than you can possibly imagine, and that you ought to lean on heavily the support that you get, and shower the ones that give it to you with all your love and let the guilt silently wash through you unseen, as they want the former and cannot use the latter.
SO much of this is incredibly relatable as a fellow elder millenial and someone who has now left tech after more than a decade to figure out and pursue what I actually want in life only midway through said life.
Its interesting that this resonance in response has quite a generational slant. I’ve never really considered that I have a kinship with my generation, but there is a certain expectation we put on ourselves back then somehow. 🧡
I felt the part about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation differences in my SOUL, I can relate so deeply with your experiences.
I was born in 86, different paths but similar trajectories in many ways, so much of your story is incredibly relatable.
As a Brit, my first gut reaction is to tell you to "keep your chin up" and keep moving forward however makes sense for you. Your FFF videos came to be at a perfect time in my career when I was transitioning from more of a pure HTML and CSS UI developer into the crazy world of JavaScript and just perfectly at the time my brain could be receptive to functional programming and the more advanced concepts you covered.
I can't thank you enough for making them, in a way that felt incredibly accessible and engaging. They helped sate a curiosity and a need to better myself and learn new things, and I think that's one of the most valuable things in this world, inspiring and motivating people to learn.
I hope reading this can, in some small way, help you in your path, whatever form it may take.
Andy, this genuinely means a lot reading - especially the part about sating a curiosity. If there was any single reason to pick to make what I do worthwhile it knowing that it sparks that particular moment. Thank you so much for writing this.
Knowing what you are going through is heartbreaking. Consider this: the most inspirational people are the ones who have gone through the most crap in their lives.
I sincerely wish you the best of all, or more realistically, learn to take the most of every situation, instead of striving to achieve the best.
I am hoping to see both of us navigate this complicated, and complex world.
It is weird to see that you are confused no less than myself.
You have been a guiding light for me so many years ago.
So I guess I have to step in and share something I feel needs to be said out loud.
Coding is not solved.
Hell, software engineering is not even coding, although many think it is.
You see, I have been on this quest for 3 months, to find meaning in my work.
I dived so deep into my OCD-fueled, ADHD-powered brain, I believe I can now explain what problem solving is, and how we can even measure it outside of those silly IQ tests.
In a practical sense.
What we do first is understand the World around us.
And it is essential we do this before it changes.
You see, we are not living in a static scenario
with some interactive elements, like in a video game.
The game itself is __evolving__
Rules update. Win condition is changing.
How do you keep winning?
That's a wrong question to answer.
People chase success all the time and they burn out.
Like you did. Like me, 150 days into unemployment.
This is not my first. It would not be my last.
So what should we ask instead?
Think about it.
I'll give you the hint.
The winning is not the point.
It was never the point. Not even in esports.
Only few teams could take the pedestal anyway.
> The point is participation.
So before we even get to the point of AI agents "solving coding" and all that,
we should ask this question.
Or, rather, a set of questions.
Do they have skin in the game?
Do they understand the World similar to how we do?
Are they participating?
Or simply doing the matrix multiplications?
You probably want to point out that multiplications,
or any sort of computation is able to solve problems.
And you wouldn't be wrong.
I believe our brains are solving hardest differential equations
on a budget of 20 Watt-Hours.
This is even more impressive than a cluster of H100s.
If you think about it,
H100 was created by this very limited thing called brain.
Can only hold at most 4 things in the working area.
Addicted to scrolling, nicotine, dopamine.
How can it advance the World? Understand it?
Comprehend? Make it all Coherent?
And yet...
That's what it just did.
It wrote those lines you are reading.
So addictive. Almost if you read next word, you learn something useful.
Something important. Something that enlighten you and pull you out of depression.
And you wouldn't be wrong.
And yes, you, Pangram lovers, you can go and check this article pretending to be a comment for AI.
I love wasting your free credits on my walls of text.
It's so funny.
But I digress.
The second part of engineering is building intent.
We do it all the time.
But it is never durable. Nobody wrote a product spec.
It's all in your head.
System works, and yet nobody knows why.
A terrible situation to be in.
I hope Spotify maintains specs.
I hope Google have detailed product specs on their products.
I hope every other company keep track on what they are building and why.
Because I am yet to meet a single team, or even a person outside of Joel Spolsky who enlightened me since 2015.
I know why his idea failed.
I know why Intentional Software failed.
I know why nobody wants to pay 4-digit sum for requirement tracing software suite.
I know why nobody writes specs.
> Because once you wrote something down, you are now the subject to accountability.
Apparently, being accountable is a human thing.
Coincidentally, it is also most paid role in the World.
You don't want some random person without Understanding suddenly become accountable about this tiny World you are living in.
You want the best one. The best money can buy.
> The one you can trust.
I never questioned authority. See where it got me.
Unemployed immigrant in another country with nothing to pay my October rent.
Well, I can sell my 5090...
But you get the point. And I don't want to make it political and ugly.
The third thing we do is verifying intent with how the reality actually works.
The so called "curse" of reading Pull Request and understanding it.
So many people never understood the point of why we even need code reviews.
Do you care about the World you are living in?
Or simply trusting someone else to architect it for you?
And I wish I am simply exaggerating.
Code is everywhere. On your left hand.
Under your fingers. Click-clack-tip-tap.
Believe it or not, even flushing toilet is impossible without code.
When you start thinking in systems.
And I went as hard as I could, I understood what exactly code is.
> Code is Data. And Data is Code.
Lisp, yes. Emacs users rejoice.
Clojure adepts ahoy.
And your product specs about how your tiny World must behave is simply that.
Code.
Wait but technically, we can't easily transform code to data and vice versa.
And you are correct.
Data becomes code only if there is a compiler, algorithms and runtime.
Our World runs on laws of physics we discovered so far, and if we can digitize time, you can see at every time quant the state is changing continuously.
Physics are source Code.
Spacetime and physical dynamics are Runtime.
Current Universe's physical State is Data.
State transitions is the Execution.
So you can formulate World as a computation engine with State, Code, Runtime.
And we are still trying to find a compact description of runtime.
We are literally reverse-engineering reality itself.
That is the ultimate goal.
> "This is the story of the ultimate dream, man's dream. A dream of escaping from the confines of his own planet. A dream of freedom within his own universe, a dream of reaching the stars." (c) X: Beyond the Frontier.
Thanks to you, I dove deep into Frontend development, JS comprehension, and web development in general. Me and some friends loved watching your videos every week, and I also remember texting each other when we saw your 2024's comeback video, just as we just texted about this new email. I rarely read anything more impactful than your writings, and I hope you are doing well (or at least, better)! I also hope your will not write another email too soon, in order to stay healthy and not trying to "catch up" with us, or whatever.
Thanks!
Thanks for this one actually, good prompt. I’ll stop responding to comments for the evening and fold some laundry and go to bed early
🫡🙏😴
Good to have you back!
Hey Mattias, happy to see an email from you after a few years.
Just wanted to say thanks for all the content you created in the past!
☺️
Thank God for people like Mattias — curious, honest, and deeply beloved. 🙏😊
Dude, I just read this and it was a great read. I remember watching every FFF video (well, almost) back when I was still a kid and learning so much. Still don't understand why I'd need a monad tho.
Thank you for sharing this post, it was refreshing to read something so human. I wish you all the best Mattias, sending much love!
I mean what does ”need” mean anyway? 🤪
It’s funny, this post had like 9 AI-assisted rewrites before I one-shotted it vanilla in IA writer in a shitty cafe in skatteskrapan
It's great to see you're back. You really changed my life when, as a mid level developer, I was struggling with coding ... I thought because I hated OOP and classical inheritance I was doomed. But your series on functional programming brought back my confidence and made coding fun again. Then the Losing Motivation video really helped me understand things on a whole other level. Fair to say I resonate. Thanks Mattias! Stay curious!
Hey man, I owe you my career. I think it was 2015 when I got in love with JS thanks to your videos. After so many years this fire of madness mixed with passion that you shared with us through FunFunFunction is still burning in me. Thanks, and all the best to you! :)
Love that burning poetry, Mr wrzosek. I’ll keep the embers going ✨
I must say that you are one of the content creators who has inspired me the most. Your content has been entertaining, educational, and moving, and it has inspired me to keep learning. I hope you continue to improve and find that spark that drives you and has been so wonderful all this time.
Carlos.🙂↕️
This is great and it really hit home for me. I've been in programming for 20+ years and your videos on functional programming gave me a renewed spark when I was in one of my burnout periods. I also understand the struggles of creating and consistency with ADHD. Initial bursts of motivation followed by insecurity then letting things fall by the wayside. I feel this. That and answering the question of why we were ever doing this "programming/coding" in the first place. Burnout is real, and I could go on about the state of the tech industry. Insanity on so many levels.
Anyway, love this post and let us all have a return to fun. Hang in there and thanks for being an inspiration.
Wow. I remember when I saw your show on YouTube(which is greatly influenced me to become a developer) I thought “wow how disciplined and motivated he is”. And in 2022 I also started my YouTube channel around frontend development while being, um… quite similar characteristics of a man. And without quirks it didn’t last, first video was a hit(one shotted without editing), others gained some k’s of views also, but I wasn’t interested anymore and drained.
And yes, last year I was kinda like cto who was implementing generative ai pipelines for different products(then mostly for one) for decent money, and then CEO decided we want another guy, failed in searching, decided to prototype new project by himself, and now playing with Claude code and delusions that in the end he will have a working product(given that complexity - zero chances). And me? I was laid off, sitting in some remote area in the expensive hotel almost without job(part-time frontend still feeds me lol) with wife and a kid and deciding what to do next. Without also an option to “return home”, well, because both of countries where I lived all my life - having a war.
And I think this is exact situation needed for me to make breakthrough changes in career, business and life.
So I think we’re cooked but in the same time we are going to make it!
Hahaha ”quite similar characterics” it’s a really peculiar difference in eloquence in the people commenting on Substack from people on YouTube, love reading the wordsmithery that goes into commentary here, just as over-elaborated as I would have done it myself
Sorry to hear that you got caught in the void that inevitably must happen when the industry tries out how much they can do on their own with the tools. An earlier version of this chronicle actually mused about what it is that we senior devs need to sell to this new class of product manager / full-stackish developer. Maybe you should interview the guy that fired you in six months and ask what he is missing, because there certainly is a class of product there that we now have kabillions of new customers for that didn’t exist, but god knows what the hell it is, we could not ask them now, because they are still in the ”I am god” mode that we felt when we first learned programming ourselves.
The stress of being financially vulnerable weighs on anyone, especially a man without his countries and my heart goes out to you. As a person that spent almost 2 years in awful financial drain and finally feel reasonably safe, I can only tell you that you will emerge stronger and wiser than you can possibly imagine, and that you ought to lean on heavily the support that you get, and shower the ones that give it to you with all your love and let the guilt silently wash through you unseen, as they want the former and cannot use the latter.
We shall prevail
SO much of this is incredibly relatable as a fellow elder millenial and someone who has now left tech after more than a decade to figure out and pursue what I actually want in life only midway through said life.
Cheers mate, and 'stay curious' indeed!
Its interesting that this resonance in response has quite a generational slant. I’ve never really considered that I have a kinship with my generation, but there is a certain expectation we put on ourselves back then somehow. 🧡
I felt the part about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation differences in my SOUL, I can relate so deeply with your experiences.
I was born in 86, different paths but similar trajectories in many ways, so much of your story is incredibly relatable.
As a Brit, my first gut reaction is to tell you to "keep your chin up" and keep moving forward however makes sense for you. Your FFF videos came to be at a perfect time in my career when I was transitioning from more of a pure HTML and CSS UI developer into the crazy world of JavaScript and just perfectly at the time my brain could be receptive to functional programming and the more advanced concepts you covered.
I can't thank you enough for making them, in a way that felt incredibly accessible and engaging. They helped sate a curiosity and a need to better myself and learn new things, and I think that's one of the most valuable things in this world, inspiring and motivating people to learn.
I hope reading this can, in some small way, help you in your path, whatever form it may take.
Keep your chin up,
Andy
Andy, this genuinely means a lot reading - especially the part about sating a curiosity. If there was any single reason to pick to make what I do worthwhile it knowing that it sparks that particular moment. Thank you so much for writing this.
It’s so good to hear from you again. I think I understand what you’re going through on many levels. Keep going, brother.
Thanks for the warm nod jz, I’ll keep on truckin’ 🧡
Knowing what you are going through is heartbreaking. Consider this: the most inspirational people are the ones who have gone through the most crap in their lives.
I sincerely wish you the best of all, or more realistically, learn to take the most of every situation, instead of striving to achieve the best.
most > best love that framing
Hey MPJ, thank you for everything so far.
I am hoping to see both of us navigate this complicated, and complex world.
It is weird to see that you are confused no less than myself.
You have been a guiding light for me so many years ago.
So I guess I have to step in and share something I feel needs to be said out loud.
Coding is not solved.
Hell, software engineering is not even coding, although many think it is.
You see, I have been on this quest for 3 months, to find meaning in my work.
I dived so deep into my OCD-fueled, ADHD-powered brain, I believe I can now explain what problem solving is, and how we can even measure it outside of those silly IQ tests.
In a practical sense.
What we do first is understand the World around us.
And it is essential we do this before it changes.
You see, we are not living in a static scenario
with some interactive elements, like in a video game.
The game itself is __evolving__
Rules update. Win condition is changing.
How do you keep winning?
That's a wrong question to answer.
People chase success all the time and they burn out.
Like you did. Like me, 150 days into unemployment.
This is not my first. It would not be my last.
So what should we ask instead?
Think about it.
I'll give you the hint.
The winning is not the point.
It was never the point. Not even in esports.
Only few teams could take the pedestal anyway.
> The point is participation.
So before we even get to the point of AI agents "solving coding" and all that,
we should ask this question.
Or, rather, a set of questions.
Do they have skin in the game?
Do they understand the World similar to how we do?
Are they participating?
Or simply doing the matrix multiplications?
You probably want to point out that multiplications,
or any sort of computation is able to solve problems.
And you wouldn't be wrong.
I believe our brains are solving hardest differential equations
on a budget of 20 Watt-Hours.
This is even more impressive than a cluster of H100s.
If you think about it,
H100 was created by this very limited thing called brain.
Can only hold at most 4 things in the working area.
Addicted to scrolling, nicotine, dopamine.
How can it advance the World? Understand it?
Comprehend? Make it all Coherent?
And yet...
That's what it just did.
It wrote those lines you are reading.
So addictive. Almost if you read next word, you learn something useful.
Something important. Something that enlighten you and pull you out of depression.
And you wouldn't be wrong.
And yes, you, Pangram lovers, you can go and check this article pretending to be a comment for AI.
I love wasting your free credits on my walls of text.
It's so funny.
But I digress.
The second part of engineering is building intent.
We do it all the time.
But it is never durable. Nobody wrote a product spec.
It's all in your head.
System works, and yet nobody knows why.
A terrible situation to be in.
I hope Spotify maintains specs.
I hope Google have detailed product specs on their products.
I hope every other company keep track on what they are building and why.
Because I am yet to meet a single team, or even a person outside of Joel Spolsky who enlightened me since 2015.
I know why his idea failed.
I know why Intentional Software failed.
I know why nobody wants to pay 4-digit sum for requirement tracing software suite.
I know why nobody writes specs.
> Because once you wrote something down, you are now the subject to accountability.
Apparently, being accountable is a human thing.
Coincidentally, it is also most paid role in the World.
You don't want some random person without Understanding suddenly become accountable about this tiny World you are living in.
You want the best one. The best money can buy.
> The one you can trust.
I never questioned authority. See where it got me.
Unemployed immigrant in another country with nothing to pay my October rent.
Well, I can sell my 5090...
But you get the point. And I don't want to make it political and ugly.
The third thing we do is verifying intent with how the reality actually works.
The so called "curse" of reading Pull Request and understanding it.
So many people never understood the point of why we even need code reviews.
Do you care about the World you are living in?
Or simply trusting someone else to architect it for you?
And I wish I am simply exaggerating.
Code is everywhere. On your left hand.
Under your fingers. Click-clack-tip-tap.
Believe it or not, even flushing toilet is impossible without code.
When you start thinking in systems.
And I went as hard as I could, I understood what exactly code is.
> Code is Data. And Data is Code.
Lisp, yes. Emacs users rejoice.
Clojure adepts ahoy.
And your product specs about how your tiny World must behave is simply that.
Code.
Wait but technically, we can't easily transform code to data and vice versa.
And you are correct.
Data becomes code only if there is a compiler, algorithms and runtime.
Our World runs on laws of physics we discovered so far, and if we can digitize time, you can see at every time quant the state is changing continuously.
Physics are source Code.
Spacetime and physical dynamics are Runtime.
Current Universe's physical State is Data.
State transitions is the Execution.
So you can formulate World as a computation engine with State, Code, Runtime.
And we are still trying to find a compact description of runtime.
We are literally reverse-engineering reality itself.
That is the ultimate goal.
> "This is the story of the ultimate dream, man's dream. A dream of escaping from the confines of his own planet. A dream of freedom within his own universe, a dream of reaching the stars." (c) X: Beyond the Frontier.
And we're only getting started.
You know, this markup sucks. I suggest you just go read it there: https://blog.br11k.dev/2026-08-29-the-ultimate-dream
But I will not remove the original or edit it.
I keep my mistake writing an article into comment section.
So people can learn on them ☺️
Kind-hearted, Humble, Together
awww that one, thank you for making me remember 🧡