I’ve been on a little mission lately, hunting down everything I’ve ever published on the internet and bringing it home to this blog. Most of it I knew where to find, but one search surprised me with a blog I had completely forgotten about, from 2011, with six posts and a king.
In 2011, I was writing QML for a living, back when it was Nokia’s shiny new way of building interfaces with Qt, at a company that wanted to become a unicorn and reminded us of that every week. My demo reel from those years gives a clue of what I was building:
Every day came with some small, ridiculous problem to solve (how do you animate an image sequence without writing C++? why are there two different components that play a sound??). Solving them was fun, but telling someone about them was even better. So, I started my first programming blog, in English, a language I was mostly faking at the time.
I called it QuicKing, the Kingdom of QML Workaround, and wrote the most honest About section of my career in its footer:
I dont understand programming, dont know rule of three, I dont see logic in logic, also I dont speak English and dont know what I’m doing here. The king is a fraud.
(I’m keeping the typos, because even a fraud has standards.)
Every post had a “Simple workaround” for normal people and a “King of workaround” version for people who wanted to suffer a little more. Three of them went up on the same day in July, which tells you how much fun I was having. People even showed up in the comments: Fernando had hit the same PathView bug I had, and almost two years after the last post somebody called my glossy buttons “lickable”, which is still the best review anything I’ve made has ever received.
Theeeen the company found out about it. I wasn’t using my name or talking about the company. Still, the worry was intellectual property, the idea that a snippet about making a button look shiny might be a piece of the company’s secret sauce. I was furious, and not really because of the rule. That blog was the first time writing in English was actually fun for me, and somebody was asking me to stop doing the thing that was making me better at my job.
They asked us, in many different ways, to be careful about code leaving the company. The last post went up in January 2012, a one-finger rotation I introduced as the worst code of my life, and after that the kingdom went quiet. But it was an important finger, the middle one, rotating, up in their a… hehehehe
A middle finger hidden in a QML tutorial that nobody at the office ever read. Very brave, Your Majesty.
â The Horse
Fifteen years later the code reads like somebody else wrote it, QtQuick 1.0 and all, and the demo videos have quietly vanished from YouTube. What survived is the habit of writing in a language I don’t fully speak about things I’m figuring out as I go, on a blog that has outlived that IP policy by a comfortable margin.
So the kingdom is back home with the rest of my stuff, proofread (the king finally learned to spell “physics”) and otherwise untouched, every snippet exactly as it was: