Is It Possible To Create A Cute And Tiny Software Empire?
Is It Possible To Create A Cute And Tiny Software Empire?

Thursday • November 24th 2022 • 11:11:46 pm

Is It Possible To Create A Cute And Tiny Software Empire?

Thursday • November 24th 2022 • 11:11:46 pm

Cute and tiny is how gigantic empires are built, the boring ones are always a bad investment.


The ranking algorithm behind the once useful search engine, used to be cute an tiny.

The AI that now runs the biggest video site, is actually cute and tiny.

Even database indexes critical to speedy data lookups, are just cute and tiny nested two-branch trees.

The real definition of a good algorithm, is, actually, cute and tiny.

Unless you are doing pure research, there all the cuteness is replaced with regret.


But this is not a poem about algorithms, it is a poem about empires.

One of the first speed bumps when learning programming, is knowing which library has your function.

You have to say, include or import file system, to be able to say “Hey file-system, let me save my file”


This, right here, in the beginning, is where you can build your first tiny empire.

You simply sell a file system, instead of saying import the main file-system library.

You ask your users to say, import your cute file-system library.

And here when someone tries to save a file, that file will be stored on your, very simple servers.

You can offer a non-persistent, temporary, in memory only storage, where files expire after a little bit.

You can clamp them down to size, and call them something like sweets, kind of like tweets.

You can use trick filenames, where they represent a checksum of the content they store.

So 10,000,000 programmers saving their Hello World code example, will actually access the same file, and this will really save on memory.

Nobody knows where this could take you, maybe you could scan if code being uploaded to servers is well formed.

This would eliminate storing garbage, and increase security.

You could offer web page publishing, where saving HTML to a file would end up being served up under a user's domain name.

You can take the paste-bin or wikipedia approach to signups, everything is free, until it starts costing you money.

Now every programmer in the world, every person learning programming, would be including you in their test code.


Cute, tiny, without limits, and full of ideas, is the only way to build large empires.