Max, a Real Programmer

Summary

The Story of Max, a Real Programmer Sun 29 June 2025 Tagged: software This is a story about Imagebin. Imagebin is the longest-lived software project that I still maintain. I'm the only user. I use it to host images, mainly to include in my blog, sometimes for sharing in other places. Imagebin's oldest changelog entry is dated May 2010, but I know it had already existed for about a year before I had the idea of keeping a changelog. Here's an image hosted by Imagebin: For years Imagebin was wide open to the public and anybody could upload their own images to it. Almost nobody did. But a couple of years ago I finally put a password on it during a paranoid spell. But actually this is not a story about Imagebin. This is a story about the boy genius who wrote it, and the ways of his craft. Lest a whole new generation of programmers grow up in ignorance of this glorious past, I feel duty-bound to describe, as best I can through the generation gap, how a Real Programmer wrote code. I'll call him Max, because that was his name. $shortfilename = sprintf("%s%s", $curnum, image_type_to_extension($imgsize[2])); $newfilename = "images/original/$shortfilename"; $thumbfilename = "images/thumbs/$shortfilename"; move_uploaded_file($_FILES['upload']['tmp_name'], $newfilename); ob_start(); passthru("exiftool -overwrite_original -all= -tagsFromFile @ -orientation $newfilename"); passthru("convert $newfilename -geometry 600x600 $thumbfilename"); ob_end_clean(); Max was a school friend of mine. He didn't like to use his surname on the internet, because that was the style at the time, so I won't share his surname. Max disappeared from our lives shortly after he went to university. We think he probably got recruited by MI6 or something. This weekend I set about rewriting Max's Imagebin in Go so that my server wouldn't have to run PHP any more. And so that I could rid myself of all the distasteful shit you find in PHP written by children 15+ years ago. I don't remember exactly what provoked ...