Thread by @dialloibu

#TBT Last year today, I was leaving a certain company. I was grateful for the opportunity and the experience I gained. I still am.

I came home and the first thing I did was open my text editor and write the title: "I was fired by a Machine"
1/16

I closed my laptop and went to celebrate. I had to right away because the very next day, I was to start full time at the company I cofounded. After our techcrunch stunt a few month earlier, Renly had received its first seed funding
2/16

I worked on my startup everyday and forgot all about the story until out of the blue, my old recruiter contacted me to see how I was doing. In that conversation, we remembered the old days and laughed about that weird experience...
3/16

I went through my inbox to see if I still had those emails from the machine. I had deleted some, but the time line was there alright. I thought it was funny.
4/16

So I decided to dust-up the old file and write the story. I thought it was a fun story that would be read by 2 or 3 people a month. (not many people read my non technical blog posts)
5/16

I was in Utah visiting my girlfriend, when I posted it. Walter (Co-founder) sent me a text and told me it was a great story. And he of course told me about the many grammatical mistakes...
6/16

"If Walter likes it, maybe more than 3 people would read it." I posted in on hackernews and watched it flop for a few minutes and hesitated to delete it. I left it to that and dropped my girlfriend to her job...
7/16

My email blew up. I thought someone finally figured out how to spam my email. My analytics said I was receiving hundreds of visits. I spent a good deal of time looking at the realtime visitors and answered emails.
8/16

In a couple hours my post had reached number one on Hackernews. It was now the second time I reach number one. First time was with my post about the PC's death. idiallo.com/blog/pc-is-not…
9/16

I received more than a 200k web requests on that day. I had been long enough on hackernews #1 and I knew that my 15 minutes of fame was coming to an end. But the numbers proved otherwise.
10/16

The next day I received more than 10 times the numbers. And my phone was ringing non-stop from journalists who wanted to interview me. I said yes to everyone!
11/16

As a developer, what impresses me the most is that my 2 five dollars servers were able to handle all that traffic. That week, I counted 4.5 million web requests. Php huh?
12/16

I am a self thought developer with a college dropout degree. When I wrote my first blog post in 2013, someone told me I need to stop. "You write like a 7th grader" But I kept writing anyway.
13/16

A generous stranger replied "Actually, 7th grade means everyone can understand him easily. Don't be discourage, keep writing." Maybe that explains my writing today…
14/16

In the past few weeks I have received praises that brought tears to my eyes. Complete strangers went out of their way to find my email and send me encouraging words. I am so grateful to you guys.
15/16

I am grateful to all those people who created free software and free information around the web that allowed me to be the man I am today. I am a product of their generosity.
16/16