Flying is not fun.

Imagine if you went back in time 200 years and went around telling people this. The inconveniences of commercial flying may never have been predicted. These inconveniences are small prices we pay to enjoy the convenience of fast, safe and affordable inter-continental travel.

Fast forward to just a few years ago. On an overseas night flight, in an attempt to catch zzz, I smothered my face into the headrest, which I’m sure is regularly cleaned after each flight. I couldn’t seem to sleep. How do other people do it? It’s cold, cramped and everything is loud. In the darkness of the cabin, from an in-seat screen a row or two ahead of me, I watched Silicon Valley for the first time.

Watching silently with subtitles, I imagined the characters voices. Clever and juvenile jokes, delivered in good time, while simulateously developing multiple plots, made me start to watch it myself on my own screen (after much relenting and finally giving up on sleep). I later ended up watching the entire series. It brought back memories of IT class in high school. I never thought I was good enough to chase a career in IT. My parents warned against it (presumably due to lack of knowledge) and I constantly compared myself to my already very capable peers who had their own websites and found ways to bypass school security systems. Despite not understanding much of the world of IT, I got the jokes in the show. The writers really hit the sweet spot and made the show accessible to non-IT people, like me.

I finished watching the show wanting more, but I didn’t do anything about it back then. Fast forward again to last week, when I started this project.

For the last few days, I’ve been thinking about what projects I can do to start myself, apart from this blog, then I remembered this joke from the show:

Not hot dog

The setup of the joke is that a lazy programmer in the show, named Jìan-Yáng, creates a crude mobile app that checks whether an image contains a hot dog, or does not. The punchline is that the characters in the show actually find a use for the app by using it to detect lewd content. A somewhat simple idea, that began with poor implementation and no obvious selling points, became a lucrative, polished app with some creativity.

It’s not often that we can take something from a TV show or media that was written purely for enjoyment and use it in our daily lives, memes aside. For me, this was one of those moments. I want to come up with my own horrible projects. And maybe, with a bit of creativity, I can turn them into something other people will use.

The biggest takeaway from all of this is to have a list somewhere with project ideas. I’m sure this is somewhat common as it is with writers. I recall reading about a writer’s method for deciding upon characters names in stories: any time the writer came across a somewhat unusual name, they wrote it down. Today, I start my own version of this.

Thank you writers of Silicon Valley. Without you, I likely wouldn’t have started this journey.