Select By ID - A Podcast by Ibrahim Diallo

A movie theater clerk asks to see your ID. You show it through the glass, they glance at it for three seconds, hand it back, and forget about it. The information never leaves that moment. But when you upload that same ID online for verification, everything changes. It goes on a permanent digital journey through servers, databases, and third-party services you've never heard of—each one a poten...

News headlines claimed that 30% of microsofts code is AI generated. Digging deeper, I found the quotes used in news outlets. But then, when I watched the actual interview, where Satya Nadella made the statement as an answer to Mark Zuckerberg, the statement was not made with much confidence. My main question was, how do you track code that is AI generated, vs Human written, vs Copy-pasta from Stac...

App developers want to keep you trapped in their app. They prevent you from fully exploring the web, by placing you into a gilded cage. The cage might look pretty, but we still want to browse the way we want to, with an actual web browser.

I love Star Wars, especially Andor. But what kept bothering me is whenever they talked about time, "day", "night", what does that mean when you travel across the galaxy? Join me in this episode where we explore how NASA keep track of time across our solar system.

I love tech hardware and software. But the second we add an internet connection, devices turn into spying boxes designed to help the company, not the owner.

Inspired by "The Gap" from Ira Glass. Because of that taste, I'm often disappointed by all the work I produce. But that is normal, as long as it doesn't stop me from continuing to work. https://idiallo.com/blog/what-a-disappointing-blog

The TikTok model is the future of the web we are getting if we don't make changes. Would you prefer if the web was served to you, instead of you actively searching?

Apple creates the iPhone—a revolutionary product that changes everything. A billion people buy it. By any reasonable measure, that's success. So why is it immediately redefined as failure? In this episode, we explore the paradox at the heart of modern capitalism: success that doesn't lead to more success is viewed as a problem, and satisfied customers are dead ends for business growth. Ima...

When I first research Unions in 2020, they were on the decline. Today it is even worst, and worker protections are falling apart. Join me in this journey as we uncover the state of things in 2025. Originally published here: https://idiallo.com/blog/unions-are-not-coming-back

We can't reliably identify great engineers in interviews. The process is broken—some candidates are master performers who can't ship code, while others interview poorly but become your best team members. So when we finally, miraculously find exceptional engineers on the job, what do we do? We immediately try to promote them away from what they're great at. In this episode, we explore t...

Was Steve Jobs' abrasive personality the secret to Apple's success? Should you emulate his management style? Spoiler alert: the answer is definitely not what most mid-level managers think. In this episode, we explore the dangerous delusion that's creating terrible managers everywhere—the belief that acting like Steve Jobs is a path to success. Starting with a personal story of a manage...

Motivation always fades away. When it does, you don't need more inspiration to continue. Instead, you need to develop rhythm and break the work down into small repeatable tasks.

We've been promised flying cars for decades, but there's a reason they never materialized—and it has nothing to do with lacking the technology. In this episode, we explore why every technological dream follows the same pattern: a pure vision focused on benefits, followed by messy reality we failed to imagine. Starting with the revelation that helicopters are flying cars (and understanding...

We all get Free Graphic Cards! What if tech bubbles aren't failures but infrastructure gifts for the next generation? In this episode, we explore how the Dot-Com crash left us with the fiber optic networks that made YouTube and Netflix possible, how the video game crash of 1983 forced the industry to evolve and bring computing into living rooms, and why the coming AI bubble burst might be the...

What would you do if you only had 2 hours of work a day? There rest is all yours to do what you please? Bertrand Russel had an opinion about work and workers: If you ask him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say: 'I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man's noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his plane...

Last year, Paramount+ deleted 25 years worth of Comedy central content. Their justification was "Cost cutting measures". What they failed to see is that this content wasn't costing them money. It was just badly designed. What they needed was to have frugal developers reevaluate the infrastructure and ensure that the content uses as little bandwidth as possible.

The cure to boredom isn't consuming the right content. Instead, you have to shift your mind and start producing. Watching entertaining is a passive action. Making things that you can show and brag about will reduce your need for feeling entertained.

Have you ever paid attention to the music playing in your favorite cafe? What if this music is not just random or good taste? There is a world of research behind the music that can be used to entice customers to act in a certain way. In this episode we talk about the different research that explain how our behavior is being modeled to improve business metrics.

Do we think think twice before we install one of those analytical scripts on websites? It's one thing to know everything you do online is being tracked, but it's a whole other to actually watch the recording. In this episode, Ibrahim walks you through his experience using tracking scripts, and the most ethical steps you can take to make sure users understand what is happening in the backgr...

You don't just buy enterprise software. You pay for the privilege of it being explained then sold to you.

Why is the internet constantly trying to make you angry? In this episode, we explore how being spectacularly wrong became one of the most profitable business models online. Starting with a personal Stack Overflow flamewar over a MySQL question (spoiler: I was wrong), we dive into the psychology of why we can't resist correcting people, and how platforms weaponize this compulsion for engagement...

We all laughed at Juicero's absurd business. A $400 Wi-fi enabled juicer that only accept $8 proprietary juice packets. But turns out, we all subscribed to their business model when it comes to streaming services. Join me as I discuss the resemblances, and how we went from the convenience of DVDs to the fragmented world of inconvenient streaming.

Ibrahim Diallo delivers a brutal truth bomb for startups and small teams: your "future-proof" architecture is killing your present. The 15-minute CI/CD pipeline  for a service nobody used Why  microservices turn into a debugging pilgrimage  without Google's resources The  "Formula 1 for grocery shopping"  analogy for over-engineering How  chasing hypothetical billions  of u...

Ibrahim Diallo uncovers the secret law of software: every user only cares about a tiny slice of your application, and it's a different slice for everyone. - The childhood discovery that Excel's only purpose was copying tables into Word - How ** Microsoft's "bloat" is someone else's vital feature - Why ignoring the 1% created a $10M opportunity for a search engine startup...

What do you do when everyone in the room knows more than you do about their specialty? In this candid exploration of technical leadership, we challenge the myth that leading experts means being the biggest expert yourself. Drawing from real experiences managing teams of backend developers, frontend specialists, and product managers who each possess deeper domain knowledge, we examine what leadersh...