Did I ever tell you guys the story of how I once made the front page of
imgur with a Perl script?
As we're all aware, imgur is a imaging sharing network traditionally dedicated to such topics as
funny cat photos,
internet memes and
other recycled content often direct from its sister site reddit. It's internet fluff in the best possible way, and what I like to browse when I'm eating lunch and I need to disconnect my brain after a morning of coding. While it's got a minority of hardcore technical members, it's not at all known for it's technical content due to posts being promoted based mostly on up and down votes given by the masses; As far as I know I'm the only person ever to get to the front page with actual code.
So how did I end up posting code of all things to imgur? Well, like most good Internet stories it started like this:
One lunchtime I saw a front page post featuring an image claiming that
startling was the only nine letter word that you could remove one letter at a time and still get a valid word (i.e.
starting, staring, string, sting, sing, sin, in, I.) I was pretty sure that wasn't right and there must be others. So I did what any Perl programmer does in this situation. I wrote a Perl program to prove that wasn't true:
And then for giggles, I posted the above image
back to imgur. Not exactly my best code, but I wrote it in about five minutes flat. Five hours later it hit the front page and I had done my duty.