Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

04 Nov 2014, 12:04 p.m.

.illusion()

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2014 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

Last night one of my Hacker School peers was practicing sleight-of-hand with a card deck, and another peer walked over and said, "Oh, I used to run a magic tricks website."

I waited with bated breath for the punchline. None came! So I had to make some up.

I used to run a magic tricks website, but it disappeared.

I used to run a magic tricks website; I wrote it in Haspell.

I used to run a magic tricks website; it ran RabbitMQ.

I used to run a magic tricks website; I used SQLAlchemy. (predicated on the false memory that SQLAlchemy's logo is a tophat and cane)

I used to run a magic tricks address book application; pick a .vcard format, any .vcard format!

I used to run a magic tricks website; this is my lovely helper function.

But I felt stymied. When I think of magic tricks, I think of visuals and descriptions, not easy-to-pun jargon. And I couldn't think of any puns on the names of GOB Bluth, Penn and Teller, David Copperfield, or Criss Angel/Mindfreak.

And then Cerek Hillen came up with: "I used to run a magic tricks website; I wrote it in Brainfreak." And I thought: yes. It is done.