Alright, I’ve been a resort photographer for the last five years, documenting shoobies enjoying paradise while I slowly realised I don’t want to do this forever.
I chose photography because, firstly, I love this shit. Deepest of my heart, I love it, ong. Even choosing to go along with this shift gives me the same feeling I get when I think about that girl back home. I don’t try anymore because it’s just not gonna work anymore. I still kinda think about what my life would’ve looked like if it worked out. But at some point you gotta choose the harder option because you know it’ll be better for you later.
Around the same time I was reevaluating my career, I got my hands on Claude and it re-sparked a former love of mine: software development. Sure, I was vibe coding, but it made me realise I could actually do this. This could work out.
A couple months before that, I’d also fully changed over to Linux. I’d been dual booting for about three years and experimenting with it in VMs for a lot longer. Part of the migration came from being less reliant on Adobe, and part of that is because I don’t do a lot of personal shoots outside work anymore.
But I started feeling like there’s a gap in the market here. Especially since Adobe has spent the last decade speedrunning through whatever moral credit they had left.
And in this day and age, someone’s gotta do something…
Photography wasn’t a mistake
As I said with that unusual analogy: I still love her. I mean photography. No, really.
Photography is where I learned how to be an adult. It taught me about the job market, leading a team, the necessity of hierarchy and where hierarchy fails, employee motivation, how to help someone find theirs again, how to deal with people, how people react in different situations, and how to get a group of people moving in the same direction.
I remember I wasn’t talkative at all when I got into the industry. Freshly 18—that feels weird to say—dropped out of college, and I’d never really been taught how to be an adult.
I learned that from the people around me. People who were technically only being paid to teach me how to take photos ended up teaching me discipline, how to talk to people, how not to piss people off, how not to tell people too much, how to say no, and when to show up for someone.
They didn’t explicitly sit me down and teach me any of this. They led by example.
Shout out Shahudan.
My problem with this relationship
As I said, I still love her, right? But it’s just not gonna work out.
Sometimes people can promise to spend their whole lives together until, unfortunately, they start growing in different directions. Yes, I’m still talking about photography. Stay with me here.
Sometimes there are things like trust. Either you or them does something that diminishes the other person’s trust. Maybe you never really had it in the beginning. I don’t know about you, man. Sometimes you just aren’t allowed to have your own time to yourself—and as a man, I know we all need that sometimes.
Then after about five years, after everything you’ve seen, you look at her and you can’t imagine a future together anymore. So you decide to end it there.
You two still talk. Like damn, you used to love each other. You used to care about each other so much. That doesn’t just completely disappear.
Just don’t jump off the cliff for ’em tho.
Also, she wanna stay with her family and I got bigger dreams, yk what I’m sayin ahheheh.
I need to get out of the Maldives. I’ve been doing this for five years, and photography has given me a life, but I don’t think it can take me where I need to go next. I want ownership. I want to build something of my own. I want to be trusted with more than just the technical work, I want the leadership that’s supposed to come with the responsibility.
I don’t wanna wait around and watch the white man get richer and richer while his nepo babies come out of nowhere to tell me what to do. Nah. I’m too egotistical for that.
I’m sorry if I sound like a broken record, but I come from the brokest of homes. I want more than survival.
I need to know what happens if I bet on myself instead.
The moment everything clicked
I’ve always been someone who was interested in tech. Just like a lot of devs in my generation, I got started modding Minecraft with JAVA, jerry-rigging different pieces of other people’s code together until I made something that… worked… I think.
I don’t think even god knows how it worked.
😡 also why tf does windows gobble up 50% of my fuggin ram on idle? 25% after reboot
I used to do this annual Linux ritual where I’d try switching, then eventually crawl back to Windows—or at least a dual boot.
But come February 2026, I installed Nobara Linux, ditched Windows, and haven’t looked back since. I’m who that one girl from that one meme wishes she had.
Around then, photography for myself—the stuff I’d shoot and edit on my own time—started dropping in priority. I don’t really know how that happened, but here we are.
One night I was trying to rice Hyprland, fucking around with Claude Code, and oh boy lemme tell you, I almost buss a nut.
Then I made a couple prototypes: DREAMLOOM and Caldera.
That was the night a fire was lit.
“I touched the computer and realised I was a god. A very small god, with a lowercase g, in a very small world. But a god nonetheless.”
Because for the first time in a long time, I felt like I could make anything.
And the cup I had for photography had been full for a long time.
@madebybark.
My username has always been @madebybark. It has never been @photosbybark. Even the account where I only post photos is called @kindabark, but that’s besides the point.
I’ve never restricted myself to photography.
It started with drawing. I used to take four pieces of drawing-block paper, tape them together, and draw across the whole thing with a pen. Then I’d take a photo of it, bring it into Photoshop, digitise it and colour it.
Then I discovered photo manipulation. New door opened.
Then Clip Studio Paint with a drawing tablet.
Then 3D animation with Blender.
Hmmmm. Write that down. Optimise it. Benchmark it. Figure out how to make Blender run better. Ah shit, I need a better computer. Got one. Hmmmm, I wanna make a company. Tried. Need funding. Shelf it until I got that bread.
Man, why tf are none of these creative apps on Linux? And why is some of the shit on Linux so ass?
Hmm.
I’ll make it better.
The medium kept changing. The obsession never did.
@madebybark never changed.
Same same butt different
If you think about it, photography and software development aren’t that different.
You’re handed a set of constraints and you gotta run with them and make something great.
If the shot does something you didn’t account for, you debug what you fucked up and try again.
In both, expertise is basically having a little dude sitting on your shoulder while your hands go on autopilot. You’re not thinking about where the aperture dial is anymore. You’re thinking about light, composition, what the image means.
I think coding gets there too. Eventually you’re not fighting syntax. You’re thinking about systems, ideas, and what the thing you’re building should actually be.
The technical shit disappears and you get to create.
Both reward you with something more fulfilling than just the thing you can hold. And when the work is good, all the tiny choices disappear. Nobody thinks about the hundred decisions behind a photograph or a piece of software until you’re talking to another professional who knows where to look.
And yeah, both communities feel somewhat threatened by AI.
But I’ve been fucking around with this shit since Artbreeder. I understand it.
I don’t want AI to make everything for me. I want to learn enough that when I ship something, I can stand by my code and defend it. The goal isn’t to have a machine build my ideas. The goal is to become good enough to build and ship them myself.
TELL DA VILLAGE
So now let it be known: Bark is coming for a piece of Adobe’s pie.
I’m not throwing the camera away. I still love her.
I’m just picking up a compiler too.
I spent five years learning how to see.
Now I’m learning how to build.
The medium changed. The obsession didn’t.