I built my business blind. Not "Ray Charles" blind, but "pilot flying in fog" blind. Except I didn't have any instruments.

I incorporated right out of university. The business was Debuggex Inc., and the first product was a regex debugger. This was an ultra-niche (I didn't realize just how niche at the time) tool to help you understand regexes. A regex is like ctrl+F on steroids - it lets you find not just specific pieces of text, but complex patterns.

Suppose you wanted to find all the dates in a document. You might want to match any digits that look like YYYY-MM-DD. To solve this, you can use a regex like this: \d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}. A few squigglies, but overall, not terrible.

Now, let's say you wanted to match an email address. It's slightly more compli...

(?:[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]