I wish more people on HN would be this adventurous and this humble about their adventures.

My career in tech has been one humbling experience after another. I don't know how anyone spends more than a few years in this industry and still feels intelligent.

With a background in linguistics and a descent understanding of Unicode, I thought I had something of a grip on the complexities of text. But then I read Text rendering hates you[0] and realized I had no idea how hard rendering text really is. The most striking example for me is the Arabic example where allh (Allah) is styled with different colours on each of the four characters, because this particular character sequence is a mandatory ligature if memory serves, and how do you figure out the colour changes when you're layout out a single glyph from the font?

0: https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/

Ha, yep this was actually one of the memories I was thinking of when I made the comment. I read this article and thought "...maybe I don't want to do this after all".

Love the pun/typo of descent there. Trying to learn about Unicode does feel like you are descending into the trenches of meaning. In ways you probably don't want to.