I've got enough years in that it's getting harder to remember exactly what year I started professionally, but somewhere a bit north of 25 years. I still spend some time on personal interest coding projects. I'm working with a friend on a Discord roleplaying bot that integrates with various AI providers. But we sort of hit proof of concept and it's been a real slog to iterate and turn it into something worth sharing with others.

If I'm honest, my coding partner has been carrying it and I've mostly been in a "consulting" role. I also have a wife and five kids (two at home) and I rarely have time to myself to just sit down and code. I have a lot of house projects that are much more critical.

The experience you get in open source and being able to talk about it in interviews can really help once you get there, but it doesn't help get the interview and you have to really apply yourself to get something valuable out of it. My GitHub CV is full of a bunch of bullshit I started and spent at most a month on before abandoning. Of course I've worked on a project for two years now and I wasn't even allowed to include it because there's no boss or company or address - just me and another guy from Europe I met online working on a passion project that probably neither of us have the drive to turn into a business.

I don't disagree, but depending on where you're at career-wise, a few 15% raises can make a huge difference come retirement. There's always more factors than just money, but money is a significant factor. Remote work is frankly huge when you look at the money not having to commute is worth in unpaid hours and transit costs. I wouldn't go back to the office for a fifteen percent raise because I'd be losing money.

Appreciate your thoughts, though. The grass is definitely not always greener on the other side.

First programming job I got laid off after ten years. Next longest was around 5 years, which I quit to move back near home. Everything else has been probably two years or so. It was all contract work except a two year stint working for a steel company. That was a good job but COVID.

Working one place is nice if you're getting good raises and there is upward mobility. Moving around a lot I've learned quite a lot from how different places do things, and my skills would've really stagnated in one place. These days I'd be worried about keeping those skills up to date if the team is small and insular, but otherwise I'd probably stay if you've got a good thing. I'd still look around from time to time to make sure you aren't getting underpaid, but if you're happy I'd not consider leaving for less than a fifteen percent raise.

Happy at work is good, but it's not your life and a big raise can make a big difference in everything else.

Reduce exclamation marks!? Great Scott!!!!! Is there a shortage of punctuation in the future!?

I was just exploring All to find some new communities to sub to and I ran into the same thing. First thing, I have a domain block in Voyager so that might be something your client can do if you're on mobile. Second, if you block the user bot@zerobytes.monster, I think that clears all the automatic Reddit cross posted garbage (if that instance even has actual users, they are buried too deep to find).

I was trying to avoid sounding condescending and privileged, but I think you're right. My first ten years were spent in very niche programming (Lotus Notes) without any mentors. It nearly sank my career and ultimately took me about another five years to rebrand myself as a full stack Java/JavaScript developer and now I'm strictly back-end/leadership. It took a lot of effort to pull myself out of that rut including carving out leadership roles for myself and other tasks above my expected duties. This guy might have to similarly do a lot of work to catch up with market demands.

I'm a fifty year old tech lead without a degree or high profile companies on my resume, and I can't relate to this blog at all and I'm wondering what the difference is. I switch jobs every few years. I've been doing mostly contract work. Last straight job I had, I lost after two years when COVID hit, and I had another job lined up in three weeks.

I'm not saying this guy's experience isn't valid, just that there is something else going on here whether it's a changing job market that hasn't caught up with me yet or soft skills or that market or outdated skill set or what.

Note: I know things are shit for Juniors and mid-level devs, but this guy sounds like a fairly senior level guy, which is why I think my experience is relevant.

Math is less important than logical thinking which often, but not always, goes with math skills. More important still is intellectual curiosity. Do you like solving puzzles? Do you like the feeling of breakthrough after a frustrating struggle figuring out how something works? Those will take you a long way.

I completely agree. The experience sucks. I almost think programming would be better to follow a skilled trade path like electricians or something with apprenticeships and the like. The current system isn't working for anyone, really. I mean I suppose it works for people like me but that's not sustainable.

I've got twenty five years in and I know how good I've got it. I may not always be able to get the job I want, but I don't ever have to worry about not working. That's an incredible luxury. But also, unfortunately it really sucks training up completely green developers. They often contribute negative value to the team and then once you finally get them to the point where you can start relying on them, they leave or your team gets broken up. That's not the fault of young developers at all, but it's just a reality we all have to navigate. I do enjoy working with enthusiastic and curious people, and experience is certainly no guarantee of that. And I like having new perspectives and skills, even if I hate to crush their expectations with the reality of development. We currently can't use fucking lambdas because they aren't supported on our ancient version of Spring.

It is indeed amazingly fast. I actually hate the constant generation of pictures while I'm typing - particularly given that I used up my free usages with two prompts.

The quality of people is poor, trending toward disfigurement. It does landscapes well.

It's hard to say what algorithm would serve you better. Seems like this does what you are seeing it to do. It's not how I'd do it, but I don't prioritize unblocked users. To fix this, I'd assign a multiplier for zero blocked users. It might be one so that no blocked users is the same as one mathematically. But maybe free speech is so important to you that you give it a multiplier of 2 or wherever.

active_users / [MAX(1,blocked_users)]

This would be a multiple of 1. Change the 1 to a 0.5 for a multiple of 2.

I didn't look at the script but it probably has a Max function which just returns the higher of two numbers, effectively putting a lower bound on the possible values.

The only thing I've deliberately left out is bog standard programming the likes of which I've done for 25 years. Which is why I asked what I'm missing.

That really depends on what you are calling AI. From my perspective, LLM, voice recognition and reproduction, and image generation, manipulation, and identification is the majority of AI. AGI doesn't exist outside of theory and primitive prototypes. If you want to include general programming using regex and case, that's not what I call AI.

Or are you saying the lion's share of AI is not on this list at all? Because I'd be interested to do more research on these other disciplines.

I also think somehow AI is getting less useful. The tighter they reign in what it's allowed to say and do and the more it sounds like a corporate tool, the less fun it is to try bending it to new purposes. We can draw and edit pictures, and we can summarize information, and we can write extremely simple computer code.

You can also make passable porn and smut, but the efforts to not let it do those things cripple it for other purposes such as tabletop roleplaying. I wrote a discord bot for this purpose almost a year also and I've spent way more time fighting with the prompt to allow combat or relationships than I have writing code and it's tedious. It's free to use in my private discord with a few select friends and no one has done anything with it in months. And these friends are all AI enthusiasts who became friends through AI Dungeon.

As an unregulated wild west frontier, AI is great and inspires creativity. As a sanitized corporate propaganda machine, it's really quite dull. I'm hoping some less censored versions catch up to OAI, but for now it feels like the gold rush is dying because it turned out to be nothing but pyrite.

I'm self taught and have pretty bad imposter syndrome. Don't think that's the magic bullet.

I once worked with someone with the title Vice President of Awesome. We worked for a consultancy where you could just pick your own title.

I'm fifty, so I started my career in a different world. I hired in to a small consulting company. Our business was selling IBM systems and development was just a required value-add to that end. There were three of us when I hired in, knowing nothing. I was computer savvy but only a hobbyist programmer.

In the course of the next year, both of the other developers left the company, leaving me to grow and learn for myself. After 5 years I was promoted to senior. I had nothing but time in and there was no one to evaluate my skills or mentor me. I stayed another 4 years until the changing business model to IT as a service forced me out.

I was now a ten year senior with an unrelated two year degree and no knowledge except what I'd uncovered myself in a dying niche. I tried owning my own business but I'm not cut or for that. I lucked into a large project that was half the old stuff and half Java. I was there for a year or two when that business failed and I was spun off into a new consultancy.

One project had me commute back and forth to DC every other week. I liked it so when a government contract reached out to me with an opportunity, I took it and moved my family. This was my first time being part of a long term team and this is where I learned everything about that side of things.

Fast forward a few years, a move back home, and a few jobs, and with 24 years of experience I just accepted a position as a tech lead which I think is as far as I ever want to go in my career. I'll put in a few years and look for a better contract or non contact position because this current company is shitty.

Title has never mattered in my career until I moved out of the SMB market into big business where title is tied to promotion path and salary. Most of them were totally arbitrary like when every one of twenty developers were just software architects. But now it's important at least in the positions I've been seeing and taking.

I've seen live updates for things like Go, NodeJS, Vue, Flutter, Angular, and you can recompile a Java class during debugging in Java (with limitations as certain things like static variables and methods need a full restart). More support and integration is certainly better but it doesn't feel like it's in a bad place to me.