She may be interested in Dijkstra’s “Why numbering should start at zero”:

https://cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/...

I’ve been using Ruby since ~2004. I’m one of the few people I know who did paid Ruby work that wasn’t Rails/web in general. It’s the language I know best (contributed bug fixes to two implementations), I love the community (I organize Ruby meetups and confs), so in a way it’s still my favorite. But I don’t really use it for private projects anymore.

If I have to target the JVM I prefer Clojure and for .NET I usually use F#.

For paid work things have shifted a bit towards Go for me, a language I have a complicated relationship with.

If I could pick the next language I want to work in full time it’d be Smalltalk (Pharo preferably) or Elixir because they have simple and consistent core language semantics, good tooling and are fun to use.

Before you start rolling your own, maybe check out Rodauth by Jeremy Evans:

https://github.com/jeremyevans/...

It also has a Rails integration:

https://github.com/janko/...

Making mobile apps that nobody needed because they just wrap an SPA in a web view.

@iiii It probably still doesn’t work just in ways you don’t yet know.

My personal belief and value system is pretty eloquently summed up by this video on optimistic nihilism:

https://kurzgesagt.org/portfolio/...

Always nice to refactor from O(k) to O(yeah).

There’s the Web Speech API:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US...

Its browser support is still a bit lacking though:

https://caniuse.com/speech-recognit...

I’m in my 40s and I honestly haven’t met many of the people you describe.

I worked with and mentored a lot of junior developers over the years. There were very few who “scared” me and in their case I was generally happy that I could help them a bit on their way. I’d rather work with someone talented and motivated who might end up “ahead” of me than an entitled child.

By remembering that very few people
say “I wish I had worked more and spent less time with people I cared about” on their deathbed. Memento mori.

These companies are also bad at estimating the total cost per hire that comes with such idiotic policies.

2 jobs ago I was a team lead at a unicorn that (internally) boasted about hiring only about 5% of candidates. Do you know how many stupid interviews I had to conduct every week? And how many promising candidates I lost because someone in a later round had to pull an alpha nerd to protect their own fragile ego?

Also, once you got in everything was about the same as in every other company I ever worked at. Pretty much every single new hire was very disappointed once they realized this, they wrongly assumed that the high hiring bar had any practical consequences.

@AlgoRythm TIL it actually uses Chromium Embedded Framework.

Maybe they read this article ;-)

https://dev.to/thormeier/...

Unrelated: is 9k ringgit a good salary for a dev in Malaysia nowadays? I know it's above the median but KL isn't such a cheap place to live anymore, so I'd have expected a bit higher tbh.

@iiii Not my thing but you do you, no judgement.

Dev: I made changes related to my employment status which should work better for me. I also redecorated your office as I saw fit, clean up whatever else I messed up to.

"I self-studied business, economics, physics, self-taught multivariable calculus, teaching myself chemistry too."

Maybe it's time to focus instead of going wide.

In your post, you mention environmental concerns, so maybe that's a topic you're passionate about. Now look at this vertical and identify opportunities. Then try to figure out how to apply your specific skill set to this problem and turn it into a business.

@AvgCakeSlice This is also how you end up with the highest staff turnover I have seen and I've been working in this industry since 2001.

@sleazyboi Let's politely disagree on this one. :-)

For context: I spent the past 15 years working at or contracting for early-stage (pre-seed to Series A/B) startups and for most of them, ignoring the things described in the OP (bugs that will almost never happen) is generally a better way to spend their time and money.

This seems like a pretty sensible default stance unless you're writing hard real-time systems for e.g. flight control systems or medical devices.

@rantsauce Of course it's subjective. I'd describe it as interesting (he's an intelligent person with strong beliefs), annoying (he can really get on your nerves with certain things), and at times challenging (mannerisms and behaviors that fall outside a neurotypical range). In all fairness, that also applies to a significant number of people you meet at meetups and conferences and probably also myself depending on who you ask :-)

I was fully nomadic for about 2 years, on average spending between 1 to 3 months per country. My advice would be to forget about it and learn to work with what you have, the reduced weight and easier logistics more than make up for the inconvenience in my experience. But I also primarily do backend and/or non-web work.

@rantsauce I got to spend an afternoon with RMS once at some FOSS event, must have been almost 20 years ago. There are many adjectives I could use to describe this experience, "cool" is not one of them.

Deletes and writes again, is humble about the quality of her code, prefers actual resources over random posts from the Internet, she sounds like a better developer than many I worked with over the years.

@Fast-Nop Ah, thanks, makes sense.

@aaronswartz It wasn't long after :-) Also, to be clear, no pizzas and Red Bulls were ordered and nobody worked through the night.