I suppose there’s positive, then there’s “totally changed how I work”. It’s a big call. Maybe a real-world example would make it sound more believable: “before ChatGPT, I would have to sift through stacks of outdated VB6 documentation on $task. This took up most of the day. Yesterday I used a LLM to get a basic implementation of $task then I tidied it up and installed it within an hour.”
For me it’s the bloody “video essay” format. Hyper narrated, spoken straight to the camera. Waste of traffic, waste of storage, waste of attention. People think the argument carries more weight, or is just more persuasive, when someone is speaking at you with some vaguely related visual in the background. But really a written piece could be pulled apart so much more quickly.
Unfortunately OpenAI’s Whisper doesn’t do written transcriptions fast enough on my workstation yet for me to use it full time.
BYD employ about 570,000 people and by some measures are the largest carmaker in the world. I’d never heard of them either until a couple years ago. They’ve definitely got the cash to put into PR like this. Past couple years Australia started importing their electric cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Company
Even with (more) UX engineers, it was incredibly difficult to get any development done. When I was in this space, management and contractors were incredibly entrenched playing political games to grow teams even bigger to get more funding. There was nobody with any authority using the thing end-to-end saying “this sucks”.
Unfortunately for those who have those values,
not all paid positions involve acting on those values.
Random brain dump incoming...
Most businesses pay money to solve problems so they can make more money.
You can solve their problems - but not in the way that you may be thinking.
This is a generalisation that is not strictly true, but I say it to illustrate a different way of thinking:
Businesses do not undertake penetration testing because they want more secure software.
They do pentesting so they can stay in business in the face of compliance and bad actors.
To find a job,
you want to start learning what people pay for.
People pay contractors to come in and fix things, then leave again (politically easier, sometimes cheaper).
People pay sotfware developers to develop features (to sell more stuff).
Start looking up job titles and see which ones interest you (DevOps, frontend dev, backend dev, embedded...).
Don't get too stuck on the titles themselves.
It's just to narrow down what kinds of business problems you find interesting.
Other random questions:
What specific projects are you interested in?
What types of problems do you like solving?
Do you like digging in and finding those tricky bugs that have been bothering people for years?
Do you like trying out new frameworks which let you think about the system differently?
Would you rather implement a database or GUI toolbox?
Once you're deep in the belly of the beast, you'll find ways to exercise those values.
It's hard to know in advance what this will look like.
Ah yes! That is a great trick that kept me going doing software dev professionally.
Instead of trying to get the system I was working with to interact correctly with some shit enterprise system, I would find common protocols (or related protocols) and implement that well.
Then I would discover more specifically where the shit enterprise system was behaving badly, and point to something politically neutral (like an IETF RFC) to help get us out of a rut.
It made debugging so much easier.
Those specifications and open-source implementations have had much more engineering talent put in them than what I was usually dealing with.
I'm not so surprised anymore.
I'm self-taught using open-source software projects for guidance.
But not everyone learns like that. For example in the commercial software dev world, having patches easy to apply with minimum tooling isn't usually a priority (for better or worse).
I also think about pop-ups back in the 90s/00s.
Imagine if browsers sent a "No-Popups" header (or something) back then. I doubt we would have seen any change in company behaviour. Instead, it took something like Firefox to implement pop-up blocking by default (https://lwn.net/Articles/130792/).
Yes that's true. I guess what I wanted to point out is that GitLab has dependencies like Postgres, Redis, Ruby (with Rails), Vue.js... whereas Forgejo uses SQLite and jQuery.
Something not mentioned yet: Forgejo, the software running Codeberg, has a smaller feature set and narrower scope than GitLab ("GitLab is the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps Platform" from their website).
so the server and bandwidth will be the cheapest tier possible and the app developed by the lowest bidder
But billed at the rate of the most expensive tier of infrastructure and charged at the highest bidder’s price but outsourced to the lowest bidder, of course!
Years ago I wanted to learn how OpenBSD worked. Some people said to me “ah you want to get into programming at OS level? I was a bit disappointed with Go. But don’t learn C, learn Rust; Rust is the future there”. So as a total novice I looked at all 3 on the page. My impressions were: Go looks easy, C looks a bit harder, Rust looks… way too advanced for a beginner like me.
Later when I heard of Zig I started reading and it looked a bit more like what I expected a “future C” to look like.
I wish I had more time and skills to do work in C, Rust and Zig. I’m a Go programmer by trade.
I suppose there’s positive, then there’s “totally changed how I work”. It’s a big call. Maybe a real-world example would make it sound more believable: “before ChatGPT, I would have to sift through stacks of outdated VB6 documentation on $task. This took up most of the day. Yesterday I used a LLM to get a basic implementation of $task then I tidied it up and installed it within an hour.”