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I'm a little surprised by how easy people joke about residential electricians and plumbers in this context. To begin with it requires young and healthy back and knees. How many men after 40 and especially 50 are like that and for how much longer?

Secondly, in CA to be a real residential electrician you need to be C-10 licensed. Which requires all kinds of time consuming prerequisites to begin with. Some of them could be a challenge if you are not the kind of guy who knows a guy. Apprenticeships, unions, depending on your major 1 to 4 year of "hands-on, full-time journey-level experience" and such. Your best hope is probably that your EE degree from 20+ years ago still counts for something.

And there quite a few 20 yo candidates to compete with who are taking DC/AC circuits classes in community colleges this very moment. They are not spoiled with life-long office work experience.

The competition among people who'd like to be an industrial robotics technician at the Tesla Fremont Factory is very real too.

Ubuntu for experimentation with Robotics/ROS2. Windows for experimentation with FPGA/Vivado. A dual-boot 14" Lenovo E14 to host the festivities.

$1M is a newly built condo in the East Bay with HOA >$800/month. Not even an 80 year old 1,300 sqft house in the same area.

Pro: In the last ten years backend development has turned into AWS SDK-orientied programming mostly. Databricks-oriented in case of data engineering recently too. Between this and python/js popularity it is more of unskilled labor now.

Contra: I'm reading digital circuits and introductory FPGA programming books this summer - fullstack development for the robotics dominated future here I come ;) Granted some EE classes in your old major will help. But modern digital circuits and embedded hardware space also have a lot of similarity to your muscle memory as a software developer.

A typical Bay Area commute (e.g. to SJ or San Mateo/Redwood City) is 40+ miles one way. A typical weekend drive (e.g. to Half Moon Bay or Sonoma) is a 100-mile roundtrip.

20 miles to SF, 25 yoe (backend, data, basic frontend), been there done that and all I have got is this automated rejection email

Very few people want to re-create their production AWS MSK cluster from scratch. And that's the only way currently. MSK can usually upgrade Kafka brokers with minor performance degradation but not for this particular change.

If you have a use-case where you currently allocate ~1K threads mostly waiting on I/O switching to virtual threads is a one-liner ("Thread.ofVirtual()" instead of "Thread.ofPlatform()"). No more golang envy for sure.

Depending on how much memory is used by the Thread stack (presumably 1M-512K by default, allegedly 128K with Alpine base images) that's your 1G-500M heap space usage improvement right off the bat.

The migration from JDK17 to JDK21 was uneventful in production. The only issue is limited monitoring as a thread dump will not show most virtual threads and the micrometer metrics will not even collect the total number of active virtual threads. It's supposed to work better in JDK24.

The Spring Framework directly supports virtual threads with "spring.threads.virtual.enabled=true" but I haven't tried it to comment.

By the time you acquire enough experience to do it in 25+ years of lunches the job market starts showing less interest in you. But that's the only promising strategy in the LLM-dominated world I guess.

I learned about OOP from a Turbo Pascal v5.5 book circa 1993. Drawing triangles, squares, circles, all the good stuff. Turbo Vision library was a powerful demonstration of the power of OOP which made MSFT MFC look like a mess in comparison.

Not every SWE working in the Bay Area can afford a $1.5M house just to charge his car. Not to mention that the car would be twice as expensive (e.g. top Elantra 2025 trim at $30K vs Model 3 at $50K+).

In a galaxy far far away so called "J2EE application servers" used to be the reason JDK upgrades were not allowed. And that would probably be a real major update Java project.

When I joined my current team (in a big honkin' corporation with a history of layoffs and outsourcing) I inherited a dozen microservices, all on JDK8 and a couple written in Scala. So among the first things I did was an upgrade to JDK17 of every single repository. And it was mostly uneventful. More or less use a different Docker base image and bump up the Spring Boot version from 1.x to 3.4. Not running the latest LTS release is professional negligence in my book.

You can ask them a single question to know the answer: do they have any cats/scalaz in their production code? Without their ilk Scala 10 years ago was the language Kotlin and Java are still trying to be.

But from what I have observed in the last few years Scala is either used in legacy projects or you're talking to a hard-core FP shop. The saddest fact that it's true even in Data Engineering with Spark :(

Apache DataFusion Comet is a high-performance accelerator for Apache Spark, built on top of the powerful Apache DataFusion query engine: https://datafusion.apache.org/comet/user-guide/overview.html

You're unfortunately right. Every Scala codebase I have seen recently is essentially legacy. New services are not built with it anymore. Other than blaming SBT and the Haskel fans I'm not aware of a technical justification. But the industry/community has shifted since 2015-2018.

The only rare exceptions I heard of were strict FP shops who share nothing with common JVM-based development. You could have a few years of full-time Scala experience with Akka and Spark and they won't even screen you.

In the year of our Lord 2024 the question is if you want to bet on Java21+ catching up with Kotlin or go with Kotlin from day one. The choice is less obvious nowadays. I'd go with a modern language, actual job market sides with Java still. At least on the backend in the Bay Area.

As a side note, I cannot imagine a competent JVM-based developer not familiar with either Kotlin or Scala by now. In a typical Java shop half of the team is dying to switch to one of them in my experience.

There's one book that discusses a few related questions from a very mainstream perspective: Functional and Reactive Domain Modeling (https://www.manning.com/books/functional-and-reactive-domain...). The emphasis here is on practical while most similar resources tend to go too hard in the Haskell-on-the-JVM direction.

I'm curious how one ends up with such ahistorical sequence. I'd expect it to be more aligned with the actual PL history. Mainstream PLs have had a fairly logical progression with each generation solving well understood problems from the previous one. And building on top of the previous generation's abstractions.

Turbo Pascal for education, C as professional lingua franca in mid-90s (manual memory management). C++ was all the rage in late 90s (OOP,STL) . Java got hot around 2003 (GC, canonical concurrency library and memory model). Scala grew in popularity around 2010-2012 (FP for the masses, much less verbosity, mainstream ADTs and pattern matching). Kotlin was cobbled together to have the Scala syntactic sugar without the Haskell-on-the-JVM complexity later.

And then they came up with golang which completely broke with any intellectual tradition and went back to before the Java heyday.

Rust feels like a Scala with pointers so the "C++ => Rust" transition looks analogous to the "Java => Scala" one.

On the other hand, most LinkedIn jobs published last week (e.g. full time/hybrid in SF) seem to be much closer to 180K-200K.

While walking around look for a set of parallel bars/horizontal bar in a park near you. Typical exercises you could do with them both take little time and really load major muscles. Just hanging for a minute from a horizontal bar regularly is good for your spine column.

Hyundai has Elantra with its 45+ MPG (with a regular ICE), distinctive exterior, advanced safety features (at least in Limited trim), and above average manufacturer warranty.

Ce n'est pas un Kafka: Kafka is a Protocol Apache Kafka is an aging open source project. It's time to accept that Kafka's protocol is what matters. (https://materializedview.io/p/ce-nest-pas-un-kafka)

Anyone with a Java background will mention JCiP. But there's another book going deeper - "Art of Multiprocessor Programming" (https://www.amazon.com/Art-Multiprocessor-Programming-Mauric...).

AWS Fargate is popular among large companies in my experience.

Some of them try to migrate from it to a unified k8s "platform" (i.e. frequently not pure k8s/EKS/helm but some kind of in-house layer built on top of it). It takes so long that your tenure with the company could end before you see it through.

You kind of can peek into parquet files with a tiny command line utility: https://github.com/manojkarthick/pqrs

The prolefeed explains that deep duckspeaking is doubleplusgood. Nothing to see here, citizen.

There are two pinnacles in a traditional CS program - building a compiler and a DBMS. They are umbrella topics that prepare you for building pretty much any kind of software.

If you came to programming because you liked computers you'll find building an interpreter a fascinating topic in its own right. Building a compiler frontend is comprehensible and reading a modern/practical textbook (e.g. based on ANTLR or whatever is the latest parser generator in the wild) will illuminate so much for you.

You're highly unlikely to find a job with this skillset though. There are very few companies that do it, very small core teams, and there's competition with PhDs from top tier schools. The current leetcode fashion will ignore your niche knowledge right off the bat. So from this perspective the utility of knowing this stuff has always been a grey area regardless of the AI.

If you like money more than you like computers surely aim for an MLE position instead of SE/DE. But that's kind of a selective club too I imagine.

Java < Kotlin < Scala

Golang < Borgo < Rust

Let's talk about you growing older. The closer you're to 50 the more difficult it gets to find a new job. You get laid off in a major downsizing round. Your COBRA healthcare plan is $2K+/month which incidentally is comparable to your 1-bedroom apartment rent. It could take you a few months to find the next job. Or longer, people discuss it on this very site every other week.

The FAANGs and the capital gains are real but for a minority of us. If you're single and under 30 the Bay Area is a top destination for sure. You won't be that person forever though.

CORBA, Avro RPC, Thrift RPC, gRPC, now this. In this industry each generation wants to re-invent IDL every decade. But anything is better then JSON over HTTP so why not this.