rockyj

A very nice read and pretty much my experience. I have been here for a quarter of my life now, I do not think I can live anywhere else now. People may not like me being here because of my skin color or whatever but I do not mind. I keep to myself and follow all the "rules" I can. In fact, I like most of the rules, rules are good because they ensure order, fairness and equality.

Will a little bit of empathy be nicer, sure, but I cannot complain. Speaking of which, a lot of German natives complain and some are even leaving the country (around 100k left last year), but honestly I have visited / lived in nine countries, and people have no idea how good they have it here. I came here with a bag, twenty euros in my pocket and a job offer, a dozen years later I have pretty much all basic comforts and stability one can dream of, my kids have a bright future waiting for them, all this is not possible in many countries.

It is truly a great city to live in. I have only visited it a few times, I wish I could live there.

This is a total mess IMHO.

- The make around 5 billion in revenue per quarter - The problem according to them is profit margin - around 150-160 million

So first of all, they are big! Secondly they are not at a loss. They just have a "thin, non-growing margin". So to fix all this they are trimming down, so they can "return to growth" (which I think is ridiculous).

Some points -

- They are huge business even now - 5 billion per quarter revenue is no joke

- They did not have to buy all those studios

- They looked at Netflix, and wanted the sweet monthly subscription cash stream

- Then they did not have to give away popular games day one on Game Pass

- And finally, they did not have to raise Game Pass prices to improve the profit margins. Of course, consumers pulled out.

- Once again, short term vision, crazy decisions, bad spending spree and a constant need to "make numbers go up" and who has to pay for all this?

Looks great! Gamedev is so cool, being able to create enjoyable, playable worlds and characters must be so satisfying. If you can tell me how to build something like this I will be so grateful.

IMHO - In an AI context an "eval" is answering the question - "Is this AI / LLM call helping me or is doing the right thing?"

AI is not deterministic like regular code, so imagine you use it for "search" (RAG) or for summarizing or for classifying emails etc. How do you know it is giving you the right results? In this context, AI evals are an important idea and very often neglected.

You can use an initial "dataset" to evaluate your prompt and AI calls + code (think test cases), this dataset will of-course be curated by humans. But as the software is used, you want to incorporate, real production data as well and run the evaluation pre and post launch. Sounds simple, but can get complicated specially since this area is new and as the post mentioned there are too many players and options out there (since everyone thought this is a money maker).

That is a strange title / comparison. Docker images (even slimmed down) have an OS (most likely a Linux distribution), some libs and the runtime needed for a programming language. On it's own a "game engine + WASM binary" is not comparable.

Last i checked, it needed JVM (parts of the library are in Java). Given there are many JS minifiers and optimizers (tree shaking etc.) avaliable in JS itself in 2026, I do not know why we need this huge overhead.

Nice! Now also get rid of the elephant in the room - "Google Closure Compiler" and then we can really celebrate.

My dad had a transportation contract with the local Wimco factory, we had stacks of these at home. Lots of childhood memories associated with the matches.

I am a Clojure fan and would love to use it. But you are right, we live in a real world where money talks and most organizations want to see developers as cheap, replaceable commodities.

Not to mention in a post AI world, cost of code generation is cheap, so orgs even need even fewer devs, combine all this with commonly used languages and frameworks and you need not worry about - "too valuable to replace or fire".

Having said that - there may be a (very) small percentage of orgs which care about people, code crafting and quality and may look at Clojure as a good option.

And at the same time, gives you a dozen of footguns. This is just a list for the gotchas in the "@Transactional" annotation - https://dev.to/closeup1202/8-spring-transactional-pitfalls-t...

Now read up on all the dozen of annotations. But yeah, we did not want to "re-invent the wheel".

Line goes up is also not enough anymore. The slope of line going up is most important. You made 10bn last year, but only 9 bn this year - this means time for some layoffs to please "the market". I have no way to explain this world we live in.

Not sure of where you are coming from. But thousands come in and go every year. A few hundred are able to land a job after graduation / post-graduation (in Germany). Zero is not theoretically possible with so many universities looking for international students.

What plan? I do not know what reality people live in. I am an Indian myself, migrated 12 years ago. There are around currently 20000 students from India in Germany. I have talked to a dozen of them in my neighborhood, only 1 in 10 can even find a job post graduation in current market

Proof - https://youtu.be/2x-aQy730Ew?si=y6hKNp9G6TOI_mtT

Yeah, don't get why you were down voted. What reality are people living in and how do I transfer in that timeline

I agree with you partly. The benefits are great & fairly above international norms. But I do not agree with the "firing protection" anymore. Last year alone I saw thousands let go in Berlin in fairly large organizations like neobanks for example. I myself saw my previous employer let go of 30% of the staff over the year. A simple Google search of - "Berlin IT firings 2025" will give you a picture.

Yeah, the numbers in Germany are not so rosy. If these numbers are true, we are looking at -

- An "average" salary of around 65K / year

- This after (an average of) 5-6 rounds of interviews

- 6 months of "probation", with only 2 weeks of notice

- And all after 4-6 years of degree/s and 4-5 years of experience (so around 10 years of investment)

Then after taxation 65K annually means around 3500/month in pocket. Then with the current prices - around 1200 goes in rent alone. Not a lot of room to spend after that. Then, prices keep going up and even a simple (new) car is around 20,000. Not to mention the stress / savings you have to keep since people can be let go anytime. To top it, there is a ceiling in Germany - unless you are extra-ordinary forget making above 100K ever even after 25 years of experience.

IT / software dev is a "barely survivable" kind of job in Germany right (sadly) now. I do not recommend it to kids in school/uni anymore (again unfortunately).

Very interesting. It would be great if this works with a "higher" level library like Pixi.js or Phaser.js, that way one could build with ease in JS/TS, using a rich library/ecosystem and still distribute a "native" app (it probably already works with these libs but not sure).

Wow! What a coincidence. I just launched this y'day - https://cric26.fun/

I tried to go for deep cricket-ing gameplay and not graphics. People from the subcontinent should be able to enjoy it.

Nope, I would probably even quit at 250K of savings. Take some time off, then maybe learn pixel art / design , and spend 2 years to make a game or SaaS to get around 2k income per month for 2 years and then repeat the cycle. The initial money secures basic housing and bills, and the small monthly income is good enough for me.

My biggest question now is - since now anyone can build a SaaS, and since everything is now optimized not for "employment" but for "enterprise" (run your own business), just how many 1-2 person companies can we build? I mean how many genuine sell-able ideas are there. Can we as a society have a 100,000s small software enterprises (and not a few hundred employing 1000s)?

I would love to start my own SaaS company, even if it generates $1000 a month I will be elated. And I have 20+ years of experience programming and in FinTech, but what do I build? Not to mention, without sales & marketing nothing will really work.

Very impressive! Worth noting that HTMX also has a WebSocket extension - https://v1.htmx.org/extensions/web-sockets/ so one could potentially also do "live views" in more performant runtimes like JVM or Node.js

Using CachyOS for all my work for around 18 months now. Super stable, fast and up-to-date always, highly recommend it.

Its simple, just follow these 30 tips and tricks :D

I assume you have never seen the German software recruitment process. 6+ rounds spread over 3 months (with no ghosting in the middle if you are lucky). Here is the current process -

- Apply online

- Initial screening with recruiter if they like your resume (book a 45 mins slot)

- Take home assignment or online assessment (2 -4 hours)

- First technical screening interview (1-1.5 hours)

- Second technical interview (system level, deep dive, 1.5 hours)

- Product manager interview (1 hour)

- Senior leadership interview (1 hour)

- Final offer

Between all these rounds, you need to book meetings and it usually takes 1-2 weeks between rounds.

In any case for a normal investor, just remember - "The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent".

Thank you, a very insightful comment :) As a side note, my latest post (on the same website) is on "reactive" Java / suspend functions in Kotlin.

I agree, this was just a sample code to show how usually imperative if / else / try / catch code is written. What is also possible is we catch the exception, log it and throw another one.

Interestingly, I have been harping on this for a while. Recently wrote a blog on how to separate business logic from infrastructure code and tie them together by composing functions together - https://rockyj-blogs.web.app/2025/10/25/result-monad.html

I also see that lately "code quality" is the least concern of most (even software product) companies, just ask AI to write code in a single file / module / class - then launch feature and fix if you have to. I could see that in a few years things will be extremely messy (but who can say).