talmr

Also, they might not even want to hire for such a thing.

There are plenty of businesses that don't need to be on fancy infrastructure or use the coolest new language for their backend.

I had my bike stolen recently so this hits me hard.

Each time I see these kinds of reviews, I take comfort in knowing my eight year old i7 3770k is still chugging along at 4.7ghz OC. Its matched with 16gb ram and a 980 TI, and it handles most modern games at 60fps just fine albeit on lower settings. I also sometimes boot into Ubuntu to write some code while my girlfriend wants to use the macbook, and I just mostly use VSC and write Node or Go apps.

Maybe in the future I'll just get a newer GPU, but for my needs of primarily gaming and coding I don't yet see a reason to upgrade the CPU and motherboard.

Also my parents couldn't afford a house there, and still don't have their own home. We were immigrants here, and our experience in Ohio was honestly a really good one with a supportive community.

Because everything else is also more expensive in California.

Way higher taxes. Gas costs double. My car registration fees for two cars was over a thousand dollars. The houses you can get for a million dollars have 3 small bedrooms, dated interiors, and pathetic back yards. If you want to live in an area that's safe and has good schools, you really need to pay a huge premium. A friend of mine purchased a 3 bedroom house that's really nice, and his down payment was almost as much as a house in Ohio. I do love living here, but it isn't really a fair comparison when it comes to housing. The houses I am mentioning in Ohio have acre plots, and large rooms.

If someone was to make less money in Ohio than their counterpart in California, I would say their dollar would stretch more in housing. Right now, even though I make decent money, I still live with house mates. I park my cars on the street, and I've had to deal with numerous crimes (bikes stolen, car registration stickers stolen, someone stole my bike rack, etc.)

FWIW I'm not the kind of person to trash California. I think there are still a lot of merits to living here.

I miss his enthusiasm and true innovation focused leadership.

Apple is a behemoth now, and I wonder what sort of products we would have if he was still here.

The iPhone changed our lives, but a decade later all phones now look like the iPhone and we have face unlock and a notch. Cool.

The Macbook is still the same pleasant to use machine, and still functions as any other laptop.

Would the iPad have replaced laptops completely? Maybe we'd have a world in which offloading everyday heavy tasks to the cloud (gaming, video editing, etc.) was super normal and we all were disconnected from carrying heavy devices everywhere. The new VSC integration in GitHub is cool, but maybe that sort of paradigm would have been everywhere.

I'm just a consumer, so I could be wrong in my sentiment but I don't really feel like we progressed as much in the last decade as we did with the jump from flip phones and having a land line, to carrying iPhones in our pockets.

I don't think my code quality would be reduced by location. If anything, I'd probably have less stress and more time to learn and improve. Making software and learning new stuff is pretty much a hobby, and more time to devote to hobby would be awesome.

Personally, I have not ever worked at a remote-friendly company. If the tides were to change and facilitating remote work becomes a first class priority, then I don't see why I couldn't thrive. My biggest irk right now is we can't just have ad hoc breakout sessions with different stakeholders (product, ux, eng) and come to quick conclusions. Zoom meetings are horrible, and I'm not really sure which tools are great for easily whiteboarding ideas. Someone recommended Google Jamboard.

Another concern moving inwards would be that I lose access to the hordes of other like-minded individuals who love technology. I won't be getting the same quality of meetups there for sure, since the area isn't a tech hub.

To be fair -

I used to live in Ohio and my parents and I lived in a 2 bedroom apartment that cost $600/mo about fifteen years ago. You could buy a 5 bedroom house for $250k. The school district I attended was also top notch. It was a great family area and I remember the mall, rec center, and numerous parks.

I checked zillow recently and 5 bedroom homes are ~$300k and apartments are about $800/mo.

At the time, my dad was the sole breadwinner and he was earning about $40k a year.

I'm out in California right now making a comfortable six figure salary, but I can't really afford a 1+ million dollar house in a good area where I can send my future kids to school.

If I was earning even $100k a year, I could comfortably afford to live in that Ohio suburb about 15 miles from a major metro.

Remote whiteboarding is challenging.

In the office, we can just make a breakout session and grab a whiteboard and jam something out. We're all present, nobody randomly sounds like a cyborg about to wreck the city, and we can actually get something done rather than have another follow up after someone puts all this into "notes".

Node is a great choice for fast iteration for a rest api if all you're doing is hitting DB, firing off other services, etc.

Express is a solid choice imo due to the tremendous community support.

If you ever need to do anything that involves CPU crunching, you can move those requirements to another language that's better suited for it like Go.

Yup. Same boat. I have an i7 3770k that I purchased in 2012 with the intention of overclocking it. It turned out to be a great chip that was stable at 4.8ghz. I use this computer mainly for gaming.

Last month, I started getting some kernel_trap BSODs so I reduced voltage a bit and also the clock speed down to 4.7ghz.

I don't see a reason for me to upgrade my CPU for another few years unless it burns out or something. The only component I've upgraded is my GPU, from a GTX 670 to a 980 TI.

The newer chips may be great for specific needs, but for gaming and light development work I don't see any reason why I need to upgrade. Sure, a quad core from 2012 isn't the hottest thing anymore, but along with my 980TI it runs all my games at 2k without any issues.

I found it pretty difficult to read because it is so bright and uses lighter font color.

IMO, I'd use only firebase auth and chat personally.

Firebase auth is supremely easy to implement, and you can write your own backend services (in node, rails, Go, whatever) and auth your clients against it using the firebase sdk. Chat makes it supremely easy as well for simpler use cases, and if you do find it limiting, you can always swap it out for something better suited.

In my case, I use firebase client sdk on mobile (react-native) and web (react). My backend (go + node) services use firebase admin sdk to authenticate requests, and my database is postgres.

Hey James. I'll bite - if you have some spare time, could you come up with some nice graphics/svg for a local cuisine/restaurant recommendations app? All the best, friend.

Joined because it is the lowest barrier entry for probably the most comfortable 6 figure job you can have in USA.

I was able to spend a couple weeks during my Christmas vacation at a previous job to learn enough to pass my first SE interview. Four years later I've moved around 3 times and I'm making enough money to live comfortably in California and own a Tesla.

Not a huge fan of web development any more, so I've really gotten into understanding how things like databases and geospatial stuff, and diving into mobile app development. Also been learning how all the different moving parts of the tech organization (sales, marketing, engineering, product, support, etc.) work together.

I'm in it as a self-taught engineer mostly for the easy money, but honestly I am finding that I don't really thrive any more. I managed to get myself into this industry and four years later I'm a senior software engineer making decent buck. However, it really isn't satisfying at all. I feel like I'm only in it because this is the easiest six figure job in the world and I'm just in it for the health insurance.

I used to be a business consultant and made a career pivot because I got burned out from working 60-80 hours a week and flying 100k+ miles each year. I loved all the projects I worked on, and many of them were very large scope (50m to 300m+ USD) with tremendous impact. I got to work with people in the senior leadership positions at multi billion dollar multinational corporations, and we were understanding their problems and coming up with solutions. It was so much freaking fun.

I barely feel that at my current work, where I'm just working on a CRUD app lol. It is so boring. I don't really care anymore about code juggling, because anyone can figure it out if they have a little dose of motivation. At first it was fun to be a "problem solver", but not like this.

I'm not really that interested in becoming a specialist. I look around at work at some of my colleagues who have years of experience in their specific subset of work, and they only know and care about that thing. These are highly qualified experienced people, but I really don't want to be like that. I like to get a low-level understanding of things I am personally passionate about, and I love learning so I try to get a high to mid level understanding of everything else. I'll fuck with dev ops, database performance, product strategy, marketing, sales, mobile app dev, whatever else that I find interesting.

Being a software engineer at a larger company does not satisfy me one bit, and it really sucks when you realize you're only in it because it is easy money.

I'm working on my own ideas now, and I'm learning as much as I can during this COVID remote time to make it on my own.

I've got a DIY desk from Ikea, so its really basic.

I am grateful that my work let me take my office chair home because my old chair at home was horrible for my back. Now that I have my nice work chair, I'm feeling much better.

Also thankful that all I need to do my work (and everything else I enjoy) is just my macbook pro.

I'm hoping that people will be eager to go back to the norm of going out and about.

I'm really not that keen of living in a future where a majority of people stay at home or use InstaCart to order groceries. That is just lame, and frankly I don't want that. We are social animals and we need to get back asap.

Long term I think that we will shift more towards self-sustenance. For the most part, people are listening to the authorities and I'm wondering if this will lead to a rise in CIVIC nationalism. This is the first time in my life that I've seen people actually work together for the greater good. I live in California and yeah it is a bubble here, but that's my experience.

Use what you know.

If you know JS, just stick to Node + Express.

I stick to Go or Node for the backend, and create-react-app for the web client. I prefer Go in most cases because I don't need to rely on many external deps, and I have my own starters for both Go and Node to create services quickly (rest, real time, assets, data/repository)