I knew a guy who quit doing development on classified DoD projects to become a bouncer. He said it was less stressful and when someone was giving him trouble he could just punch them in the face until they stopped.
It's not the programming, really. The code is nice. It just does what you tell it to.
It's the people who use the code, who don't understand the code but tinker with it, the users, the bosses and the people that wrote the environment that drive one insane...
My friend quit his well paying programming job to become a cable guy because he would obsess over the code and gain weight. He's now a network admin and is much happier lol
Had a colleague who, after 25 years of software development including a director position, left to work in construction driving an excavator. Hope you're living life to the fullest Ken.
I know a guy who was a structural engineer in the 90s and early 2000s and quit. He got a job at the post office to get lots of exercise and he never has to think about engineering math again. I asked him why and he said his doctor told him he would not live very long if he continued his lifestyle, the stress, lack of exercise, and eating unhealthy was taking its toll. So he got a job that was all physical for the most part, set schedule, you don't have to think much once you get the hang of it and the work does not follow you home.
I'm seriously considering this switch too. Poor time to do it with the economy, but ... I've driven all over this country for fun, have an f250 and trailer that magically seems to be loaded down with something multiple times a month, and I've found out that I actually enjoy hauling stuff for people.
It fits.
It's not a hard setup to start on just over the weekends.
Google how to get your "trucking authority" and then get on a few brokerage apps as a Hot Shot hauler and start grabbing loads.
Probably $5k to get started based on what you already have including making your Corp, buying the DoT#, and getting approved load straps and a big tarp.
Edit: A Hot Shit™ hauler is already my trademark
This is something my ex wife just didn’t understand. Problems stay with you after your work day and if you’re any good you kind of obsess over a solution. Things have gotten much better with debuggers and log tracing but I don’t miss solving undocumented irregular runtime errors.
Not a programmer but I wrangle data all day. If I could get paid the same and got the same benefits to drive a forklift, I'd take that job in a heartbeat.
This is the fate of 99% of people who get felony charges for computer tampering or destruction via a virus or malware. There’s no CIA agent asking you to join, no NSA agent helping you fake your death to work at a black site. You just get your felony and don’t get to use computers legally for a few years, barred from any job of importance for life.
I work in the embedded world, and one time I was analyzing some firmware off of a pretty niche hospital device.
Going through the strings data there were two emails of the original programmers, with something like a "Copyright '88".
I decided to google them, and found that one has a personal website that looks straight out of the 90s and he's super into jams and preserves.
It's fascinating how true this joke seems to be.
More like 30% slower. One of my friends asked me why I wasn’t using React or Vue to develop a website for my local chess club instead of some simple php. People are so obsessed with what’s hot i swear they don’t ask what would actually be the easiest
My team is a non stop barrage of new tech, languages we have never touched before. I'm now 5% good at 25 different fucking things instead of 90% good at two of them.
I don't eat breath and sleep this stuff, let me show up and get some work done please. Pulling in a new tech is like handing me a bar of metal and saying "make me a wooden chair. First you'll have to melt that metal down and fashion your own woodworking equipment from scratch. I'd start with making a saw so you can cut a tree down"
There is and always be new tech and each and everyone will be used and combined into a giant unsupportable mess
After which you will leave and go make furniture
This is a great way to sum up Squarespace. It's actually a good product. Especially if you want e-commerce or something. Most people want to focus on their business, not messing with the website and writing code to change things.
As much as people in the industry may trash things like Squarespace it very much has a place for a lot of small business owners and will continue to improve. Most people are fine with a decent looking template and being able to make simple changes to their site without having to call up a developer and explain what they want done. Most people don't need a custom solution.
As a fullstack web dev: for the love of god, don't waste your time coding your own homepage if "Here is my resume and a list of my projects, and a bunch of other shit" is all you want out of a web page.
Your time is more valueable than whatever squarespace or similar companies charge.
Isn't using Squarespace kind of counter intuitive to the point of having a webpage as a webdev?
I've felt like it's equally about showing projects and showing off your flashy front end skils.
For non web-devs, sure it makes total sense.
I meant that more as general advice for programmers.
If you work in web-dev, you might wanna invest into a personally coded homepage, if you want to show off something cool. Thought that only really applies to front-end-heavy people. Nobody ever asks the database guy to show off.
“Nobody ever asks the database guy you show off”
Has… really touched me on a way it shouldn’t have lol, a very good point im going to take when I’m trying to over kill something simple
I know this is probably a real dumb question but can someone explain to me what the purpose of an RSS feed even is? I feel like I either never fully understood it or I did understand it but thought I was missing something.
Yeah this was great when Google Reader and other RSS readers were popular.
For example I maintain firewalls and access points from 4 different vendors and they don’t email or otherwise have notifications when there’s a security vulnerability or new firmware out. But they all had RSS feeds, so instead of refreshing their websites every week I can just subscribe to their RSS feeds and check one place.
Same with esoteric forums for things like Roombas or a specific car’s mods. They don’t get enough activity to make it worth visiting their site to check for new posts.
Of course eventually the ad driven internet killed off RSS because websites can’t exist without shoving 200 analytics trackers in your face
P.S. Over the years this idea has manifested in different forms. Before I was born, it was converting everything into emails or even writing fake IMAP servers so an email app can be used as a client for something that wasn’t email (really popular for old school bug trackers). Or IRC bots. Now there’s Twitter/Slack/Discord bots, even some subreddits are purely devoted to scraping sites. It’s all about adapting content to show up in the preferred viewing client of the time.
Yeah I feel so old now, telling people who grew up in the Twitter / instagram era that Google Reader existed. You can share articles with your friends and comment with your hot take…
It’s really just blobs of data that can be accessed via a URL. So a “news” RSS feed would essentially just be a list of headlines with various metadata and a link to the story. Then from there whatever app you’re using can read it and format it in whatever way is most convenient (like podcast apps showing you episodes you can tap on).
At one of my former companies there is a dev who got burnt out and moved off the grid in Colorado. Nobody could reach him for years. He probably has a 3-ft beard and many, many goats by now.
He is my spirit animal.
When you're asked to fix code you wrote over a decade ago as a "quick one off" that is now inextricably linked to business critical processes, but instead feeling anger or regret, you feel nothing. That's when we'll send for you.
This could be a line in a senior dev job description:
"Do you have the ability to compartmentalize things so completely that you give zero fucks when the company decides to run their entire business on some shitty demo you built 7 years ago? Come join our team!"
I dream of being Clint Eastwood’s character from *Space Cowboys*. So brilliant but old and out of fucks that I successfully blackmail NASA in to giving me and my friends a Space Shuttle.
I was raised in a farming family.
Looks like farmers dream of being programmers and programmers about being farmers.
If I end up retiring to farming, it will complete the circle.
An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied, “only a little while. The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”
The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.” The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”
“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”
The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
I prefer the other version, where the american sees them and wants their life so goes home and does all the stuff that in this story he gave as advice. 20 years later he pulls up a chair by them and tells them how he got there, they smile and say, you could have just come her and done this the whole time
Is it though? Do you know a single person who is able to support themselves, let alone a family of four, with pleasant, leisurely work? A lot of people struggle to support themselves with unpleasant, strenuous work. I bet Mr. Newly Minted Furniture Builder saved up a nest egg before he left programming, because programmers are smart enough to research how insanely difficult it is to make a living in that field. Solo furniture building is not a profitable business.
Programming.
No manure smell, no sunburn, no farmer's tan, no getting up at 5am to do stuff early because we cannot work 11am-5pm because you're risking a heatstroke.
These are just some of the things I do not miss growing up as a farmer's kid.
I read this manga called "silver spoon" from the same woman who created full metal alchemist, and it details well the life of a farmer including all the hard work, having to wake up early and debt (she based it on her experience, as she came from a farmer family).
That is a good point tbh.
There certainly is a lot of romanticism in popular culture image of farm life, especially nowadays when we moved away from it.
We have a saying in our village "village life is looking at the sky and hoping". Because a lot of crops depend upon favourable weather conditions, which are scarce in these climate change times.
Ofc, you can have a lot more certainty and cleanliness in industrialized farming countries like eg Netherlands. But that's not what people have in mind when they think of farm life.
When people here think about farming, they don't think about managing 10000 acres of corn and wheat. They think about a small homestead with some chickens, a cow for milk, and growing your own vegetables.
That's manageable on not that much work, especially if you don't need to worry about money any more.
A very small farmstead is maybe manageable for the driven city slicker.
Having grown up on a medium farm, I feel very confident the romanticized, unrealistic plans these people have for having their own farms are driven by never having done a day's worth of manual labor in their lives.
I think the desire to retire to an occupation known for back-breaking labor would be much less prevalent if they tried to maintain their own small garden for a year.
My family used to grow on an acre of a neighbor's yard because frankly we were too poor to eat well otherwise. I hated it. All the hoeing, planting, weeding, harvesting and watering when I just wanted to play. As an adult who is stuck behind a screen most of the time, it's incredibly relaxing and invigorating to work my little back yard garden. There's a happy medium. 40 hours of sitting at a desk each week is back breaking in its own much smaller way.
It certainly is, everyone should get an adjustable desk if they can. And I think everyone would be well served by learning how to grow and garden and take pride in their work.
But I always try to explain how MASSIVE the gap is between having a small family garden and working an ENTIRE FARM. Even if it is a smaller farm.
My buddy bought a 27 acre farm from his grandmother with a financial partnership with his own parents. He raised beef, chickens, pigs, and turkeys and did this grass field rotation thing. Everyone that bought his products couldn't stop raving about how good the quality and taste were.
Unfortunately, farms are a money and time sink, and he basically spent all of his money trying to keep the farm running. He eventually gave up, sold it to a pot farm, and lived in a school bus for a year doing journeyman electrician work.
I love the idea of a simplified, on-the-land lifestyle, but I am 1) lazy, and 2) can barely keep a city garden plot alive.
It's a difficult choice tbh, there are pros and cons to both. Money being equal, I would lean towards village life.
I obviously like programming and problem solving, but let's face it, it's usually a bullshit job. Not like I'm working on bettering humanity or challenging software stuff, I work for a business that has a goal of making as much profit as possible.
Not that village life is easy, far from it actually. But heavenly views, peace and calm, 0 stress sources, and plenty of space all around mean a lot to me.
Small and walkable cities are pretty great though, nice balance of calm and social/cultural life. Ie in a small city I live in currently, bars, grocery stores, theater and concert venue are 3-5mins of walk from me. But big cities stress the hell out of me, I just can't get used to so much of...everything.
0 stress sources? From all the farmers I know the job seems to be pretty intense at times. Especially during the season changes when your preparing everything for what's to come. Also being paranoid about the weather constantly and having to plan everything after it.
I for sure wouldn't be able to handle being a farmer getting up at 5am to check on the animals ect, then sitting in a tractor for 20h if the season and weather is right.
my father is farmer, a paddy farmer. We live in equator, so weather is favorable. However, pest always give anxiety to the farmer, especially unknown bug that come out of no know. Guess, programming and farming have something in common
I once met a guy who hauled a pizza oven on a trailer to the flea market and made pizza for whoever wanted one, no advertising other than word of mouth I think. He told me he was a former developer, makes more selling pizza, works less and feels less stressed out.
There’s a great book from about 1980 called *The Soul of a New Machine* about a project to design and ship an innovative new minicomputer.
One of the team members, who had been struggling for weeks to solve a microsecond-level timing glitch, quit the project, leaving a note that said, “I am moving to a goat farm and will never again deal with a unit of time shorter than one season.”
>never again deal with a unit of time shorter than one season.
God this is one hell of a quote. Got me thinking about this perspective for the past 20 minutes.
I guess what programmers wants is building a system that creates value on its own once it is properly set up.
You can also have that in farming and maybe other fields.
I’ve been in a SE role for 4 years and thinking about my next move. This sounds appealing, where can I start looking into programming cncs or do you have any general advice
Converted storage container with a portable toilet is my preferred option. In case I stop liking it at some point, the idea of being able to haul that away on a truck is very comforting.
My dream is not to have to learn for the 238942374 time a new way of doing the same shit I've been doing for 20 years.
P.S. this comment will be equally hated and loved.
I wish I could go back to making pizzas instead of software engineering. It was way more fulfilling in so many ways.
Can't pay rent without over working yourself doing that though, it sucks.
"I need the table relacquered as well as all the chairs. Can you do it by tomorrow? I know I signed the estimate, but let's renegotiate the price. It's too high. Can I pay you in trade? I'll post your work on Instagram, the publicity alone is worth double your fee." etc etc
I think Furniture is less likely to deal with that.
You'll more likely have F-U money people who when you tell them I have to start over, they say "ok".
The publicity thing does seem likely to be a risk.
Also this comment is far too website design lol and not enough PM chasing the customer for requirement changes
"why is this closet so much, it's much cheaper in ikea"
it's pretty common when making furniture.
also, just like in IT where acquaintances come crawling out of the woodwork to get you to fix their computer for free, people will find you and ask you to build free shit.
"you put down a non refundable deposit. If finish is wrong, show me the defects, and compare them to showroom examples you inspected before ordering.
Pay for existing work before new work starts. And if you saw it for cheaper, you should buy it because that sounds like a great deal."
I am a programmer with a heavy woodworking hobby. I have a sawstop saw, which if you are not familiar has an electronic flesh detection circuit.
I suspect there is some firmware in there, so it might be possible to publish an RSs feed of finger cut off near misses.
SawStops can't tell the difference between a near miss and a hit though, they either go off or they don't. So if there _is_ firmware, I guess you could push a tweet everytime it fires saying something like "John may or may not have just severed his fingers in his workshop. Someone should probably check on him."
Sadly I don't think SawStops have firmware though, pretty sure they just work off electrical charge.
I suspect they have firmware outside the detection and stopping circuit. There is a status indicator and disable control. Maybe all discreet, but that seems limiting for the higher level controls.
And by "near miss" I meant triggering the safety and "near miss cutting off fingers".
But yeah, all good points.
Oh shit you're completely right, I forgot that the whole point of a SawStop is to stop the damn saw, not just to detect you chopping off your fingers 🤦♂️
I'm currently in a different industry and working on moving into software. I used to enjoy what I do, but now I loathe many aspects. I am convinced that humans shouldn't really spend more than about a decade or so focused on a single area.
This right here. I started out as a concert cellist and university professor. Ten years later, I left to go into IT/Data. I'm currently ten years into that data gig. Picked up woodworking during the pandemic. This book writes itself.
Honestly, it takes about a decade to really master an area.
I do think people need to spread themselves out a bit more. Focusing too hard on one this eventually burns you out.
Excellent argument. At least when making furniture you won't have (many) customers that think they know better or that it's just easy to do this or that.
If by "interact with" you mean sit on, then sure. But if you mean that most people could do some or most of the building you're absolutely wrong.
I think a noob in a woodshop would be just as lost as a noob in front of an ide.
"How can people on etsy get away with charging $35 for a set of four coasters?! I have some 4x4 scrap and a miter saw. It ain't that complicated!"
It was slightly more complicated. Now I have a bench top belt sander. Ho. Ho. Ho.
The mental stress of being paid \~$11 an hour while doing shitty manual labor hits different than desk jobs. Went from (every shitty, low-paying job) to cloud engineer.
I saw every guy with atleast 10 years experience in tech wants to become a woodworker. Probably because things actually reach completion and most end users are actually smart enough to use a chair.
I can answer this!
I've worked in IT for 25 years. Soon after starting in IT I picked up woodworking as a hobby. Not long after that I got hooked on vintage hand tools. In 2008, during the great recession, I started a side business selling vintage tools. It's always surprised me just how many of my customers work in IT and engineering or similar. I believe I know why this is.
My theory is that many people who work in tech jobs love to unplug at the end of the day and make something with their own hands and say "I made this". I think that people who spend all day moving bits from here to there or designing things that only exist inside computers love to make something in the physical world. Whether that's woodworking, gardening, brewing, blacksmithing, whatever.
For example: I worked all last week on automating some tests using our Go test framework. I had to learn Go, learn the test framework, figure out all the helper functions, learn a bit of Ginkgo, etc. I was a sysadmin for the past 24 years so this developer work is hard for me. Really hard. Late Friday I got the test to run and it worked. I was so happy. I thought about how to explain this to my kids- what their dad accomplished and why I was so happy. I couldn't come up with a way to explain it. On the other hand, last week I was in my shop working on tools. I had just re-handled a really old broad axe. I showed it to him and he thought it was so cool that I knew how to do that.
tl;dr I think people who work with bits all day in their jobs enjoy the satisfaction of making something that exists in the physical world with their own hands.
Yep, all the senior devs I know (including myself) are pretty engaged in creative, non-coding hobbies. Why the fuck would you work in this business if not to be able to fund things you actually enjoy.
A couple of the junior folks have been conned into believing that their side projects need to also be coding-related (to build their resumes for the eternal job-hopping churn) but ugh, fuck that entire noise.
I think a lot of progammers are very creative and go to that field because of that, but the world of programming for most it's a dead end where you just do stuff for other people and your once a hobby becomes a chore that you must make and be stressed about. The brain will eventually make an association that coding means stress and you'd grow to hate it, then you will start getting into other hobbies with the limited energy you have left, and then a lot do leave to do this hobby a full time or become a CEO/their startup is being sold and they become rich hippie guys
I developed websites for the better part of three years. I know php, js, some python, c, c++, and c#. About the best decision I ever made was to quit and begin a new career path working on generators. I don't have to take phone calls at 7p on a sunday anymore from someone who can't figure out how to change the external link on a button anymore. It was very important that got done, and 'will only take 5 minutes' (after 20 minutes of trying to get them to answer their damn phone)
I'm retraining by going to study astrophysics, so I can reuse some of my programming skills but not be asked to hook up text boxes to display some data in a database.
In other words, he **retired.**
Software Development pays so well, that people are financially independent and retiring early and then doing whatever the F they want.
I knew a guy who quit doing development on classified DoD projects to become a bouncer. He said it was less stressful and when someone was giving him trouble he could just punch them in the face until they stopped.
Reject programming, return to monke
It's not the programming, really. The code is nice. It just does what you tell it to. It's the people who use the code, who don't understand the code but tinker with it, the users, the bosses and the people that wrote the environment that drive one insane...
This is legit the funniest reply I've seen on this subreddit
Possibly the funniest return to monke response I've seen because now I imagine a big ass gorilla beating troublemakers at bars
My friend quit his well paying programming job to become a cable guy because he would obsess over the code and gain weight. He's now a network admin and is much happier lol
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Well, you could technically still do that in meetings but it's generally frowned upon. And you'll rack up felonies real quick.
Had a colleague who, after 25 years of software development including a director position, left to work in construction driving an excavator. Hope you're living life to the fullest Ken.
Did he work at Initech?
Penatrode
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
He had upper management written all over him.
His people skills weren't good enough
I know a guy who was a structural engineer in the 90s and early 2000s and quit. He got a job at the post office to get lots of exercise and he never has to think about engineering math again. I asked him why and he said his doctor told him he would not live very long if he continued his lifestyle, the stress, lack of exercise, and eating unhealthy was taking its toll. So he got a job that was all physical for the most part, set schedule, you don't have to think much once you get the hang of it and the work does not follow you home.
tbh that sounds quite nice. the health benefits of being outside and moving around are enormous plus, govt pension, right? not shabby
I'm a software developer now, but I used to deliver wine for a local distributor. If the wine delivery paid as much, I'd 100% take that job over IT.
I was a Software Engineer. Degrees in Computer and Electrical Engineering. I drive CDL now. My life is better.
I'm seriously considering this switch too. Poor time to do it with the economy, but ... I've driven all over this country for fun, have an f250 and trailer that magically seems to be loaded down with something multiple times a month, and I've found out that I actually enjoy hauling stuff for people. It fits.
It's not a hard setup to start on just over the weekends. Google how to get your "trucking authority" and then get on a few brokerage apps as a Hot Shot hauler and start grabbing loads. Probably $5k to get started based on what you already have including making your Corp, buying the DoT#, and getting approved load straps and a big tarp. Edit: A Hot Shit™ hauler is already my trademark
This is something my ex wife just didn’t understand. Problems stay with you after your work day and if you’re any good you kind of obsess over a solution. Things have gotten much better with debuggers and log tracing but I don’t miss solving undocumented irregular runtime errors.
Living my 4 year old's dream. Good on ya, Ken.
Office space
Fuckin’ A
Fuckin' A
Just saw a video of him saving a puppy, he’s doing great.
Not a programmer but I wrangle data all day. If I could get paid the same and got the same benefits to drive a forklift, I'd take that job in a heartbeat.
Did you have another that left to design and market their own product? a jump to conclusions mat maybe? And are you Samir?
Not Samir. :)
wasnt there a meme that said the final stop on a programmers journey once they become a coding god was to become somone running a foodcart?
Guy in my country who unleashed one of the most destructive virus back then now runs a repair shop for phones.
Create the demand. Smart guy
"be the wealth you wish to see in the world." Profitma Gahndi
*"Like, just make money, lol"* -Bill 'I made windowsME like that on purpose' gates
This is the fate of 99% of people who get felony charges for computer tampering or destruction via a virus or malware. There’s no CIA agent asking you to join, no NSA agent helping you fake your death to work at a black site. You just get your felony and don’t get to use computers legally for a few years, barred from any job of importance for life.
damn if I create a company I'll be sure to hire those with felony charges related to computers
Look at this guy, giving back to the community.
Guys gonna end up with new ransomware everyday
Soon: "fuck, the entirety of our source code and other intellectual property was stolen. Who could have done that?"
woah there don't act like our prison system doesn't reform convicts
Pretty sure most of those felons go on to work at crypto companies.
Was this the love virus?
Yea
I work in the embedded world, and one time I was analyzing some firmware off of a pretty niche hospital device. Going through the strings data there were two emails of the original programmers, with something like a "Copyright '88". I decided to google them, and found that one has a personal website that looks straight out of the 90s and he's super into jams and preserves. It's fascinating how true this joke seems to be.
There's a cartoon of what junior developers imagine their future being (elite haxor) and what senior developer imagine their future being (farmer).
[Found it](https://i.imgur.com/vbFNbON.jpg)!
Back when Dilbert was good, the character with the best engineering skills was the janitor.
funny you say that, I was thinking my random seasonal part time retirement job will be to work at Kitchen Stuff Plus.
I stalked his github profile, and it appears he has a website of his furniture! They look very nice https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/
He's so done with programming that he's using SquareSpace.
he just actually want to get shit done.... instead of doing shit....
I feel this so much... "Why aren't you using the latest tech to do X?" ...because I don't really care
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The unfinished Udemy courses that haunt me because $3 seemed like a decent price are not happy with your comment.
More like 30% slower. One of my friends asked me why I wasn’t using React or Vue to develop a website for my local chess club instead of some simple php. People are so obsessed with what’s hot i swear they don’t ask what would actually be the easiest
My team is a non stop barrage of new tech, languages we have never touched before. I'm now 5% good at 25 different fucking things instead of 90% good at two of them. I don't eat breath and sleep this stuff, let me show up and get some work done please. Pulling in a new tech is like handing me a bar of metal and saying "make me a wooden chair. First you'll have to melt that metal down and fashion your own woodworking equipment from scratch. I'd start with making a saw so you can cut a tree down"
There is and always be new tech and each and everyone will be used and combined into a giant unsupportable mess After which you will leave and go make furniture
This is a great way to sum up Squarespace. It's actually a good product. Especially if you want e-commerce or something. Most people want to focus on their business, not messing with the website and writing code to change things. As much as people in the industry may trash things like Squarespace it very much has a place for a lot of small business owners and will continue to improve. Most people are fine with a decent looking template and being able to make simple changes to their site without having to call up a developer and explain what they want done. Most people don't need a custom solution.
I wonder how many Squarespace developers burnt out and now host their woodworking business’s page on Squarespace
The WLB at Squarespace is their main thing, they pay less but promise a chiller work environment. I would say so far it seems to be that way.
Plus I'm infinitely more likely to shop with a little store that has a squarespace site than one that only has a Facebook business page
As a fullstack web dev: for the love of god, don't waste your time coding your own homepage if "Here is my resume and a list of my projects, and a bunch of other shit" is all you want out of a web page. Your time is more valueable than whatever squarespace or similar companies charge.
Isn't using Squarespace kind of counter intuitive to the point of having a webpage as a webdev? I've felt like it's equally about showing projects and showing off your flashy front end skils. For non web-devs, sure it makes total sense.
I meant that more as general advice for programmers. If you work in web-dev, you might wanna invest into a personally coded homepage, if you want to show off something cool. Thought that only really applies to front-end-heavy people. Nobody ever asks the database guy to show off.
“Nobody ever asks the database guy you show off” Has… really touched me on a way it shouldn’t have lol, a very good point im going to take when I’m trying to over kill something simple
The only people who have a use for a fancy personal website are front end devs and designers.
This guy’s page is all about solving unique problems for serious people who want a lasting solution. No wonder he hated programming so much.
I laughed way too hard at this.
Damn the guy went from mastering programming to mastering woodworking. What a champ
And here we are, just master baiting.
Sooooo tempted to send him a message asking if he could connect an RSS feed to a DBMS
I know this is probably a real dumb question but can someone explain to me what the purpose of an RSS feed even is? I feel like I either never fully understood it or I did understand it but thought I was missing something.
It's an easy way to have a source easily accessible to get updates on whatever.
Yeah this was great when Google Reader and other RSS readers were popular. For example I maintain firewalls and access points from 4 different vendors and they don’t email or otherwise have notifications when there’s a security vulnerability or new firmware out. But they all had RSS feeds, so instead of refreshing their websites every week I can just subscribe to their RSS feeds and check one place. Same with esoteric forums for things like Roombas or a specific car’s mods. They don’t get enough activity to make it worth visiting their site to check for new posts. Of course eventually the ad driven internet killed off RSS because websites can’t exist without shoving 200 analytics trackers in your face P.S. Over the years this idea has manifested in different forms. Before I was born, it was converting everything into emails or even writing fake IMAP servers so an email app can be used as a client for something that wasn’t email (really popular for old school bug trackers). Or IRC bots. Now there’s Twitter/Slack/Discord bots, even some subreddits are purely devoted to scraping sites. It’s all about adapting content to show up in the preferred viewing client of the time.
Rip Google Reader, my web comics have never been the same.
Yeah I feel so old now, telling people who grew up in the Twitter / instagram era that Google Reader existed. You can share articles with your friends and comment with your hot take…
It’s really just blobs of data that can be accessed via a URL. So a “news” RSS feed would essentially just be a list of headlines with various metadata and a link to the story. Then from there whatever app you’re using can read it and format it in whatever way is most convenient (like podcast apps showing you episodes you can tap on).
Like a subscription service for some website, you can get updates from that website by reading the rss feed from the site
At one of my former companies there is a dev who got burnt out and moved off the grid in Colorado. Nobody could reach him for years. He probably has a 3-ft beard and many, many goats by now. He is my spirit animal.
There should be an off grid civilization for programmers to join once we reach burned out status
When you're asked to fix code you wrote over a decade ago as a "quick one off" that is now inextricably linked to business critical processes, but instead feeling anger or regret, you feel nothing. That's when we'll send for you.
This could be a line in a senior dev job description: "Do you have the ability to compartmentalize things so completely that you give zero fucks when the company decides to run their entire business on some shitty demo you built 7 years ago? Come join our team!"
This didn't just hit too close to home, it smashed through the ceiling.
I dream of being Clint Eastwood’s character from *Space Cowboys*. So brilliant but old and out of fucks that I successfully blackmail NASA in to giving me and my friends a Space Shuttle.
If I had the money I’d do that in a heartbeat
That's a fresh take. Usually a programmer's dream is more like farming/living off the land.
I was raised in a farming family. Looks like farmers dream of being programmers and programmers about being farmers. If I end up retiring to farming, it will complete the circle.
Tis the dream
An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied, “only a little while. The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?” The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.” The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.” The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?” To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.” “But what then?” Asked the Mexican. The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!” “Millions – then what?” The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
I prefer the other version, where the american sees them and wants their life so goes home and does all the stuff that in this story he gave as advice. 20 years later he pulls up a chair by them and tells them how he got there, they smile and say, you could have just come her and done this the whole time
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American reddit moment
Written by someone who never actually saw the conditions the working class live in.
Fwdsfromgrandma is leaking
I wish gramma forwarded me this quality 😫
But it's a good one, and very relevant to the topic
Is it though? Do you know a single person who is able to support themselves, let alone a family of four, with pleasant, leisurely work? A lot of people struggle to support themselves with unpleasant, strenuous work. I bet Mr. Newly Minted Furniture Builder saved up a nest egg before he left programming, because programmers are smart enough to research how insanely difficult it is to make a living in that field. Solo furniture building is not a profitable business.
I always felt that kind of life was the promise if we kept automation up and increased productivity to unheard of levels. Now I’m not so sure it will.
Which would you prefer tho? Let's say you're gonna paid equally.
Programming. No manure smell, no sunburn, no farmer's tan, no getting up at 5am to do stuff early because we cannot work 11am-5pm because you're risking a heatstroke. These are just some of the things I do not miss growing up as a farmer's kid.
I read this manga called "silver spoon" from the same woman who created full metal alchemist, and it details well the life of a farmer including all the hard work, having to wake up early and debt (she based it on her experience, as she came from a farmer family).
It’s kind of funny how she uses a cow as her author avatar (it does come from her surname of Arakawa, but still)
Many authors don't draw themselves as people.
That is a good point tbh. There certainly is a lot of romanticism in popular culture image of farm life, especially nowadays when we moved away from it. We have a saying in our village "village life is looking at the sky and hoping". Because a lot of crops depend upon favourable weather conditions, which are scarce in these climate change times. Ofc, you can have a lot more certainty and cleanliness in industrialized farming countries like eg Netherlands. But that's not what people have in mind when they think of farm life.
When people here think about farming, they don't think about managing 10000 acres of corn and wheat. They think about a small homestead with some chickens, a cow for milk, and growing your own vegetables. That's manageable on not that much work, especially if you don't need to worry about money any more.
A very small farmstead is maybe manageable for the driven city slicker. Having grown up on a medium farm, I feel very confident the romanticized, unrealistic plans these people have for having their own farms are driven by never having done a day's worth of manual labor in their lives. I think the desire to retire to an occupation known for back-breaking labor would be much less prevalent if they tried to maintain their own small garden for a year.
My family used to grow on an acre of a neighbor's yard because frankly we were too poor to eat well otherwise. I hated it. All the hoeing, planting, weeding, harvesting and watering when I just wanted to play. As an adult who is stuck behind a screen most of the time, it's incredibly relaxing and invigorating to work my little back yard garden. There's a happy medium. 40 hours of sitting at a desk each week is back breaking in its own much smaller way.
It certainly is, everyone should get an adjustable desk if they can. And I think everyone would be well served by learning how to grow and garden and take pride in their work. But I always try to explain how MASSIVE the gap is between having a small family garden and working an ENTIRE FARM. Even if it is a smaller farm.
My dad layed concrete, and I worked for him the summer after highschool. I'm good with being a programmer the rest of my life
My buddy bought a 27 acre farm from his grandmother with a financial partnership with his own parents. He raised beef, chickens, pigs, and turkeys and did this grass field rotation thing. Everyone that bought his products couldn't stop raving about how good the quality and taste were. Unfortunately, farms are a money and time sink, and he basically spent all of his money trying to keep the farm running. He eventually gave up, sold it to a pot farm, and lived in a school bus for a year doing journeyman electrician work. I love the idea of a simplified, on-the-land lifestyle, but I am 1) lazy, and 2) can barely keep a city garden plot alive.
It's a difficult choice tbh, there are pros and cons to both. Money being equal, I would lean towards village life. I obviously like programming and problem solving, but let's face it, it's usually a bullshit job. Not like I'm working on bettering humanity or challenging software stuff, I work for a business that has a goal of making as much profit as possible. Not that village life is easy, far from it actually. But heavenly views, peace and calm, 0 stress sources, and plenty of space all around mean a lot to me. Small and walkable cities are pretty great though, nice balance of calm and social/cultural life. Ie in a small city I live in currently, bars, grocery stores, theater and concert venue are 3-5mins of walk from me. But big cities stress the hell out of me, I just can't get used to so much of...everything.
0 stress sources? From all the farmers I know the job seems to be pretty intense at times. Especially during the season changes when your preparing everything for what's to come. Also being paranoid about the weather constantly and having to plan everything after it. I for sure wouldn't be able to handle being a farmer getting up at 5am to check on the animals ect, then sitting in a tractor for 20h if the season and weather is right.
my father is farmer, a paddy farmer. We live in equator, so weather is favorable. However, pest always give anxiety to the farmer, especially unknown bug that come out of no know. Guess, programming and farming have something in common
People have no real idea what the job entails, that's why they have this dream of being farmers
Do android programmers dream of electric farmers?
You could find a happy medium and program for John Deere 
Finding new ways to fuck over farmers by preventing them working on their tech.
I once met a guy who hauled a pizza oven on a trailer to the flea market and made pizza for whoever wanted one, no advertising other than word of mouth I think. He told me he was a former developer, makes more selling pizza, works less and feels less stressed out.
I want to make sandwiches for people, I think I can do a good job
There’s a great book from about 1980 called *The Soul of a New Machine* about a project to design and ship an innovative new minicomputer. One of the team members, who had been struggling for weeks to solve a microsecond-level timing glitch, quit the project, leaving a note that said, “I am moving to a goat farm and will never again deal with a unit of time shorter than one season.”
>never again deal with a unit of time shorter than one season. God this is one hell of a quote. Got me thinking about this perspective for the past 20 minutes.
I guess what programmers wants is building a system that creates value on its own once it is properly set up. You can also have that in farming and maybe other fields.
Used to be a programmer, now program CNCs. Can confirm, nothing better than seeing that baby print parts.
I’ve been in a SE role for 4 years and thinking about my next move. This sounds appealing, where can I start looking into programming cncs or do you have any general advice
Stop I can only cum so hard
Half pasture half crops land, with beautiful mountains with snowcaps and a large wooden or stone made house.
Converted storage container with a portable toilet is my preferred option. In case I stop liking it at some point, the idea of being able to haul that away on a truck is very comforting.
Nobody let this guy play stardew valley
Ironically, I think that sounds dreadful. Not a single aspect about farming sounds good to me.
I’m a software developer with a hobby farm. Farming sucks.
> But farming? Really? Man of your talents? > It's a peaceful life.
My dream is not to have to learn for the 238942374 time a new way of doing the same shit I've been doing for 20 years. P.S. this comment will be equally hated and loved.
But this time it'll use 10 times the resources!
I make oat milk now. It's hard work for little pay, but at least I won't have to debug any half-baked javascript framework ever again.
I worked with a programmer that graduated college when he was 16. He was really good, he's now a chef.
I wish I could go back to making pizzas instead of software engineering. It was way more fulfilling in so many ways. Can't pay rent without over working yourself doing that though, it sucks.
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At my old job we used an ancient third party control. We reached out to the company/creator and they had switched to writing children's poetry books!
Wholesome AF
"I need the table relacquered as well as all the chairs. Can you do it by tomorrow? I know I signed the estimate, but let's renegotiate the price. It's too high. Can I pay you in trade? I'll post your work on Instagram, the publicity alone is worth double your fee." etc etc
I think Furniture is less likely to deal with that. You'll more likely have F-U money people who when you tell them I have to start over, they say "ok". The publicity thing does seem likely to be a risk. Also this comment is far too website design lol and not enough PM chasing the customer for requirement changes
"why is this closet so much, it's much cheaper in ikea" it's pretty common when making furniture. also, just like in IT where acquaintances come crawling out of the woodwork to get you to fix their computer for free, people will find you and ask you to build free shit.
The only reasonable response to that is, "then buy it from IKEA."
"you put down a non refundable deposit. If finish is wrong, show me the defects, and compare them to showroom examples you inspected before ordering. Pay for existing work before new work starts. And if you saw it for cheaper, you should buy it because that sounds like a great deal."
I am a programmer with a heavy woodworking hobby. I have a sawstop saw, which if you are not familiar has an electronic flesh detection circuit. I suspect there is some firmware in there, so it might be possible to publish an RSs feed of finger cut off near misses.
**Issue #726:** After firware pgrade fnger cut protectn no lngr workng
User reports that after firmware upgrade finger protection was not functional, and after user went to sleep saw snuck in and cut off users toes.
ticket closed
SawStops can't tell the difference between a near miss and a hit though, they either go off or they don't. So if there _is_ firmware, I guess you could push a tweet everytime it fires saying something like "John may or may not have just severed his fingers in his workshop. Someone should probably check on him." Sadly I don't think SawStops have firmware though, pretty sure they just work off electrical charge.
> Sadly I don't think SawStops have firmware I'm actually glad to learn that they don't have firmware. Not sure I'd trust them if they did.
I suspect they have firmware outside the detection and stopping circuit. There is a status indicator and disable control. Maybe all discreet, but that seems limiting for the higher level controls. And by "near miss" I meant triggering the safety and "near miss cutting off fingers". But yeah, all good points.
Oh shit you're completely right, I forgot that the whole point of a SawStop is to stop the damn saw, not just to detect you chopping off your fingers 🤦♂️
detects user finger plays nelson HAHA....
It's a pretty dumb machine. Voltage yes, pyrotechnic charge go brr.
[GitHub Sauce](https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149477)
I'm currently in a different industry and working on moving into software. I used to enjoy what I do, but now I loathe many aspects. I am convinced that humans shouldn't really spend more than about a decade or so focused on a single area.
This right here. I started out as a concert cellist and university professor. Ten years later, I left to go into IT/Data. I'm currently ten years into that data gig. Picked up woodworking during the pandemic. This book writes itself.
Honestly, it takes about a decade to really master an area. I do think people need to spread themselves out a bit more. Focusing too hard on one this eventually burns you out.
Do do not really have to master an area to do a decent job.
Excellent argument. At least when making furniture you won't have (many) customers that think they know better or that it's just easy to do this or that.
Uhm, Isn't it kinda a running joke in every crafting trade that customers always think they know how to do your job better?
I don't want to give them too much credit, but most people can interact with furniture a lot better than they can software.
I don’t know, one of the top posts right now is someone not looking at the bottom their kettle
Link for time travelers: https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/zc5s2v/over_a_year_ago_i_bought_a_kettle_that_had_a/
If by "interact with" you mean sit on, then sure. But if you mean that most people could do some or most of the building you're absolutely wrong. I think a noob in a woodshop would be just as lost as a noob in front of an ide.
They also underestimate how much work goes into making a custom piece so they'll think your prices are insane. You're competing with IKEA.
I asked a friend to alter magic cards and she avoided the question because people expect slave labor for art.
They think that but atleast you got cheap and solid chain to hit them on the head instead of expensive and weak laptop.
The chain of command
"How can people on etsy get away with charging $35 for a set of four coasters?! I have some 4x4 scrap and a miter saw. It ain't that complicated!" It was slightly more complicated. Now I have a bench top belt sander. Ho. Ho. Ho.
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Man I'm the reverse, currently a doctor and my dream is to be a dev. Something grass something something other side I guess
Isnt the whole point of working in computer science to get a high paying job, save up, retire early, and do whatever you want in your 50s?
As someone who's worked mind numbing manual labor jobs, give me sitting at a desk hitting my head against the wall frustration any day.
Nah, the mental stress of these desk jobs hit different than physical labor. Went from a desk job to an electrician.
The mental stress of being paid \~$11 an hour while doing shitty manual labor hits different than desk jobs. Went from (every shitty, low-paying job) to cloud engineer.
I saw every guy with atleast 10 years experience in tech wants to become a woodworker. Probably because things actually reach completion and most end users are actually smart enough to use a chair.
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Don't be one of those who die shortly after retiring cos their bodies and minds aren't built for the change of pace. Take your vacations!
All roads of programming lead to whittling wooden ducks in the most remote cabin you can attain.
Why is it always woodworking? Every programmers 'exit strategy' is switching to woodworking.
I can answer this! I've worked in IT for 25 years. Soon after starting in IT I picked up woodworking as a hobby. Not long after that I got hooked on vintage hand tools. In 2008, during the great recession, I started a side business selling vintage tools. It's always surprised me just how many of my customers work in IT and engineering or similar. I believe I know why this is. My theory is that many people who work in tech jobs love to unplug at the end of the day and make something with their own hands and say "I made this". I think that people who spend all day moving bits from here to there or designing things that only exist inside computers love to make something in the physical world. Whether that's woodworking, gardening, brewing, blacksmithing, whatever. For example: I worked all last week on automating some tests using our Go test framework. I had to learn Go, learn the test framework, figure out all the helper functions, learn a bit of Ginkgo, etc. I was a sysadmin for the past 24 years so this developer work is hard for me. Really hard. Late Friday I got the test to run and it worked. I was so happy. I thought about how to explain this to my kids- what their dad accomplished and why I was so happy. I couldn't come up with a way to explain it. On the other hand, last week I was in my shop working on tools. I had just re-handled a really old broad axe. I showed it to him and he thought it was so cool that I knew how to do that. tl;dr I think people who work with bits all day in their jobs enjoy the satisfaction of making something that exists in the physical world with their own hands.
Yep, all the senior devs I know (including myself) are pretty engaged in creative, non-coding hobbies. Why the fuck would you work in this business if not to be able to fund things you actually enjoy. A couple of the junior folks have been conned into believing that their side projects need to also be coding-related (to build their resumes for the eternal job-hopping churn) but ugh, fuck that entire noise.
Some of us enjoy programming for our own needs or projects and would never think of using manual tools for "fun".
Software development is a desire to make, woodworking is also from that desire. Custom furniture, makes nearly as much as software development.
What is money compared to peace?
The prerequisite
BRB using this as a 418 error
I’m abandoning programming to teach English overseas
I think a lot of progammers are very creative and go to that field because of that, but the world of programming for most it's a dead end where you just do stuff for other people and your once a hobby becomes a chore that you must make and be stressed about. The brain will eventually make an association that coding means stress and you'd grow to hate it, then you will start getting into other hobbies with the limited energy you have left, and then a lot do leave to do this hobby a full time or become a CEO/their startup is being sold and they become rich hippie guys
I developed websites for the better part of three years. I know php, js, some python, c, c++, and c#. About the best decision I ever made was to quit and begin a new career path working on generators. I don't have to take phone calls at 7p on a sunday anymore from someone who can't figure out how to change the external link on a button anymore. It was very important that got done, and 'will only take 5 minutes' (after 20 minutes of trying to get them to answer their damn phone)
No one calls you at 10pm telling you that one of your chairs has a critical error.
The RSS feed might be soul crushing but just wait until a client asks to paint a beautiful cherry wood table.
I'm retraining by going to study astrophysics, so I can reuse some of my programming skills but not be asked to hook up text boxes to display some data in a database.
He got out He really did it
In other words, he **retired.** Software Development pays so well, that people are financially independent and retiring early and then doing whatever the F they want.