That IT subject matter like cybersecurity and admin work is exactly the same as coding,
At least my dad was the one who bore the brunt of that mistake, and now I have a shiny master's degree to show to all the recruiters that still don't give my resume a second glance!
Not a software engineer, but work closely with them in a different field. This is 100% common, especially for junior devs.
My honest advice is to push with it and truly spend some time in the field, and if you hate it, then leave without regrets. However, know that the initial bump is the hardest, over time it gets easier and you'll even likely find yourself doing side projects on your own time!
I used to enjoy programming as a hobby in my spare time, but in two years I’ve opened the IDE on my personal machine no more than twice.
This is why I have never taken on programming as a profession. I earn more than I would ever make as a developer (even a very senior developer) leveraging my (average) programming skills to produce a personal suite of software tools and scripts that means I can do my chosen profession better, faster and with less effort than any of my colleagues or competitors. I have also developed small apps on a private/ personal basis that I have then sold to my employer for wider use in the company.
And I still enjoy programming as a hobby as much as I ever have. Don't underestimate how much being able to program at even an average level can boost a career in another field.
I could use some honest advice from experienced programmers and engineers.
Old man programmer checking in.
if you sat me down and asked me about algorithms or anything else I did to get my job in the first place I would be clueless.
Don't sweat it. No one knows how the fuck computers work.
Anyone who thinks they actually know, isnt educated enough to understand about the bits they don't understand.
I can solve problems and always get my work done, but I don't even know the language/framework I use daily well enough to explain what's going on, I can just do things.
Nice. You've got the important part. Ride that until the end.
I don't think I have imposter syndrome, I think I really might have let any skill I had atrophy.
It's not impostor syndrome when you're only 2 years into your career.
If you feel like you don't know jack shit compared to what I know, after decades... that's because you don't know jack shit compared to what I know. There's nothing wrong with that. Someday I'll be pissing myself in a nursing home run by automation you maintain. We all get our turn.
I'm the meantime, lucky for you, I can't be arsed to work more than 40 hours in a week, so there's plenty of work left to do while you learn.
And I'll retire soon, and I'l promise I'll do you a solid and leave decades of my own mistakes and missteps out there for you to earn $$$$ cleaning up after. You're welcome... I guess.
I used to enjoy programming as a hobby in my spare time, but in two years I've opened the IDE on my personal machine no more than twice.
This is very normal. Welcome to the big leagues. If you do something you love for your job, eventually it's still just a job.
People talk about all the side projects they have, but I have none. I feel too stressed out from the job to do any programming outside of work, even though I love it.
This is very normal for your current stage of your career.
If you stick with it, it gets better when you get to someday become a self-important lob like me who only works on really interesting problems.
And how do I only work on really interesting problems? I make my boss hire a few junior developers and I delegate all the boring stuff to them.
It's a pretty sweet deal for at least one of us. (Who for, varies by the day, really.)
I feel like I can't level up from a Junior to Senior because I either don't have the headspace or the will to do so.
I guarantee that you've learned way more than you think. If you stick with it, you'll have a random moment sometime soon when someone else just can't wrap their head around a concept you take for granted.
It doesn't help that the job I've had has taught me very little and my dev team has been a shitshow from the beginning.
That sucks, sorry. There are more shitty developer teams than good ones. If you stick with it, and do some strategic job hopping, you can find the good ones.
This is a tough time to switch jobs in tech, I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to mess with it.
At the moment I have an offer on the table to do a job that isn't engineering (but still tech) and it surprisingly pays more.
Hell yes! Fuck your current employer for underpaying you!
And you already admitting your current team is shit.
Go take that money!
but I fear I might go down this route and never be able to come back to engineering. Not that I'm sure I want to.
Your developer skills won't vanish. Trust your future self.
If someone asks why you spent time as a non-developer "those assholes weren't paying a fair wage" is a fine answer.
It might sound defeatist but I don't think I'll ever be a top 5% or even 25% engineer.
As a top 5% engineer (with a trophy for humility), it's not all they promised.
It turns out there's still plenty I don't know, and I spend much more of my time confused and frustrated than I did before. The cool part is that I'm now confused and frustrated by really interesting problems.
I could be average with a lot of work, but not great.
I pay top dollar for average programmers. I'm not hiring right now, but let's stay in touch.
There's a lot of coders out there without the self awareness to realize what they don't know. Those programmers never get any better, and never reach average.
(Contrasted with myself, who, as I said, have several awards for excessive humility in spite of my undeniable genius. /s)
I could potentially be great in the new field I'm being recruited for, but that's also hard to say without being in the job.
Go find out!
Beware though, when they find out you can code, they will find a way to add that to your job duties.
I know that some people just aren't cut out for being engineers.
True. Some people's ego or laziness blinds them to what they need to learn.
I have a huge ego, and I am deeply lazy, but I occasionally put both in check for just long enough to learn.
Maybe I have the aptitude but not the mentality to do this for 30+ years.
Take it a year at a time. Once in awhile, take out some cash and spread it on the ground and sort of roll in it.
Hopefully you've noticed, but while this job is usually a pain in the ass, it also pays really fucking well.
I want to know if that's what it sounds like to people who've seen that before.
I've had this conversation with all of my very top people, if that's any consolation.
If you were in my position, would you walk away and just be a hobbyist programmer or stick it out and hope to be a mediocre engineer one day?
If you told my younger self how much money I could make as a mediocre engineer, I would be all over that deal.
I would've agonized about the trade-off if I knew I would stop loving my hobby, but taken comfort that I would later love it again.
Everything happens in seasons. Some seasons I code for fun. Some I don't.
A cool side effect of being paid to code is that when I do find the mind space to hobby code, I am a fucking badass hobby coder.
I think you should take this job because your current employer is running a shitty team, and underpaying you. Then take another programming job later when the next opportunity arrives (and it will..it really will.)
It's utilizing an obscure bug in the Rust compiler that unfortunately lets you circumvent the safety guarantees in order to produce undefined behavior - it's mostly just a joke though, you will not run into the bug in normal code
Pulsar is a fork of Atom, which was discontinued because almost everyone jumped ship to VSCode.
What does Pulsar do that is better than VSCode? All the features this article highlights are in VSCode too, and I can think of a bunch of features that Pulsar doesn't have (dev containers are a big one for me - they allow you to have different versions of the same software installed, depending what project you're working on right now... and you can work on/run both versions of the same software at the same time, on the same hardware... you can also emulate other CPU architectures in a dev container, some of the software I work with every day can't actually run natively on my hardware).
The author also makes some incorrect or misleading claims, specifically about emacs. I acknowledge there's a high bar for entry there and don't personally like emacs, but it's not modal, and it does have the ability to display images and markdown previews.
It really doesn't matter much anymore. MariaDB doesn't have the significance it once had. Worst case scenario if it were to disappear people would switch to Postgres and that's that.
Huh? Postgresql is not mysql compatible. Mariadb is very popular in a ton of businesses around the world as a not stupidly expensive sql database with great support.
Just last week I decided to try a different tech than I'm used to to run up a site. I did a little research then searched GitHub and found Hugo. I read the Hugo docs, followed their beginners guide and... Didn't get fucking anywhere. Their docs are out of date, the examples are out of date. It looked so promising but my brain works best when referencing examples and when I couldn't even get those to work, well, I don't have time for that these days.
If anyone knows another static site generator with up to date documentation and an easy to run up example please let me know.
I tried a few. Zola was the only one I got far enough with to actually get my site deployed.
Some of that might be that I learned stuff from my previous failures, but I really feel like the combination of the way it works and the Zola-specific themes are what worked for me.
I use zola for my sites. It's got not as many templates as hugo but my sites don't use templates and I found it very straightforward to use from scratch.
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