Took some good ideas of Pascal and making it more modern. Minimal runtime, manual memory management, single (small) executable, no dependencies. Compiler itself is written in Swift and I am using QBE as a backend ATM.
Careers could be very very long. My relative was kicked out of academia after finishing his postdoc and has to work manual jobs till the end of comunism in my country. His career actually started after 60 and he died just a few weeks before his announced retirement at the age of 96, teaching 5 to 6 classes a year in CS department.
It was custom SW created by construction company: things like quotations, warehouse management, controlling, some accounting integrations, time tracking and what not. At the end it was sold to about 60 other companies. It was about 30 years old when the development stopped: it was slowly being eaten by more modern software, but I am sure it is still used somewhere. I was single dev working on it since my day 1.
I lived for next to nothing and I had a gig maintaining a system that paid something like 1500 euros a month and it required few hours a month. Did that gig for 12 years, saved me many times when I tried to launch other projects.
I also taken up farming in 2013 after 10 years of working on startups (as founder and early engineer, with no success at all). I was about to move back to village I was born at and escaped as fast as I could at the age 15.
I started natural winery at the ripe time when it first started to be popular and managed to miss the wave. It was a great first year after many years of tech grind in big tech hubs. I was waking up late, went for walk where I probably met friend or two who had nothing much to do, so we drink a coffee and talked a bit. Waiting for summer heat to be over, then work in the vineyard till the sun went down and then go to the local pub for beer or four.
I guess it sounds like it was vacation or playing farmer. And that is what it was, really. I did that for couple of years and then moved back to the nearby city and rejoined the startup grind. What I got from this experience is that there are seasons in life and it is great to have an optionality to play with different modes of life. The tech industry will always be there.
I am in my 40s now. Found a wife, got a mortgage and couple of kids. I kept the farm and treated it as a weekend hobby, rented out most of the land and I am slowly building the infrastructure I missed when I started. One day the kids will be old enough and tech will no longer excite me. The season will change, I move back, wake up late, meet with local friends who have nothing much to do during summer heat, work the vineyards and then hit pub when the sun went down.
"Do LLMs make bad code: yes all the time (at the moment zero clue about good architecture). Are they still useful: yes, extremely so."
Well, lets see how all the economics will play out. LLMs might be really useful, but as far as I can see all the AI companies are not making money on inference alone. We might be hitting plateau in capabilities with money being raised on vision of being this godlike tech that will change the world completely. Sooner or later the costs will have to meet the reality.
Even if I wrote 10k lines of code a day I will be out of things to implement in day two. Maybe I am working on wrong codebases, but I never felt like I am behind because of not enough lines got writen. It was always finding and forming correct perspective.
Just for fun I checked the codebase stats for platform I am working on and it is 70k lines of code. We are talking about enterprise saas processing payments in billions per year.
Similar story in Europe with white tailed eagles, which are quite similar in size. They were extinct in my area for maybe 60 years and recently returned and even started to hatch.
Universities in eastern bloc were really elite places. Only low single digits percent of people were able to enroll. Also majority of degrees were in STEM, education or medicine as they were deemed useful for the state. To get degree outside of STEM, political background of your family was checked and things like having family member (even say uncle) who emigrated outside of country or having grandparents who owned businesses or farm decades ago will get you discarded. So the smart kids usually have very limited path forward, so STEM it was (if you were lucky)
100 or even 200 will be quite a hard target to hit even considering BOM. Most bare bone optics setup will cost you maybe 100, 130 USD. Unless you find some spare parts or go DVD grating route. The best way is to search for ocean optics parts on eBay. There are multiple "benches", sensors and optics sets available most of the time. Still, it will be more than 200.
The Pragmatic Programmer - I read this book when I was programming professionally for maybe 5 or so years, so I already had my basics covered, but reading this book really expanded my horizons on what it means to create software profesionally. I read, maybe, 100 books about programming since and before then, but no other book changed my thinking that much like this one.
Technically it was not an investment, they've sold part of company to Bezos. As in money went directly into owners bank accounts instead of bank account of the company.
Well, purpose of Tada list was to act as a funnel to Basecamp: they took part of the functionality and when you needed more you check the Basecamp. I think they are going to with this strategy again: limited subset of Basecamp and when you need, say, mobile app or more features you know where to go.
Took some good ideas of Pascal and making it more modern. Minimal runtime, manual memory management, single (small) executable, no dependencies. Compiler itself is written in Swift and I am using QBE as a backend ATM.