I find AI useful, I use it most days to write snippets of code or to rubber duck with. It hasn't changed my workflows that much, just replaced Stackoverflow with ChatGPT. Feels like the sweet spot for me, everything else is noise.
I wouldn't mind RTO so much if the cities where most tech jobs are were affordable. I'd rather be a millwright in my middle-of-nowhere mining town with a 10 minute commute in a 250k house versus a software developer with an hour long commute and a million dollar mortgage in big-metropolis. For now, I am making hay while the sun is shining and getting the best of both worlds while squirreling away as much cash as possible.
They should have leaned into becoming a developer community (the developer community) instead of focusing on Q&A. StackOverflow jobs were a great resource. Add an ad-hoc discussion forum and chat and it would have be great, like the modern IRC.
I am nobody important living in rural middle of nowhere, but visited SF twice for work, and it was the most horrific city I have ever been to. I am a big man and didn't feel very safe.
Grass is greener and so forth but as a Canadian I find our current government paternalistic, pandering, reactive, and stifling. Not every problem should be solved by the sledgehammer of our public service, regulation, and bureaucracy, all of which are highly inefficient and wasteful. It's tax season - I pay nearly half my wages to the government in income tax - all so they can redistribute it to those who they deem worthy and unworthy (similar how to they might deem some content harmful and other content unharmful). Let me make my own decisions!
I encountered a niche but common bug and figured out a workaround. Mentioned my blog post about it in the relevant GitHub issue discussion for the bug. Gets a low but steady amount of traffic to-date.
Laravel or Rails spitting out Blade or ERB templates respectively. As a solo dev you have everything you need in both ecosystems and you aren't doing 2x the work with a separate front end and back end.
This is because of Wordpress. Wordpress work pays less than application development typically. Writing an application with Symfony or Laravel pays market rate for an equivalent dev in your ecosystem of choice (Rails, Django, whatever).
Most applications that would leverage this (e.g. server-side rendered Rails or Laravel or Django) already have those templates as partials for their views, so leveraging the functionality is trivial.
Doesn't surprise me given Salesforce is all about squeezing their (generally) non-technical customers with arbitrary licensing restrictions and "best practices" that lead to paying for more and more.
Front end development doesn't have to be awful, particularly with how much JavaScript the language has improved alongside browser APIs. React made sense at one point because the abstractions it employed were common in other contexts: lifecycle events (intentionally avoiding the "hook" word here) are present pretty much everywhere in programming abstractions (on initialization, on deinitialization, on update, and so forth). These were aptly named "onComponentThing"s and grokable.
Hooks, and particularly useEffect, ruined it for me. I have given up trying to understand why changing button states or presenting modals has become so obtuse and frustrating. I don't care about updating my react-router and rewriting it again for the third or fourth or whatever time. I don't want another new testing library, another new "best practice", or another repeated mistake in the reinventing-the-wheel-cycle the React community seems obsessed with.
It's all so exhausting. I write Rails now with erb templates and some dumb javascript to toggle modals and change button colours. It's not cool but at least I can understand it six months later.
For some reason rich people assume their riches makes them wise. Humanity hasn't changed much (at all) since culture was recorded. Read philosophers if you want philosophy - Andreessen is a (poor) sophist and he wants to sell you something.
Haven't ever used Rust and probably won't. Regardless, the melodramatic cliquey "I'm leaving the project" bluster as of late reminds me of my 14 year old self on various vbulletin forums and grants me conviction avoiding adopting this language and its ecosystem. I prefer the tools I use for building businesses to be administered by adults.