Erlang is uniquely suited to chat systems out of the box in a way that most other ecosystems aren't. Lightweight green threads via the BEAM vm, process scheduler so concurrent out of the box, immutable data structures, message passing as communication between processes.
Ive been working in Elixir since 2015. I love the ecosystem and think its the best choice for building a web app from a pure tech/stability/scalability/productivity perspective (I also have a decade+ experience in Ruby on rails, Nodejs, and Php laravel, plus Rust to a lesser extent).
I am however having trouble in the human side of it. Ive got a strong resume but I was laid off in Nov 2024 and Im having trouble even getting Elixir interviews (with 9+ years of production Elixir experience!). Hiring people with experience was also hard when I was the hiring manager. It is becoming less niche these days. I love it too much to leave for other ecosystems in the web sphere
I definitely want to become an owner and learn about the business. I've even conceived and executed projects to improve the bottom and top line revenue. That being said, as a developer in a small business, the thought is that I'm too expensive an employee to not be coding even if I had a lot of impact on my own initiatives. The thinking is that a lot of people can think about strategy but very few people can code so I get pigeonholed into just executing. This has been my experience at multiple startups at various stages of their lifecycle.
While I agree with you in that we should have more native applications that are more conscious of how much resources they're using, making that transition from Electron to Native is probably not easy and riddled with pitfalls. Unless there's a standard path, how do you sell that to your superiors in the company in terms of opportunity cost?
I imagine part of it is that it's far easier to lose your job disagreeing with your superiors in the private sector ("Not a culture fit", "Not a team player"). It's better to just go along with stuff sometimes because most of the time systemic failure takes years to manifest.
I owe a lot to Ryan Bates and Railscasts for transforming from a CS student to junior software engineer. It provided the details in mentorship that supplemented what I received IRL at work.
The scale of time over which this will happen will be soo great that we humans most likely wont need to worry about it. We will either die out or evolve many times before then.
I understand where you're coming from related to this. We (in the US) hear this critique with regards to the NHS or the Canadian healthcare system.
The part you're missing is that there is an arms race of pricing between healthcare corporations (there have been massive mergers of hospital systems) and insurance companies in terms of prices. We, the patients, are caught in between the giants while prices are going sky high and we are at our most vulnerable.
The hope is this will fix prices to a reasonable level so if we choose to go for private care, those prices will also be reasonable. A lot of specialists that I see ask for cash payments and don't accept insurance. They are also overbooked because a lot of healthcare providers are being driven out of industry from the conditions.
I pay Viz and Shonen Jump as a subscriber in their apps. Whats frustrating is that I only get a tiny subset of their catalogue. I can't ready some of their older series. I'm even willing to buy them if given the option but I'm only offered new stuff that I'm not really interested in.
This also worked for me. I deleted the Instagram app from my phone. If I want to see it, I can look at it from the phone browser. The experience is just barely not smooth enough to break the addiction.
I also keep the Nintendo Switch nearby. I've come to allow myself to take breaks, and I play Dead Cells for a level. Its the perfect amount of time to rest while also not completely losing context.
The other thing is that regular exercise for an hour everyday seems to improve my social media addiction. I feel better overall so I don't need the hit from social media.
I think its related to weight. We have to acknowledge that there is a serious obesity epidemic in the developed world. The majority of adults are overweight and obese.
This is anecdata from what I've seen: you see fat runners. you see old runners. You dont tend to see many fat old runners.
The other thing is that if you dont regularly change your running shoes, you will absolutely hurt yourself. I get knee pain if I don't swap out my shoes every 250 miles or 3 months.