I agree with you, in general this place doesn't increase my happiness but finding insights from the submissions and more often, well crafted comments, does. This is going into my browser search shortcut - thank you!
I'm reading this because of the newsletter! HN is a time sink so the newsletter lifts only items worthy of attention to my email. Been a sub for many years. Thank you!
You've gotta be in Australia because I had a cx-5 2014 2.2 TD and it was a nightmare. I'll never buy a Mazda again. You know its bad when years after the warranty has expired Mazda are fixing head gaskets or outright replacing engines for free.
I work in a global company with people in Asia, Australia, North America and across Europe. My team are all in NA and I'm in Australia. I just get up early to maximise cross over, two morning meetings for me a week. Works pretty well but I do get up/stay up occasionally for 2am meetings. Apart from all hands there's no pressure to do so. Hardest part is arranging a meeting between a European, American and myself - someone is going to be out of normal hours. Fully remote rather than "remote but this timezone" is great.
Thats a sombre take. My father in law was a professional photographer for 30 years. His experience was very much that everyone can take a decent photo today. But he saw diminishing opportunities as early as the days of small point and shoot cameras. Today, they're not used as much because commodity DSLRs are relatively cheap and dont require much if any training. Are we in the days of the Nikon Coolpix? Maybe, its definitely something to consider.
Python is a good first language. Big community. Easy to start, can start without OOP or even functions - just a script. Large ecosystem from web to AI. Automating the boring stuff type work has real world application and is a decent glide path from learning programming to actually enjoying it.
I want new programmers to learn to enjoy it before trudging through theory and patterns. "Read what you love until you love to read" sings true here.
I use mermaid.js a lot but not enough that I an fluent in the DSL. So I pump things into excalidraw's AI and tell it to create the mermaid chart. It gets my 80% of the way and I tweak/extend from there. If nothing else its awesome for that
Having experience in other languages it should be fairly easy to pick up. I personally bought the book Let's Go by Alex Edwards. It's a project based book where he teaches you Go by writing an API server. I found it really beneficial as I was familiar with API development but not with Go. After that I used what I learnt to create some side projects and the rest is history.
If you feel you're already past that point of learning then I'd just create little projects. Re-write one of your old ones in Go, and things like that.