The reasons why companies hire or don't hire someone usually have very little with the candidate themselves. From my experience, whenever this machine needs another cog, almost any will do - usually the first one within reach. And when it doesn't, not even the shiniest one will be of interest. So it's probably nothing personal OP
Finding the right balance between "zero dependencies, building everything from scratch", and relying too heavily on third-party code. Both extremes are full of misery and frustration, and it's so hard sometimes to get it right. But most of the time these days I find it easier to start with fewer dependencies and probe for balance from there
I think it would be nice to have some UI when you first open the app, so you can at least learn how to play it. It's kind of hard to figure out what you're doing wrong when you tap and what success should look like.
Also, are there any difficulty levels? It feels like the very first sequence is kind of hard.
Wow, so many great responses, thank you all for that! I'm going to throw in my personal favorite: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. Somehow it touches me in a way that no other book does. It's also quite short, I think I've read it at least 3 times in the last few years and found something new and insightful each time
If the money is good, and the job doesn't take all of your time and energy, then you can just ignore the dysfunction and focus on your work. You can use your free time to look for something better, or to work on your own thing if you're ambitious. Being a cog is actually even liberating as cogs are only responsible for a very small part of the whole, so you can just do your part and not worry about the rest.
So far, I haven't found anything better than collecting individual RSS feeds that I like. Mostly personal blogs, a bit of HN of course. It's not a "platform" of course, but it's very future-proof
That looks pretty cool. But as far as I know, the biggest challenge is getting through the ATS systems on the company's side. Even in the old days, every job posting used to get ridiculous hundreds and thousands of applications, most of them garbage. With modern AI tools, it will probably get even worse.
So we're getting into this weird reality where bots are applying and bots are reading. And maybe some lucky 1-5% of all applications will get a human to look at them.
Have you tested your solutions with some of the big ATS systems? I wonder how well it would do.
> Given my experience with this archaic pattern, I've now started exploring HTMX with Golang. This seems more my speed.
It's actually a pretty good way to start. And not in any way "archaic". The web these days is dominated by JavaScript frameworks, but there's a growing trend towards server-side rendering and static site generation. Go has a solid templating engine that you can use to generate HTML. You can even dodge HTMX and just use plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
> But, I want to build beautiful web applications, but I don't get CSS. Like is it supposed to be this hard to build a UI?
Yes, it can be pretty hard. There is a reason why we have developers who work exclusively on the frontend. It's a whole different world from backend development. It's not just about writing code, it's about design, user experience, and a lot of other things. It's a whole different skill set.
I would suggest trying Tailwind CSS. It's sort of like a "higher-level" CSS framework that makes it easier to produce nice-looking UIs without having to deal with the details of CSS. It also has some very nice design patterns built into it. Creating a beautiful UI is as much about design as it is about coding. I'm a pretty experienced frontend developer and I can't design for :hankey:. But with Tailwind, I can make things look at least decent.
> Are there books or blogs that you'd recommend I read, so I can understand the beauty and challenges of frontend dev?
Building stuff is always the best way to learn. But if you want to read something, I would suggest "Refactoring UI" (by the creators of Tailwind CSS). It's a great book that will give you some insights into how to design a good UI. It's not about coding, but it's a great resource for understanding the design aspect of frontend development.
frontendmasters.com is also a great resource. They have a lot of courses on frontend development, from beginner to advanced. But they are pricey. Watching YouTube tutorials might make more sense if you're just starting out. But again, this days they are heavily focused on JavaScript frameworks. Maybe you can try the channel Web Dev Simplified. He has some great content on frontend development that are more focused on the basics.
A week ago I was browsing this list of zsh plugins https://github.com/unixorn/awesome-zsh-plugins and I wondered if there was a way to quickly find the best and hottest without visiting each repo's page. I found none, so I've built it myself.
It's a Chrome plugin that uses GitHub API to fetch metadata for each repo it finds on the page and then it shows the results right next to each link. It's opensource and you can find the code here: https://github.com/alexpyzhianov/awesome-star-spy
I'd be delighted if someone else finds it useful :) Any feedback is welcome
I'm not the author of the comment above, but I did. I didn't compromise too much, but I could have done much better I believe, have I prioritized salary/tech/opportunities.
But I get to build a thing that is meaningful to me
what if we have chosen a wrong metric there?