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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Given these trends, what might a post-piracy world entail?

    Assuming you are right with this:

    For media: Buy in or consume less. If piracy will really become less prevalent you don’t really have much choice, do you? I don’t think everyone has to live like I do, but my media consumption in the past few years has shrunk more and more (for various reasons) and maybe that’s something other people may gravitate towards as well. Life has a lot to offer beyond screens.

    For software it’s trickier. Maybe you find an open source project that suits your needs or maybe there’s a competitor that hasn’t (yet) enshittified their product. Unfortunately, if you really need a specific piece of software I think you might just be SOL 🤷‍♂️

    Just my two cents





  • I think it heavily depends on the size and (management) culture of your employer. My most recent gig had me sit in way too many meetings that were way too long (1hr daily anyone?), dealing with a lot of tooling issues and touching legacy code as little as possible while still adding new features to our main product on a daily basis. Obviously “we don’t need a clean solution. We’re going to replace that codebase anyways, next year™”.

    The job before that had me actually code for about 80% of the time, but writing tests is annoying and slows you down and we don’t have time for that. Odd how there was always time for fixing the regressions later.






  • … an average hobbyist programmer …

    and

    … create an MVP?

    are at odds in my opinion. Are you looking for a hobby project or are you trying to build a product that you can sell/persuade investors with?

    If you are interested in building such a thing because you care about the idea, go for it! Even if you abandon the whole thing after a few months of consistent work, I’m pretty confident that you will gain something in the process (insights, learnings, an idea for an actual product etc.).

    However if your goal is to build something that’s commercially viable, I would do some market analysis (see what’s out there, what you want to do differently) and maybe talk to people who have already launched products or started companies before, instead of basing my decision on the responses from strangers on social media.



  • The thing is, it works like this in certain countries. At least in Switzerland and Germany it is possible to make an apprenticeship as a programmer. This means there is a structured path for the vocational education that must meet certain regulatory criteria. Normally this takes 3-4 years to finish and includes both, working at a company as well as visiting vocational school. College is often done after finishing one’s apprenticeship to broaden the understanding of more complex or advanced topics like security, architecture, project management, advanced math etc.

    I don’t understand why this system is not more common in other places. Programming (not CS) is very much like a craft and to large degrees can be taught as/similar to one.