I don’t know. I might say “Matrix” and run a private server? But that’s a bunch of IT work. It’s attractive to use a SaaS because you don’t have to do any long-term planning or hiring; just pay Slack a crazy amount of money and it all works.

Corps also like a commercial paid service because they get a contract with an SLA (even if it’s rare to actually get anything from these SLAs).

You haven’t missed anything; there isn’t any such place. There’s a bunch of suggestions on how you could patch such a thing together StackOverflow: Is there a way to list pip dependencies/requirements?. Basically either running pip or querying the PyPI API to discover transitive dependencies. Sounds like a fun little programming project! 😀

OpenTofu is mostly getting users from the corporate world. My work is on Slack and we’re moving to OT. The lowest-friction for me as an OT-when-at-work user is to add another Slack. (I’d personally rather that they used an open platform. But it’s easy for me to see why they didn’t.)

it is agnostic of cloud providers: you can use it to deploy infrastructure to multiple providers

Nicely put. I frequently see the first part of this sentence and not the second. (Maybe I only pay attention to the first part and then disappoint myself…)

Terraform/Tofu allow me to use the same basic syntax and to have one project that controls AWS/GCP/K8s/my home servers, but I cannot use it to describe “a running server process” and just deploy that on any of those places. Instead I’d need to have like aws_beanstalk_service { ... } and gcp_application { ... } and kubernetes_manifest { ... } and systemd_service { ... } and the contents of those blocks would be totally different (and I’d need a bunch of different ancillary blocks for each of those).

The job market is not terrible. But there is a frustrating thing where a “senior” developer with 3 years of experience will get tons of recruiter-spam offering them $200k+ positions, while a junior developer (your position) will get ghosted when you apply for a job that’s offering to pay $50k. So it can feel demoralizing because people you see as your peers are having a very different experience. (And if you go in some circles the FOMO just never stops; people telling you you’re wasting your life not being a Meta dev getting $800k TComp or founding a unicorn start-up…)

You say you enjoyed programming, which sure sounds to me like you could enjoy getting paid to do it. But it’s easy to overwork yourself because your boss says that real developers pull 80-hour weeks. Or burn out because it’s so frustrating to watch bad decisions ruin your good work. If you can find the right balance of caring and not caring, you can make good money and enjoy your job.

And it only takes a year or two to get rid of the “junior developer” label and then jobs are a lot easier. (Others have said that the market is bad. And it is bad compared to how it was in, like, 2020. But it’s still a very good market all things considered.)

I have no idea how well it works in reality, but I can imagine the Lifetime Pass being a good business model for them: only the most enthusiastic user will pay for 3 years up front (lifetime currently costs 3x the yearly). So when they get a Lifetime pass they’re getting 3 years paid up front and an evangelist who will probably tell their friends about Plex. If that Lifetime subscriber gets even one person to sign up for a yearly sub who otherwise wouldn’t have, then Plex came out ahead.

Sure, I’m not saying Plex has to do a single-payment model. Just that it’s a think that’s been done successfully (and for longer than Plex has existed). Everyone’s pushing subscription models so hard that it’s easy to think “this is the only possible way that anything can work”.

I like my Shield TV: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/shield-tv/

I did need to install a custom launcher on it when the standard AndroidTV launcher added ads.

Lots of businesses have and do exist without a subscription model. I’m fond of the Paprika Recipe Manager, for example, which asks a one-time payment for each major version. All commercial software worked this way in the 80s.

Can we think of any device someone might have that would struggle with 60k? Certainly an ESP32 chip could handle it fine, so most IoT devices would work…

The row limitation seems, to me, like an actually-good thing. Excel is for data where you might conceivably scroll up and down looking at it and 1M is definitely beyond the ability of a human even to just skim looking for something different.

An older version of Excel could only handle 64k rows and I had a client who wanted large amounts of data in Excel format. “Oh sorry, it’s a Microsoft limitation,” I was thrilled to say. “I have no choice but to give you a useful summarization of the data instead of 800k rows (each 1000 columns wide) of raw data.”

Actual UML-according-to-some-books is old and unpopular now. I think C4 is taking its place, in that I’ve seen architect-types ask for it. More generally, I really like PlantUML and the prettier-looking Mermaid which both allow me to code diagrams using a text document.

Yeah, I agree: academia gets people expecting to go, “give me 2x Visitor Pattern, then 1 Builder Pattern, then as many Divide and Conquers as you need to reach the end”. It can be nice to have a name for things, but most of the time I’m asking for, “see how the setup, actual work, and cleanup are nicely divided up? Do like that.” Or, “let’s put all the related endpoints in the same file.”

• talks loudly in an open office when he take phone calls

That one’s my least favorite. Might as well just grab me by the shoulders and shout your conversation in my face for how little work I’m getting done.

As an undergraduate, I wondered how it was possible to write code professionally, because I could only barely fit the semester-long programming assignment in my head. When I asked my professor about it, I got an independent study credit to learn about UML.

UML (as a representative example of thoughtful documentation) is a partial answer. But actually a much larger part is that with practice I can hold a lot more code in my head. Today, that semester project seems trivial and if I see a stack trace I can tell you how to fix the bug that caused that exception to get thrown.

As a senior dev, I’d answer “how do you remember what your code does?” with

1. As you work, you get better at just remembering
2. As you find patterns and follow them, you’ll have less to remember (I bet I know what the downloadUnpackUpdate() method does!)
3. As you do the first two, you’ll learn to recognize when comments are helpful

It’d be way less offensive if it was just present as an option, instead of dancing around flashing at me