> I found all of the first jobs I had in highschool and just after. 3/3 of my first roles now advertise a minimum salary over twice what I was paid 14-18 years ago. Prices have gone up around 20-30% since then overall so I would have had 40% more purchasing power today with the same jobs.
I want you to complete that thought. Stay with it. Explain exactly how the helicopter parents are responsible for removing the things you liked in American city recreational parks.
On Android/Graphene, I recommend permanently turning on do not disturb and adding apps to the allowlist. Opt in to notifications, rather than opting out.
That's opting out of notificationse which is subtly different. I'm advocating for something a little different. See if your mind feels less scattered if you don't have any notifications at all. Then allow back in the ones that you feel are essential. A lot of the notifications we get feel important, but aren't.
From my personal account, I started with PHP and Perl (high school and college) and then graduated to Ruby on Rails (early dev career) and now its Python and JS.
I would say Ruby on Rails was a 10x on raw PHP in terms of feature specs per hour and AI is a 10x on Ruby on Rails (and its derivatives).
We're probably 100x the developer productivity on a per developer basis from the early days of Web 2.0 with PHP, just a personal anecdote though.
> We're probably 100x the developer productivity on a per developer basis from the early days of Web 2.0 with PHP, just a personal anecdote though.
Only if you compare create a website in PHP 20 years ago vs using wordpress. But to create a project like wordpress from zero now is as difficult as it was 20 years ago.
> Only if you compare create a website in PHP 20 years ago vs using wordpress. But to create a project like wordpress from zero now is as difficult as it was 20 years ago.
Roll to disbelieve on this one. There's no way that creating something like WordPress 20 years ago, before any modern-day web application frameworks, was anywhere near as easy. I'm not even talking React/Next or whatever - this was before RoR, before Django (or at least very early versions of both).
I think it's pretty impossible to look around and not notice that technical advances have improved a lot of things in the world - why does it sound credible that programming itself hasn't improved at all in twenty years? Even look at languages like C++ today compared to 20 years ago, they're massively different - do you think all those changes to the languages are neutral or negative in terms of productivity?
Quality does not change as fast :)) Actually, most of the times, when things go faster, the quality drops as fast.
> There's no way that creating something like WordPress 20 years ago, before any modern-day web application frameworks, was anywhere near as easy
Wordpress was 10% about coding and 90% about community. This 90% part can't be automated by AI or fast-tracked using RoR, Django or whatever. So much that none of the hundreds of wordpress alternatives created in the past 2 decades got any closer to replace it.
> Wordpress was 10% about coding and 90% about community.
I completely agree. I just didn't think we were talking about that aspect, just how long it takes to actually build the code of WordPress.
You might be saying that making the technical-building aspects of most technical products go faster won't necessarily have as big an impact as many programmers believe. Programming isn't the core of most products to the degree most programmers think, and instead the core of most products/companies is more about product thinking, sales & marketing, etc. I agree with this sentiment a lot.
That aside, I think there's no question it's faster to program in Python or C++ right now, than it was 20 years ago. Things really have improved on the programming language front (and related libraries, and other advances).
Perhaps the transferable skill in hand-tool woodworking with the greatest relevance to a career in programming is this: recognizing when slowing down for precision is called for; perhaps for many of us, the implied converse is more important. That is, recognizing when we can save time and effort by accepting something noncritical as "good enough".
Paul Sellers has an incredible ability to communicate passion for making things, at once providing incredibly precise instruction and making the beginner unafraid of making mistakes. Watching this series of videos set me on a path that I will surely be traveling years from now. For those of you who don't know his body of educational work, perhaps it will interest you to explore it.
