A place for my favorite links found across the web.
-
π Learn in Public
"Whatever your thing is, make the thing you wish you had found when you were learning. Donβt judge your results by βclapsβ or retweets or stars or upvotes - just talk to yourself from 3 months ago."
I keep this bookmarked and reread it often as it's my guiding principle for this blog, the Elixir Year project, and future learning efforts. Leaving a trail of "learning exhaust" is a great metaphor to keep in mind, as is the truth that people love cartoons. Time to bust out my Apple Pencil :)
Via Swyx.io
-
π Short-Term Work for Seasoned Devs
Ask HN: Where Do Seasoned Devs Look for Short-Term Work?
"I did this a few years ago and the winning recipe was a shameless linkedin post where I pretty much just summarized my skillset and explained that I was looking for a senior engineer equivalent of a summer internship, with no chance of extension. Got me 3-4 offers. None of the offering companies had ads out for roles like this, so this was pretty much the only way."
Another hiring/job related topic, this one has some unconventional advice and details about what's worked for others. Really appreciate how diverse people's approaches are. These speak to my current soul-search as I'm grappling with the "wtf do I do with my career" question.
These days I'm telling myself to challenge the status quo when it comes to work. Nothing is normal anymore, why should careers adhere to advice from nearly a century ago? Remote work used to be fringe, but now that it's normalized, I'm open to finding new modalities.
The search continues.
(Via HN)
-
π Selling Onions
So I just started down a path, with no end goal or milestone set. I just started going. No angel investor. No VC backer. I just used some modest profit from my other domain name developments to fund the endeavor.
Guy buys onion domain as a joke. Nails the execution. Brilliantly inspiring, I often forget how useful it is to have the skills & experience to buy a domain, build a commerce application, and learn everything needed to run a business. I'm not sure if I'll be selling onions anytime soon, but I sure appreciate the reminder there's more avenues to employment than building a SaaS company.
-
π Lifestyle Programming
This post, along with 20 years of working on the same software project, helped me imagine a future for myself that I can be content and proud of. I've struggled to visualize the specifics of the kind of life I want, and now I feel a bit closer. The author shares his experience being a solo developer running a 1-man software company, and it's terribly inspiring. Lifestyle businesses aren't as glamorous as wild startup stories so they're under-represented and therefore fly under the radar as options. I'm glad this one didn't.
-
π AI Killed the Tech Interview
βAI straight-up kills hackerrank. The only thing that is a filter for now is if you have the know-how to use AI and prompt correctly. That can be useful, but hackerrank will need to adapt somehow. If it canβt, I canβt see it being used at all in five years.β - Kane Narraway
The original article and the HN comments offer some great suggestions for equitable outcomes on both the hiring and interview side. I particularly like the suggestions to collaborate on code reviews, or build an actual application with AI. These sorts of discussions remind me of articles discussing how asking students to write an essay is pointless now, and instead requires finding new AI-compatible challenges to demonstrate learning. The common thread? Scale up the request to account for the massive boost in capability.
-
π Redbean: Single-file webserver stack
"redbean is an open source webserver in a single-file that runs natively on six OSes for both AMD64 and ARM64. Basic idea is if you want to build a web app that runs anywhere, then you download the redbean.com file, put your .html and .lua files inside it using the zip command, and you've got a hermetic app you deploy and share."
Wowzers, that's really nifty. I love how modular and straightforward it is, great way to distribute web apps and tools. Pretty sure this is also a great way to package little bits of code that Claude & ChatGPT generate via the
/canvasmode. Hmmm...(Discovered in this HN discussion)
-
π Interviewing in the Age of AI
Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
"Have you gone back to in-person whiteboards? More focus on practical problems? I really have no idea how the traditional tech interview is supposed to work now when problems are trivially solvable by GPT." - ramesh31
This post is wildly relevant to me as I last interviewed for a tech job back in 2018 and hardly go a day without wondering what to expect after my sabbatical is over (2026). I'm learning Elixir with Github Copilot turned off and try to solve everything the "old school" way before getting LLMs involved. I believe this is still the best way, but there's always some doubt.
(Via Hacker News)