The main worker is a .Net API with Hangfire that hits a public facing API from the radio station. That data is stored in a MySQL database that feeds a React dashboard front end.
There's some caching that happens behind the scenes to help with some of the large data crunching.
A dashboard to see what my local commercial free radio station (89.3 The Current) in Minnesota is playing. It shows how often tracks are played, track and artist play history as well as some other fun lookups and visualizations.
I did this about ten years ago when I was feeling burned out. I started a t-shirt company in the off hours which eventually grew to be large enough for my wife and I to live off.
Running a business is a lot of work so I'm not sure if that is the type of transition you were looking for. But a starting a side business doing something you enjoy could be a worthy path to check out. Obviously, it's not as easy as applying for a part-time job at an established company.
The meetups in Minneapolis are still going strong. There was the COVID pause when most went to Zoom but the majority are back to in person now.
A good amount tend to revolve around breweries so their definitely much more social leaning than educational. But our JavaScript meetup is very strong and they do a good job of education/learning with a good mix of socialization. I'm still waiting for the .Net group to come back to in person, however.
It's still crucial for senior level people to review and scrutinize code generated by Jr and AI developers.
There's always been the need to verify the code matches the business requirement, right? It used to be when you asked someone why they wrote the code the way they did, they'd tell you they thought it was the right way because X or Y. But with AI they can respond saying they actually don't know why they wrote it a certain way. That's just what ChatGPT or Claude told them to do. So, that's the nightmare part that people are experiencing.
Code reviews are important and software architecture skills are just as important now.
Just got our Tin Can a few weeks ago. The hardware is "eh", but the service is pretty great. The ability to approve incoming/outgoing numbers before being able to call/receive calls is very handy to cut out any spam calls that you'd get with a normal land line.
We've got a tin can phone and the biggest positive for us is the phone can't make calls or receive calls from numbers that we don't approve first. I know other parents who have the phone line through the cable company that gets hammered with spam calls.
Been working remotely for a long time now and was beginning to feel that loneliness. So, I started going to a co-working space to be around people again. Two/three days a week I'm in the "office" with my new "coworkers". It's been great to get to socialize and talk to other tech folks who are working on interesting and different things.
But I also love that freedom of staying home whenever I want to. IMO, more offices should operate more like this.
I was in the same boat around the 10 year mark as well. I started a t-shirt business on the side. It took a while but after a few years made enough to live off of.
Eventually I came back to tech as a contractor/consultant and like it so much more. My passion for development and engineering is much higher now.
A React Native mobile coffee shop map of all coffee shops in New York City. It's integrated with Google Places so I can return summaries of each coffee shops via Googles AI summary feature.
The next step is going to explore building a local LLM into the application itself to then skip over the entire Google part. I want to implement some question/answer features that I THINK could be solved with a local LLM integration. But for now it's just a quick app to help you find coffee.
React Native mobile app + React web app that shows all the coffee shops across New York City. The idea is that you can open it and the app instantly displays the closest coffee shop to you. It integrates with Google Maps reviews AI summaries for a lowdown on the coffee shop and vibe.
This is a good way to look at it. I recently starting thinking something similar now that chatgpt.com and Perplexity are showing up as referral sources to my blog. So there is some verification (or hope there is) that someone got to my content and learned something from it.
What about hiring junior developers to do the work I don't want to spend time training AI to do? Humans retain context, over time learn the ins and outs of the business and will sit in a meeting with stakeholders to gain understanding of the business rules and ask the 'stupid' questions that need to be asked.
I would much rather have that junior take some hacks at building some features with AI along with my guidance than context switching over to AI just to walk it through doing a task which means having to explain the business and our business rules over and over again.
To me cutting out a junior developer adds more time for senior developers than making their work lighter.
I created a website and mobile app to display all the coffee shops in the state of Minnesota. It's a .Net Core MVC website and React Native mobile app that is pretty much entirely vibe coded.
I've had fun with building the data loaded, website and mobile app via Claude Code from VS Code. However, I didn't find building the project as enjoyable as actual coding myself. The code is a mess and is definitely overengineered and hard to read. I have had to consistently fix bugs and calibrate my prompts so the machine could produced the features that I was trying to create.
Another thing I learned is to commit early and often. Then create PRs to check what code was updated as things got away from me quickly without me knowing or asking the machine to do the thing it did. A few times entire sections of code were removed that had nothing to do with the feature I was working on. Being able to go back to the previous working commit probably saved me hours.
Vibe coding an entire project was a good experience. There's a lot to learn and focus on the next time I go this route.
There's some caching that happens behind the scenes to help with some of the large data crunching.