When the masses discovered programming to be profitable ~5 years ago, it became "cool" and was quickly gamed into the ground from both ends.
Look at what "cool" does to art and music. The "rockstars" get paid a lot, and everyone else works for peanuts (or no nuts) or gets a "real job". 90% of the work now is marketing yourself. So it is with programming. Programming is like music now.
This is all thanks to the supply of programmers (and wannabes) increasing tenfold thanks to boot camps, and a 400% increase in computer science majors in the past 5 years.
The craziest thing about all of this is that you can be a complete novice, but if you have a decent following on social media and are putting out somewhat interesting content and are a terrible programmer, you will absolutely get hired over the expert that isn't contributing publically. It's all about visibility now.
My advice is find something you intrinsically enjoy so much, that doing all the extra annoying stuff is at the very least tolerable.
Be happy you haven't invested 10 years into the industry like I have.
So tired of seeing blockchain, machine learning, and JS in hte news. Things like Ethereum and even Bitcoin are 100% hype, "what if", and are nothing more than dreams.
Last century gave us things like the personal computer, the internet, and so on. What about this one? Fancier webpages? Selfies? Tweets?
All of this blockchain and cryptocurrency and JS hype is tiresome to see. What happened to making real stuff that works and solves real problems?
Realizing that I don't have to be (or even want to be) a talking head in the industry.
Realizing that I don't have to build a following to be extremely happy, and that contrary to popular opinion, living a small life is much more desirable.
After being a windows jerk for 20 years I fully switched over about a year ago. My only remaining attachment to Microsoft is an old version of office I have running in CrossOver.
I think what did it for me was the hardware, but the forced updates and telemetry completely sabotaged trust and closed the deal. It was a tough move, but my new found hatred for Microsoft fueled the whole journey adequately. Just what are they thinking?
This survey is making me think I may start packing my things and moving to Linux. With great numbers come all the nasty viruses. No thanks!
Ex: Choose a hundred random subjects and assign them irrelevant, obscure keywords to speak loudly into their phones while the messenger app is open. Report back with resulting ads displayed over the following week.
It's only a matter of time before someone harnesses AGI to enslave the planet and declare totalitarian rule. Perhaps even by accident.
I haven't been able to get this off of my mind lately because it's inevitable.
Physicists made nuclear things that do amazing things like power all of our refrigerators from hundreds of miles away, but have also killed thousands (Hiroshima) poisoned the environment (Fukushima, Chernobyl) and have essentially made the world a ticking time bomb.
AGI and its surrounding technologies are easily 1000x more powerful than nuclear anything, and absolutely will be abused.
There's been plenty of startups that launched with bad domain names but wound up hits. thefacebook.com, getdropbox.com to name a couple.
Going the appname+app.com route you are quite literally signing up to work for the guy that owns appname.com. Think about it. Some day you will be paying him a huge cash sum for simply squatting on your name. Some day you may come to find he doesn't want to sell it ever, and will happily take advantage of this. Are you okay with either of these scenarios? I certainly am not.
Ideally you want one or two short dictionary words in a .com format, but all of those are taken. So what do you do?
IMO, the best option is uniquelySpelledName.com, no prefixes or suffixes, no non-.com domain names. Preferably it's short, 5-8 characters. People can only remember 7 or so new things at a time without much effort.
Ex: Your startup name is coolhats, but coolhats.com is obviously taken. Fine, register KewlHatz.com. Done deal. Memorable. Unique.
Why no alternate TLDs? Because they don't pass the grandma test. It's too much to remember. Your company ends up being "Foo Bar Co, withouot the m. Not .com, but .co" or "Foo Bar dot eye oh, <explanation>" ... grandma ain't gonna be remembering any of that.
Think about this. Do you really want to be explaining something as simple as your web address over and over again? I don't.
When the masses discovered programming to be profitable ~5 years ago, it became "cool" and was quickly gamed into the ground from both ends.
Look at what "cool" does to art and music. The "rockstars" get paid a lot, and everyone else works for peanuts (or no nuts) or gets a "real job". 90% of the work now is marketing yourself. So it is with programming. Programming is like music now.
This is all thanks to the supply of programmers (and wannabes) increasing tenfold thanks to boot camps, and a 400% increase in computer science majors in the past 5 years.
The craziest thing about all of this is that you can be a complete novice, but if you have a decent following on social media and are putting out somewhat interesting content and are a terrible programmer, you will absolutely get hired over the expert that isn't contributing publically. It's all about visibility now.
My advice is find something you intrinsically enjoy so much, that doing all the extra annoying stuff is at the very least tolerable.
Be happy you haven't invested 10 years into the industry like I have.