kaaaate's comments

As a self-taught software developer, yeah, it's kinda true. I've encountered developers that are older than me, have more experience as me, has multiple degrees, yet they're dumb as bricks when it comes to anything remotely related to problem solving (or not using genai to do all the work for them, which I think is absolutely disgusting).

I learnt everything I know about programming from buggering around, and just making cool stuff. Then you'll get annoyed how past-you wrote it, and then you'll rewrite it and you'll learn how to make better code & better projects. Most engineers/devs I know that was taught at a university or college can't really do that, and most I know take ages to make anything that can be used (or even shown off as a demo to your boss). Some of this could also just be that there's usually a higher chance for self-taught engineers/devs to be neurodivergent of some sort (adhd/autism), because I am myself and I know that my different perspective does give people a breath of fresh air when working on projects.

Team Fortress 2 has plagues by aimbots for the past few years, yet VALVe have done practically nothing to aid the situation. VALVe are still raking in an income from Team Fortress 2 (via lootcrates and a PVE gamemode), yet nothing has been done to fix any of the issues in official VALVe servers.

I developed a custom (open-source, under AGPLv3) solution at my first job for a centralized software distribution system.

The entire thing was written in C# with ASP.NET Core for the server, and (sorry) WinForms for the Admin Panel and the launcher. And it integrated quite nicely with the authentication for the web application that was being developed. At one point I was thinking of LDAP support, but I left that job before I could implement it. It has a fully functional license key system (no DRM, gotta implement that yourself), branching, and an announcement system.

As far as I know, it's still running and fully functional after leaving a year ago, with the actual ASP.NET Core server having about a year of uptime.

I have been considering making some QoL changes and creating my own open-source launcher, but I haven't had the time or the mental capacity to do that.

https://github.com/ktwrd/OpenSoftwareLauncher

It was hard, but with enough effort, fixing mental health issues, and mass applying to jobs (about 300 from August to December 2023), you can get there in the end. I only got about 4 interviews in total; an insurance company (ghosted), WA Police (turned down), Atlassian (ghosted), and HSS (current role).

Finding a tech job in 2024 is definitely going to be a lot of luck, mass-applying, and trying to make yourself stand out from other candidates.

Surprisingly well at the moment, but I was terrible last year...

I got layer off in January 2023 before I even started my role with Avanade. I quit my job at a mining startup (which recently got bought for 45mil AUD, which I could've got a cut of if I stayed there and dealt with SA) to go work for Avanade. One of the worst decisions I've ever made since it caused my fiancé to break up with me (which caused a mental health crisis). Got some dosh out of them which was good (because they breached my contract), didn't even sign the release documents to get the money and make me shut up (but I got the money anyway).

Was working at a mining equipment company and developing copy protection/DRM there, and I got sacked the day after I completed the project.

I was unable to get a job for a while because both of my previous bosses gave the worst references ever and went dead silent after I confronted them about it :/

But I'm back on my feet with a dev job working for my State Government (in the Health Sector) which is quite lovely, and my co-workers aren't assholes for once!

  Location: Perth, Western Australia
  Remote: Yes, hybrid/WFO only is okay if travel time isn't long
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: C#, ASP.NET, Rust, Node.JS, VB6, SQL/PGSQL, MongoDB, GCS/AWS/Azure, Docker
  Résumé/CV: https://res.kate.pet/Resume_public_latest.pdf
  Portfolio: https://kate.pet/p/portfolio  https://github.com/ktwrd
  Email: [email protected]

Coming up to 3 years of professional YoE (in December). As a reminder, I'm only 20yo and everything I've done is self-taught.

I wish I could have a smaller phone, specifically the size of an S10+, but with all the new & fancy stuff slapped on top.

I love the size of the phone and it fits very well but my current S20 Ultra feels too big for me at times.

In my first dev job, it was practically a private office just for the devs.

When I started it was only myself and the one accountant, and near the end of my time there it was just myself and another dev (that got hired shortly after I started) since the accountant got their own office.

At my 2nd role, it was terrible. The devs were smushed in-between the Accounting and HR department, which made it absolute hell to talk to my co-workers about issues and to actually do some development without interruption. Oh, and it was strictly no WFH/Hybrid. 2hr on public transport one way, every day.

Now I work for the government and it's lovely being able to do hybrid, and the office is actually somewhat quiet since the whole floor is for the developers.

Recently I re-wrote my personal homepage (which was previously written in Vue.js) and the homepage for my discord bot in PHP (w/ smarty, and some CSS copied from Bootstrap).

For one of my other projects, my discord bot dashboard (which uses MongoDB and lots of boilerplate stuff for interacting with MongoDB), I'm using ASP.NET Core and Boostrap. It does the job, and it does it quite well.

took a peek at your comment, and i do agree with you. docker can add unnecessary bloat to projects.

docker shouldn't be used for everything. if you provide a docker version of something, it's a smart idea to also publish (for example) an appimage or deb file for people who can't or don't want to use docker.

like for example, at my work we don't want to use docker because we will have to get approval from corporate for every little script we want to run in a container because corporate identifies a container as a separate application so it must go through the approval process (which takes 4-8 weeks).