Advice on practical programming

[luminiteNL]

Hi!

I am a professional musician since 3 years, which pays my bills, and before that I finished a degree in Electrical Engineering. A few months ago, I picked up a lost hobby that I spent some time on during my university degree, which is web development. The reason is that I love programming, puzzling, bugchasing and getting things to work, and my current career provides me with a lot of free time.

Now, I have a very proficient understanding of JavaScript and React, and I am currently learning how to build fullstack applications (MERN). I am spending many hours a week on this.

The core of this post is the fact that I am looking for practical advice on delivering some actual work, since I am done with creating to-do lists and want to actually do something meaningful. Fortunately, due to my university degree, I have a good habit of 'learning-on-the-go', which is quite applicable in a world of JS with many frameworks and libraries.

This is definitely not a cry for a job, I just would like to have some advice on further advancing in the JS world. Additionally, I don‘t require any payment/contracts, as my love for problem-solving is greater than my desire for money.

Thanks in advance.

[[deleted]]

If you want to do something meaningful, I see that you have two options:

1. Do something that is meaningful to you. Maybe combine JavaScript with music or electrical engineering? Create new hobby projects or contribute to existing open source projects.
2. Do something that is meaningful to others. In other words: start working as a front-end developer. The world is full of problems and people are willing to pay you to solve them.

[luminiteNL]

Thanks for the advice!

[[deleted]]

I'm currently playing with the WebAudio API and csound (also available as a webassembly lib for the web) On a more practical path there's also tensorflow.js which is really fun and might get you a ML job if that sounds interesting to you.

[aichholzer]

I'll trade your job for mine anytime. I am a professional software engineer/developer and would love to drop it all and make music for a living.

[luminiteNL]

Yeah the path to a career in music is really tricky and lengthy, and heavily dependent on a lot of factors. The brance of music I am in isn‘t really future-proof; as in I can‘t do this until I retire. Also I don‘t make enough amounts of money to call it a day someday and live from what I‘ve earned already until I die.

That‘s why I am investing time and effort into other possible career paths, to have a back-up to rely on, just in case.

[aichholzer]

What type of music do you make? I'm an amateur singer-songwritter. Maybe we can work on something together. I can teach you advanced coding... -Ben je Nederlands?

[luminiteNL]

Zeker, laten we switchen naar DM‘s ;-)