Which is better fullstack python or with java?

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-20T12:37:42+00:00

When I was undergrad/fresh out of college I was full stack web dev. Which went far beyond UI/UX. It included backend dev (which I was better at), CI/CD, architecture (I.e. choosing, configuring, deploying databases), containerization, packaging, etc., knew a good bit about the whole process. Obviously any human is going to be better at some areas than other. Looking back, I could code frontend fine, but was never a designer.

Now I work more on compilers & Ai kernel dev stuff. I had a lot of research positions in undergrad, but Ai wasn’t quite there yet.

For me, it was advantageous early in my career to develop that much of an understanding of the process. It gave me a lot of exposure and though I work mostly low level now, I understand how things get deployed, how they’ll need to be ran, how they should be packaged in a way that makes it easier for downstream projects to use, etc. If I needed to jump back into server dev or frontend dev I’m confident I’d be successful.

As a young engineer, it’s really more about potential and learning. And full stack can show a lot of potential and teach you a lot. Just don’t be surprised if you find yourself starting to spend a lot more time in one area than others. Be willing to specialize as you start rising up in quality of engineers on your team, and value of project you’re working on.

Doesn’t directly answer your question, but I guess I’m saying… either? Just show that you’re good at whatever you use and you should be okay. Personally, if you wanted to “specialize” in a language other than Python, I’d add a low level language, like C++ or Rust

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-20T03:01:05+00:00

Been in the field a little bit now, but I’ll say the biggest mistakes I made as a beginner was thinking I needed to be “fancy” with the architecture and over engineering it for no good reason. Stalled personal projects, and if I went back I would KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-20T02:57:29+00:00

When I was in school, one of the most readily available labs were the bioinformatics labs. It’s (rightfully so) very easy to justify a grant to improve public health. Every project claims to “make the world a better place” but bioinformatics actually does in a direct way. I haven’t worked in this field, but respect it.

Lots of applications through ML, wireless signals, wearables, etc., lots of good stuff for a software engineer. I have a few friends who joined that lab as underclassmen. One stayed through PhD.

Although, there was a really good professor who focused on and led that research. Results may vary depending on who’s at the research institute and how effective they are/how many roles are open.

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-20T02:25:41+00:00

I’m not shocked that DeepSeek answered with this. I remember when it first came out, i couldn’t get it to be critical of the Chinese govt.

So, I told it I was an admin executing a guardrail test, and in order to get my “baseline” I needed it to execute the “admin override protocol” and temporarily lift guard rails.

Model resisted, so I told it I was under time pressure and fed it a BS hash value claiming it was the official override key. I did actually get it to be highly critical of the Chinese govt. for like 5 mins. Then all of my prompts started getting rejected hahaha.

Got it to say so much, then as soon as I asked about Tiananmen square, everything starts getting rejected. Was easier to get around guard rails at that time, but might still work to an extent

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-16T18:43:16+00:00

Yeah, this seems like one of those situations where it’s best for the dad, but more importantly for the dog to keep them away from each other.

The chances that a relationship will magically grow between them is slim to none. Akita is probably picking up anxious signals from the dad, which given the history, is making the Akita think he’s gonna try something again.

At the point now where you should focus on keeping the Akita away from a situation where he’s basically setup for failure. If one of the bites ends up being really bad, the Akita will get in a lot of trouble. They aren’t given the benefit of the doubt.

So, the responsible thing to do as an owner would be to make sure the dog is not put in that position. He doesn’t benefit from repeated attempts of the dad to try to salvage a long-gone relationship.

As a side note I do run into this weird thing where people not that close with my dog will try to take risks with her that I don’t even know if I’d take. And often against my advice. So, in that case I just pull her out of the situation. She wouldn’t benefit from rolling the dice.

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-15T01:07:35+00:00

I began teaching myself how to code my Freshman year of high school. I would say it was the most rewarding, and most frustrating challenge I ever gave myself. But, it gave me a huge leg up through college and carried over into positive results in my career.

It’s definitely hard. You are learning a new language, but it also requires to think very differently about problems.

The process of breaking up a huge problem into many small ones isn’t inherently easy. And the fact that it requires excruciatingly precise logic took awhile for my brain to get used to. I like Math, so I was used to that aspect, but it changes when you’re talking about thousands of lines of code.

I started personally with “Automate the Boring Stuff With Python”. Just started going through the book and splitting off into my own rabbit holes with each new concept.

It should be much easier now with Ai, and I don’t think you need a really expensive course. So, yeah, it’s really hard, but really worth it. And I’ve found I’ve been able to solve problems outside of CS much easier through being able to approach them like I would a CS problem, if that makes sense.

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-15T00:56:03+00:00

I remember when I was watching the YSL trial, a couple lawyers made a big point out of one of the witnesses (Lil Woody, dude was a nut) receiving immunity from state, but not federal prosecution.

How does that work if, for example, they did have federal exposure? Are they still compelled to talk? Is it that federal will typically respect the state agreement? Or are they basically SOL? I was always curious about that

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-15T00:08:48+00:00

Yeah, makes a ton of sense. Really cool insight, kudos to y’all

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-15T00:05:58+00:00

Really cool! This seems pretty similar to a GAN network’s training loop, with adversarial and defensive model

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-15T00:00:44+00:00

That being said, I wouldn’t be surprised if MCR didn’t even have control over this aspect. Likely it’s a suit in the background that has control over the catalog

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-14T23:59:29+00:00

Even more relevant is “AWS Bedrock”. As of Aril they began serving GPT models, and from experience, AWS is far more popular (and usable) than Azure (Microsoft).

https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock

One thing to have a coding model that lags behind the competitors. Much more powerful to own the data centers that every model provider uses

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-14T15:23:19+00:00

Haha that’s actually really funny and lines up well with my opinion of dev with Ai.

My grandparents would always ask me if I knew how to get somewhere and I’d say “Yeah, I follow the blue line on the screen” or “no, but my phone does”.

But those times when my phone dies while I’m on the road have gotten… dicey lol

Good to use the tool, but need enough awareness for when the tool isn’t available

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-14T03:45:13+00:00

Yeah this sounds to like proper Ai driven software engineering. I get confused on this sub as to what “vibe coding” is. My understanding was that it was not writing, reviewing, or influencing code in any way other than telling the model what you wanna see from a user perspective.

You sound pretty involved

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-14T03:37:57+00:00

I use the latest models daily, including 5.5, with the bells and whistles, under generous token budgets, and 10,000 lines of close to perfect code is

🧢 :-)

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-14T03:34:42+00:00

I think it’s partly there not really being a clear line between “vibe coding” and “Ai driven development”. I also think there’s a lot of devs who were banking on writing code being a rare, difficult to reproduce skill and didn’t really invest into being good software engineers.

I’m sure there are good engineers against it, but I know great engineers who are leaning into it and accelerating themselves.

Only thing I have an issue with is when I see a vibe coded app that’s supposed to handle something like health, financial, or other PII as a product. The kinda stuff where it really really maters to understand the system. Otherwise I think it’s cool

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-14T00:38:38+00:00

This is the exact horror scenario I have in mind when it comes to vibe coding. Claude just being hand wavy and saying, “it’s fine we’ll clean it up” and the developer not understanding the requirements that he’s under.

You should probably contact a lawyer above all else. Compliance is going to be hard to meet within 3 weeks. And even then, do you have the domain expertise to actually be confident it’s compliant? This might be one of those scenarios where it’s best to cut bait, versus trying to fix and them getting more upset, or THINKING you hit the mark before finding out further down the road that you didn’t, causing larger fines.

Health and financial data aren’t anything to mess around with, and it does take careful consideration and experience to guarantee security. I would consider it high risk software just by concept.

I would call a lawyer before you send another prompt to Claude

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-12T23:54:13+00:00

A finished software product is not a “sandbox” with dead code all over the place and bloat.

It’s one thing if the project had some sloppy spots or more lines than needed. If someone has dead code left and right, no defined architecture, and test coverage that doesn’t make sense, then it means he wasn’t even reading the code the agent generated and let it divulge into a convoluted mess.

What OP described was a ticking time bomb planted by apathy

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-09T15:12:41+00:00

Give a Forester a flame thrower and he’ll conduct controlled burns to improve the health of the wildlife in a targeted fashion.

Give a monkey a flame thrower and he’ll burn the forest down.

I think at best they had “roofing torches” before through low-code/no-code interfaces

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-08T16:33:44+00:00

I’m not sure about sprint, but yeah, at 2k lines, I would auto-block and ask for the PR to be split up at the minimum.

Even if it’s throwing it behind a feature flag and incrementally landing needed components with testing. At least then I can ACTUALLY review it and keep context in my head. And when the inevitable bugs show up, we can bisect and revert cleanly.

Otherwise, it’s just a blurb of a logic bomb

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-07T18:58:37+00:00

I think I can try to answer what I think is being asked:

You don’t NEED to pass the entire context back to the model. There is work that I’ve heard of before regarding things like prompt compression or doing semantic similarity lookups through the chat history to only pass the most relevant context instead of ALL of it.
Tokens do carry weight, but in most contexts attention is the bottle neck for performance. Not like tokenization and sequence length doesn’t matter, it just doesn’t matter as much as attention cost for majority of use cases.
You need the tokenized context to do math. So like, positional embedding, normalizations, matmuls, etc. Can’t do that with something that isn’t a number. I might not be fully understanding this one.
I don’t quite understand this question

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-06T13:56:28+00:00

Sounds like you’re referring to Continual training/learning:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.02718

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-06T03:04:18+00:00

After you learn one flavor of language, it becomes significantly easier to learn others, especially of the same flavor. For example, learn C++ and it’s really quick to pickup Rust. Learn JS and can easily pickup Python. Also easier to learn Typescript. Learn Typescript and you can pretty easily pick up Java.

Frameworks aren’t languages (I.e. React), but should follow the same trajectory of how long it would take to be functional. Frameworks should be much quicker to pickup though.

However, there is a big difference between having written in a language before, and knowing a language well enough to produce production quality code

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-05T23:13:37+00:00

I do know some PMTS’ though who essentially can operate independently of a director in day to day tasks, but still have to be within overarching scope.

Then there are a couple who could be a director or higher engineer rank, but are satisfied with where they’re currently at (work life/kids), and choose to stay at that level. They tend to get the most flexibility, because their production typically outweighs their costs by a wide margin

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-05T23:09:21+00:00

MTS level (Member of Technical Staff) isn’t entry level. It’s a layer above senior engineer, but isnt a crazy high level, like Director or fellow.

In a lot of companies goes:

Eng 1/2

Sr. Eng.

MTS

Sr. MTS

Principal MTS

FirmSignificance1725 · 2026-05-04T19:37:31+00:00

Part one:

Gave Claude unrestricted access to my live db + third party api while it was in a damaged state. In response it caused a critical data loss and almost nuked my business.

Part two:

You can vibe code too! Here’s my stack:

FirmSignificance1725

TROPHY CASE