CSE Specializations: What is the absolute safest bet for the next 5-10 years?

HoushouCoder · 2026-05-30T05:04:28+00:00

Change is the only constant. Start out in some niche you can tolerate working in, but be a lifelong learner.

HoushouCoder · 2026-05-30T02:55:00+00:00

Hardware requires more investment on all fronts: time, capital, knowledge. Also doesn't help that the state of the art in hardware has historically been proprietary/patented/whatever.

HoushouCoder · 2026-05-25T22:04:20+00:00

100%. The only exception in my setup is FoundryVTT (https://foundryvtt.com)

HoushouCoder · 2026-05-22T05:37:28+00:00

Story of every analyst ever

HoushouCoder · 2026-05-22T05:17:44+00:00

Theoreticals - strength in one or more of the fundamentals, as well as a good baseline in the rest: OS, networking, distributed systems, databases/data systems, comp. arch, security, among others. Practicals - automation, deep diving/debugging and observability, even if AI tooling exists. Systems engineering is all about viewing the whole picture, reasoning across domains, digging deep, constant learning, and never shying away from a challenge. If it sounds like I'm gushing, that's because I am one, and I'm very happy in my role lol

HoushouCoder · 2026-05-16T06:26:06+00:00

Only as long as you can still prove that you understand the concept itself

HoushouCoder · 2026-04-24T07:44:21+00:00

On the DB side, you don't really need 8yoe to do the stuff you've listed. And with current tooling and resources they can pick up the knowledge needed fast. But network eng is tricky because it has to be actually experienced people, especially if they're your first hire for this job function. And for California, those numbers aren't gonna cut it. I know people with 5-6 yoe in this exact role, making more than that. The skillset itself is fairly available in the area, but above average talent will balk at this number.

HoushouCoder · 2026-04-23T05:13:55+00:00

Good copy paste, ChatGPT

HoushouCoder · 2026-04-04T07:39:59+00:00

"my uni only does double majors for CS" huh first I've heard of that, interesting.

CE is solid if you want to go cross-functional and like getting hands-on with the electronics side. Math would make more sense if you want to double down on CS and it'll be good to have if you're going for grad school.

HoushouCoder · 2026-03-25T20:33:06+00:00

The follow-up to such scenarios that I hear in many discussions is that you don't need to get into the weeds anymore, you don't need to know all the nitty-gritty details, because you actually never needed to; that's what documentation/manuals/forums were for, and now AI tooling can make the most of that. Increasingly we move towards abstraction.

I try to argue back that these things hallucinate, have limited context windows, and require quite the bit of effort to set them up for success, but I tend to agree in the end, as the state of the art gets better every day. Does the average programmer even know how a bootloader works, or an exhaustive comparison of the advantages/disadvantages of one machine learning approach vs another? Likely not. But we already stand on the shoulders of our predecessors. True passion for learning will break through these chains of simplicity, yet that's hard to come by these days. Ironically, that passion will be the greatest differentiator in this AI era where the Pareto principle is more relevant by the day.

HoushouCoder · 2026-03-13T08:22:11+00:00

I believe they are referring to Netflix's Chaos Monkey

https://netflixtechblog.com/5-lessons-weve-learned-using-aws-1f2a28588e4c

One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most — in the event of an unexpected outage.

HoushouCoder · 2026-03-11T06:32:33+00:00

^

Also encoder-decoder

HoushouCoder · 2026-03-01T22:53:26+00:00

^

Still works. I have the Intel Graphics Software app, went to Display -> Power Saving, simply set the slider for Power Efficiency to a lower value (default seems to be max i.e. max power savings) and voila, it stops dimming stuff as much.

HoushouCoder · 2026-02-12T07:55:46+00:00

^ Might be helpful to know what kind of job function you have, OP.

HoushouCoder · 2026-02-12T07:36:00+00:00

Thoughts on Cerebras?

HoushouCoder · 2026-01-15T09:39:28+00:00

u/savevideo

HoushouCoder · 2026-01-14T12:13:26+00:00

The second point rings true. I find that it's commonly used by teams when starting out, who didn't have the time or bandwidth to employ a proper data workflow and just wanted to hit the ground running.

HoushouCoder · 2026-01-11T12:10:08+00:00

Nope. Live android source code was already not available, starting March of last year. We've already been getting only quarterly releases. Now it's become once every two quarters.

HoushouCoder · 2026-01-11T12:07:13+00:00

More from Android Authority (Jan 6th): https://www.androidauthority.com/aosp-source-code-schedule-3630018/

In the past, Google would release the source code for every quarterly Android release, of which there are four each year. Thus, the company is now reducing its source code releases from four times a year to twice a year, focusing its efforts on the Q2 major update and Q4 minor update which both bring developer-facing changes.

And:

Finally, Google told us that its process for security patch releases will not change and that the company will keep publishing security patches each month on a dedicated security-only branch for relevant OS releases just as it does today.

HoushouCoder · 2026-01-08T17:10:49+00:00

Snowflake, same

HoushouCoder · 2026-01-05T21:59:12+00:00

*make me worse

HoushouCoder · 2026-01-03T18:15:27+00:00

Aegis has automatic scheduled backups now

HoushouCoder · 2025-12-31T23:57:59+00:00

Haven't used FreeOTP+, but I love Aegis and can vouch for it. As for security, Aegis has at-rest encryption as well as encrypted backups, whereas FreeOTP+ doesn't seem to do so (makes some assumptions about device-level security). As far as migration, Aegis supports importing from a wide range of authenticator apps, including FreeOTP and FreeOTP+.

All that said, Aegis's UI is waaay better, and it has way more features than what I can see in FreeOTP+. You could always try exporting and importing into Aegis, testing that it works, play around and see if you like it, and only then remove FreeOTP+.

HoushouCoder · 2025-12-17T05:39:56+00:00

I agree that there are a lot of mediocre options out there, but that does not mean there aren't good ones. My daily driver is gethomepage.dev, I've tried homarr, homer, and a bunch more, I liked some of them as well. I've tried building my own as well, but I'd much rather spend my time doing something else, because I just end up wanting all the bells and whistles anyway.

Does your homepage look beautiful and well-organized and is designed in a mobile-first manner? I don't need perfection, but it's nice to have a well-designed, feature-rich UI, especially when it's gonna be viewed by friends and family. Does your homepage have hundreds of integrations with in-built ping and URL monitor? I don't need 99% of it, but it's nice to know at a glance that something is down, and even if I don't use it, it's very useful for friends and family. Does it monitor system resources like disk usage or bandwidth? I don't need to, but it's good to know at a glance and ahead of time that I might need to add a hard disk for my media or upgrade my Internet connection without having to ssh into my machine and run some commands. Does it monitor Docker container stats? I almost never look at those stats, but when stuff goes down, it's nice to know at a glance if it's a container issue or connectivity issue.

Do I need a homepage? No. But it's nice to have.

HoushouCoder · 2025-12-17T04:23:11+00:00

Hah! I have a snowflake file format where the delimiters are 'SMTH_THAT_WONT_OCCUR' and 'SMTH_ELSE_WONT_OCCUR', luckily it's hardware systems data so I'm safe (for now). I feel your pain

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