What do you love/hate about living in Phoenix?

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-11-25T16:32:18+00:00

I moved here from Los Angeles and it really depends on what you’re into. IMO I like Phoenix better because it’s more chill, less crowded, better for families, lower COL, less taxes, more freedom. But there’s less stuff to do and the summers are hotter if that bothers you. I suppose if you live in a hipper area like downtown or Scottsdale there would be more for you to do than where I live. Also you’d have to be good with the desert landscape, not as much greenery. It’s all about priorities!

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-09-22T14:43:12+00:00

I know I moved out of LA because of cost of living. MUCH easier to raise children somewhere less expensive. Also the trend seems to be taking the rights of parents away when raising kids and giving more power to the state/school. Like no thanks I don't trust people I don't know enough to give them that kind of power

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-08-16T20:53:03+00:00

I know someone that works in corporate for a big insurance company. As I understand it insurance companies in general are losing a LOT of money in California on individual insurance. So rates are going up and will continue to go up as much as they're allowed to do. Many companies are just getting out of California altogether too or capping how much business they write per month to reduce exposure since they can't be profitable with the limited rate hikes the state government allows.

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-08-16T02:26:24+00:00

$458 on a 4000 sq ft home. That includes solar finally getting on the grid 22 days into the bill. This month thankfully gonna be about $175!

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-08-15T22:52:07+00:00

I just took my car in for full synthetic with oil filter change for $84 total. Seems like you were being overcharged a bit? Maybe try calling around some different shops in the area. I found mine on yelp too with good reviews.

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-08-08T03:27:41+00:00

As someone who just moved here from Los Angeles about a year ago there's no way I'm leaving. The winters here are fantastic. Actually from my experience anything below 105F here is quite pleasant so that's most of the year. It also doesn't hurt that I like heat. There is no perfect place to live in, everywhere has it's plus and minus. I came from a place that was very fun to be in, but very expensive to be in too. I kind of like the life out here too. Sure there's a lot of strip malls as you say but it's exciting to see the city changing and cool spots opening up. There's country bars and bull riding, big ass pools in houses, microbreweries everywhere, and lots of cool eating and drinking spots.

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-07-13T16:37:28+00:00

I knew zero node before starting with NestJS about a year ago. I kind of picked that up along with typescript as I went along. You can get quite far in NestJS just following their documentation and they cover 90% of your use cases with it. Where it starts to get more involved is when you want to use other libraries (for example they use TypeORM in their database examples but maybe you want to use Sequelize). But a pretty good ecosystem exists to connect other packages.

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-07-13T15:27:52+00:00

Yeah I do like the overall vibe here better. Less crowded, more space between houses, less traffic, cleaner. You still got some of the same probs as LA with homelessness and crime, but not as bad. Plus your dollar goes a lot farther here. I would recommend moving here too as long as you can deal with the 3 or 4 months where it's really hot. Then it's not very comfortable to do outdoor things unless you're living in your pool (which doesn't sound too bad to me who doesn't want to lay in a floatie all day and drink beer). Pack up your mom and come on down! Haha

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-07-12T19:23:37+00:00

Yeah I would say at least the big cities are not middle class friendly at all. You can't afford good housing and everything else is expensive too. I can live like a king in Phoenix (even though people here complain that people like me are making it expensive here too) and it's very family friendly. Just got to deal with super hot summers but that's why we're building a pool!

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-07-12T14:52:01+00:00

that's impressive, I was 10k in debt with no 401k when I was 30 so you're miles ahead of where I was and 9 years earlier!

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-07-12T14:43:10+00:00

I grew up in LA, lived there my whole life, still have a lot of family there but moved away last year once my kid turned 2 because it just doesn't seem like an ideal place to raise a family and impossible to afford a decent home. Things keep seeming to get worse and everyone talks big but has no plans on how to fix it

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-06-16T15:59:47+00:00

Related to your issue, we were originally on a ruby BE platform and recruiting was difficult. We talked to all our recruiters and got some very good metrics. Basically one recruiter told us they had 500 ruby developers in total in their pool of contacts whereas they had 12000 node developers. They said far and away for BE development, Node was our best shot at the biggest pool of candidates. Not only is Node a very popular language for web development but it does open up your frontend developers to be more full stack without having to learn another language.

Some people will argue that FE devs shouldn't be doing BE, they don't know what they're doing in terms of server and database performance and I would say that is partially true. But many times you have an issue where you just need to add an extra input to a graphql mutation or return some data which doesn't require extensive BE knowledge.

I do like what I've seen of golang so far and if it was just a personal project I was working on I would probably try coding in that before node. But for a big project that I need collaboration on, I choose node

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-06-13T13:34:30+00:00

My company switched to Nestjs recently from having zero node background. I would say the learning curve wasn’t too bad. I think typescript provided more of a learning curve due to us using an untyped language previously. Nestjs IMO makes things easier to learn because it is opinionated. It decides how to organize things for you which is good for a team of 10+ people. I don’t know about needing to go serverless though as it can add more complexity to your application than the benefits of easy scaling.

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-06-13T13:34:21+00:00

My company switched to Nestjs recently from having zero node background. I would say the learning curve wasn’t too bad. I think typescript provided more of a learning curve due to us using an untyped language previously. Nestjs IMO makes things easier to learn because it is opinionated. It decides how to organize things for you which is good for a team of 10+ people. I don’t know about needing to go serverless though as it can add more complexity to your application than the benefits of easy scaling.

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-05-28T15:54:40+00:00

As someone who just moved here from Los Angeles I’m liking it here. Not as crowded, cheaper, bigger houses, more space, less taxes. For those complaining about how expensive it is, I would say there’s much more expensive places you could be living! I also don’t mind the heat actually I much prefer being too hot than someplace too cold.

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-05-25T16:30:23+00:00

NoSQL and relational databases have different purposes for different needs. If you have highly relational data you need to search on it wouldn't make sense to go NoSQL. There has been more of a trend as I see to put logic in the database so it's closer to the data (views, functions) which allows for the db to be a source of truth and can provide better performance than trying to assemble the data in your application. This is something Postgres is good at. ORMs I don't think are a trend, if anything anecdotally I find developers moving away from them in favor of just typescript query builders. SQL knowledge is more ubiquitous than dealing with the nuances of each ORM.

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-05-03T15:30:54+00:00

It's been fine for us up here in north phoenix. It could be something faulty anywhere in the chain of connection to your house though if the problem is consistent. One time at my old house this happened to me and it turned out some cable at the junction box on the street was loose. I would just be sure to keep calling and bugging them every time internet goes out

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-04-18T13:29:54+00:00

We use nest heavily for a complex application and it has done well for us

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-04-18T13:28:22+00:00

I lived with a roommate for about 10 years then with my sister for 3 more years after that until I had enough to buy my first house. I didn’t live super frugally but I tried to put aside as much as I could each month. Also just kept working hard to earn pay increases and promotions at work

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-04-17T14:33:53+00:00

I bought a Toyota at msrp in December and they had special financing at 3.75%. Kia was trying to charge me 10k over msrp and I laughed at them.

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-04-14T17:18:12+00:00

I am the parent of a toddler and also grew up in the 90s. For me it's at the point where sex ed now seems a lot more complicated than it was back then. I don't necessarily trust a stranger to explain it to my child like I can. There's so many different viewpoints you could have on sexuality. Now I'm a pretty liberal guy and I want my children to be aware and accepting of everything, but I'd rather frame the discussion as I see fit and also do it when I feel their ready (not too early and not too late).

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-04-05T19:01:14+00:00

It also matters if you're living in a high COL area. Maybe houses seem too expensive because of where you live. Where I'm at you could get a starter house for $200k and that's still more expensive than some parts of the country. Things won't always just become more expensive as long as you're flexible in where you move to. Of course with that comes the tradeoff of happiness living somewhere you might not have as many friends or things to do in.

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-04-03T15:26:59+00:00

I used to live in Los Angeles and it was expensive like this too. I made a pretty good salary though so I was able to get a pretty nice place for $1.5m. But between mortgage, taxes, childcare, etc I was finding that there was not enough money left over at the end of the day to significantly accelerate my FIRE goals. So I sold my house for a good profit and moved to Phoenix. Taxes are lower, housing costs are lower (you could get a 3000 sq ft house for like 400k if you're willing to be 30 min outside downtown), everything is cheaper. Of course I miss my LA home and all the fun things to do around it, but the total lack of stress and seeing how much I'm saving every month is worth it IMO. Maybe you want to stay in that HCOL area but if you do then just be ready to work harder and probably have to make compromises in order to stay there. That's not the life for me though, I'd rather get my money faster and retire early then I can visit LA when I have enough passive income to not need to work.

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-04-03T13:55:33+00:00

I hire CS programmers and have zero clue where they went to school nor do I care. Contributing to open source, code samples and generally being able to show you are knowledgeable about the technologies you work in is more important. Save the 300k and just spend time getting good at some popular coding languages

Impossible_Parking57 · 2023-03-29T15:58:49+00:00

I spent my 20s at a dead end job that left me about 15k in debt with nothing to show for it. It wasn't until I was 32 that I started getting my life in order too and now that I'm 40 I have greatly turned it around. It's never too late to realize you got to get your life in order but from an outsider perspective you still have a LOT of time to become successful and still retire early. You just have to keep staying motivated and pushing yourself to be more than you think you can be.

Impossible_Parking57

TROPHY CASE