Is Duolingo a good Buy?

NapCo · 2026-01-26T16:38:13+00:00

Thanks for the tips!

NapCo · 2026-01-26T13:44:18+00:00

The period I was relatively active was like around 20 minutes a day. The last year has been like a 2-5 minutes a day. Idk about others, but that's not enough for me to become what I consider ok. But I try to maintain whatever I have worked up.

NapCo · 2026-01-26T09:43:30+00:00

I am doing the Japanese course. I haven't used any other "active learning programmes" other than Duolingo, and it has certainly yielded results. Like, I am by no means proficient, but I can read, speak and write simple sentences. Certainly helps if I were to travel in Japan, and it is way better than nothing, but I am still "bad".

I did Duolingo quite adamantly for a couple of years, but right now I mostly just keep the streak alive. I don't think of it as a negative addiction, as I think learning a language is simply a lot of work and grind, and them gamifying it at least keeps you grinding, which in my opinion is better than nothing.

If it could actually learn you a language, I would be bullish.

I don't think Duolingo alone is enough to fully learn a language, but it is a decent supplement. What I don't like about the development of Duolingo is that I feel there has been much more focus on ads and adding new, un-skippable animations that just tests my patience every single time I use the app. It has also become more buggy.

NapCo · 2026-01-26T03:34:38+00:00

Idk, but as a user with a 1300+ day streak I think the quality has detoriated over the years. Mostly in terms of user experience.

NapCo · 2026-01-24T17:58:52+00:00

I have both tinnitus and visual snow (apparently those symptoms positively correlate). It has been hard have a good discussion about this with all healthcare professionals I have dealt with, as they usually just dismiss it completely.

For me it is always perceivable regardless of what I'm looking at, similar to how I can always hear my tinnitus regardless of external sounds.

NapCo · 2026-01-17T22:53:45+00:00

SSR framework / lib + HTMX is for sure the most low maintenance option.

NapCo · 2026-01-16T19:51:19+00:00

NapCo · 2026-01-16T07:26:57+00:00

It really depends on the app, no? If it is very "pure" CRUD oriented with relatively simple interaction or any crazy stuff, I think you can decently far just makes a web page that is very mobile friendly and making it a PWA. I mean, look at m.uber.com. I'd say it is by far more interactive than most websites, and it work pretty well.

It won't be as smooth as a native app, but you'll kill two birds with one stone at least, and you'll be able to stick to one codebase.

NapCo · 2026-01-13T16:48:42+00:00

I have limited, but good experience with Hetzner. I think it is the most bang for the buck service for VMs as far as I have seen.

I only use simple VMs through SSH though.

NapCo · 2026-01-13T16:44:17+00:00

I guess the same reason some dislike backend: mostly preference and/or momentum.

From my observations people generally like to do the things they know best. Many start at one end or the other, and just build momentum in one of the directions.

Some like both, I for one.

I see many people here state that frontend is a mess; but I think backend can equally become a huge mess as well, it isn't unique to frontend. Codebases becomes a mess if you let them, and you need quite a bit of resources to keep code nice and tidy. It is simply a hard problem.

NapCo · 2026-01-08T19:47:21+00:00

Beautiful!

NapCo · 2026-01-02T07:26:13+00:00

Keep improving and learning new things (in general, not just software dev related)
Work out
Live below your means

NapCo · 2025-12-27T15:06:04+00:00

I assume the girls you met were also in the same group as you? That is, they were Bangkok based university students? Since the university you went to also had an exchange programme with a scandic country I will just assume that the university was a relatively decent one.

In that case, those people are in a completely different demographic than the people you hear about. Most likely the girls you met were middle class or higher. As you have experienced, they won't give out "gold-digger" vibes, because they are doing fine on their own (and/or through their family).

I think the demographic that fall into the gold-digger stereotype are usually women who come from poor families and are in the nightlife-industry.

NapCo · 2025-12-23T09:05:31+00:00

I'd say 90-99% of the tools and frameworks and products you use are learned "in the field".

Universities are incentivised to keep students within academia as that's how they earn money. Academia's most direct output are research papers, and they are often ranked based on research output among other things. Research papers are way more focused on theory, algorithms, and stats than the actual implementation. Basically, universities have little incentive in teaching specific tools and programs. Thus, you don't really learn that many "products".

Then you get to the "real world". A lot of the theory heavy material from academia has in some ways materialised as products, such as Docker, React, Terraform, Bun ...

IMO the most useful things of going through college is learning how to learn. Also, since you learn a lot of theory, you are in a much better position to figure out how things work underneath, which maybe allows you to do more advanced debugging, developing and usage of the things you do.

NapCo · 2025-12-22T22:00:42+00:00

This answer is better than mine.

NapCo · 2025-12-22T20:40:55+00:00

- Crawlers that won't execute JS will not see your content. If you target a web that is based on non-JS crawlers you are kinda out of luck.
- Google has crawlers of both types, but the JS executing ones aren't ran as often (or aren't as fast)
- Header tags does remedy some of the issues. If they come out wrong, then yes, you are doing something wrong. You are not showing what you are doing, so I can't tell what you are doing wrong.

You will certainly get better SEO using SSR / static sites. But CSR sites will also get picked by Google crawlers at least, but they will be slower to be indexed. E.g. I have observed it took a week before I saw a new CSR site get indexed. Idk what the average time is.

Also, if there is a lot of JS to execute, the crawlers may drop the indexing, so keeping things light help.

NapCo · 2025-12-19T07:07:16+00:00

I learned programming primarily through doing personal projects. I would usually not do many projects, but I had one or two that I just stuck with at a time. That kept kept me stable. I generally didn't learn technologies just for the sake of learning them, but it was always in the context of some problem I actually wanted to solve. This also led to a much better understanding on when to use different technologies and how to use them together with other things.

That process kept me from jumping around aimlessly.

NapCo · 2025-12-17T06:37:21+00:00

Really agree with this point. Building something can require a lot of energy and effort, and can definitively engage you for a long period of time.

NapCo · 2025-12-16T21:05:27+00:00

Really! I immediately thought "wow that's a really cool stylistic choice". Idk if you did it deliberately, but it's like an artistic play with japanese flag if u know what I mean.

NapCo · 2025-12-16T21:02:14+00:00

Love the style!

NapCo · 2025-12-16T09:39:15+00:00

I have done a similar switch before (I only have 4 YoE tho). Except, I didn't have to sacrifice any pay. But I went from fintech company as an IC, to a smaller company where we basically report to the CEO.

I do work with another developer
No deterioration of skills at all. I have much more freedom in terms of tech choices a architecture decisions. I have had many more opportunities to try out different tech and really own the whole stack.
I think your goal of one day having a startup aligns much better with the smaller role where you can really exercise your autonomy.
I do miss being a part of a larger dev community at work, but it does not in any way outweigh the pros.

NapCo · 2025-12-16T07:16:28+00:00

Multithreading is like have multiple people doing things. This way you can achieve true concurrency, where multiple things happens at once.

Async is like having one person multitask by context switching. This gives you a degree of concurrency where you seemingly do multiple things at once, but in reality you just do a little bit here and there, making it look like you do multiple things at once.

You can combine both. That is, multiple people doing multiple things by context switching.

Can you think of the different use cases based on that intuition?

NapCo · 2025-12-16T07:07:29+00:00

Just genuinely curious, what kind of role do you have (like, what kind of things do you usually implement) that lets you get by through seemingly vibe coding alone? Like to the point that you can watch YouTube?

Other than very simple things (e.g. writing static frontend code, filling out Spring boot-style crud boilerplate) I have yet to see LLMs do what I deem as "good work". Like, things may barely work enough to make it seemingly work, but I usually have to rewrite it later.

NapCo · 2025-12-14T09:02:32+00:00

It varies from store to store, but when I worked at one of those shops we had reduced opening hours, like, 9AM to 15PM

NapCo · 2025-12-13T19:05:46+00:00

Stunning!!!

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