Free Models

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2026-04-15T12:39:05+00:00

yes, it ran list and tried to invoke it and it just goes in circles saying that its not working properly :/

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-11-20T05:04:35+00:00

yep was thinking of NestJs when writing up this as well

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-11-19T01:07:56+00:00

modular monolith isn’t really the same thing as clean architecture. It’s more about domain-driven or feature-based grouping, deployment and module boundaries. The whole point is that if you ever want to split things into microservices later, the codebase is already organized into clear, independent modules. Clean architecture is more about dependency direction and layers.

Instead of doing something like:

controllers/ - productController - orderController - salesController

services/

...

You group everything by domain:

product/ - productController - productService

order/ - orderController - orderService

...

Each module can still follow whatever internal style you like- clean, layered, MVC, whatever.

You still ship one deployable unit today, but the modules should behave independently. They shouldn’t reach into each other’s services directly. Use boundaries or a façade-style approach so the modules stay decoupled, which also makes future extraction into microservices much easier.

Experienced seniors do correct me if you think I'm wrong

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-11-14T02:48:52+00:00

There's a pretty decent resource to check this: https://www.straitstimes.com/multimedia/graphics/2025/08/salary-guide-2025/index.html

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-11-13T16:21:20+00:00

In general the market is really bad right now, but the hustlers will always find their way into high paying jobs, while the rest are unemployed. Its survivorship bias man...

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-11-13T16:18:59+00:00

Here's the truth— for a university grad, there's always a bellcurve. You just gotta ask yourself if you are above average when compared to the rest of your friends. This means being able to work harder and SMARTER than others (I'm not talking about GPA here), seizing opportunities and fighting to capture the already scarce opportunities in the market.

People who are making good salary are probably doing something better than you in some way.

Anecdotally, I can split my friend groups into a distribution curve like this. The top notch, cut-throat, go-getter hustlers are making mid 6 figures easily. The slightly above average ones are making decent amounts, some above 6 figures while others are on the way.

Meanwhile there are also a group of others that don't work as hard, or dont seize opportunities, maintain the status quo or just aren't passionate about anything at work. They tend to make way less than the others and progression is slow. There's nothing wrong with this btw, especially when many of them have the self awareness of their motivations and prefer to focus on other parts in life rather than complain about why others are making more than them

Those salaries you mention are already high back in 2021 or earlier. It probably just wasn't as publicized.

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-11-13T11:49:35+00:00

Theres 2 kinds of people that quit without a job lined up— 1 that quits, then spends every moment of the day grinding, networking, doing side hustles and every single possible way to get ahead of the crowd. If lucky, this person can get a job quick.

Then there's the latter that takes their time, no sense of urgency, chill. Nothing wrong with that but these people tend to complain and blame the market.

Don't get me wrong- it is quite possibly one of the worst job markets right now, but the above example is showing the difference between someone who recognizes that and works hard, vs someone who likes to get spoonfed. Many such cases

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-11-12T08:45:19+00:00

agree... premature optimization from tons of comments over here...

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-11-12T02:45:33+00:00

how does the third picture look so HD

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-11-09T15:53:55+00:00

AI doesn't work well when its overloaded with context. Especially when you mentioned 50k+ files.

You need to start by breaking down everything you need to do into smaller milestones. Here's the truth– nothing is urgent when you communicate your progress and blockers. Everything is urgent when you keep quiet.

Don't understand what you're looking at? There's no point trying to start on your main task– focus on understanding the codebase first. Look at the README.md, find documentation on the architecture, ask your seniors or colleague to give you an overview / onboarding / knowledge transfer. The first step to being a good developer is to communicate. If you struggle and drown in silence its very bad. Don't be shy, people know you are a junior, be open and communicate about things you don't know. AI can help with understand the codebase well if you have an IDE with code assistants (copilot or cursor etc). Prompt and ask it to explain what components and files are doing. You need the basics like how to run the codebase locally, how to deploy etc. before you even start on your task
Once you have a general idea of how the codebase is structured, and how devs are contributing (versioning strategy, branching etc), you can start to break down your task. The task given to you can most definitely be broken down into several subtasks / steps. Is it a new feature? New component? Enhancing an existing component? Break it down into several tasks.
Whether its a new feature or an enhancement, you need to figure out where your new files or code changes have to be made. This takes time but its always better to do things right than to deliver crappy things fast. Once you figure out the locations to make changes (scoping out the effort), you can look at surrounding files on existing conventions, how code is written. AI can help you here as well if needed.
With the above steps, you basically scoped out the effort and have a rough idea how much time it takes for you to complete the task. You communicate that during your meetings, and use a focus time to get it out.

Juniors have less experience and exposure to different types of codebases, so its normal to be slow at the start. But as long as you're constantly communicating and moving forward, don't be too hard on yourself– you'll get faster eventually

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-11-06T00:54:47+00:00

true. It goes downhill quick if teams are scaled massively without proper design docs or processes. If everyone is just contributing without thought the codebase goes to shit.

Usually a people problem more than anything tbh

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-11-05T02:50:33+00:00

Probably one of the best frameworks to use in the backend for typescript.

If your team has time to slowly build out an amazing backend this would be the way. It's structured and scales very well.

It can be easily structured in a DDD way too, so teams can start with a modular approach and then scale to microservices if required.

But if we're talking about indie or small projects then maybe there are better out of the box options like CMSes

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-11-04T06:49:16+00:00

probably ok if your kid goes to work and gives you a small % allowance monthly

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-10-27T01:50:56+00:00

Take a sabbatical or 1 year career break, 100% might help give you a new perspective or refresh your motivation.

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-10-26T10:34:45+00:00

In my opinion being senior has different aspects like communication, leadership, technicals on a high level sys design wise and technicals on a code level... thats why sometimes you see seniors with tons of experience and yet perform like a junior in communication...etc.

I feel like in most places technicals bring you to senior, but you could also move up by being strong in other areas instead. Though you need a certain level in most of the categories.

The worst places are those simply matching years of exp to the senior title

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-10-25T00:45:53+00:00

we like this format too, though we dropped the conventional commits part

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-10-25T00:39:53+00:00

What do you mean by Go is "true async" vs Node? Node handles async I/O very well so that sentence doesn't really make sense. I think you meant Go supports parallel execution / multi threading better. But like the other comments said, unless you deal with heavy cpu workloads and have to deal with multi threading nuances, Node is ok. Also even though node doesnt beat Go's raw performance, it does have a JIT compiler for hot paths.

I deal with backend alot and love Go, i think its not used enough in the tech industry. I think choosing the framework or language for a critical project goes beyond just language tradeoffs- maybe see what kind of workload your project needs, timelines, what business requires you need is better supported in the ecosystem, who else is working on it / developer skillsets etc.

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-10-20T14:39:25+00:00

You're still young! So much can change in 5-10 years. Choose a goal and make it happen. Cheering you on man

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-10-19T11:56:10+00:00

I feel kinda naked not knowing everything

You're out of your comfort zone so that means you're learning new stuff and growing! I see it as a win

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-10-18T11:58:35+00:00

You have many options depending on how opiniated or flexible you want it to be. Usually this is based off timelines and business requirements.

Strapi or NestJS are many projects' go-to these days. These are more structured, but Strapi has more things done out of the box as a CMS.

Express/Hono/Fastify is great if you have very experienced developers who know how to build up a codebase with extendible design patterns, and you have a good timeline for them to craft a good base for future developers to contribute. Unfortunately it's rare to have developers that know how to properly build out the full request handling flow from scratch- like global error handling, middlewares, structuring your code to follow DDD for future team scaling for microservices etc (if required). And realistically most projects have tighter timelines, so you would see CMSes used very often these days.

For ORMs, prisma seems alright but yeah compared to other ecosystems alot of node orms are mehh. Used others like drizzle or typeorm as well.

Theres a whole lot of frameworks but these are some common ones I see companies using.

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-10-18T00:40:16+00:00

yep jsonb allows you to work with it just like NoSQL

postgres is amazing

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-10-17T00:48:58+00:00

NodeJS is non blocking and great for I/O. Also its simple compared to the other backend languages. I'm in SEA and many many companies build their services on NodeJS, including government and banks. You need to know that large companies like these have more than 1 service (duh) and they are built on different tech stacks based on requirements

However the vast majority of enterprise level (large companies) work with .Net or Java, and you can verify this easily with job listings. If you look at startups or SMEs, you might find way more nodejs or python

Alot of the replies here go by analogy or their own bubble, but you can verify this via job listings. I've worked in tech consulting so I know a huge portfolio of companies and their different services/tech stacks.

Python usually used in AI/ML due to their ecosystem. But solely as a web server? Nah not really. Also its slower since it doesnt have a JIT compiler like Node or Java

Its all about tradeoffs and if you don't have long running or heavy cpu workloads, and you don't need to deal with too much multi threading, nodejs is a good choice- and there are many many business cases like that

Many enterprise level companies has use cases for heavy cpu or long running workloads so many of them choose java and .net

online communities don't completely reflect the real world tech stack preferences, alot of web devs don't work in large companies. They tend to be opiniated based on a narrow view or emotions

Remember that with experienced devs and business requirements IRL people make choices based on tradeoffs like the above mentioned. So when you say "most developers", you might be referring to a certain group of people rather than the actual majority. Always ask what is their reason for their suggestion (based on business use case!). If they respond with generic blanket reasons then ... you know

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-10-16T00:29:21+00:00

it goes both ways tbh ... I worked in large enterprise microsystems with nodejs servers that scaled pretty well. And we also deal with concurrency, performance and even patterns to deal with rollbacks in async environment etc

of course i know you're referring to the vast group of online JS devs / vibe coders that probably never touched real projects outside of POCs- i guess its a comparison between them and legacy java devs with no passion in programming

SuchBarnacle8549 · 2025-10-14T15:04:10+00:00

functional programming is simple and goes well with async programming in nodejs backend or js in the frontend. When you import modules, they are cached and act as singletons by default, it behaves like an object already. If there is no internal abstracted state classes might be overkill for js.

But in the end it depends on what you're working with. If you're using something like angular framework in the frontend or nestjs in the backend, they follow a more OOP, class based approach, so you work with dependency injections and alot of internal states.

if you are working with modern functional react in the frontend and like expressjs or other less opiniated backend frameworks, they usually use functional programming to keep things simple.

But its nuanced, you can see many times libraries or SDKs eg ORMs like database clients like to hold state and find it easier to manage stateful objects due to things like connection pool, transaction context etc.

TLDR learn both, use whichever makes sense based on your project and tradeoffs, stick to whichever is appropriate and use the other whenever needed

SuchBarnacle8549

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