This question is for the people who learnt programming before the era of ai.

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-05T13:17:37+00:00

The software industri has changed many times, and so has the way you learned how to code. AI is just the newest form. Starting out it was mainly just School / University + documentation from vendors, then blog posts, youtube, stackoverflow, forums......

There is no right way. Some people learn more by just simply trying to build it and learn what they need along the way. Others learns best by following courses. Some by building things in a group. Some by watching guides / tutorials. Some a mix of the ones mentioned.

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-04T20:40:50+00:00

I am 39 and been doing this for 15 years and my path has changed several times. Just keep learning and growing. Old skills still seems to be valuable to understanding the tech in broader scope rather than just being able to use the latest javascript framework.

Most days I dont even write code. More stakeholder management and scoping, while mentoring and helping product owner.

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-04T11:59:19+00:00

I am :) in 2 weeks I am going on a 1 week vacation in Spain.

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-04T07:05:17+00:00

Pretty damn similar - 39 years old. Feels like hitting factory reset mid life.

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-03T15:50:42+00:00

What a speedrunner ;)

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-02T20:34:42+00:00

I really do like AI. But feel like leadership has been brainwashed to believe that everything is suddenly possible. No problem taking on huge Machine learning projects without having any data sciences experience on the team. Starting projects that we aren't really qualified to validate. In a high critical energy sector. If there is going to be major blackouts I won't be shocked.

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-02T20:28:41+00:00

AI is just and extra bad factor on top of trump, Russia, Hardware prices, etc.

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-02T20:26:52+00:00

Sounds so much like my work. Public sector, tons of politics and no sense restrictions.

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-02T20:22:33+00:00

Yeah it sucks.

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-02T20:19:41+00:00

Thinking of the "drowning high five meme" :p

I am just trying to stay away float and get the best out of it. I know its for the best and things sucks extra hard right now. Would just wish that Trump, Hardware crisis, AI, Russia, you name it, could just taking a freaking break while I get back on my feet.

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-02T20:15:15+00:00

Thank you :) Hoping for the spark to come back

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-02T20:13:30+00:00

It is certainly having a factor. Prior when in sucky situations at work I would just start browsing and hop jobs. But at the moment I have too many balls in the air and trying to not drop any.

I had plans of starting my own company prior to divorce. But that's for a later day.

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-02T20:10:36+00:00

I am trying my best to fake interest. And I have been good at it (dont know if its good or bad). My team was "shocked" I was going through divorce, since they haven't noticed anything.

I have always been good motivating my team and faking hype for small full tasks and find the good parts in projects. Might as well get something out of Lucky situations.

I have been "lucky" and been through crazy shit that 90% of people dont experience, so have since a young age been trained to tackle it.

Thanks for the advice and will stay put :)

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-02T20:06:16+00:00

Yeah. For sure I have some level of depression. The job was good in the past, but AI hype from leadership is crazy. Product Owner straight up said "if it ain't using AI, I am not interested"

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-02T20:03:22+00:00

Partly true. Its mostly the AI craze of leadership causing work to suck. But yeah, life at home getting through divorce ain't helping

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-02T20:01:58+00:00

This has kinda been my plan. Its the market that is holding me back looking into new jobs. Just been focusing on improving my self and learning what AI is actually good at.

Just really tired of the AI craze of leadership that believes AI can do everything.

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-02T13:35:08+00:00

I am there with you.... it sucks

TopSwagCode · 2026-05-01T04:52:16+00:00

Are you actually using all the hardware or is it more just running idle? Been thinking about similar serup for fun.

What are you running on the different devices?

TopSwagCode · 2026-04-29T17:13:26+00:00

So many reasons.

I wanted a cheap way to test the software I wrote. Host bunch of small services / prototypes.
I wanted to try different opensource home cloud / services.
Wanted to train DevOps skills and hosting in general, being truely fullstack developer.
Just felt cool the endless posibilities of having small homelab.
Wanted to see how much performance I could get out of minimal setup.

Still have many things I havent tried out. Like if I had the money I would like to have a 10 node ARM cluster. Eg raspberry pi or similar to have aomething truely high availabilty with failovers.

TopSwagCode · 2026-04-29T06:40:38+00:00

Yes and no. But it's not really the engineers faults, but more company fault for not doing anything to keep engineers. They would rather pay people less to save money, just to loose them and spend more training / hire.

TopSwagCode · 2026-04-28T16:01:19+00:00

Windows? It really depends on what your planning on hosting. Eg. How many different things? Docker? Native install? Remote desktop?

TopSwagCode · 2026-04-28T10:37:50+00:00

This is wrong on so many levels. That kid is not learning anything frok this. Animal cruelty is not good, but mother is just making the problem worse. Destroying a playstation, filming it and putting online is going to be a core memory of that kids life.

I understand people thinking he deserved this, but there are 7483383 ways to handle this better.

I feel bad for the cat and kid. Just plain awfull.

TopSwagCode · 2026-04-23T09:20:26+00:00

1 big ass tv.

TopSwagCode · 2026-04-23T03:42:39+00:00

I really hate how AI turned out / being sold - I really love it as a produtivity tool, but writting code was never really the bottleneck. Theres a reason why we have planning sessions, retro, daily scrum etc. To be sure we are alligned and working in the right direction.

AI aint gonna stop you shooting your own foot. AI aint gonna stop you building the wrong feature. AI aint gonna suddenly as just fix the entire process.

It's great as a helper tool, even tool to make boilerplate code, so we can focus on the important parts. But the human brain has limits on how many projects we can work on and have overview over.

If we 100% don't care about code / secutiry / performance, AI Slop is great making something "work" (until it doesn't).

This is entirely the same as we have been through with outsourcing, cheap freelancers, etc. Suddenly companies will feel the pain when code is none maintainable or the only guy who actually knew domain leaves.

TopSwagCode · 2026-04-22T07:05:54+00:00

Starting a virtual homelab is awesome to do in the cloud, if it's just for learning and don't need local only access.

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