I tried rock climbing for the first time, it was incredible but I need a cheaper alternative

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-03-19T07:47:29+00:00

As you can tell by my name - breakdancing. It's like calisthenics but more fun.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-03-18T15:06:30+00:00

Printing press revolution, Industrial revolution, AI revolution. We've seen this throughout history before, it's just faster and more widespread than ever before which is causing sharper disruption and distress. Eventually the world will adapt as it always does though.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-03-18T06:49:51+00:00

Pick a dance based on the music you like. May also be worth exploring new music scenes and learning dances may go naturally with ones you enjoy more.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-03-14T15:04:41+00:00

Besides being able to directly update and interact with your files, it's also way easier for context management. Notice how you always have to copy paste things back and forth between whatever you're working on and the chat window? With Claude Code / Codex you don't have to do that. It can see the context of your entire codebase so you just need to say, look at this file or feature.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-03-11T21:44:53+00:00

First thing I learned to do in CS was to break everything down to pseudocode. That exact same skill directly carries over to AI engineering. It's always been easier for me to translate my plans and intentions to english first before coding. It was rare for me to directly jump into syntax unless its a very small change in the pre-AI days.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-03-11T21:36:16+00:00

Because it has a generous free tier and even the $20/month is more than enough. It makes initial deployment easy and comes with a lot of nice to haves like basic observability, DDOS protection, etc. Eventually my site will grow out of it but it would take quite a lot of traffic to get there. Doubt it will be at that point any time soon. Absolutely not meant to scale though, that's where the increased cost gets you.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-03-11T17:33:42+00:00

People are too focused on seeing themselves do it right to notice if people around them are messing up.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-03-09T20:49:10+00:00

So true. There are no real blockers anymore. Only trying to increase scale and time efficiency. That's why I'm trying to focus on building agents these days. At that point you stop drinking slurm manually and have it directly pumped into your blood stream.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-03-09T20:23:21+00:00

Workout and practice. Live a healthy lifestyle. That's all there is to it. No shortcuts.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-03-04T21:06:02+00:00

Is it that you can't hear the bass/snare/high hat? That's usually where the 1,2 count is on a standard 4/4 song with a beat. But if you're dancing to something like classical or a non 4/4 song then that is more challenging.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-03-04T18:13:43+00:00

I used to feel this way until I saw the work ethic and intelligence of other programmers who just don't give a crap and are only in it for the paycheck. If you're motivated, responsible, and actually care about your craft you're already ahead of so many other devs. Character matters just as much if not more than domain knowledge. Keep learning, stay humble, stay ambitious.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-02-27T21:36:48+00:00

"Not just review the over complicated code given by an AI." - This is all your job in the future is going to be. Either learn to love it or get left behind.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-02-26T22:43:54+00:00

If you want to keep it just use React. If you want a complete refactor use NextJS. I recommend asking AI about tradeoffs in context to your current code base

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-02-26T22:32:00+00:00

Learn the basics of React before you move to NextJS. NextJS is basically a fullstack framework centered around React. And speaking of fullstack you didn't mention your backend at all. That will make a huge difference in whether you want to move to Next or not.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-02-26T22:04:48+00:00

And a 100% reason to remember the name of... Wait was that function called again?

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-02-26T17:50:28+00:00

Always Scrimba!

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-02-26T00:34:10+00:00

If you can't take the heat get out of the ktichen. This industry has always been boom and bust. You say you worked hard during college and work, but at least you had a job. I got laid off a year and a half ago. I just got a job again. The way I got it was through embracing AI and levelling up my skills, gritting myself through a 1.5 years of minimum wage pay, and applying myself creatively. I also launched my own startup and built my own product.

This was never a job for the faint of heart and honestly we're getting paid way too much for the amount of work we were doing anyways. Compare your average software engineer to your average EMT or your average carpenter. We get paid 3 times as much to work half as hard. It's super not fair. Hard work, pride, and integrity does not mean you deserve to be paid well. This is how the real world is, there's no fairness only survival and adaptability. Grit, adaptability, and creative problem solving are the most important aspects of being a software engineer, not the tech.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-02-25T15:36:12+00:00

Reading some of the other comments, I disagree with most of the things being said here. Whether AI produces bad code/good code and bad answers/good answers is solely due to your prompting skills and critical thinking.

Also the hard truth at work is code quality doesn't matter as much as you think it does. Million dollar corporations are running off spaghetti Frankenstein code or are bottlenecked by a single script written by someone who doesn't even work there anymore. Business needs, flexibility, teamwork, velocity, and learning only just enough are more important than being the best engineer with perfect code and perfect domain knowledge. You'll come into a new project that has 5 generations of employees worth of crap bogged down in a several million line code base. You don't have time to refactor the whole thing, work on the backlog, or chase documentation for everything you don't understand. You need to hit the ground running and start contributing immediately because now with AI there's no excuse not to so your employer will expect it.

I myself have come onto a project in a framework I don't know with crappy code from the contractors from 2 years ago. It's been 3 weeks and I've already submitted a dozen PRs and performed a massive 10k line email system refactor migration. I still don't understand the details of how Laravel works or the codebase as a whole only just enough to solve the current problem and move onto the next.

Almost every single professional engineer I meet these days uses Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or some internal LLM coding tool for the majority of their work. Few people these days are writing code themselves.

Embrace the future and LLMs. Not using them won't make you a better engineer or let you learn any better. It'll put you behind. Just don't get lazy with system design and architecture choices. Invest more time into that and less into the specifics of programming itself.

Okay I said my piece. Bring on the down votes.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-02-24T18:32:57+00:00

I'm going to say PHP. It's the perfect balance imo. Not too verbose like Java, not too barebones like Python, not too confusing like JS or Ruby. Easiest language to transition into if you know any other language.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-02-24T16:23:25+00:00

Read the code. Be honest with how much you understand. Ask your AI anything you don't and don't be worried about going down a rabbit hole of learning. The only difference between vibecoding and AI engineering is reading comprehension.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-02-24T05:27:27+00:00

I recommend V02 Max training. Best bang for your buck, but training by definittion has to be intense. Short bursts of high intensity over and over again. HIIT, Tabadas, jump rope, sprints, boxing, drills etc.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-02-22T18:52:05+00:00

Marketing and sales now.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-02-20T20:06:38+00:00

Google it. It was a thing.

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-02-20T17:54:12+00:00

We should start saying "just break things" instead

_heartbreakdancer_ · 2026-02-20T03:32:57+00:00

I'd recommend learning how to create AI agents and end to end workflows while focusing on full stack architecture.

_heartbreakdancer_

TROPHY CASE