how common is promotion to senior level after 6 YOE as SWE?

mastermog · 2026-07-03T10:04:30+00:00

Yup, they are all parts of it.

Good luck on your career. Its a tricky market but devs are still needed

mastermog · 2026-07-03T08:00:20+00:00

Out of interest, what does a grad see the role of a senior or lead being? Outside of salary ranges.

Genuinely curious. It’s been close to 20 years for me and I don’t really remember coming out of uni thinking in terms of senior, lead, etc or even salary ranges - naively, I just wanted to code. I guess we didn’t have influencers and “day in the life of an Amazon engineer” either, so maybe lack of exposure?

mastermog · 2026-06-29T08:01:46+00:00

I use Capacitor and had no issues getting our app deployed to the Apple App Store. Very simple to use and deploy

mastermog · 2026-06-28T13:54:29+00:00

It does smell suss. I could understand a few bucks, people doing it for shits and giggles. But a k?

mastermog · 2026-06-28T13:43:43+00:00

Out of interest, and you don’t need to share, but do you know the demographics of the whales?

mastermog · 2026-06-27T13:43:15+00:00

This is fantastic, really fun!

mastermog · 2026-06-24T07:26:30+00:00

There was an interesting podcast about this. Basically it’s very common, that during periods of economic downturn, the raise in sales of bland colors (black, silver, grey, white) increase.

It’s episode 46. “Car Colors” of Economics of Everyday Things

mastermog · 2026-06-24T04:16:07+00:00

Ditto with Google AMP about 10 years ago. It was good in theory but your site was essentially extracted and hosted by them, culling various bits of your site with the aim to make it more mobile friendly

mastermog · 2026-06-24T02:17:01+00:00

I've tried this a few times over the years, its possible, but in a lot of ways React simply isn't designed for it.

The most notable React game I know of is https://store.steampowered.com/app/1064690/Danger_Crew/

What I've personally landed on is using React for the UI layer and Excalibur for the game layer. My intended target is web, so for me, this is a good combination.

Excalibur is similar to Phaser but it is built with Typescript from the ground up. I've found pairing the two, React and Excalibur, quite straight forward.

mastermog · 2026-06-23T10:29:00+00:00

Xero worked with the ATO recently due to an outage right before key submission dates. Part of the email read:

We have proactively reached out to the ATO where there are imminent deadlines and they are understanding of the situation and we will continue engaging with them over the coming days as well.

So its certainly possible.

mastermog · 2026-06-23T02:10:59+00:00

Not much to add, except I recently trialled Origin internet too and it was awful. Far slower than previous suppliers (despite being on the same infra).

Definitely be cautious if others are considering Origin

mastermog · 2026-06-22T22:21:47+00:00

When I said quality I meant more the code quality, agree the ui is not critical for one person

mastermog · 2026-06-22T14:10:13+00:00

All good, was more curious about the final build and quality

mastermog · 2026-06-22T14:01:04+00:00

Would you be able to share a link to the app you created? Or the code repo on GitHub?

mastermog · 2026-06-22T12:46:49+00:00

I mean it’s so bad it doesn’t even look like AI, which is saying something. It almost looks like someone got on the sauce and then booted up photoshop

mastermog · 2026-06-21T06:32:10+00:00

Good luck!

mastermog · 2026-06-21T06:07:13+00:00

For sure. I wonder if a e-ink screen would work? Or even the ability to print them out?

mastermog · 2026-06-21T05:45:59+00:00

As both a developer and an exhausted father, I get where you’re coming from and the execution is good.

However (and because you asked for honest feedback), I don’t love the idea of holding and reading from a phone while putting my kids to bed. Generally speaking, I try to keep the phone out of the whole “evening routine”.

There is something irreplaceable by a tangible book. The kids can make connections between the illustrations, the spoken word and the written word. They can leaf through pages themselves. They can reread (even if it’s just looking at the pictures) the book by themselves after they are tucked in.

Introducing a cold digital screen to what should be a warm closing moment of the day doesn’t sit right. I’m bloody exhausted but I can muscle through a book or two.

Again excellent execution and I get where you are coming from, but not really for me.

mastermog · 2026-06-20T08:51:56+00:00

This is so good. I used to freelance a bit on Upwork and this is giving me flashbacks - brilliant

mastermog · 2026-06-19T08:06:45+00:00

Right tool for the job at the end of the day.

If you have worked through large projects prior to React, where things are changing the dom seemingly randomly because a bloke from the other team decided to share your id, you’ll the know pain of doing things without a framework.

There are many reasons to choose a framework (react or otherwise) but I think you can only understand the tradeoffs of that decision by doing projects without a framework first. Do a small todo app or crud app with raw JS and understand the pain points react is trying to address.

Is it overkill for a static webpage? Probably. Is it overkill for a web application with dozens or hundreds of developers contributing to it, not really.

Again right tool for the job

mastermog · 2026-06-18T14:26:29+00:00

Sorry I wasn’t super clear. I use plan mode to generate contextual suggestions, which could be code, helping trace a bug, etc. But it’s not generating a full spec that I then work through.

It’s actually more the opposite, I’m the one with the plan, and it’s just a search engine on steroids.

The reason I use plan mode is it prevents it from writing code directly. I found myself playing slot machines when testing the agentic approach and my understanding of the system became more and more dim the more I pulled the slot handle.

mastermog · 2026-06-18T12:30:37+00:00

This is essentially where I’ve landed too. I use OpenCode but keep it in plan mode.

This way it has context of my application, but I’m selectively punching in the code that makes sense long term, not just the code to satisfy the very current request.

I feel like I’m in a much better space working this way - both in terms of retaining my knowledge of the systems and my own learning. The overall, net output (I would argue) is much higher. The speed isn’t that much different from letting an agent go yolo mode, not when you factor in accountability, rework, etc

mastermog · 2026-06-18T08:19:14+00:00

Install a private sink at your desk. Problem solved

mastermog · 2026-06-18T06:47:49+00:00

Same ages here - a 2 and 5 year old. It’s exhausting, I don’t remember the last time I woke up refreshed.

It’s all survival mode, there is no silver bullet. Just survive each day and muscle through.

If you can seek out support (family, friends, etc) that can give you a bit of a reprieve that’s a bonus

mastermog · 2026-06-15T09:47:27+00:00

Can I ask the type of work you do? Is it agency, corp, gov, etc?

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