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Volrath89on Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

As someone who writes software for a big grocery store chain in Germany I'm surprised the logistics work at all. It's a s*show inside once you know the details, but somehow, yes it kind of works well enough as for the customers to not even realize is there.

Volrath89on Ask HN: I'm So Lonely

LOL that hits home. This Saturday some random person talked to me in Discord. My immediate reaction was to type "Do I know you? Why are you writing to me?" But instead I just went with the flow of the conversation...

It didn't last long. After a few minutes I finally typed "Why are you talking to me?" and the other person just answered "Why not?"

It was interesting and I keep looking forward to continue chatting with her

Volrath89on .NET Myths Dispelled

I live in Europe. Here there are not "plenty" very well paid senior roles, especially not for .NET

Also take into account I'm looking for some serious amount of money in order to work there for 3-5 years and then retire.

Or maybe a US company that hires remote and pays well? Until now they all prefer to hire in the same timezone so I've had no luck so far (and I haven't seen a remote salary as good as a faang one)

Volrath89on .NET Myths Dispelled

It's probably an order of magnitude harder, especially because after university you have many CS concepts fresh, and after 8 years you have totally forgotten about inverting a binary tree...

But I think it's possible. Most FAANG now are just another big corporation and they are always hiring for all levels of experience. Especially since so many developers seem to retire early I think its doable

Volrath89on .NET Myths Dispelled

I've been a .NET dev for almost 8 years now and I agree with the general positivity sentiment in the comments, but...

As many senior devs I also want to retire early from tech. But unlike many, even if I spend hundreds of hours in leetcode, mock interviews, etc. I'm not sure if my work experience would be even considered for an interview at FAANG. Of course I could interview at Microsoft, but it's the only one. Google, Amazon, Facebook, they don't use/hire C# devs at all.

I'm guessing the only path is to learn some Java and sell myself as a C#/Java dev in order to be able to at least get an interview. Any former dotnet dev here that has successfully transitioned into a FAANG position that wants to share advices/experience?

Volrath89on How I learned French in 12 months (2020)

The good thing is... it's not that hard to get your level back. I went from A0 to B2 in German in about a year, 9 years ago. After that I lived for 1 year in Germany then left the country and didn't use nor practiced any German again for 8 years.

A couple of months ago I booked a Lingoda sprint and my first German B1 class was embarrassing. Had to go back to A2. I had forgotten so many basic words, but it took only a few classes to go back to B1 and only a few more to go to B2 (I knew it was time to go up when I felt my classmates were speaking unbearable slow).

I feel like my grammar is still worse compared to 9 years ago but my understanding and speaking are almost back to where they were before. Definitely good to know it only takes a couple of months to get your level back. Oh and I think this time my English hasn't suffered that much, since I'm not a native English speaker.

Volrath89on State of JavaScript 2021

Yes! I feel exactly the same.

I don't think I'll be looking to work in a react codebase in the future again. I don't know what was wrong with class based components, especially the lifecycle methods, they were so easy to understand/read. But almost every react codebase is now a combination of classes/hooks or 100% hooks which imo is so messy/unreadable...

When I will be looking for a job change I'll definitively look for angular only jobs (or even better, backend only)

Volrath89on Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

I think all jobs suck in some way or another. The best approach in my opinion is to not worry too much about it, work just the required 8 daily hours and try to enjoy life outside of work.

If you feel you are not getting good enough raises, just look for another job. The market is hot atm.

If the codebase is that bad and the offshore team is making it worse, see my last paragraph. Honestly I've many times considered quitting because of an awful code base

If you really like/enjoy programming and feel bad because in the job you can't program the way you want then make your own side projects, they don't need to be for profit.

Volrath89on Ask HN: Who's not sucky to work for?

In my case it was the opposite. The code done by the devs in the US was awful, the code did not compile, they didn't use git, one guy had the "working" copy of the project in his laptop...

We as the offshore team started to improve things a bit, we started using git, using CI pipelines to at least have the code always compiling, etc

After some months the CTO fired all the US devs and everybody is now offshore. We haven't had many prod issues and we deliver things faster than the last team

I guess my point is that it doesn't matter where the devs come from there are good and bad devs everywhere, if you hire good offshore devs they can be great

Volrath89on .NET Hot Reload Support via CLI

I happily pay for rider license every year. When you make so much money as a dev, investing in the tool you use every single day makes a lot of financial sense. Even if it makes you 1 or 2% more productive than VS it pays for itself (in my experience the speed boost alone is so worth it)

Volrath89on Is going to the office a broken way of working?

I think you are right if your goal is to always climb to higher positions, especially to get to the very top of management.

But some of us just want to be normal devs for most of our careers, so I don't care if I piss some % of my coworkers with some political stance, even if that means hindering my chances to get "promotions". I don't even _want_ to get any promotions.

And it's also very hard for me to make friends outside of work, which I guess it's true for almost everyone who is 30+ in the western world

Volrath89on Ask HN: Where can I live off 1k USD per month?

Colombia. Both in Bogotá and Medellin you will be able to live comfortably and the internet is pretty good in those 2 cities. I pay USD 387 for a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment relatively near the city center in Bogotá. Food is quite affordable a very good restaurant with entry, main course and a glass of wine would be less than 15. A big mac costs less than 5.

The big advantage is the plummeting of the Colombian peso in comparison to the US Dollar. 1k USD is almost 4x the minimum wage, and most people make less than the minimum wage and survive so 1k USD for one person puts you in a strong upper middle class actually.

The only caveat is that most people have poor English, so some Spanish is a must. Maybe in Medellin could be different since there is a huge number of expats there, but in Bogotá at least, most people won't speak English.

Volrath89on The Framework Laptop is now shipping

Please please launch this in non-US countries as well

Volrath89on Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

Yes but then in the new job you need to maintain other people's stuff, which is even harder that maintaining your own stuff. And over time you get to own that, including all the previous tech debt that you didn't create

Volrath89on Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout

The best/fastest performers usually get rewarded with... more work.

Something I've seen more and more often is that a lot of developers take a lot of time for every ticket. Much more time than I'd take, but I suppose it's because they are not incentivized to work fast, they'll still get paid the same no matter how many tickets they close. But I don't think paying more if you close more tickets is the solution, I don't have any solution, really.

Volrath89on ‘Great Resignation’ gains steam as return-to-work plans take effect

Although I didn't meet my wife in the same office (as a developer 95% of my colleagues have always been male), if it wasn't for the office where I had to go every day, I wouldn't have met her.

She worked in the same building for another company and we often saw each other at a nearby restaurant at lunch time. Often as in every single day. After some time (months) I was able to find someone in the other company that told me her name, searched her on facebook add her and we started talking first online, then of course we went to lunch together since we were in the same building. The rest is history as they say.

Volrath89on The most precious resource is agency

One of the best comments I've read in a long time. The importance of a steady paycheck is underrated, especially for peace of mind.

I'm in a point of life that I actually long for easy and laid back CRUD-style jobs where one can do everything easily, quickly, be productive and also work a reasonable amount of hours and can stop thinking about work after signing off.

I recently had to start a new front end using just jquery (customer requirement) and oh boy, I felt so much productive compared to react/angular

Volrath89on “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

You can live in a flat in the best parts of major cities comfortably, you could hire one or maybe even two FT employees to help you to cook, clean the house, take care of kids, etc. If you don't like the city life, you could also rent a small "mansion" in the suburbs (but then you'd suffer a bit with the internet connection, fiber only goes to major cities)

You could dine out at nice restaurants every weekend and travel around by plane every time there is a holiday and stay at 5 star hotels

Taking into account the minimum salary here is 300 USD / month and with 50k per year you are already top 1%, 100k gives you an unimaginable level of wealth. You'd earn about the same salary as the president of the country and more than most CEOs from local companies

But that would be if you spend all your salary every month which is not so smart, what most of us (bilingual developers) do is continue living a standard middle class life and just invest heavily, I invest more than 50% of my salary, mostly in real state and US stocks

Volrath89on “Great resignation” wave coming for companies

I'm located in Colombia, and all my developers friends/acquaintances that speak English are already working for US companies. Some of them earning 100k+, but most of them earning about 50-70k.

I'd say there is not a general unwillingness to hire overseas developers, on the contrary, if more people could speak english in south america US companies would be more than happy to hire even more here.

There is a shortage in english speaking developers globally, but not a shortage on companies' interest in hiring anywhere

Volrath89on Matomo: Open-source analytics platform

I've been using plausible, and don't miss a thing about GA so far

Volrath89on Ask HN: Who's looking for a co-founder?

looks promising, good luck

Volrath89on Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

https://developerjobs.world

It's a job board site specifically thought for developers. All the jobs are scrapped from companies' carreer sites.

I stopped adding companies/countries because the visits to the site are underwhelming, not more than a couple per day. I unexpectedly got "many" visits from Nigeria even though there are no jobs from that country. Maybe I could try adding Nigerian jobs; if anyone has a github link with tech companies from Nigeria similar to the ones that exist for other countries I could scrape them

Volrath89on The Future of RTS

It's worth noting that the game never really died. After the "golden age" of the early 2000's the player base organized and formed voobly, which had it's own competitive scene and even game patches for the original game (a group of developers reverse engineered it and fixed stuff like pathfinding)

And I think the game is hands down played mostly by casual players. As of today there are over 40k people that have played at least a rated multiplayer match (how many more that never hit the multiplayer button?), and from those more than 75% have an ELO lower than 1200 which is on the lower end of the spectrum (best player of the world has 2500 ELO and one starts with 1000)

The game is still pretty challenging for newcomers, my 12 year old nephew loves watching me play, but whenever I offer him a chance to play he is "scared" because it looks to difficult, and says he prefers to just watch. When I was 12 (or even younger) I loved playing. Nowadays it seems games are designed intentionally to not being too difficult to play/learn

Volrath89on Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?

Any recommendations of open source projects to work on for a C# dev?

Volrath89on New Grad vs. Senior Dev

Why do people always associate cqrs with microservices?

I have a project where only 3 developers work; we re designed it to be cqrs. I was sceptical at first - I especially don't like some of the boilerplate it creates - but I'm now sold on it by combining it with the mediator pattern, now I can have validation, logging and performance checks on every command and query without repeating code, works like a middleware

And ofc being only 3 devs it would be nuts to have microservices so we are happy with a cqrs monolith

Volrath89on Ask HN: Are books worth it?

I've always wondered how non-spanish or even non latin american people can enjoy García Márquez. His books display great usage of the language and are full of historic references. I personally enjoyed his work after having read a lot of other books (expanding my vocabulary) and only after learning colombian history and not before

PD: Before becoming a nobel laureate writer, he worked as a journalist for a newspaper. In my university we studied one of his articles in depth, as they were beautifully written.

Volrath89on .NET Core 3.0 Concludes the .NET Framework API Porting Project

.NET is an enterprise framework, mostly used in B2B software, which is rarely "rockstar"

Anyway, who cares about it, when the bulk of job vacancies are offered by the enterprise. It's a lot easier to find a junior dev role for a .NET dev than for a Ruby dev for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUgNy-okDQ4

Volrath89on .NET Core 3.0 Concludes the .NET Framework API Porting Project

Have you tried itextsharp? https://www.nuget.org/packages/iTextSharp/5.5.13.1

I've successfully used it both in .net 4.7 and .net core 2.2 to generate complex pdf structures, and it has been a great experience.

Volrath89on SQL queries don't start with SELECT

> Of course, the framework is a hairy mess for other reasons (lazy loading, untranslateable methods, ugly generated queries) but the alternative to SQL it presents is lovely.

What is wrong with lazy loading enabled by default?

Volrath89on The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

Completely agree. My default stack is now react + an api in the backend. The way you can reuse components is a great time saver (even for simple apps). I also like redux-thunk to separate all my API calls from the components. Makes everything very lean and readable.

I feel way more productive today than in the old jQuery, knockout messes