3 ms·

I've been doing full-stack Dev (mostly Django though I foolishly had a brief moment where I kinda thought Flask was okay then fell for the same dumb thing brief

by Induane 4mo ago

I've been doing full-stack Dev (mostly Django though I foolishly had a brief moment where I kinda thought Flask was okay then fell for the same dumb thing briefly with FastAPI) for 20+ years and don't feel marketable. I went from jQuery to a brief dalliance with Angular to HTMX+_HyperScript. Everyone wants full stack Devs to use react and struggle eternally with insane dependency trees and challenging client side state management. I like to build things that can be maintained in perpetuity by small teams. So I'm not very marketable.

hyperhello 4mo ago
Write a script that tidies up and fixes everything in a repo.
- Induane 4mo ago
  Turn Claude loose I guess.
joss82 4mo ago
Dude. You are marketable as fuck. Don’t live in the hype. Not everyone is drinking the ai cool-aid bottoms up. What do you mean by fastapi being a mistake ?
- Induane 4mo ago
  I don't know; I am not sure I'm marketable in THIS particular market. As for FastAPI bring a mistake - that's an overgeneralisation to be sure. It has it's uses. My first issue is that it falls into the same kind of small footprint as Flask. Every Flask project I work on slowly reinvents Django via a combination of plugins of varied quality and custom code/plugins. Get some Auth plugins, build step for manifest static files, add in Jinja2, grab an ORM like SQLAlchemy (or hopefully PeeWee), a migration system, test runners with fixtures/dB integration and rollback and on and on and on. FastAPI is operating more at that level but also adds the often unnecessary complexity of async. In Python this is a cooperative setup meaning you have to yield to the event loop yourself (otherwise despite being "async" it blocks). Plus with a webapp all async often does is let you hammer your services (i.e. dispatch more queries to your poor DB) harder. The actual performance improvements don't manifest so much at scale as people often think. Plus you end up with a whole second set of ways to call functions and... makes me pine for gevent. There are absolutely cases for this kind of async, even in webapps, but it's often not actually that helpful in places that it's used (and doesn't actually need to be everywhere). Good development imo means picking the right tool for the job rather than jumping on hype trains. MongoDB is webscale!!
  - joss82 4mo ago
    Thank you for this answer, it saved me hours of experimenting. And bonus points for bashing MongoDB, of course. Every single project that I worked on where MongoDB was used, also had MongoDB as the single largest constraint and operations time sink.
wccrawford 4mo ago
I'm full stack for 19 years and I love React, and I've been laid off for 1.5 years now. This is a terrible job market right now. That doesn't mean you don't have good skills, it just means that too many people have them. It happens from time to time in every industrial, for all skills. Obviously, I don't have any good advice about how to deal with it.
- altern8 4mo ago
  You mean you haven't been working for 1 1/2 years? How do you buy food?
  - vkou 4mo ago
    Presumably they haven't been living paycheck to paycheck for the past 19. It's not that difficult for a SWE in North America.
    - altern8 4mo ago
      Yes, I guess investments, etc., but 1.5 years is a long time. I don't think I could go more than 2-3 months. Maybe I should start saving some money.
      - Sohcahtoa82 4mo ago
        Location matters a LOT. The parent comment mentioned North America. This is huge. Tech salaries in Europe are half what they are in NA. In India, they're like 1/4 to 1/3. Saving is absolutely important, especially in such a layoff-ridden industry. You should really strive to get at least 6 months of living expenses into savings.
        altern8 4mo ago
        I know but there's always something shiny that keeps me away from that goal. But I keep reading about people getting fired because of AI and every time I do I get progressively more anxious and closer to getting start on that.

by Induane 4mo ago

hyperhello 4mo ago

Write a script that tidies up and fixes everything in a repo.

Induane 4mo ago
Turn Claude loose I guess.

joss82 4mo ago

Dude. You are marketable as fuck. Don’t live in the hype. Not everyone is drinking the ai cool-aid bottoms up. What do you mean by fastapi being a mistake ?

Induane 4mo ago
I don't know; I am not sure I'm marketable in THIS particular market. As for FastAPI bring a mistake - that's an overgeneralisation to be sure. It has it's uses. My first issue is that it falls into the same kind of small footprint as Flask. Every Flask project I work on slowly reinvents Django via a combination of plugins of varied quality and custom code/plugins. Get some Auth plugins, build step for manifest static files, add in Jinja2, grab an ORM like SQLAlchemy (or hopefully PeeWee), a migration system, test runners with fixtures/dB integration and rollback and on and on and on. FastAPI is operating more at that level but also adds the often unnecessary complexity of async. In Python this is a cooperative setup meaning you have to yield to the event loop yourself (otherwise despite being "async" it blocks). Plus with a webapp all async often does is let you hammer your services (i.e. dispatch more queries to your poor DB) harder. The actual performance improvements don't manifest so much at scale as people often think. Plus you end up with a whole second set of ways to call functions and... makes me pine for gevent. There are absolutely cases for this kind of async, even in webapps, but it's often not actually that helpful in places that it's used (and doesn't actually need to be everywhere). Good development imo means picking the right tool for the job rather than jumping on hype trains. MongoDB is webscale!!
- joss82 4mo ago
  Thank you for this answer, it saved me hours of experimenting. And bonus points for bashing MongoDB, of course. Every single project that I worked on where MongoDB was used, also had MongoDB as the single largest constraint and operations time sink.

wccrawford 4mo ago

I'm full stack for 19 years and I love React, and I've been laid off for 1.5 years now. This is a terrible job market right now. That doesn't mean you don't have good skills, it just means that too many people have them. It happens from time to time in every industrial, for all skills. Obviously, I don't have any good advice about how to deal with it.

altern8 4mo ago
You mean you haven't been working for 1 1/2 years? How do you buy food?
- vkou 4mo ago
  Presumably they haven't been living paycheck to paycheck for the past 19. It's not that difficult for a SWE in North America.
  - altern8 4mo ago
    Yes, I guess investments, etc., but 1.5 years is a long time. I don't think I could go more than 2-3 months. Maybe I should start saving some money.
    - Sohcahtoa82 4mo ago
      Location matters a LOT. The parent comment mentioned North America. This is huge. Tech salaries in Europe are half what they are in NA. In India, they're like 1/4 to 1/3. Saving is absolutely important, especially in such a layoff-ridden industry. You should really strive to get at least 6 months of living expenses into savings.
      - altern8 4mo ago
        I know but there's always something shiny that keeps me away from that goal. But I keep reading about people getting fired because of AI and every time I do I get progressively more anxious and closer to getting start on that.