Self study is the best study. Out of all the bloatedness of modern education, one thing that doesnt bother me is the high cost of textbooks. High quality books and a habit of studying yourself enables you to learn high skill disciplines on the cheap.
For me, I am currently slogging through Lazlo Lovasz's combinatorics book and another one on Monte Carlo method. Dont know why but its just a good way to pass the time while staying away from the internet and its attention hogging.
Are technical/scientific books from pre-1925 particularly useful for self-learning today? I'd imagine for most disciplines, the knowledge has progressed and possibly changed course since then and it may be more outdated than not.
It might depend on the topic. Classical mechanics? I'm not sure that there is any fundamentally new knowledge since 1925 in that field. What's different is that people have 100 more years of figuring out how to explain it well.
For me its the money. Software paid and does pay well when I got in. I have actually been trying to get the eff out as fast as I can and move to management/research (I work in ML). I have avoided web dev shit like the plague since it is indeed very low value added work. The fact that LLMs can finish all this crappy work for 20bucks a month where I dont have to do it by hand is a welcome step. Otoh, I dont think point and trust is the way to do AI assisted coding. You get better output when you know the business logic and can make sense of the code. In fact, I prompt many many times until the AI spits out something I understand.
Honestly all the complaining about dying of a craft is just pathetic. In one of the jobs I worked, there were specific performance rubrics under "Craft" and those really annoyed me. Software / Code is just a tool to solve a problem.
Coding is a tool to solve a problem, but, to many it is also a culture. It has a history, it has connections, it has lore, it had some loosely commonly held values, and yes it absolutely was a craft. It’s okay for people to mourn that. It’s not the same as someone who may have taken it up for money. That itself, is seeing coding as a tool for income—which is valid.
Calling it pathetic I think lacks empathy and perhaps an appreciation for what it might mean to other people outside the letters we type. Those letters, the languages we type, compilers that process them, and libraries that enable them were, at the end of the day, made by people.
Thats actually right. Tbh, I loved learning languages and read books like Programming Perl just because somebody recommended it in an online forum (back in the day). So I get the appeal. But in the end, coding by hand is on its way out and its better to move on rather than romanticize.
Right. Lets all write our own Spring Framework / Django / Ruby on Rails. Everyone who contributed to these frameworks was obviously a jackass but me with my Claude sub can beat everybody while ignoring the actual stuff that I should be doing. Makes for a perfectly great maintenance burden.
Literally everything is a UI atop a database. Writing the data models, crafting the right uI and the right flows is non trivial. It requires iteration and that refinement is what customers pay for. The reality with SaaS stocks is they dont make anything critical. eg Take any large consumer tech company and they dont use Klaviyo. These companies build their own stack and one thats intimately connected with the data lake. It works for tech companies since they hve good data and it doesng work for non-tech companies because a good fraction of their data is trash.
This was the same hype around NoCode a few years ago. Thing is people for software as a service and internal teams dont want to do the service part. A common thread among all of the vibe coded stuff I hear is that nobody talks about the next requirement which was handled. Frankly UIs are learnable and after a few tries everybody gets used to it. The extra polish is totally not worth it. Eventually every SaaS on the non-critical business path gets ripped out with one of the platform players such as SAP, SalesForce etc which are infinitely customizable. Salesforce even has its own language in which customers write their apps.
The system of record bit is quite correct and imo the only durable advantage. But that doesnt explain why Klaviyo shoyld worry. In fact marketing workflows are some of the most important systems of record directly tied to business earnings.
The assumtpion that in SaaS you build once and everybody uses it is false. There are always customizations or features that need to be built for big contracts. Its the small players that are okay with out of the box SaaS since they lack the budget to pay for a customization. Ironically, these teams will get hurt the most should they choose to go down the vibe code everything path. Here infra capex is far lower than payroll and owning too much software (vibe coded or not) will simply steal time from business development.
Honestly, the market just panicked and caused a temporary correction thats all. Then we all got busy and wrote a bunch of thought leadership crap on top.
In reality AI is the best thing to happen to SaaS companies since it reduces RnD time and expenses, allows even small players to bid for large contracts without overloading existing dev capacity and also makes it possible to put devs in front of customers since now there's no need to sit down and code. AI is also the best thing to happen to engineering since it now allows for product management to be folded into the existing craft.
For me, I am currently slogging through Lazlo Lovasz's combinatorics book and another one on Monte Carlo method. Dont know why but its just a good way to pass the time while staying away from the internet and its attention hogging.