yes you should buy a mechanical keyboard.
Anyway, thank you for sharing this @hodlbod.
I am having a similar emotional journey, albeit much shorter. 3 years ago I didn't know much about programming, and my first 2 years were quite rough because I didn't delegate anything to the clankers, but actually used AI to teach myself and was questioning everything. In hindsight that was good, and the pain I felt when learning and failing and finally making it right played a huge role in making me going to sleep tired but with a sense of satisfaction. However I felt a similar kind of satisfaction after doing some manual work like placing a parquet, painting the walls and similar. The sweat creates the meaning.
For software engineers to find a similar sense of satisfaction I see two roads. The first one is dreaming bigger, being bolder, attacking previously unexplored problems, maybe even ones were the success is tied to human understanding itself. As an example, I am researching if I can take Leela (an AI that play chess, similar to Alpha Zero if you know it), feed it some positions, look at the internal representations and extract chess concepts that may be novel, and use it to create an AI chess coach or something. If this shit works, I'm pretty sure I'll find satisfaction because it's an incredible project that no one has ever achieved (compared to may standards). Deepmind did good work on it, and is still doing, but not even close to my goal. And without AI there would be no fucking way I can attack this problem, I would just lose years on small implementation details where instead I need to iterate quickly.
The second road is completely different, and it's custom made software. Now it's actually possible for a small business to outsource a piece of software they need, made to fit their need perfectly. In the past this would have been way too expensive. Today in fact I showed a friend of mine who has a medium size business the website + we app demo I made for him, and man, sawing his face in awe gave me a lot of satisfaction. The opposite of the commodification of software, this is software becoming craftsmanship, where there is one customer, not many! I'll make this for you, and because of that I can perfectly map it around the way you work, they way you think, your values, your brand, everything! A custom digital suit. A software artisan. I'm trying this road for some time, I'll report back.
I am having a similar emotional journey, albeit much shorter. 3 years ago I didn't know much about programming, and my first 2 years were quite rough because I didn't delegate anything to the clankers, but actually used AI to teach myself and was questioning everything. In hindsight that was good, and the pain I felt when learning and failing and finally making it right played a huge role in making me going to sleep tired but with a sense of satisfaction. However I felt a similar kind of satisfaction after doing some manual work like placing a parquet, painting the walls and similar. The sweat creates the meaning.
For software engineers to find a similar sense of satisfaction I see two roads. The first one is dreaming bigger, being bolder, attacking previously unexplored problems, maybe even ones were the success is tied to human understanding itself. As an example, I am researching if I can take Leela (an AI that play chess, similar to Alpha Zero if you know it), feed it some positions, look at the internal representations and extract chess concepts that may be novel, and use it to create an AI chess coach or something. If this shit works, I'm pretty sure I'll find satisfaction because it's an incredible project that no one has ever achieved (compared to may standards). Deepmind did good work on it, and is still doing, but not even close to my goal. And without AI there would be no fucking way I can attack this problem, I would just lose years on small implementation details where instead I need to iterate quickly.
The second road is completely different, and it's custom made software. Now it's actually possible for a small business to outsource a piece of software they need, made to fit their need perfectly. In the past this would have been way too expensive. Today in fact I showed a friend of mine who has a medium size business the website + we app demo I made for him, and man, sawing his face in awe gave me a lot of satisfaction. The opposite of the commodification of software, this is software becoming craftsmanship, where there is one customer, not many! I'll make this for you, and because of that I can perfectly map it around the way you work, they way you think, your values, your brand, everything! A custom digital suit. A software artisan. I'm trying this road for some time, I'll report back.
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