@nebula Thanks. Actually I would follow up with this: specialize as much as you need to. I was doing everything that came up. "Is it technical and you don't know where to start? Yeah sure I'll figure out how to fix it." Which gave me all the challenge I could ask for and a sense of accomplishment, but how do you market "I can figure anything out"? Hard to convince people of it. Instead I should have chosen a stack and said "I can work on things that resemble this stack" even if that meant saying no sometimes.

Short version: I tried it and I'm giving up. Several years ago I worked as an early hire at a VC-funded SF startup in a non-coding role, where I saw how much more money, respect, freedom and satisfaction the devs got out of working there. I had programmed in high school and studied CS topics on my own, so I decided to become a solo consultant. I watched a million tutorials and eventually got a client. I've had 7 total but the flow dried up...I was so lazy about sales/marketing, relying on referrals (from mostly academic clients). So now I'm looking for a jr dev position in my old age. Anyway, going it alone can be done, I just did it all wrong.

F

When I first heard of functional programming I thought wow, I don't like OO because of the mysterious state, the boilerplate and indirection, so I would love to try something that's very functional...like, you know, focused on doing things! I was completely at sea. I was disappointed when I understood what "functional" meant, but I stayed interested anyway.

I had a "friend" who wanted to hire me to convert Crystal Reports to Microstrategy reports, I had never touched either so I backed away cautiously.

@MM83 The most bizarre one to me was Sumerian for their VR avatars (?) thing.

I easily trip over stuff like this. In LA there are the parallel streets Veteran Ave, Military Ave and Federal Ave, all within a half mile. They are randomly scattered among streets that are all surnames, like Bentley and Purdue. I have never been able to remember which one goes where.

@bhouston [barfs and dies]

@iiii "Okay the new button looks great. Also, when the user logs out, can we have a pterodactyl fly towards them screeching and gobble up their user id?"

@HitWRight One situation where I use multiple stylesheets that are not bundled: a site where logged in users are a tiny fraction of site visitors, and there are elements on the logged-in side that don't exist for the drive-by visitors; also when there are 150k pages and only like 200 of them contain an unusual combo of data items that requires different styling.

By the way I was digging into some site the other day and found it had loaded 5 css files for a total of over 100k lines (also about that much JS in 6 or 7 files). The best part is the site doesn't have any fancy styling or functionality.

"Hey, the user clicked the button! What should I do?"
"Well, it depends. Was the button...*gray* by any chance?"

My bro-in-law does specialized creative work for a huge consumer goods company. He does good work, everybody likes him, all is fine. This goes on for some time. Then the group gets a new boss, a transfer from an overseas office. One of the first things that happens is he feels shut out of discussions, and soon after that he gets a lukewarm performance review from her -- for the first time ever. New boss starts sprinkling in people she knows. Fortunately the new boss got moved on to something else before she could force him out.

"undocumented dependency between toasters and bread slicing machines" -- that is awesome.

Now I'll be on the lookout for unwritten assumptions behind real-world artifacts working together.

And in git "master" is not even a control thing, it's like a recording master. It's a standard, a reference.