I missed a week. That happens! Too much to do, too deeply involved in projects, or far less interesting activities (taxes, anyone?), too many things to read online (learning new things, looking for technical answers, or just going through the rabbit hole, one among so many others, of economy, housing, people, AI, businesses, and when the world’s likely going to end because of us, dumb humans…), there’s ALWAYS an excuse, good I think, for other things to stall. Well, at least it’s my own projects that stall, not professional work (I only spend time looking for things online that are work related, don’t get me wrong)
Anyways, these last two weeks, I’ve been learning more about ANTLR4 - I’m 40% through with the ANTLR bible - and I think it’s really a great improvement over the classic lex/yacc or flex/bison parsers. I initially started learning about ANTLR for the Neutro project (inventing a gender-neutral language), but I’m not sure at this point there will be an easy way to implement a parser for that natural language, even though it has some logic in it that make it possibly slightly less natural 🙃) Eventually, I might as well create a new programming language of some sort, for some purpose to determine at some point. Because why not create a language for fun, even though it may never be used by anyone with common sense? Or will it…?
My search for a job has also shown me that being a Senior Software Developer is all relative. I’m skilled in PHP, with half a decade of significant years of professional experience (not your usual “web developer” that hardly understand programming, data structure, protocols or cloud-related stuff) and even more for personal coding on my own projects (PHP, Laravel, Go, Vue, Node, Javascript, and blah-blah-blah), but that often doesn’t seem to be enough. I realized several things:
- I compete with job hoppers from the big five (or six), which contrary to me have no interest in the position they apply to, but rather to the name of the companies and the corresponding salaries, and do so only to be able to hop to a bigger one not even a year later. Some post (and comments) on LinkedIn had me ranting for a bit, but since there’s nothing I can do about it, it’s already in the past.
- I compete with tons of incompetent people with inflated resumes (possibly AI-generated) which may be better than me at marketing themselves. I’m good, skilled and efficient, but then it’s my word against someone else’s, and I’m not a good self-salesperson (some people are born salesmen, rather than developers, I’m a born developer but the heck of a salesperson 😄)
- I’m definitely NOT skilled enough in some highly-seeked for languages, like Java, Python, and React (Native). Sure I can learn, and I learn fast, but again, companies don’t seem to care, they think they’ll get the perfect candidate on day one, and that candidate will IMMEDIATELY produce results… Who am I to tell them it’s an utopia?
- I have so much to learn about so many things and practices. Will the rest of my life be enough???
Last week, I was thinking about a novel I (re-)started working on while tanning at the pool in Mexico (why not make pleasurable rhyme with useful?), last January. I’ve started a side project a few weeks ago, with relation to that novel, and it includes building a site to accompany the novel, but a fun site, not a boring dumb thing aimed at selling ads or the novel itself. I can’t enter into more details unfortunately, but all this to say I came to the idea of simulating a Mac OS interface in the site, using Vue.js, and started coding that. It actually works pretty well, despite a few things I need to fix, and not everything in the interface is functional, but many things seem “real”. I will likely distribute the interface itself, as an open-source npm/github project, since it may be useful to others too. Note that I said it’s a simulation/emulation, but not the actual thing, meaning there’s no point in people trying to hack it, because there’s no Mac anywhere in sight (besides the one I’m currently typing on…). More about this in a future weekly post, or maybe even a dedicated one.
Oh, I almost forgot, I also started reading Stephen King’s book “On Writing”, before the ANTLR one, and that book led me to buy another one referenced by King, “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr, which is quite old (1918) but gives all the proper grammar I should be using for writing. Fortunately, my English is not that bad, so I already know most of the rules and it’s mostly a brain-refresher 😅
Plan for this week, or at least half of what is left, is to continue with the MacOS simulation, apply to a few more jobs, post my final tax return, and everything else I can fit in any day… oh, and tonight is pickleball. Can’t hurt to do a bit of sport 🤪
AI generated books pixel drawing