The craft of coding and pride in their work. Over the last 12 years I have worked with more people than not that hand off code that solves the problem, but is sloppy and not very readable. I've wondered if this is a byproduct of rushing to meet sprint deadlines.

Learning to do proper debugging. Again, 3 orgs in 12 years, and it seems like the debugging skills of those coming into the industry are getting worse. Personal observation, so take it for what it is, but it seems like even developers 2 or 3 years into the industry still don't know how to use debugging tools or have a "system" for troubleshooting and investigating an issue.

Do you have any advice to more novice developers on how to be less “dependent” on dependencies? Where can we learn the lost art of writing code?

It feels that unless you want to reinvent the wheel, you need a bunch of third party libraries to get anywhere near results clients want within ecosystems like JS/Python.

Personally, recognizing that my burnout was caused by one or more of the following and doing something positive about it.

1. Lack of autonomy 2. Lack of mastery 3. Lack of purpose

Kudos on your launch! I just had a question: the pricing plans seem slightly pricey, is it to break even before bringing prices down, or is it due to expensive storage? If the latter, is there a self-hosted option?

Also, the website looks absolutely great!

For a long time, my plan was to "get rich" and then use my money to work full time on specific interesting tech ideas of mine. The tradeoff of time spent "getting rich", even if it took a decade, was worth it because of the free time I would have afterwards. With this in mind, I tried building various startup ideas and joining startups that could blow up big. Nothing really worked out, and I realized just how difficult it is to get rich in that way. In the mean time, I was trading what I really wanted to be doing for these failed attempts at things I didn't want to do, and meanwhile the years were ticking away.

It took me a long time to realize that the gamble isn't worth it to me. If my end goal is to be working on the interesting tech ideas full time, I need to make it happen regardless of my financial situation. So that's where I'm at now: consistently taking 1 step every night and weekend. It's much slower than my ideal hypothetical world of riches, but it is more fulfilling because it is real. I'm making actual progress now, as opposed to maybe-future progress.

This sort of pessimistic attitude is, in my opinion, the reason why we have economic stagflation. The entire history of humanity can be summarized with:

"People arrogant and self-confident enough to think they'd be the one and they could do no wrong and who'd hold little to no regards for the status quo and the concept of opportunity cost"

The self-confidence of people is dropping at an ever increasing rate ever since the turn of the millennium, concurrently the awareness of the concept of opportunity cost is skyrocketing. People blamed the Financial Crisis but I think it's the other way around. The financial crisis happened because people self-confidence and risk-taking suddenly collapsed (it's not going fast that kills you, becoming immediately stationary does).

Economists claim that the biggest 'tragedy of the commons' are taxation or the taking care of the environment or public parks.

In reality the biggest 'tragedy of the commons' is people not having the confidence to try out whatever crazy idea they have in mind with regards to the natural world or the entrepreneurial world or the industrial world etc.

It's like we know it's a tragedy of the commons because we encourage (or at least we did) people to follow their dreams, but in the dark of our office with the curtains closed we play it safe .

We need to try a lot of crazy ideas, some of them will stick and we could go back at having 10% YoY real growth...but we are afraid to do so ourselves because we don't want to try and fail, we want to try and win! And get the accolades and status which goes with it.

At the same time who knows if other people are trying themselves or they are playing it safe? Maybe in the dark of their office with the curtains closed, just relentlessly buying the S&P and index funds in awe of their preacher John Boogle....the similarities with tax avoidance/climate/public good care is again there to be seen.

I think it's a known problem outside of academia.

Ray Dalio mentions it very often [1] and Sergey Brin [2] dedicated a couple of minutes to this problem in a talk he gave at Davos (I guess if you follow your dream long enough that's where you end up!) and thinks the Internet is at fault for this pessimistic attitude

The internet might have complicated things even further, people were already becoming more and more risk averse, now they have a projection of all the things which could go wrong as well as rapid access to the info about the #1 person in that domain so they can compare themselves against their accomplishments. They become stuck in a "play it safe" and "analysis paralysis" mode for a very long time before actually experimenting.

Other than the internet I guess the only other reason could be the ever diminishing levels of testosterone in the median male (of all age groups and ethnicity). Testosterone has been declining and nobody knows why.

It makes sense in theory, Testosterone is correlated with risk-taking, might also explain societal changes and the constant level of stress which is put nowadays on security, safety, financial stability. In one word Stasis. Might also be the reason why a President like Trump is not acceptable whereas John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who were exactly the same personality and all around the same persona were elevated as heroes (initially by the left but also nationally)

There is some hopes though, people who take shots have a much less crowded trade so to speak. There is also the reason why I should remember myself that a guy like Musk extracting his richest man in the world wealth and status from Tesla before the company is even out of the woods of bankruptcy and insolvency would have earned him the title of scam artist and fraudster a while ago. Today people are so adamant and desire to see somebody take a shot that would elevate him and praise him, because in a world where nobody tries , he does.

[1] https://youtu.be/XTKXrojiCrA?t=235

[2] https://youtu.be/ffvu6Mr1SVc?t=1630

I think follow your dreams (or perhaps find what you’re passionate about) is ok but only part of the advice.

The rest is:

- Understand what the job really entails. Speak to people who currently do it, try get work experience doing it etc.

- look at supply and demand, if only 0.01% of the people who are doing it are making any money, that’s a tough market to do well in.

- look for barriers to entry that you can overcome that limits supply. See what’s involved in building a moat. Passion helps with this.

- work to address the bias towards jobs that sound interesting to everyone eg YouTube celebrity, game designer, footballer etc, although these also fail at the supply and demand stage. Actively look for jobs that are less obvious that have the properties you like.

- consider you’re career holistically e.g. does it fit with the lifestyle you’d like, is it populated by the kinds of people you’d like to work with, how likely is a stable income.

- think long term, dreams change, how hard would it be to pivot

etc.

And what do you suggest is better? I've worked with nearly every tool (open source and closed) under the sun in medical, industrial, and personal settings and Dragon NaturallySpeaking/Professional was by far the best in terms of accuracy regardless of prosody, accent, background noise, technical terms used, etc.

Personally I think they should've been acquired a decade ago.

Probably a crapton of patents for voice recognition.

Also, if you cannot operate a keyboard and must communicate by speech to operate a computer, it's pretty much Dragon NaturallySpeaking or GTFO. Integrating NaturallySpeaking tech into Windows would be a huge boon and further cement Windows as the os to have if you have disabilities.