Reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon where the pointy haired boss tells his team they were going to start paying the developers to fix bugs. Wally tells everyone that he is going to code himself a minivan.
I once interviewed at Microsoft. The hiring manager asked me how I would go about programming a break point if I were writing a debugger. I started to explain how I would have to swap out an instruction to put an INT 3 in the code and then replace it when the breakpoint would hit.
He stopped me an said he was just looking to see if I knew what an INT 3 was. He said few engineers he interviewed had any idea.
One thing the age of the internet brought us, was the ability to easily connect with people over a broad area, who have an interest in something very niche.
You might be the only person in your neighborhood, school, or even town to have a deep interest in something. Others might think you are weird because 'nobody' else thinks that thing is cool.
But post something here on HN or other forum, and suddenly you find out that hundreds or thousands of people around the world also have some interest in it.
This is both the best and the worst thing about the internet. On the one hand, it's amazing how many completely niche things a person might really care about that they can find a community for online. The MAME project doesn't just capture the arcade games everyone thinks about, but it captures things like the old Tiger LCD handhelds, and mechanical games like coin pushers and pinball machines, and even those old bartop trivia games. All because the internet allows a small group of people who really care about those things and preserving those things to coordinate and work with others who care just as much as they do. Heck most of the retro gaming world works on this.
But at the same time, the internet massively amplifies the effects of a niche being taken over by its most extreme members. The middle between "dabbling interest" in a topic and "this topic is my life and I all I do is eat, drink and sleep this topic" erodes very quickly. If you only care a little or only care about a part of a topic, the internet can be almost as isolating or dismissive as the real world around you too. Some of that is a lot of internet communities are actually a small handful of people who are growing together, so they've already covered the same topics over and over that newer entrants might want to cover. But some of it is also just a level of care or obsession that many people won't ever reach. Popping into a "Show HN" thread, especially about something that was built that has either A) been built before or B) isn't clearly built with a business case can be a very depressing experience as "super carers" tear the thing being shown off to pieces for choosing the wrong language, or the wrong library or the wrong security model. And I get that some of this is just people trying to covey hard won knowledge, but it does sometimes feel like the equivalent of having an astronomy club where half the people are amateurs with back yard telescopes and half are people working at and with mountain top radio telescopes all having discussions about the best equipment to buy.
I agree that some topics can be dominated by outspoken 'experts' who don't have very good social skills. They can be hostile to newcomers as they try to keep their little club exclusive. They can also ridicule anyone who tries to introduce a new idea or direction.
But hopefully, the club itself will have enough reasonable members to keep those people in check.
Realize that the tech industry lives on hype. Every new piece of technology is 'going to upend everything'; according to those building it.
Us old programmers have live through about 100 of these hype cycles; so experience tells us to not panic.
AI is definitely a real thing like the internet, but it won't replace every programmer. Study it. Use it for things it is good at. Adapt to be useful in areas it is not good at.
Of course it won't, but work is getting too demanding.
* management assumes work X shouldn't take 20 days anymore - they're partly right, if you do full vibe-coding you get result in 1 day
* depending on which part of the spectrum you went with (full vibe coding, complete manual, somewhere in between) - you understand that problems are getting accumulated, it is on you to prevent them or do rework in the future - I have been in many companies where rework is difficult to justify, its easier to prevent mess going in to the codebase, but not anymore, now leadership wants things to be delivered faster, and they ask to postpone quality work (because they are not responsible when things go down)
It is very difficult, especially if you need it to be an instant success (i.e. replace your salary before you are homeless).
I have a project (a new kind of general-purpose data management system) that I have worked on for over 10 years. In the beginning, I hoped it would 'take off' and replace my salary. I was never able to quit my day job because it was so lucrative.
Now I am retired. I still work on it in bursts (spend many hours for a week to get something working, then don't touch it for a month); but I treat it like a hobby.
Maybe it will catch on (it does some amazing things with large data sets), but maybe it won't. I try to spread the word on forums or in my blog, but I am not a big marketing guy and there is so much noise out there that everything gets lost.
Cancel culture is alive and well. There are many people who will boycott businesses, shun performances, or refuse to associate with someone whose views differ from their own.
This happens even if the product or service has nothing to do with anything political. It must be hard to shop when you feel like you have to investigate the backgrounds of everyone who might have built it.
Creating interactive pivot tables from large relational tables.
Many people know that a handy data analysis feature in Excel is to create a pivot table from a spreadsheet. But spreadsheets are limited to just a million rows. You can get around this limit by jumping through a bunch of hoops.
My system lets you easily create tables with thousands of columns and hundreds of millions of rows. (Just drop a CSV, Json, or other file on a window to create a table.)
Now you can create a pivot table from it with just a few clicks of the mouse. It is fast (I created a pivot table against an 8.5 million row table of Chicago crime data in less than a second.)
The resulting pivot table is interactive. Each cell (row/column intersection) has all the row keys mapped to it. Double-click on any cell and it will instantly show you all the rows in the original table that were used to calculate the cell. You can then analyze those rows further.
It also works well against much larger tables. I have tested it out against 25M, 50M, 100M, and 200M+ row tables.
How are you planning to sell it given the market dominance of Excel? The people that would be most willing to pay for spreadsheets are also the people who are already paying for Excel.
Not trying to discourage you, I am curious as to see how you are planning to enter the market as that was something I couldn’t answer when considering working on spreadsheet tools of various kinds or even an excel alternative.
If your dataset is small enough to fit in an Excel spreadsheet, then you probably are not looking for an alternative.
But if your dataset has millions of rows and you need something quick to help you slice and dice the data in a variety of ways to try and find valuable insights in it to drive business decisions; then maybe you are looking for something better.
BTW: creating pivot tables is just one of dozens of things my system can do. I am currently trying to figure out which features will attract the most customers.
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