v10: Opportunities are everywhere

📍 Brighton, 🇬🇧 

🥃 TL;DR

• The market's tough, but software engineering offers endless opportunities

• New tech opens exciting possibilities, but not every trend lasts

• Frameworks are evolving, simplifying our work by replacing old tools.

• Stay positive despite challenges; kindness and optimism boost health.

• You don’t always need to grind hard; sometimes chilling out gets you to the same place.

• Everyone cuts corners, so focus on your niche, not the hype.

• Be kind to yourself, stay curious, and don’t stress the hustle.

Heya! 👋

Lately, with the market being down, salaries taking a hit, and jobs getting harder to find, I've been asking myself: is it all worth it? I mean staying a software dev. Maybe I should start a brewery or something? Would you buy a pale ale from me? Or an IPA maybe?

But honestly, I can't picture myself doing anything else. I have a degree in marketing and business, and after graduation, I looked for jobs in those fields. I didn't like any of it.

Software engineering, though? It has so many chances to try new things, which keeps my ADHD happy because there's always something new to explore.

At the same time, all those options can wear me out. I end the day feeling tired and often burnt out.

To be clear, I don't get that FOMO anymore. Early in my career, maybe, but now I've accepted that new stuff will keep coming, and that's just how it is.

Today, I guess I wanted to chat about opportunities. They're all around us, and we can do so much with them.

For example, ChatGPT apps just came out, and a lot of people are calling it a big money-making chance.

I do get vibes from Alexa Skills, though. Remember when Alexa launched and they opened up their tools so anyone could make a "skill"? People thought it was the future, that we'd use voice for booking trips or shopping for groceries. Games were also really popular!

That didn't turn out that way. But hey, that doesn't mean ChatGPT apps will flop the same. They might not handle everything, but they'll find their niche. And you can find your niche too.

On top of that, there are tons of tools making our work easier, like the ones that I've listed in my Tools of the Week section below.

Frameworks are getting better all the time, changing to fit what we need. Have you seen the new stuff in Node.js? It's wild. 🤯 

We can say goodbye to some big packages we've relied on before!

It's not just software! Hardware is stepping up too.

Nvidia just came out with the DGX Spark, a small AI supercomputer that fits on your desk. It has a powerful chip called Grace Blackwell, with 1 PFLOPS of AI performance and 128GB of memory.

You can run gpt-oss-20b on it! 🤯 It's one of my favourites.

You can even stack them to handle bigger models. Soon, we might run something like GPT-5 on a single machine we use everyday. Who knows, maybe they'll open source it... No?

In my daily life, I sometimes forget about all these cool things we can do, especially with the tough market and low pay pulling me down. Negative thoughts can mess with a lot.

Have you heard of the Rabbit Effect? It's from a 1978 study on rabbits. They found that kind care cut down on heart issues, even with a fatty diet. So, no matter what's going on, we should try to stay positive, because it has a positive effect on our physical health.

I've been working on that lately: being nicer to myself, stressing less, and going with the flow of the crazy economy.

In Haruki Murakami's book Hear the Wind Sing, there's this scene where two people are lost at sea. One swims hard toward what she thinks is land, putting in tons of effort. The other just floats, drinks beer, and waits for help. Both get rescued in the end, but the first one feels let down because she worked so much for the same result.

The takeaway for me? You don't always have to push hard to end up in the same place as those who do. I'm not saying stop trying altogether, but sometimes it's fine to let go and chill.

As part of being kind to myself, I'm going to try the "don't work hard" thing now and then. No more constant grind like I've done for years. 🏖️

I mean, look at ChatGPT Atlas! Even big companies like OpenAI aren't putting in max effort. A $500 billion company!

And smaller ones too, like 8Sleep, who’s smart mattresses have an always on connection to AWS and stop working when the server is unreachable

The companies who do try, who invest thousands and millions of $$ to try to be on top of all the things, they’re likely to fail, like this 👇 post suggests (and I think they’re right!)

Maybe it's just me getting older talking.

To sum up: don't always work hard, be kind to yourself, stay positive, and keep being curious ie do what you want, not what you’re made to do.

PS: Now this is the newsletter issue I think I'm most proud of! It won't get better than this! 😄

🎓️ Top Learning Materials of the Week

I’ve been looking into n8n lately, spending some time in their docs. So that’s what I’m going with this week. 😁

⚒️ Tools of the Week

Upstash: used it for my AI RAG bot on my personal site. Nice docs, easy to setup, and provides some rate limiting functionality with minimal config. Loved it! Gotta protect those AI routes from abuse 😄 

Arcjet: while thinking about how else I can protect my public route, I found these guys. They’re working with all major frameworks, like Next.js and Astro, and they provide a lot of easy to setup security as well! They’re amazing, even Netlify has them in their extensions marketplace. I didn’t end up using them, because it doesn’t cater static sites. 🤷 

Turso: if you haven’t heard about them, it’s a Neon for SQLite. It accepts vectors, it’s light, it’s cheap, it was perfect for my small RAG bot. In fact, it can be great for a large AI project, where you can have a database per user (look into that)! 🤯