was chatting with a friend about some of the challenges with teaching yourself programming topics:

* you have random gaps that you don’t even know about
* it's hard to assess your level, you might know a lot about one subtopic and be a total beginner elsewhere
* it's very difficult to guess what other fellow autodidacts know about the subject

I've had to learn how to suss out what shared knowledge base I have with another programmer on any given topic quickly so that we can talk

(1/?)

grabbed a breakfast sandwich out of the case at the hippie food co-op today. it was on a cinnamon raisin bagel.

i do not even like the joker but now i am the joker.

As someone in software for a while that has been the most surprising thing that Open Source did: It massively increased complexity even for small projects because "that's how Google/Amazon/etc do it".

Yes Amazon does Microservice architectures. They also have a few people for every service that knows the ins and outs. You have a team of 5 that now not only has to understand the problem but juggle dependency chains from here around the moon and back so your React App that should have been plain HTML doesn't fail while showing a basically static page.

You won't grow to Google/Amazon scale. It's fine. Just build a simple solution you can maintain.

Working on React/K8s or whatever is mostly you training yourself on your own dime and time to be a potential hire for some Big tech company that will fire you to juice the numbers at he end of the next quarter.