Quite the gap.<p>The legends the article talks about are legends because they either started a project that blew up in popularity and/or solved a demanded problem with original code.<p>For most people writing software for a living that is gone. Its been gone since I started writing software 20 years ago. The goal post has moved. Its no longer about solving any problem. Its about hiring.<p>The distinction is massive. Most of the people doing this work will never encounter an important problem to solve or write original code. Instead they will use tools and modify templates. There is still some troubleshooting there, but no originality. Its like being a plumber. Plumbers still make good money, but they aren't engineers. Now, with AI being pushed on everybody even becoming something like a plumber is becoming a distant gap for the next generation.<p>The most clear exception are hobbyists, which has always been there as an exception through my years writing software. The only real distinction between most of these hobbyists and the legends is obscurity. The very real distinction between the hobbyists and less original professional is time spent practicing.
I agree with you.
There's a saying in Korea and East Asia: 'Open source is a moat.' This might sound difficult, but it means that if you're trying to sell a product, its quality or UX/UI basically needs to be better than what's already publicly available in open source — and that's not easy.<p>As the era becomes increasingly advanced, the cognitive cost of making a single project public keeps rising. But if you try to use an LLM to share or assist, there are many people who say LLMs are bad.<p>It's a difficult problem
Reminds me of when Jensen Huang recently compared <i>Linux</i> to <i>OpenClaw</i> and showed this ridiculous GitHub star comparison. To me these projects are incomparable.
As my brother said once with exasperation: "I got into this business to write code, and now I'm just an integrator."
I also want to communicate with someone and have programming conversations. There's no one around me to talk about programming with. I'm the only programmer around. Aside from AI and books, I sometimes want to talk with a real person.
I gave away an old switch to a guy on Gumtree. He mentioned he was building a machine cabinet. We got talking. He's now my home lab shoptalk guy, and we meet in the pub every other month.<p>I gave away an old PCB to a guy in gumtree. We got talking. He's now my 3D printer shop talk guy, and we meet at the pub every other month.<p>It's surprisingly easier to foster your own hacker space if you trade goods in those circles.<p>Best part is that Gumtree/Craigslist/Kleinanzeigen let you define a radius to meet these people, so they're all local<p>I'd advise against the "Im lonely..." angle in seeking out these connections, go more for the "hey I've got this thing you might want..." style patter, even if the former is true.<p>And always use protection.
For me problem is that talking with developers most of the time is more annoying than it is worth.<p>Being one-upped all the time, having devs nag about tiny irrelevant flaws just to show who is smarter. Adding just one more sentence to keep upper hand and trying to „make better” when good wasn’t done yet.<p>When I was younger I also had my fair share of those flaws.
I live in an area dominated by finance and commerce people (New York Suburbs).<p>I’ve learned not to talk about what I do, as I see eyes glaze over, quickly, when I do.<p>If I were to talk about the commodities exchanges, though, we’d be chatting up a storm.<p>I miss having people to talk to, about this stuff. The few techhies around, tend to freeze me out. They all like going into Brooklyn, to hang out.<p>I guess that’s one reason that I’m so busy here.
I found great enjoyment from <a href="https://late.sh/" rel="nofollow">https://late.sh/</a>. I'm not as active as I would like to be but the small community is still active enought that there is basically always someone around to chat with.
Can’t connect unfortunately.<p>debug1: Sending environment.
debug1: channel 2: setting env LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
debug2: channel 2: request env confirm 0
debug1: channel 2: setting env LC_TERMINAL = "iTerm2"
debug2: channel 2: request env confirm 0
debug1: channel 2: setting env LC_TERMINAL_VERSION = "3.6.10"
debug2: channel 2: request env confirm 0
debug1: channel 2: setting env LC_ALL = "en_US.UTF-8"
debug2: channel 2: request env confirm 0
debug2: channel 2: request shell confirm 1
debug2: channel_input_open_confirmation: channel 2: callback done
debug2: channel 2: open confirm rwindow 8388608 rmax 32768
debug1: mux_client_request_session: master session id: 2
debug2: channel_input_status_confirm: type 99 id 2
debug2: PTY allocation request accepted on channel 2
Connection to late.sh closed by remote host.
I am actually blown away by how good it is. Both the features, the UI, everything. wow.
thanks!
I recently moved to London. Would be really really happy to meet up with others who <i>enjoy</i> computers/hobbyists. If you have a blog, I'm interested in meeting you! There are too many corporate events here and almost no hobbyist groups.
I (software engineer) have lived with a software engineer for 14 years. We (half jokingly, somewhat seriously) refer to non-software engineers as "real persons", or human-humans.
In most places there are software meetups, in my area there are many at meetup.com. I once started one myself, that later got taken over and is still quite big. Actually a lot of fun, and at the time we would even get sponsoring offers quite quickly.
Tangentially, over the last decade or two Meetup.com has allowed me to meet countless people in multiple countries, of whom some became friends. I've got such value out of this commercial service that I frequently find myself worrying about its business model. To me, Meetup is close to being the holy grail: an independent company, an excellent web client with no need to install an app, and it's not integrated with the corporate social platforms. I so want them to continue to prosper.
I don't have that kind of gathering on side. There are no programming meetups. It's an industrial area. My job mostly involves programming equipment operation using WinForm and WPF. I sometimes wish there were such meetups too. Around here, it's all factories
Create your own low-stakes "Beer & Programming" or whatever is doable where you live.<p>I grew up on a island where there was maybe one or two other people who knew computers enough to know programming as a thing existed as a concept, but similarly to you, absolutely nothing else, and it gets very lonely and outright boring after a while.<p>I solved this (accidentally) by moving to another area, but isn't possible for everyone, then the closest you can get to that would be to bring people closer to where you are instead, or start up something small and reoccurring :)
yeah you can just start your own! meetup (and if you have fb groups) have a good chance to bring in lots of people.
We have them around here.<p>I stopped going, because the “circle of avoidance” around me makes me self-conscious.<p>The ageism in New York, is even worse than in Silicon Valley.
Along similar lines: many of your favorite authors, musicians, and creators have public email addresses and seem to love getting emails. I’ve started writing notes with my kids to their favorite authors with ideas and always a thank you note.<p>I’ve gotten replies from authors on NYT best sellers lists, musicians, and more.<p>People like to be appreciated.
I wrote an essay and sent it to Chomsky once. He wrote back that he probably won't have time to read it.<p>Some years ago I realized that I can just start sending emails to an OSS mailing list. Without introduction just starting to post as if I belonged there. I had already made some grammar fixes more than five years before that but I started to comment and critique submissions. And submitting my own patches. Now checking the mailing list is daily habit. Unfortunately I didn't have time to post the second version of a submission on the bus today (another documentation fix).<p>People, and especially in my culture, are very good at staying out of places where they do not belong through self-policing alone. Unfortunately to the point where at least I do get stuck in narrow patterns and never even consider certain opportunities.
When I started working in software I took a job in a city different than mine, so I had to go there to live alone, and the job was by myself in a room with no windows. Most lonely 2 years of my life.
On the other hand, I wasn't working in software but after I moved country, I managed to get my foot into the industry, and it opened up my social life like nothing else, as finally I had people around me who also like software development, something I never experienced for ~18 years or so until I did a drastic move.
I rejected a job like that early in my career.
I wrote an email to Mike Pall once and got a very refreshing reply.<p>Daniel Stenberg is not on the list but he is also a very active programmer on social media like LinkedIn that you can interact with.
This is the way! Email is great. I've written to many famous people, and from time to time, gotten replies. I've sold SaaS and consultants for 100s of k of USD, all through emails. It's an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.
Yeah, surely this will come to an end soon. My personal email is full of AI-generated recruiter email. I still read all my email (well, not the Updates or Promotions tabs in gmail), but I 'm not in any way famous.
I constantly wonder what life was like, then, for the earliest inventors, scientists, and curious minds in our history. Surely they didn't have many people to bounce ideas or build things with. How did they find the strength to persist in their interests? These days, it's far easier to quit when you cannot find community since you can distract yourself with many kinds of entertainment instead; and with bleak economic outlook everywhere, the very act of persistence itself can feel rather pointless.
Maybe it's a bit over-generalized, but I generally find there are two types of people in world, the important one here is the one's who are genuinely curious, and they tend to be that about everything, especially things they don't understand.<p>Growing up rural, I had about zero people interested in technology around me, even less about programming. But, there was a few of those "curious people" who I talked to about computers and programming. They mostly had no idea, but they were interested, and engaging to talk about, they acted more like a wall to bounce the ball against, rather than actually mentoring me for programming, or whatever.<p>Anyways, these people, the curious ones, exists everywhere, even in rural areas, even in places with less than 1000 people. They tend to be seen maybe as eccentric, odd or weird, but you can talk to them about everything and anything, and you'll still probably learn something, if not about the subject, maybe about yourself or maybe about your new friend :)
They did have immense networks and were constantly communicating with one another. In On the Origin of Species, I was amazed how Darwin basically knew all the top breeders and naturists form South America, Arab Gulf, Oceania, which he mentions by name. He mentions his peers from the first page in the introduction and the correspondence and responses he got from them.<p>There's not many geniuses without an ecosystem around them that produced them. And even if there are, how would we know about them if they weren't well connected enough to start mattering?
They wrote a lot of letters to each other. That's effectively how the Royal Society started, as the formalization of a network of letter writers
I would say that a big part of research in Ye Old Days was either your local peers and colleagues but especially it was exchanging letters with the known Big Names in their respective fields. It is not without reason that nowadays that correspondence between researchers is a great source of insight.
Amazing how these people are even reachable via phone, their numbers are pretty easy to find.
Yep, the biggest blocker for a good conversation is people simply not writing an email or trying to make that call.<p>Which is why I wrote this.<p>Is the same at conferences: one of the best things you can do is to fo and talk to the person holding the lecture. They usually appreciate it very much.<p>You don’t need to be famous to do that.
Will there ever be any more “legendary” programmers ever again now with the rise of AI basically making any coding accomplishments unimpressive?
One should go for it if they enjoy it, yes. On the other hand, life and work is not meant to be spent in full time worldwide interaction either.<p>If someone want to interact with people like Linus Torvalds, they should be aware that in his case he publicly admitted the way he interacted with other was toxic[1]. To be clear, it’s no personal attack against him, it’s about the kind of interaction that can and does occur with largely celebrated figures in general. If anything at least in that case there is some recognition of the issue, though fair credit should probably given also to all people beyond the scene who certainly made tremendous effort for this to happen.<p>And things like popular micro-blogging platforms are notoriously known to cause interaction going toxic[2].<p>Just because something is possible doesn’t mean its a nice path to thrive for everybody.<p>To each their own judgment, but at least consider the tradeoffs.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/after-years-of-abusive-e-mails-the-creator-of-linux-steps-aside" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/after-years-of-ab...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07229-y" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07229-y</a>
Yeah, it’s not about spamming people but overcoming the imposter syndrome.<p>Learning to find this balance of not being annoying is probably easiest by trying to make relevant comments on someones tweet. And the response back will give you an energy boost! :)<p>These people are much more approachable than people generally believe.
This seems to be a submarine advertisement for a telephony API startup.<p>It seems like it's been around for a few years so it probably isn't vibe-coded, but I do wonder if even small services like this will inevitably be gobbled up by AI. Like I know it probably isn't the case but I've become so jaded now that I'm looking at their teams page and wonder if these are even real people.<p>Yes it's an amazing time for programmers but only in a "twilight of the gods" sense. The time for community passed about a decade ago, before Twitter turned into a Nazi bar and everything went entirely to shit. There's a little bit left but it's dying fast. Why would any of these people want to waste their time talking to the community that wants to assimilate their work and replace it with the mediocre shit dribbled from a Claude prompt? These people don't need your emails, they're probably already deluged with bots as it is.
> Take the opportunity to send one of them an email or tweet.<p>But ... why?<p>I don't understand why I should write an email to Linus. Or
Phil. Or Pete. Or Joe. I can barely keep up with the influx
of existing emails as-is. Do I really want to extend to this
and have to read through even MORE emails now?!
Why stop at these people. You might as well reach out to Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Jansen Huang. There's more to life than tech companies. Why not reach out to the president. It takes less effort than you might think to reach out to anyone in the world. It is truly a small place.
If you email a CEO or President, you're not emailing them. You're emailing a team of EAs who are filtering for them. Their fame leads to a lot of problems in the inbox: begging letters, death threats, and irrelevant noise more than you can imagine.<p>They also don't know much that you can probably make use of. They might think they do, and you might think they do, but they got there mostly through knowing how to talk to boards and investors, not by being able to engage deeply in expertise that is applicable to most people looking to make their way in the World - and if becoming a CEO of a major tech firm or President is the thing you need the help with, you probably know them or people like them already.<p>I've met quite a few famous people in tech over the years, particularly open source, and have had some short and some long conversations with many of them. I've found most people pretty approachable.<p>I also know through another side of my life quite a few people in the media and am an acquaintance of someone who is a household name in the UK. Through him, I've met famous sports people, writers, actors, etc., and through that and other networks I know people who have worked behind the scenes on major TV and theatre shows who have met hundreds of famous people.<p>The one thing that unifies all of them is obvious, but seemingly lost on a lot of people who "other" those whose names are known to them despite never meeting them: they're all just human.<p>They're not "other", they're us. Including everyone you see on TV, everyone you have read about in magazines, everyone you see on a stage.<p>They have to put up with being recognised and people dealing with them in strange ways (how would you <i>really</i> deal with a stranger asking for a selfie while you were eating dinner with your family in a restaurant?), but they still do all the things you and I do. As the old saying goes, they all have to put their trousers on one leg at a time in the morning.<p>I'd definitely encourage people to seek out experts (not just "famous people" unless those people are famous for expertise), and engage them as you'd want to be engaged about your expertise. You'll find most people will be approachable.<p>But emailing that specific list of people is unlikely going to get you much beyond a template reply from one of their army of assistants.
You don’t want to reach out to them, because you don’t want that kind of peiple in your life. You might as well start hanging with the local biker gang or start selling drugs on the corner.<p>(Maybe Cook and Huang are not that bad, but Musk and Trump I’d like in my life as much as cancer).
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