I built a full stack app in about 6 months, at one point, 5 years ago. (frontend js framework, backend js framework, SQL framework)

I now work for a company whose applications aren't much more complex than what I built, in terms of systems and complexity. Though the apps are definitely much more polished and with many more complete UX & usage options. It makes millions of dollars.

At least at most large companies which are lumbering, slow moving, where 60% of people contribute and 40% of people barely hang on by pretending to work

(largely because A. they don't know what's going on due to poor documentation and poor requirements gathering, and B. they aren't qualified in the skills needed for currently under development work).

As a solo developer, I move much faster and learn much more on my own, than I do at my current job. Why? Because I direct my own work, on my own projects. I don't have someone who has never built an application, who has a project/product manager title, trying to gather requirements for something they've never done before.

Not to mention that they've never founded an organization and led it to success. So, they don't understand how Apps are built, and the don't understand how Organizations are built and guided efficiently...

Combine this with a company that has a bunch of legacy applications and is now moving into somewhat over-hyped frameworks...

Yeah... Don't get me wrong-- I like the people I work with. I see a lot of under-qualified people in management who are slowing down the system because they can't efficiently organize people to do what they don't understand-- they have too many unknown unknowns in their ability to parse out upcoming work. Unfortunately, most of them were hired for currently-fashionable political reasons.

Google doesn't seem to care about their users-- This is a common problem with Google: There's no way to get in contact with a human-- unless you create a viral twitter post about the problem.

That said, learning how useEffect replaces lifecycle methods is pretty quick to pickup. As is useState.

The lesser known hooks are what are difficult for me to understand. useRef is pretty clear. useMemo? I'm not quite sure what it's for, but I imagine it's not too tough to figure out if I spend a bit of time learning & experimenting with it.

So, although I liked the simplicity of class components, functional ones aren't too bad. They bring in some additional complications, but with a bit of effort it seems to all be learnable to me.

The APA-- the professional org. which represents the field of psychology in the USA--[1] literally instituted a definition of "toxic masculinity".

If that isn't an attempt to control masculinity in society, I don't know what is.

[1] "APA is the leading scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States, with more than 133,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students as its members." https://www.apa.org/about

Masculinity kept humanity alive in the face of various dangerous precipices facing a group of social animals seeking to survive during the course of their evolution.

Just because it has become recently politically fashionable to discount it, does not mean it is harmful.

Nor do I believe any absolute-ist interpretation that boys suppress emotions, or that society forces them to suppress emotions. It varies across time & space-- relative to culture, which fluctuates.

To make a blanket statement on the concept is just plain silly, in my view. Human emotions, cultures, and societies are not static.

Therefore any sort of claim by any institution that their of years of study results in which speaks for in my opinion, again, is just plain silly.

And it attempts to gatekeep healthy masculinity-- again, pure silliness which demonstrates the nanny mentality of those who attempt such gatekeeping.

Given that scientific discourse and outcomes fluctuate, we can assume the same is true social science.

Furthermore, social science is much more dependent on current fashionable political trends. This can be seen in the example of the American Psychological Association accepting recent political topics such as "toxic masculinity" [1] as new definitions in psychological phenomena.

Check out this PhD's work to show how usage of bombastic identity politics terminology increased in mainstream journalism in a non-organic way. It seems driven by top-down institution-based entryism. [2] & [3]

[1] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/01/ce-corner

[2] "Many trends develop over decades but I’ve never seen change so rapid as the breathtaking success of what one might call social justice concerns. Beginning around 2010-2014 there appears to have been a inflection point. Here from Zach Goldberg on twitter are various words drawn from Lexis-Nexis." https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...

[3] "1/n Spent some time on LexisNexis over the weekend. Depending on your political orientation, what follows will either disturb or encourage you. But regardless of political orientation, I'm sure we can all say 'holy f*** s**'"

https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1133440945201061888

I love it for its portability and durability-- I can pop it in my pocket or backpack and check out stuff on nature trails.

...Checking out its amazon page I also see this related, more powerful product for $20: "Carson MicroFlip 100x-250x LED and UV Lighted Pocket Microscope with Flip Down Slide Base and Smartphone Digiscoping Clip" [2]

And a search for 1000x microscope yields this $60 one "LCD Digital Microscope,4.3 Inch 1080P 10 Megapixels,1-1000X Magnification Zoom Wireless USB Stereo Microscope Camera,10MP Camera Video Recorder with HD Screen" [3]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LAX52IQ?psc=1

[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015MS8O48

[3] https://www.amazon.com/PalliPartners-Microscope-Magnificatio...

I believe there should be more restrictions on the use of plastic in society, seeing as "Plastic Fibers Are Found in 83% of the World's Tap Water, a New Study Reveals"[1]

[1] https://time.com/4928759/plastic-fiber-tap-water-study/

Just curious-- do you mean that in absolute terms?

For example: Can a teacher/parent/manager scrutinize or judge a student/child/employee? Certainly this is expected virtually all cultures.

Or, if you hire someone to do work on your house, or to build a car, train, or airplane, let's say. You cannot scrutinize their work?

There are entire industries & occupations devoted to this very practice-- Inspections.

So, I very much disagree. I think observable premises in reality demonstrate a different reality from what you claim.

You are not the gatekeeper of what is and is not "misogyny".

Leave women alone? Are women somehow ordained with a shield against any criticism? No one can ever criticize a woman-- following that logic... women are always correct?

That sounds authoritarian to me.

Definition of authoritarian

1 : of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority 2 : of, relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people an authoritarian regime.

__________

The logic in: criticism != hatred is quite sound.

a definition of criticism: the expression of disapproval of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes.

a definition of critique: a detailed analysis and assessment of something

a definition of hatred: intense dislike or ill will

_________

TLDR: disapproval does not equal intense dislike

As someone who has taken a few sabbaticals--including leaving an apartment to live in a tent for months at a time in order to reduce expenses while traveling-- the fear, I think, of a sabbatical, is a fear of two things:

1. leaving comfort

2. facing the unknown

Both of these are growth experiences. You'll learn what you can live without, and you'll learn various new things through new experiences with the people you meet, new ideas you develop, and beautiful new places & experience you have.

Uh, no.

Criticism does not equate to hatred.

And the more the word "misogyny" is misused by being thrown around frivolously, the less useful it is as an accurate descriptor.

You do our language and society a disservice by conflating the concepts of hate vs critique.

Of course it feels the same across apps and industries-- it's a concrete slab upon which you build things.

Add layers on top of that, such as:

- Data visualizations. You have data from your CRUD, so do something creative with it. If you're familiar with ReactJS, check out open source, free libraries such as: https://nivo.rocks/ and https://charts.ant.design/

- Data integrations. Depending on the business you're in, experiment with integrating your CRUD app with external data sources via REST API or GraphQL. For example, a CRM like Salesforce or Marketo. Or a REST API in a particular business domain. Or a Google product which a customer might use, such as google drive.

How to create an full stack web app didn't click until three things happened:

1. I took two statistics courses (one at a community college, one at a university. the university one involved programming in R). This really helped me understand that there are tons of different types of data, with different shapes, sizes, purposes.

2. I took a "Database Management" course at a university. This helped me understand how databases are designed and how they're used within the context of an app.

3. I looked up "What is a REST API" and "how does http work"-- specifically, coming to terms with what diagrams and code for these things means.

From there, I set my sights on building a full stack app in javascript. NodeJS (ExpressJS) on the backend, and initially jQuery on the frontend-- then I realized my jQuery project was turning into a mostly unstructured mess. I had heard about ReactJS, so I decided to take 1 month to learn it via Udemy.com (Stephen Grider's course). THen I re-did the frontend, and kept grinding on the project.

At various points, I lived in a tent in California, on a friend's ranch in Texas (did landscaping in exchange for rent), drove back to CA but failed to land a job (app was only halfway built), then I realized "You know what? Instead of living out of this tent in California, I bet I can rent a place for cheap in Mexico"-- Drove to Rosarito, Baja California, stayed at a hostel & made friends with its owner who rented me a cheap house for 3 months. Then went back to ranch in Texas, and 3 months later I finished the app.

All in all, most of the app was created part time in 6 months of part-time work (usually about 4 hours a day) (Prior to that I did some exploratory & design work on it for about a month).

The day after I finished it, I made a diagram about it. And a web portfolio featuring the project. And it's on github as well of course.

I applied to about 15 jobs. Landed one two weeks later, working with Clojure/ClojureScript-- I had never used it but the company gave me 2 weeks to pick up the basics.

So yeah--

- It takes sacrifice

- It takes focus

- It takes marketing strategy

It doesn't have to be a fantasy. That first job was $80k on contract. About 3-4 years later I'm at $180k on salary (that number includes stock & bonuses)

What helped me was:

- The mentality of "If you really want it, you'll do whatever it takes to make it happen"

- Motivational music & speeches

- Help from developers on IRC (Especially the #nodejs and #reactjs channels -- these days on Libera server). And Udemy.com / Youtube / StackOverflow. But IRC is a chatroom where you can chat in real time w/ devs.

https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/tractor/

"LifeTrac is a low-cost, multipurpose open source tractor. It serves as a workhorse backbone for many of GVCS technologies. We are currently on the 7th prototype – see LifeTrac Genealogy.

The highlight of our design is that it is a modular design that allows for a high degree of modification and flexibility – such as scalable frames, interchangeable power units, quick connect wheel drive, and plug-and-play hydraulic power that allows for a driver and remote."

I was just curious about your perspective-- When do you mean by Helm is pretty bad? Could you elaborate? Also, how does it compare with alternatives?

Open Source Ecology

"...currently developing a set of open source blueprints for the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – a set of the 50 most important machines that it takes for modern life to exist – everything from a tractor, to an oven, to a circuit maker."

We’re developing open source industrial machines that can be made for a fraction of commercial costs, and sharing our designs online for free. The goal of Open Source Ecology is to create an open source economy – an efficient economy which increases innovation by open collaboration."

https://www.opensourceecology.org/about-overview/