We're a five-person legal tech startup and the work environment is far and away the best I've ever experienced. Granted, I've only been a developer in total for four or five years now (including almost three here), but of all the jobs I've had it's the best.

My CTO/supervisor is amazing: smart, funny, likable and with a management style that works for me amazingly well. Mostly hands off, but fully available for deep dives on technical subjects when necessary. At this point I've earned enough trust to be able to just get shit done with minimal oversight, though we do check in daily at least, and keep each other apprised of what we're up to, or interesting things we've come across.

The lack of external forcing agents is probably a win for us at this point. Obviously there's benefits to having a pile of money to burn: we'd probably hire several more developers and really work to hone our product. But for a team with two full-time developers and a really great designer, not to mention extremely smart and talented leadership and sales teams, we're doing great, and ship features at a pace that seems to put to shame similar companies with much larger teams and far more money. Honestly, I have no idea what they're doing with their time.

Still working on that product-market fit though...

Anyway, tl;dr I feel like I hit the jackpot here.

Basically the exact opposite of my browser habits, where I easily have 100 tabs open at any time, lol.

I mean, couldn't many of the existing frameworks be described as low-code wrappers around more complex work flows and concepts?

This is highly variable. The more rote aspects of web development are indeed automatable: the parts that feel like repeating boilerplate because that's what they are. Creating duplicative controller actions, state updates, etc.

But then there are the parts that would be extremely difficult to automate. Creating rich, unique UI elements with lots of custom logic. Anticipating the user's needs before they realize they even have them. These take a lot of skill and experience, and are truly fun to work on – assuming they're your jam. Lucky for me, they are.

Ice baths: that's for mental acuity, or overall physical health? I know it's used frequently in high-level sports for recuperation purposes.

Also, the balaclava is interesting: I can imagine the benefit is almost similar to that people get from using a gravity blanket. The weight and "hugging" effect might be very comforting.

Really sorry to hear about the sleep apnea; that's an awful problem to deal with. Hope you're able to find a treatment which works for you.

The only thing I've found effective is modafinil for alertness and some general mental sharpness. Especially after a night of poor sleep, the mental alertness it provides is a god-send.

I'd say this is a bit overly negative. There's value in developing theories and frameworks which aren't yet provable but should be as soon as technology or other theoretical frameworks catch up.

Possibly the best line in an article full of really fantastic lines.

Certainly if you need a very small volume in one specific location and already have copper and iron present you can slap down an assembler making copper wire and another making the circuits, but that's generally far less space efficient than just pulling them in from the bus.

Not sure how much of an issue this still is, but thieves used to steal airbags. That's a lot more expensive and a PITA to replace.

When I started as a developer, my team was fully remote (I was the only developer in NYC, most of the rest were in Portugal or elsewhere in the US.) I found it very difficult to ask questions remotely for several reasons: I never knew if I was intruding on somebody else's time, and explaining things over Slack isn't as effective (in retrospect, I should have made more use of video and voice chat). YMMV: some people are probably more bold in asking questions remotely. For newer developers, this is important.

You really can't overstate how useful it is to just plunk your laptop down in front of another developer and ask questions while staring at the same screen.

At my current company, I'm usually co-located with our other developer, which made the process of clarifying things for both of us a lot easier. As I've gained experience, I've found it a lot easier to ask questions remotely: we've made great use of various voice/video/screensharing functionality for this purpose.

Honestly, fuck mosquitoes. If the mosquito laser system were ever actually viable/purchasable, I'd happily drop thousands of dollars to keep those bastards out of my bedroom at night.

Not something I'm likely to be looking at in the nearish future, but the next time I need to do some refactoring/rolling out a new Stripe feature, I'll definitely drop you a line with my thoughts. Thanks for the heads up!