I think you're right the bar is still too high for most folks, although I will note that I think it's dramatically lower than it used to be. A lot of the tools are all-around way easier to deal with, tailscale makes a lot of "personal cloud" use-cases much more feasible, and then coding agents (I'm using claude code) dramatically reduce the labor costs of getting this stuff all working and fixing it when something goes wrong.

Like most things postgres it'll probably still work better than it has any right to for a while, but it'd be extremely unsurprising if it caused you unexpected problems at some point. (And if it does, they'll likely excitingly novel and you'll probably have to dig pretty deep to understand what's going on.)

About a third of the way through The Little Schemer, things just clicked, and what had been hard became pretty instantly easy.

Some of that was it building on existing knowledge, but I found the structure very helpful. The narrative is really just the glue around a well-designed series of incremental problems.

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I've written primarily in a functional language (OCaml) for a long time now, and it's very rare I write a recursive function. Definitely less than once a month.

In most domains, almost every high-level programming task involves operating on a collection. In the same way that you generally don't do that with a while loop in an imperative language, you generally don't do it with recursion in a functional one, because it's an overly-powerful and overly-clunky tool for the problem.

For me the real key to starting to be comfortable and productive working in a functional language was realizing that they do actually all have for-each loops all over the place: the "fold" function.

(Although actually it turns out you don't end up writing "fold"s all that often either, because most functional languages have lots of helper functions for common cases--map, filter, partition, etc. If you're solving a simpler problem, the simpler tool is more concise and easier to think about.)

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It's a web interface, but the underlying representation is text-based, and you can type in the commands directly if you want. This leads to some nice features--for example, you can plan your moves several steps ahead of time, and you get a game log for free.

There creator wrote a blog post about that particular design decision: https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2014-12-08-command-lan...

One nitpick: the guide says "If you're curious why it's important to not have a phone number on your account, see the security key FAQ", but the linked security FAQ doesn't actually appear to say why it's important.

But it's made my laptop a far more pleasant place to get work done if I need to do so, and generally works far better than I was expecting it would. I no longer feel compelled to run a VM on my laptop to get real work done.

And then you end up with an email which has new releases by authors you've read before.

I generally have no use for most of what Goodreads does, but this combined with the ability to pull my Kindle purchases in automatically is pretty useful.

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Why that and not something more general which might encompass other kinds of domain-specific knowledge? There are a lot of companies on your list which seem like they might care more about other skills that don't really fit anywhere else. (Experience working with databases for example, for one of the 7 or so database companies.)

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Not sure if that'll help you with your specific program, but it might.

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