Software consultant, solution architect, solutions eng, all do what an "FDE" does without having the weirdly cringe palantir branding.

BEAM is great, although it's definitely missing something like pprof for go or java flight recorder.

Source: I work at WhatsApp

My day job was writing cpp and elixir, although I kept my job and returned to it. I've been thinking about leaving software completely though.

When I was doing my masters in anthropology at the same time as my SWE job, I ran into this issue of having too many notes and not enough organization. Random other tools never quite did it, generic search didn't work, notion et all kind of sucked, so I ended up rolling my own thing on top of Org roam. It's all plaintext org files, easily accessible.

When I do scholarly work, it's great because all of stuff is in one place. It's also useful for tracking the breadcrumbs I do for my real tech job.

But the nature of the long tail is that it is comprised of a series of outliers. To use the author's analogy, what might be happening is that there's a distributional shift occurring at the same time the general amount of "stuff" under the curve is increasing, which gives the appearance that things have become more alike, even though what has actually happened is that the bump has just gotten bigger.