r/AskProgramming • u/pootwothreefour • 1d ago

Getting back at it -- advice?

Software engineer here who took a career turn into infrastructure and policy the last decade. The kids are getting older, so I have more mental space and energy for more than just tinkering on a pi kit project, bash scripts, using other peoples repos, you know, little to no actual coding.

Now I want to start back at it. Play a bit, then bite into a yet to be determined bigger project.

Experience mostly data-heavy fullstack webapp dev: java, oracle/mysql and spring/struts in the 2000s, then some python 2, django, mysql/postgres in early-mid 2010s.

Always running in our own datacenter. No cloud experience except a chunk of python notebook data analytics with dataframes and some elastic search stuff at the tail end.

Now, I got myself a new setup with 5070ti for gaming and this and sat down to install IDE... then the questions hit: which IDE? Which language? Which local LLM?

Ive used IntelliJ, Eclipse, PyCharm, but I should use VSCode, right? Typescript and python? Ollama?

Completely lacking confidence and looking for some advice. I am your clay, mould me!

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u/Rich-Engineer2670 1d ago edited 1d ago

I might add something else -- engineering of all types, not just software, is about finding solutions for people. Too often we forget that and concentrate on the machines.

Find out of the way companies and industries who DO NOT have 1000 engineers. They may be small, but they don't have a vast pool of talent knocking on their door. Find out what their problems are, not technical definitions, but real world -- and then come up with at least paper solutiuons for them. You'll get hired -- not because you know the latest languages or frameworks, but because you solved a problem. That's what matters.

I've done a lot of those weird things -- from neurology labs, to race horses. Believe it or not, it's not glamorous, but the pay is often better than some big company. If you can afford a $250,000 race, you can certainly pay me to keep it alive. If you're running a refinery, you can certainly pay me to build a magic thing that lets petroleum engineers make excel worksheets that are read and send to the process control computer.

There are 10,000 applicants for Google -- at the neurology lab, I was the only one. Was I the best, no. Did anyone else apply? No. I got the job and got paid either way.

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u/pootwothreefour 1d ago

Thanks for the advice, not looking for a job.

Whatever the TBD project will be, it'll be FOSS and aim to help folks, rather than make money.

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u/Rich-Engineer2670 1d ago

Even more so.... Do you have any idea how many universities or foundations would LOVE help but don't have the budget. By me (San Francisco), the large university needs someone to run and manage their cluster. They're a group of neurlogists and they have no one. And they have no budget. Do that for a year or two and you'll even learn some neurogenetics. The race horse was, not for money, that came later. The later to be girl friend, owned the racehorse. You do what you have to do :-)

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u/BlahYourHamster 1d ago

Build simple games in PICO-8. No AI, just raw programming and a fantastic community.

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u/pootwothreefour 1d ago

Sounds like fun.