Tech Newsletter by Bas Steins - Issue #3
What's moving the tech industry?
Follow up on last week’s issue
Deadly Robots
In last week's issue, I mentioned that San Francisco allowed police robots to execute deadly force. They took back the decision in less than one week.
The job market
CS students face a shrinking job market. That comes with little surprise.
RTO to replace WFH – WTF?
According to some of my San Francisco-based friends, SoMa is dying. Shops, bars, and restaurants are closing South of Market St. The whole city seems to be in desperate need of tech workers coming back to their offices. Developers all over the world have adapted to post covid work from home, and working remotely has long been seen as the future, not only for indie developers and early-stage startup developers. Now, it seems the trend is reversing, as many well-known names in the Bay Area are mandating their workers to return to the offices.
More AI
Will software developers be replaced by AI? Last week, my take on that was that AI is "just another productivity tool". Software development will evolve. All the tooling we have nowadays is way more sophisticated than what we had 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Rising demand (remember "Software is Eating the World"?) created more developer jobs, not less, despite all the productivity increase. Now, ChatGPT is a certified AWS Cloud Practitioner. As I said: We will need to rethink what and how software developers will work in future, and obviously, passing certification exams is probably something that we won't do so much, anymore.
The news about Twitter don't stop. Twitter Blue will be back (with a reportedly higher price for iOS users, let's see how Apple will react). unused Twitter handles will be freed, and rumours say that the character limit per tweet will be increased to 4,000 characters. While people making fun of this and wondering if Twitter then becomes another Facebook, Meta is considering launching a Twitter clone. Oh, the irony!
Funny?
Not sure if it’s funny or tragic this week, but the European Union wasted 387,000 EUR (408,000 USD) of taxpayers' money on a “metaverse concert” to which nobody showed up.
Tinkering
In other news
My Journey
This is the personal part of the newsletter: My 2022 journey. For me, 2022 was full of intended change and a lot of improvements in different areas: Community, Health and Mindset. I will share some of my learnings with you in this and the following two issues. Today: Community
Community
During the pandemic, I had the idea to do some online versions of the training courses I used to give to dev teams. I couldn’t get my head around video editing and got lost in the rabbit hole of perfectionism. So, eventually, in January, I decided to start off with text content on Twitter. That was a great decision! I had over 150 coffee chats this year and learned some really great perspectives on life, and had some interesting discussions about the tech space in general. I grew my Twitter account to more than 4,000 followers. It might not sound like a lot, but I made some incredibly great connections with people, not followers. I’m also very grateful for the opportunity to speak about Django’s ORM at PyConDE in Berlin and DjangoCon EU in Porto.
Key takeaway: It’s about people.
Tools used: Genuine interest; trust in karma; zoom (for the coffee chats)
Btw, if we haven’t talked yet, please feel free to book a coffee chat with me. I’d love to hear your story!
Rune's perspective
Rune has been a programmer since childhood, later equipped with a Ph.D. in CS, has a genuine passion for helping others learn Python, which he took online in 2020 during lockdowns. I asked him what surprised him the most about teaching online. Here is his answer:
"How long does it take to learn Python?" What? I am still a learner, I would like to answer. They are really interested in something else. Brief background, I have primarily worked with big-data backend systems that feed data to data scientist. They had to learn Python and I helped. The goal was pretty clear.
Back to online: "How long will it take?" Well, what do you want with Python? Surprisingly, most people don't know. The strength of Python is that it can be used for so many things, but it is also the danger as a beginner. If you don't know what you want with Python, you'll try a little bit of everything and not be good enough for anything useful.
Which brings us back to the question. Most people are really interested in how long it takes to get a paying job as a Python developer. Well, what are you going to do? With focus, I helped a guy who took it from first line of code to employee in 9 months. Yes, it can be done, but he had one goal from the beginning and new exactly what he wanted.
What else?
I will change this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format will not only contain curated news and insights from the tech world but also set the stage for fellow developers.
I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is a lot to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you!
Of course, I need your help with this.
Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 400 readers!
What is something you learned?
What are some books that recently influenced you?
What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?
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Best,