Hey high five, also a local newspaper guy! I bumbled into it maybe 7 years ago. It doesn't pay well (it's pretty rural) but it totally aligns with my principles. It's rough in the newspaper industry these days but it's also an interesting challenge. Your competition is basically Facebook and Google.

I totally agree though. Certain small businesses are happy to have a skilled programmer. My boss gives me a lot of leeway to follow my principals when it comes to user privacy and stuff.

I to this day still have to Google tons of stuff, even very simple things; sometimes it’s just hard to remember that function’s name or whatever, it’s no big deal.

Programming didn’t click for me until I actually built something. Just a little command line game. Eventually after a certain point I realized: oh my god I can do anything! (with enough time)

You’ll get there, but try working on something bigger with zero stakes where you can feel out how code you write in one place ripples out to other places.

Man, Unicode is one of those things that is both brilliant and absolutely absurd. There is so much complexity to language and making one system to rule them all ends up involving so many compromises. Unicode has metadata for each character and algorithms dealing with normalization and capitalization and sorting. With human language being as varied as it is, these algorithms can have really wacky results. Another good article on it is https://eev.ee/blog/2015/09/12/dark-corners-of-unicode/

And if you want to RENDER text, oh boy. Look at this: https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/

I say learn Clojure… but only because it is really really neat.

Can't help with the job thing though, unless you want to work at a tiny little newspaper as their only programmer for not a whole lot of money.

I'm surprised at how negative the reaction to SO is here! It just takes a while to get the site, which unfortunately doesn't work if you jump right in without lurking. If you ask questions the moment you run into trouble, you kind of project a disrespect for the answerer's time by not trying to solve it yourself first. If you ask as a last resort and list what you've tried, people are waayy nicer, even if your question sucks.

I think the real problem is that people's expectations aren't properly primed going in. The site could do a much better job about that. If you ask only as a last resort, you end up solving most of your problems yourself, and SO is REALLY good at helping you do that, in a way that leaves most other sites in the dust, in my opinion.

Classic talk; one of my favorites. I’ve watched it multiple times and it always goes way over my head. Always makes me think of LISP.

WHAT?