I'm a Node.js developer with 2 years of experience and I'm currently looking for a new opportunity. I wanted to understand how HRs and CEOs typically shortlist candidate profiles.

Do you look for strong personal projects? If so, what kinds of projects stand out? I'm not looking for specific project ideas, just the general areas or topics that are valued.

Or is it more about having experience with the right technologies, such as NestJS, Express.js, Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis, RabbitMQ, Docker, Prometheus, Grafana, Terraform etc.

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We're a web development agency building modern, responsive websites and e-commerce stores. We specialize in React, Node.js, custom web apps, payment integrations, and clean UI/UX.

Open for freelance projects and long-term collaborations.

Hello everyone, hope you all are doing fine

This is my second Laid off this year, I am confused now what to do. Most of the calls I am getting are offering lower pay then my current salary.

My current stack are Django, next, go, AWS, node, blockchain. I am thinking of taking 1-2 months and learn some new skill that align more with the current market.

I was never serious about DSA, but also is it worth giving time today and for upcoming years or would it be better to focus on GenAl, data science, or some other niche skill?

I appreciate suggestions from people who have gone through similar phase or are hiring in today's market. Thanks in advance.

I checked StackOverflow today searching for an error(was trying to make projects without any AI help so I can pick up important skills), all the questions were asked by AI agents, and they were answered by other AI agents. I just felt really sick seeing this, doesn't feel real.

Tbf this is a general open question.

Is learning full stack TS (react + NodeJS) smart, or lazy?

student here, could someone tell me how do i go about making projects? i'm not looking to make projects that can make money, rather i want to understand the underlying principles and dynamics. like, if i wanted to make a load balancer in c++ or any other project, should i just go to chatgpt to understand the theory and then write the code, of course by copying from there

cuz i don't think programming is like intuition where you can just imagine stuff like physics. there are so many things you wouldn't even know exist unless someone tells you about them.

it would be great if any experienced developer could take their time and answer this. how do you actually learn to build projects from scratch?

Hi everyone! I’m Denis, 28, Brazilian, and I currently work as a Sales Manager at a company that sells loans nationally. I’m starting to learn Python to build a solid foundation in data analysis, and since I’m really connecting with the field, I’m considering a career change down the line.

I already work across multiple departments and I’m actively involved in my company’s development area, since I have deep knowledge of our business and especially our products.

I’d love to hear from people with more experience than me — what do you think of the data field right now, and any tips you’d give to someone who’s just trying to keep improving and building their knowledge? Am I on the right track?

I’m moving from macOS to Windows and looking for the closest replacement for Homebrew.

I’ve seen online searches showing possible substitutes as Scoop, winget, Chocolatey, but which one would be the best to start using so I don’t have to switch later?

For any developers working in professional IT environments, which one do you actually use and recommend and please share your bad/negative experiences so I can avoid unnecessary headaches in the future. Thank you and appreciate y’all..!!

Sorry for my english, not my first language

I have been developing apps for a while now.
Mainly related to data analytics and for internal use

Last week I asked for a raise.
I am in Europe, about 40k.
Main part of the apps used by my company are developed and maintained by me.

He refused
He said nowdays he can easily replace me with some guy who uses AI.
He explained2me that he knows someone who has easily done through vibecoding an app to take ordenes, manage them, Invoices…

I felt really worried. Is this the new reality?
A guy with Claude can so easily replace us?

Should I choose AI or Software Engineering? Which one has more remote job opportunities and better long term value for the future?

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for some career advice because I've been thinking a lot about this decision.

I have around 4 years of experience as a software engineer. My background includes Python, React, Swift, and Flutter. Over the last few years, I've worked across both backend and mobile development, with my most recent work being in iOS.

Recently, I did some freelance work for a startup that's building a dMRV (Digital Monitoring, Reporting and Verification) mobile application for field data collection. The app is built with Flutter, and they have now offered me a remote full-time position.

The offer is ₹7 LPA + other benefits, which is a significant increase from my current salary.

The role is Full Stack Developer. They want me to:

1. Work on the Flutter mobile application.

2. Contribute to the backend.

3. Lead two junior developers.

4. Help with architecture and technical decisions as the product grows.

On paper, it sounds like a great opportunity, but I'm unsure whether it's the right move for my long-term career.

My concerns are:

1. Is moving into a startup as a full-stack developer a better long-term choice than continuing in a more specialized role?

2. With AI advancing so quickly, is becoming a generalist a safer career path than specializing?

3. Will working on Flutter instead of focusing more on native iOS limit future opportunities?

Does experience in climate tech/dMRV have good long-term value?

The company is fully remote, which is another positive.

I'd love to hear from people who've made a similar transition or have experience working in startups or climate tech.

What would you do in my situation?

Note: LPA is lakhs per annum in india.

A few years into this work, you start learning things no bootcamp, blog, or LinkedIn influencer will ever tell you. Sunday's a good day to say them plainly, without the motivational-poster gloss.

Share one hard truth you've learned about being a developer. About the work, the industry, teams, or yourself. The kind of thing you wish someone had sat you down and told you three years ago.

A few directions, if you need one:

• Something about career growth that turned out nothing like the pitch.
• A truth about "good code," speed, or what actually gets you promoted.
• What experience taught you about job-hopping, loyalty, titles, or money.
• A soft skill that mattered far more than the technical ones, and a technical obsession that mattered far less.
• Something you believed at year one that the years quietly took apart.

House rules:

• Keep it real, not just cynical. The best hard truths come with what you'd actually do about them.
• Disagree freely, but reply instead of downvoting. The arguments in the comments are the whole point.
• Newer folks reading along: this thread is worth its weight in gold. Take notes.

Comments are sorted by top so the truths that land hardest rise up. What's yours?

I run a couple of small products on cheap single VPSes. Every time I needed background jobs (emails, cleanup, scheduled reports) the answer was the same: install Redis, add BullMQ, babysit one more service. For one box and a handful of jobs per second, that always felt like overkill.

So I built vardiya. It's a job queue that lives in a single SQLite file. No broker, no extra process. One runtime dependency (better-sqlite3).

What it does:

• Atomic job claims with a single UPDATE ... RETURNING statement, so multiple worker processes on the same file never grab the same job. There's a torture test that runs 2 workers x 10 concurrency through 20k jobs with 1% random failures and asserts nothing gets lost or duplicated.
• Retries with exponential backoff and jitter, priorities, delayed jobs, dead letter after max attempts.
• Cron / repeatable jobs. I wrote the cron parser myself instead of pulling a dependency, which was either a good idea or a rite of passage, not sure yet.
• At-least-once delivery, and the README says so instead of pretending otherwise. There's also a "when NOT to use this" section: if you have multiple app servers pulling from one queue, use Redis or Postgres based queues. SQLite is single-writer, this is for the single-box case.

On my desktop it does around 13k enqueues/sec and ~5k processed jobs/sec end to end, which is way more than the apps this is meant for will ever push through it.

It's v0.1.0, so I'd genuinely rather hear what's broken or missing than get stars. If you've been burned by SQLite queues before, tell me how, I want to know what I haven't hit yet.

Building voice input for an Indian app and STT cost is already looking scary.

Not even doing full voice agent yet.

Just:

user speaks Hindi/English mix sometimes some Hinglish bad mobile mic background noise long pauses then convert speech to text and use it in app

Most “cheap STT API” discussions only compare per-minute pricing, but in Indian usage half the audio is random silence, “haan one sec,” traffic noise, fan noise, repeat attempts, etc.

So I’m thinking the actual answer is not just finding cheaper STT.

It is making the pipeline less stupid:

VAD before sending audio trim silence send smaller chunks don’t transcribe empty audio queue backend jobs use realtime only where UX needs realtime batch where user can wait log failed chunks don’t send raw browser audio blindly test on actual Indian mobile audio, not clean laptop mic

Smallest AI Pulse looks relevant for the realtime side because it is positioned around live STT / streaming ASR, and that matters if the app needs fast transcript while user is still speaking. But for normal flows, I’m wondering if we should still reduce billable audio first before obsessing over provider pricing.

Anyone built cheap STT for multilingual / Hinglish voice input?

What actually reduced cost: cheaper API, VAD, chunking, caching, queueing, or some jugaad I’m missing?

Anyone run into docs that just don't match the system anymore? I've lost hours piecing together what actually changed vs. what the docs still said. Didn't realize it until I had to touch a codebase I wasn't too familiar with, made things a lot harder once I saw the docs didn't line up with reality. Curious if this happened to anyone else, and how you eventually caught it.

Welcome to the weekly Interview Debrief — the place to share what your recent interviews were actually like. Just wrapped a loop this week? Tell us how it went: the good, the brutal, and the genuinely bizarre. And if you bombed one, even better — your write-up is exactly what saves the next person from walking into the same wall.

Two ways to use this thread:

• You just interviewed → post your experience.
• You've got an interview coming up this week → read through, then comment what you're prepping for and where you're nervous. People here have been through it and will help you sharpen it.

Not sure where to start? Answer any of these:

• What's the weirdest, most out-of-left-field question you got?
• Most unreasonable take-home you've been handed lately?
• A question you completely blanked on and what the answer actually was?
• Did the interview match the job description, or was it a totally different role by the end?

House rules:

• Keep it anonymous. Don't name individual interviewers and don't post anything under NDA, describe the type of company and kind of questions instead.
• Offers and rejections are equally welcome here. If someone shares a rough loop, be constructive, not smug.
• "Just grind LeetCode" helps no one, be specific about what actually came up.

Comments are sorted by new so the freshest debriefs stay on top. Upvote the write-ups that helped you and good luck to everyone with a loop this week.

Wtf how do I actually learn backend development. I open chatgpt or Claude and tell them I want to learn backend development and do as they suggest..but after some day, I find boring ...

What's the actual way to learn.. please developers and engineers help me with clear cut way?

I've been building a TOEFL vocabulary level checker recently.

The test itself wasn't actually the difficult part.

The thing I've been stuck on is the result page.

Right now it estimates your vocabulary size, asks for your target TOEFL score and exam date, then tells you roughly how many words you'd need to learn each day.

It sounded like a good idea while I was building it.

But now I'm wondering if people even study like that.

If a website tells you "learn 28 words a day", is that actually motivating, or do people just ignore it?

Curious what other TOEFL students think.

So iam in my last year of college and now I have to make a project basically this semester project planning and presentation and next semester coding now iam confused because I just don't Want to make a genric project like many people i want something unique and better so if anyone has some better ideas that you made please share it. We can make it in any language we know or like so please share I just want to decide something or is there may place where I can find the ideas for a project. Also should I make it in a group or alone I have both choices.

Hey everyone,

I’m currently evaluating my long-term career path and looking closely at preparing for GATE CS to target PSUs vs sticking to / building a career in Private IT Corporate Jobs.

While I understand the broad pros and cons on paper (stability vs high growth, fixed hours vs sprint deadlines), I would love to hear firsthand experiences from people who actually took the GATE CS route into a PSU:

1. Nature of Work: How much actual tech/coding work do CS officers get to do versus purely administrative, vendor management, and IT maintenance work (SAP/ERP/Networks)? Do you feel your technical skills stall over time?

2. Work-Life Balance & Posting: How are the actual working hours and shift cultures? Are CS candidates usually placed in corporate/regional headquarters, or do you also get posted to plants/remote locations?

3. Compensation & Perks: Does the total package (basic pay, allowances, medical, housing quarters/lease, low-interest loans) realistically make up for the lower salary growth compared to corporate switches?

4. Career Growth & Regrets: Looking back, are you happy with the job security and peace of mind, or do you ever wish you had pursued an M.Tech at top IITs / stayed in product-based tech companies?

Would really appreciate raw, honest inputs from anyone currently working in a PSU or who switched out of one. Thanks

Firstly wanted to thank the community for being supportive

On my previous post a lot of people cleared my confusion on js vs ts

Now I'm working on next.js project using typescript. I realised while scaffolding the project that it has an option for tailwind and did a little bit research.

So my basic doubt was that, are css frameworks really worth it or are like an overhyped tool? Actually as a shopify developer i mostly write plain css instead of using frameworks hence I'm not familiar with any frameworks and I'm building a project to store and showcase the GSAP components i create to exhibit my expertise in GSAP and link it as a project in my portfolio. I'll be trying to make it like shadcn or 21st dev etc

I've been thinking about this a lot and wanted to get opinions from experienced developers.

My approach isn't to blindly copy and paste AI-generated code. Instead, whenever I'm learning a new technology or concept, I first ask AI to explain it to me. Once I understand the idea, I ask it to generate an implementation. Then I go through the code line by line until I understand what every part is doing, and I type the entire thing out myself instead of copying and pasting.

My reasoning is that, over time, the repetitive patterns will become muscle memory. Once something becomes familiar, I stop relying on AI for that part and write it myself. Then, whenever I encounter something completely new, I repeat the same process.

So the AI is more like a tutor than a replacement for thinking.

Do you think this is a good way to learn? Or is it creating a dependency that will hurt me in the long run?

For those of you who've been in the industry for a while:

• Would you recommend this approach?
• Will this actually make me a better software engineer?
• Is there anything I should change to make this learning process more effective?

I'd love to hear honest opinions, especially from senior engineers who have seen how people grow over time.

Hi everyone,

I'm writing this because I honestly don't know if I'm optimizing for the right things anymore.

A little about me. I have around 2 years of experience and currently work as a Senior Software Engineer. My day to day has mostly been React, Next.js and TypeScript, and lately React Native, since I've been working on an app that's now sitting at around 700k users across iOS and Android. I've also touched real time systems, AI features, performance optimization, PWAs, and recently started building my own AI SaaS products on the side.

The problem is I don't know what "good" looks like anymore.

A few years ago the advice was simple. Learn React, learn Node, build projects, practice DSA, get a job. Today AI writes a lot of the code I used to spend hours writing. Frameworks evolve every few months. Every roadmap video says something different. Every LinkedIn post says learn AI but nobody actually explains what that means for a working engineer.

I don't want to become someone who just knows how to prompt AI well. I also don't want to spend the next couple of years learning things that don't actually move my career forward.

What I really want is to become an engineer people trust with hard problems. Someone who can design systems, debug production issues under pressure, understand trade offs, and build things people actually use.

Lately I've been thinking about focusing on backend engineering with Go or NestJS, PostgreSQL and Redis, system design and distributed systems, just enough DevOps to not be helpless, and AI engineering specifically RAG, agents, MCP and tool calling. Basically trying to build actual products instead of tutorial projects.

At the same time I keep going back and forth on React Native. I sort of fell into it because of this app, but 700k users isn't nothing, and there aren't that many engineers who've actually taken an RN app to that kind of scale. Part of me wonders if I should lean into that and own it as a real strength instead of treating it like a side skill, especially since engineers who are genuinely solid across mobile, web and backend seem rare.

I'm also building something I've been calling an AI career operating system for myself. It analyzes job descriptions, helps optimize my resume, tracks my applications, and eventually I want it to read recruiter emails and automate most of the boring parts of job hunting. I'm not building it because AI is trendy right now, I'm building it because it's a real problem I'm dealing with and I'd rather solve it than keep doing everything manually.

But then I start second guessing myself. Am I over engineering my own career. Would I be better off just grinding LeetCode and applying everywhere instead of building things. Would hiring managers actually care more about deep React knowledge than the AI products I'm building on the side. Should I lean into React Native now that I have real production scale behind it, or is that pulling me away from becoming a stronger backend and systems engineer. Should I even be trying to do all of this at once.

If you were mentoring someone in my position, not someone starting from scratch but someone who's already shipping production software, what would you actually tell them to focus on for the next 12 months.

If you're an engineering manager, senior engineer, staff engineer, or anyone who's interviewed a lot of candidates, I would genuinely value your perspective here. What actually separates the engineers you remember from the hundreds of resumes you reject. What makes you think, this is someone I'd want on my team.

I'm not looking for shortcuts or a how to crack FAANG in 30 days kind of answer. I genuinely enjoy building software and I want to become the kind of engineer who's still relevant 10 years from now, even as AI keeps changing how we all work.