T-shaped? T-pose?
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Live stream archives
I've been doing livestreams, this is the last few weeks worth of recordings:
- The Pod Processing Plant - Part 1
- SQLite on Object Storage
- LLM on Fly GPU with Elixir
- Fundamentals of Object Storage
lostkobrakai on the radio
Meet the german who has probably helped every single Elixir developer at some point. You'll recognize his avatar on Slack, ElixirForum and probably the Discord. You will be amazed that he ever gets any work done.
Benjamin Milde joined me on BEAM Radio.
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Specialization requires general skill
I listened to Oxide and Friends with Andres Freund, the developer that discovered the xz backdoor. Aside from weird audio clipping, probably a noise gate or something, it was good and interesting. I think most people would, prior to this world-wide news, have considered Andres a specialist.
He spends his days building on Postgres doing a lot of performance optimization work and such. He is pretty deep in the niche there. Of course when speaking to Brian Cantrill who is not a database optimization developer to my knowledge they both largely speak and understand C. They both do systems programming. Their tools, techniques and fundamentals very much overlap.
And Andres has probably done a variety of things prior to Postgres. His specialization sits on top of a general capability in programming, troubleshooting and understanding computers.
My skillset is very general. I grow it in width constantly and as I work more with something I tend to intensify the depth of particular parts. Some of them now largely discarded such as Drupal 6 and ActionScript. Right now the general developer public would pin me as an Elixir specialist.
I think the Elixir developer community would consider me a pretty generalist web-oriented developer but I'm not sure. People don't tell you these things very often. Increasingly I'm falling into a Nerves-shaped hole which is definitely a specialization within Elixir.
The only reason I can go and fall into that hole with any efficiency is because I have a lot of weird and varied Linux and computer experience that I can draw on to form my basic understanding of how things work. I've fought with C, Makefiles and such before. There is so much stuff going on in embedded. Some of it is web development, believe it or not.
If I do go down the path of becoming a Nerves specialist. People would say that I am incredibly niche and highly specialized. But it would be entirely dependent on a very wide skillset.
Are you specialized? How? You can reach me on the Fediverse where I'm @lawik@fosstodon.org or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.
Thanks for reading. I appreciate it.
