Øredev 2024

I will be at Øredev this November and I hope some of you will be able to make it as well. I recommend poking your employer to get you tickets and send you there, get the latest trends and make the good connections. I was there last year and had a great time. This year, even more podcasting, publishing and shenanigans.

I juuust might also end up doing a talk. Who could say. I'm not on the schedule yet but here is to hoping. About what? Nerves of course.

Last time I spoke the recording kind of casually shot to the top 2 of most watched talks they've ever had so let's see if we can't make a bigger bang this time.

Also have it on good authority that Fly and by extension Tigris are likely to show up. Hope to have some fun with them.

It is kind of a perfect time of the year in Sweden to be in-doors and nerding out because the weather will be terrible and it will be a long time until we see the sun.

Note: I am being compensated with tickets to the event and accomodations to help promote the event. The last one I was at was a very good event so I bothered to maintain the relationship and make something happen this year as well.

If you missed my talk trying to get the wider world to try Elixir & LiveView. Do give it a look :)

Sorry about all the pre-amble. I have a lot coming up this final quarter and I do want y'all to know about it. Let me know if you have questions or input.

Pick the biggest damn lang out there

New plan. I'm a JS & TypeScript developer with a side of Python, Java and .Net.

There will be infinity roles posted I can apply to by an infinity of companies. I will apply to them all. Me and the surrounding legion of faceless developers will throng around every remote opportunity and expect that one of us is chosen. It will sometimes even be true.

I will bank on larger corporations that need 50 generic developers to keep their generalized framework for abstracting systems running. But you know, in a hip way, because they've mostly migrated to JS. And by JS we mean TypeScript. And by migrated we definitely mean partially.

I will apply to all the Python + Java data pipeline roles you've ever seen. Data will be moved as convolutedly as possible. Countless servers will decode and encode eternal JSON in the least efficient ways imaginable.

The larger the company the greater the chance that no-one will notice if I do well or poorly. The terminations and promotions will be arbitrary. The systems, both human and technical, will be fully opaque. Right up until your job gets out-sourced. Success is not the objective.

Every place uses their own bespoke cocktail of frameworks from various eras, from various tech leads making choices for their particular CV. Cohesion, opinion and design are concerns for the small ecosystems. We do everything here. We've got market share.

We only deal in big. Mass market, universal, omnipresent technologies. It is very important that we can acquire the necessary .. talent. You know 10 devs to the team that ports our SettingsFactoryProviderManagerContext from Java to TypeScript. And we must be certain that we can source 500 devs until Q2 2026. Because that's a number someone wrote and now that's what we do. Sourcing devs.

We have market share. There are jobs. Of course there are vastly more applicants than positions here, just as in the smaller ecosystems, though we get 2000 applicants for every position instead of 100. That still counts as there being jobs. The number of listings is high.

I used to do Elixir you know. But it doesn't have any market share. No-one uses it. It seems to be most popular with smaller companies with ideas about system design, opinionated choices and weird objectives like success. They'll never hire 500 before Q2 2026. Just look at Erlang. Whatsapp didn't ever hire 500 devs before they got acquired. Like they didn't even need 500 devs total to do the thing. That's a bad ecosystem!

Also I don't think their Settings Factory gets Provided and it certainly doesn't get Managed with any Context. Heck, I bet they still regularly hire without posting roles. Almost like they all connect. Like some kind of community. They don't get it. It is all about the size of the market.

If you read this far and are very confused. Yes, this is intended to be satire. I don't prefer calling that out but maybe you are new here. Is it good satire? Your call. You can reach me on the Fediverse where I'm @lawik@fosstodon.org or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate it.