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by solardev 904 days ago
In the web dev space, Vercel is beta-ing AI generated frontends. I'm really excited about this, even though it will probably put me out of work soon, lol (already had a hell of a time finding work this year, and I suspect it's only going to get worse). https://v0.dev/

Wix also does something similar for simple blogs and marketing pages, but having a general purpose frontend generator would be awesome. I hope this allows smaller teams and businesses to create better websites and UX without a dedicated frontend team.

Mostly, I just want the web to be better, whether it's made by me, another dev, or a robot. Bad UIs are annoying!

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On the solar side, I see more and more companies take on the storage problem (batteries, state change materials, etc.). Right now we already have a ton of renewables out West, in some cases too much (California's grid really struggles with it). Spikes in production from sunrise to sunset unfortunately doesn't match up neatly with consumption patterns, and it's hard for the grid to suddenly have to spin up a bunch of fossil fuel plants to meet the mismatched demand when the sun goes down.

Utility-scale batteries/storage basically act as a buffer, smoothing out the demand vs production spikes.

It's interesting to me, as a software person, how this problem has some parallels to API rate limits, vertical vs horizontal scaling, etc. I love these problems at scale, how individual solar panels can build up to grid instability at the large scale, and wish I understood them better.
1 comments
idontwantthis 903 days ago
Are you taking steps to prepare yourself for not being able to work in your field anymore?
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solardev 903 days ago
Yeah, I'm going back to school for a different field (environmental engineering, of the crystals and concrete sort). But if I'm being honest with myself, my main preparation isn't educational but attitudinal/emotional: accepting that I will probably be much poorer in the second half of my life than the first. If retirement seemed a distant prospect before, it will certainly be an impossibility now.

I've done web dev long enough (nearly 30 years) to see it grow from some niche field for nerdy teenagers and certain businesses, to exploratory and revolutionary in the Gmail days, to now taken over by global capital and hypercommercialized.

I thought my labor was fairly compensated at $20 to $40 an hour, working for small businesses and being part of their communities not much different than a graphic designer or brochure maker.

When web dev work skyrocketed to $150-$200+ an hour, as it did during the pandemic years, it just looked like another insane dot com bubble to me. I'm glad that burst and I hope it stays that way -- IMO nothing tech gives us is worth the enshittification it causes our societies and cities, in terms of rampant homelessness and lack of housing, etc.

While challenging on a personal level, I think this was a necessary market adjustment. I know from direct experience my work isn't very difficult, both compared to other parts of the web stack and compared to the many technical fields that require years of study and PhDs and such. The wage explosion we enjoyed was just caused by speculatory investment, a form of gambling all its own, not because our skill or social value suddenly skyrocketed.

In a different world without predatory capitalism, I would've enjoyed being able to do this work the same way potters make mugs, as a personal craft and a pursuit of art. But these days more and more it seems that part of it is getting pushed out by the kind of development that only cares about profit and engagement. It's not what I want out of my career or my life, no matter how much it pays.

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