[dkarl]

> Add that to the fact that we’ve also been overpromised new shiny things that turn out to he disappointments

I was a young developer when Enterprise Java was the future, and the way you knew it was the future was that it used XML for _everything_, so I'm not sure things are so different in that respect.

I don't remember getting excited about the hyped new stuff that VCs were excited about. I remember getting excited about simple stuff, almost dumb stuff. I remember getting my mind blown by powerful programming concepts, but I also remember getting my mind blown that I could select text in emacs and run a shell command on it with a few keystrokes.

I guess when I learned these things I didn't automatically crush my excitement with thoughts like "you can't make a business out of this" or "other people already know this" or "there are bigger, higher-leverage ideas I also need to be pursuing" or "I might get laid off from this job and never be able to get a software development job again." I did have those thoughts -- after the dot-com bust, nobody was sure the programming job market would recover again -- but I had them separately. I didn't feel like I needed to crush the pleasure I took in small things to make room for the big things.

P.S. If you're burned out by grandiose promises, a tool like DuckDB is a refreshing change. It was probably built to solve a really hard problem for somebody, but for me it's a humble little tool that scales down nicely to annoying file munging problems that feel like they should be easier. If you have a CSV file and want to run a SQL query on it, or you want to write a query that joins a CSV file with a JSON file, it'll have you there in no time, no need to write a script or fire up a Jupyter session.