Two interesting articles (especially as I use this period of particularly bleak jobhunting to think about where I've been):
"The looming demise of the 10x developer" what really hit home for me was not the subject of the tile but the recognition of the distinctiveness and luck of a certain generation of coder. Luckily I tend to run as a youthful version of whatever age I happen to be, because I grew up with those 80s computers - horribly slow (especially given we all ran interpreted BASIC on 'em) but the way you had full power over the machine was intoxicating - or you could even write a game in the ballpark of the store bought ones. As the world moved on to Win 3.1 and Mac-ish WIMP UI, things were more egalitarian but the power of coding for fun was less obvious. (In this era I turned to Visual Basic - even designed and taught a class in it for my fellow undergrads - and then later added Java-based Processing into the mix.)
Then the WWW and first dot com boom happened, and the DIY web was hella fun. Even Geocities pages could be an exercise in coding, and the "Blogosphere" was way more open than Web 2.0. Again a turn with things becoming more egalitarian, but less open. (And I'm bummed how even in the last 10-15 years, the chasm in tools and technique between coding for fun and coding for work has continued to grow - lots of added complexity, not as much added stability as one might have hoped...)
And with the dawn of widely available LLM / ChatGPT stuff - anyone who types for a living has to rethink how they do what they do.
Anyway, related to the first article's emphasis on young geeks growing up - "an Ode to Grids" - - some truly fun animations in that one. I remember geeking out with graph paper as a high schooler and then even when I got a nice graph paper notebook - playing with 2D and isometric 3D fonts and shapes is tons of fun.
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