One of the things you can also focus on, is not looking like an easy target. Which would lower your chance of getting mugged in the first place. Exercise goes a long way there. And if you do end up getting mugged, set up something like a duress pin, which opens a different profile, with different apps, etc.
I'm living on a business visa, somewhere in Asia. I am a freelancer, on long to medium term contracts (6-12 months), but my clients may cancel my contract at any 3 month notice, depending on how they feels (that's the nature of the game). Which would mean that my business visa is in limbo, and I potentially need to return to where I came from; which for me would be fatal at this point (economically, spiritually & socially).
The way I cope with this, is by making sure that my current contract does not define my future. I'm always interviewing and networking with new companies & clients (3-4x per month), and am working on my own startup, which after +1 year is slowly getting users. Perhaps there is no perfect advice here, but I cope by making sure that my job is as replaceable as me. I also have backup plans for if my visa doesn't work work out (spend some time in another country, where I already made plans to get around if my visa becomes a problem).
I am in a similar position as you. And I feel like I am avoiding burnout by shifting the productivity ChatGPT provides me with to my own projects. I mainly work for clients as a independent contractor (web dev), initially they got A LOT more output from me, in the hours which I worked in. I stopped doing that, I actually started to reduce my hours, and gave them the same expected output. 8 hours billed usually where 4-6 hours of sitting behind my desk, now 8 hours billed are 2-4 hours. I would have expected to burn out by now, if all I did was client work; even if they paid me by my output.
Now, I have a mountain of free time, and all this free time goes into working alongside ChatGPT on my own startup. It's a non-AI B2B app, where before ChatGPT I would have needed at least 2 other people working with me. Instead its just me, 8-12 hours per day, next to my work. Its absolutely NOT a work-life balance, but the potential in pay-off which is slowly starting to become realized (2nd B2B user signed on just yesterday), off-sets any fear of a burn out at the moment.
I often feel, that people who say, that ChatGPT can't help them be productive, or makes them "10%-20% more productive", are too far ahead of their own progression curve, or just don't know how to prompt well. For me its easily a 2-5x productivity boost. I stopped talking with some friends who were constantly sending me ChatGPT memes or tricks to get AI to see weird things; its been ridiculous.
> Personally, in my early 40s, I feel my brain is back in 20s.
Him being a game developer, saying that game development will survive, while web programming will die, definitely does project some bias. But I would like to make the argument that web-development as we know it will collapse in the future. Not too far from here, it won't be necessary to have specialized knowledge of languages and frameworks to create applications. You just need to know how to throw configs together. This predates even AI, where its already possible with no-code and low-code platforms to build stuff.
I'm sure that there will be a place for web-development as we know it today, but it probably will not as popular, neither as much of a lever when it comes to building applications and services on the internet. I feel like we were on this path already before AI (no-code, low-code, etc). But with AI it feels like we are on an even faster projection of abstracting most code away behind building blocks. Give it a few years.
You google my real name, and there’s a mountain of content I created. I’m an independent contractor and it’s been getting me short and long term work… all over the world as a web developer. I think it’s been the best thing I ever did.
It's December 7, 1941. The Japanese have just attacked Pearl Harbor. Suddenly, most people realize the status quo has changed. The economy needs to make a major transition. Things need to be built at an unprecedented rate. Sacrifices will need to be made at every level because survival is on the line. Victory is possible but it will be a long and difficult fight.
Do we throw up our collective hands and say "it's too hard, the job is too big, not enough people are willing, we surrender"?
Or do we shut up and get to work?
The transition away from a carbon-emitting economy can be done if we have the will, and we will come out of it stronger than ever. We just need to stop saying we can't, and start building.
Yes, plenty of alternative energy technologies will emit too much carbon during the transition to make them viable. Right now, whenever we build something, we have GHG byproducts all over the place, so we have to really do the math first. A lot of needles will have to be threaded in the coming years if our civilization as we know it is going to survive.
But that doesn't mean we should just give up. And half measures are no longer an option.
This is silly. How can you possibly make such a sweeping statement? How can you possibly believe 7 billion people would feverishly begin working towards something with no sense of plan or intentionally?
Just for the common people. They’re going to fly private jets to every meeting to talk about how best to do it, and meet on their 400 foot yachts afterwards to sign the agreements.
The tyrants always sell themselves as the answer to the apocalypse. Everyone you know is going to die. Society is always heading towards multiple kinds of total destruction. Anyone who uses that to try to take control of us is a tyrant. We shouldn’t sacrifice society at the feet of fear, especially to the very people in charge of the factories and industries causing the problems.
I don’t deny global warming. But I don’t believe the people claiming to have the answers and I’m not willing to follow Hitler logic to take people back to the Stone Age as the “solution” to the problem because I read books (and you shouldn’t either).
But I guarantee you others will put this forward as the “inevitable logic” or “nature will do it for us if we don’t sacrifice everything” as if technology has done nothing and we can’t possibly come back into balance with nature without utterly obliterating human civilization. It’s actually kind of batshit.
Maybe we should stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, and start a schedule of steady tax increases on it so that remembers become gradually but overwhelming cheaper to use.
I think I have what it takes absolutely, what's stopping me currently is time. I'm working on a side project, where I am almost 100% sure that it will pay off immensely. But client work is also paying of really well and its very stable with little risk! So balancing the time between starting (and developing) my own business, and helping someone build their business is what is currently stopping me. Wish I could somehow arbitrage time, without spending money and introducing more risk :)
Looking at the requirements, they feel very understandable to me since I have worked with Flask quite a bit. Then when I look at your repo, I see poetry and quart, both things which aren't even in the requirements. If I had written these requirements, and received your assignments, I would have passed on them the moment I see something I don't know or didn't specify (like quart).
There is nothing wrong with it. I mean there are probably a few dozen others things he could have used. But if my requirements did not mention quant and poetry, while I know that I could get this to work with only docker-compose, I’d fail this take home and move to another applicant who followed the requirements and carried out the process I’m familiar with. Yes sure… he sure he shows that he knows that other tools as well… cool, but what if this was a well defined sprint ticket instead and he came back being off requirements, not matching up with the process? I’m sure there must have been other applications who didn’t diverge at all… delivered me only a working docker-compose, perfect. I’d prefer moving forward with those instead.
