Yeah I used to use Pidgin to chat with people on Facebook! I miss those days.

Prosody was a breeze to set up and it worked pretty well for me. I set up a simple bot to get notifications on my phone. The whole set up works great until you get to the notifications. Super unreliable. I believe that's an issue of the iOS client I am using.

Personally, I am happy to see someone else thinking about cutting down stuff and simplifying. Similar posts have started popping up more frequently and as a fan of simplicity, reliability and maintainability I am very happy! Don't get discouraged.

I guess this can be view from Jung's point of view where you adopt different personas in different situations. If I understand correctly this is necessary for normal existence but identifying too much with a specific persona can lead to undesired side effects.

I've adopted a mindset where each persona is just a tool for a specific situation or setting, but I always try to be aware that it is just the self using the persona, not the other way around. I had fallen into the trap of strongly identifying with a persona and was wondering why I was feeling so confused, so stepping back a bit helped a lot.

Reading about Jung's map of the psyche has been quite interesting and useful.

Well, but Jung is wrong. What did this guy know about humans, anyway? You have one identity and only one. Anything else is just lack of integrity. Said Mark Zuckerberg.

Why did the title of the post change? It doesn't reflect what's on the page.

> What does the unit "year of experience" represent, and is it comparable across domains?

In my opinion, "years of experience" should not be disqualified as one of multiple evaluation tools for skill. I think it signifies that you have had the opportunity to go through a variety of situations, challenges, projects etc. and you have accumulated knowledge and experience that cannot be learned by reading tutorials or working on side projects.

From personal experience and by talking to and working with other much more experienced engineers than me, I have noticed that some of the most important knowledge is obtained just by working on something for a longer amount of time.

Obviously, there are many exceptions to this rule, there are engineers with years and years of experience that are just bad at what they do. What I am trying to say is that this tool for evaluation should not be discarded.

This is exactly it. This guy is just ignorant. He wanted this job, hoping it would „make him a better developer“.

But was shocked they consider a senior dev someone who had many jobs that made him a better developer.

WTF?

Soon we need Senior+ and Senior++ levels, if anyone can be senior.

The seniors i have seen, in my decade of programming, scare the shit out of me and make me feel like i just hello worlded into programming.

Looks like I am on a similar path to you but you are a couple of steps ahead of me. Is there a place I can contact you with a few questions. I'd really appreciate it.

Sure, email in profile, happy to chat.

I think sometime we, software engineers, forget that we are hired to do a job and not to play around with toys in the sandbox.

Congrats! That is really cool. I recently built something very similar out of annoyance with spam that I was actually interested in: https://pobox.host/ The difference is you don't need an email to register. I am happy to see that the idea is validate and people actually pay for the service.

Thank you. pobox.host is very nice, I like the simplicity of it.

As others have said, this is great! A simple but very useful idea and a great execution. Thank you for not making it an amalgamation of heavy javascript frameworks.

Thank you. I wanted to mainly use Python for the backend, since that's the language I am most comfortable in. And Django was good enough for 90% of the use case. For the frontend stuff like Newsfeed, Comments, Upvotes etc which involved user interaction I used Javascript/handlebars/jQuery.

React or any frontend frameworks would have probably been an overkill (honestly, even jQuery was) in the case of diff.blog, since Django did most of the Job. If the frontend codebase becomes larger, I would probably rewrite them to make use of native Web Components. I still have not yet experimented with web components though.

Thank you for going “old school”. We need more stuff like this. All these frontend monstrosities are getting out of hand lately. Lots of overhead for very little value.