specific, clear idea of what skills I might need to have, refine, etc,

Make stuff. Keep making stuff. Publish your source code, even the shitty stuff. Maybe especially the shitty stuff, since that tends to be more interesting. Be ready to talk about it (humbly) during job interviews.

as well as some looser guidance and direction after losing my confidence.

Hang in there. The industry is in a fuck around phase right now where we bet that AI will be an acceptable substitute for good old fashioned recruitment.

Another “find out” phase is on the horizon - where we fall over ourselves to recruit anyone who can code to undo our stupidity before we go out of business. (Or to quickly capitalize on market gaps left by our competitors who went out of business.)

Do any of you have experience with services like this?

I’ve gotten my mentorship a few places:

• Community college classes and workshops.
• The #python IRC (Internet Rely Chat) channel on FreeNode.org (it’s free)
• Channels (mostly YouTube) full of free recordings of programming conference recordings.
• Networking through volunteering to teach what I know at Libraries and Makerspaces
• Occasionally taking lower paying jobs to spend time working with someone known to me to be an excellent mentor.
• Professional Programming Conferences (once I could get employers to pay my way)

Rust’s borrow checker may be annoying at times, but it forces you to think about ownership and prevents you from stuffing statefulness where it shouldn’t be.

That does sound pretty cool.

is very hard to create a good inheritance structure that does not devolve over time as new requirements get added

That’s such an important point. Whatever else folks take from this thread, I hope they catch that.

And I’ll pile on to add - more layers is more risk. One layer of inheritance is a lot easier to keep maintaining than inheritance that goes four layers deep.

The pressure to structure code Is very nice.

That is a great point. It’s interesting how our tools influence our designs, and OOP does force some thought to go into having an intentional structure.

Thanks. I hate it.

I’m going to spend this thread agreeing with Rust fans, and I hate that the most. (I love you all, really, but you’re fun to try to wind up.)

OOP sucks because Inheritance sucks. This person’s brief non-shitty experience doesn’t change that.

Languages built around OOP suck where they use inheritance instead of interfaces.

Inheritance is isn’t always a terrible choice. But it is a terrible choice often enough that we need to warn the next generation.

when it became apparent that all the states that kept getting hit with natural disasters were mostly Republican controlled ones. 😂

Yeah. Almost like electing a long string of sociopaths makes the citizens more vulnerable to disaster impacts…

“the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.”

I found that tough to parse, but worth it.

“Either apartheid is right or wrong. It’s really, really simple.”

Well put.