I used to work in web dev, but I enjoy my current work a lot more. Most of my web role was just taking mockups from the UX team and translating them into code which felt mindless. Now I get handed a system and am asked to squeeze as much performance out of it as possible which I find much more interesting.

The work can be interesting, but intense when in the thick of building a system. There is less competition for jobs compared to pure web/programming, but also less jobs in total. The option is always there to take a web/programming gig if the specialised work is hard to get. Potentially pay is lower than some of the big US web companies, but that's probably as much from me not chasing dollars to the exclusion of all else. Some people/companies don't see this work as deserving of the same/better compensation as web/programming, as it is not as easy to understand and they won't pay for what they don't understand. Find the right employer/client and it can be lucrative.

When I'm home I help operate a rabbit rescue.

All of this is done in a Python environment with usage of Rust for speeding up critical code/computations. (The rust code is delivered as Python modules.)

The work is interesting and different challenges arise when having to process and compute datasets that are updated with 10s of TBs of fresh data daily.

I was once in a group that was switched away from the work we were doing and repurposed to do web work. It was a bad experience, but not because it was web work. The code base we were given was in terrible shape and we weren't allowed the time to adequately fix issues. Thankfully I no longer work there.

I've mostly set aside the languages and tools I used to use, and I'm learning Haiku's variant of C++ to write some native-mode Haiku application software.

Earlier it was geodata imports from OSM or private sources. Now it's mostly routers and GPS tracks. Interfacing with OSRM & Valhalla via C bindings. Road graph analysis and algorithms. I wrote a router myself, comparing different routing algorithms. I also developed a pedestrian traffic model for entire cities, for retail. I also did various ML models. My languages are Python w/ GeoPandas & CatBoost, Rust, Go.

The first version of the code looks like this, https://youtube.com/watch?v=rJuRTZOE99g

The new version is much more feature rich, catering towards the user. Unreal use in Python is now native and users can launch a dedicated server.

The development process can be slow, lots of waiting on compiling and cooking. The Python part of this project is great. Code is very simple and readable and I'm building out a renderer for the geometric algebra package I'm using, Kingdon. This lets users quickly visualize 3D elements, lines, points, planes, and shapes. Working on non-web stuff is great. I love building out UI and text in 3D, it feels like the final form of UI and is a lot more expressive than web UI. Controlling objects in 3D let's you do a lot more. Everything feels right.

Web stuff will burn you out. In my case, that happened 10+ years ago and I've never desired to go back [to building web products].

Working with a stateful and complex protocol like SIP is fun and a pain. You need stateful load balancers, traffic routing can be tricky (f.ex. in k8s...), interoperability between providers is not trivial, etc.

We also use relatively niche protocols for real-time text over RTP, which isn't (or until recently, hasn't been) supported in much VoIP software. This is starting to change due to EU legislation requiring accessibility in all commercial PSTN services, however.

The market for this type of tech was very small ~15-20 years ago. Thus, the company was comitting to every possible sales lead, leaving a right mess in tech debt. So much of the work is handling and working around that...

Much of the product pre-dates viable, affordable 3rd party technology, so there are home-grown components for all sorts of things: conferencing media component that also supports text, RTP proxies that were needed because few 3rd party clients supported ICE or TURN, etc.

Stateful and complex protocols, with home-grown bespoke software components, 3rd party interoperability, 15-20 years of technical debt, and changing customer demands. Fun and challenging!

Full-time: C++ work on nearby connectivity (bluetooth) for embedded / industrial devices (factory equipment). Deep stack, hardware constraints, long lifecycles, high reliability.

Non-web work feels very different: stronger constraints, slower but deliberate releases, and bugs are much more expensive. There’s a lot of interesting software being built far away from HTTP and browsers.

It's a giant pile of legacy code so a lot of what I do is just C++ generalist stuff, but I have a strong math background so if that's ever called for it's me doing that work (especially because I have English-language skills that don't often come with the strong math background at this pay scale). In particular, I'm the guy wrangling Parasolid (geometry kernel used by SolidWorks, for those familiar) to produce geometry for walls and floors.

It is a different experience to be sure - I work on stuff that nobody likes and where most people are surprised it still exists. And my goals tend to be about shutting down, not growing. I succeed with every server we kill, every product we turn off, every customer we get rid of.

My main job currently is in game dev, writing C#. Working for a small studio with flexible roles, I sometimes also take the opportunity to use other tech, like actual web stuff. A couple years ago I wrote a simple HTTP API for some internal needs and that was the first time I did modern web.

I've worked in the embedded space and adjacent. I've done automotive (Autosar), I've done some bare metal applications and I've maintained a custom Linux system for a series of embedded products. I've also worked on tooling (native desktop applications) related to some of these embedded uses.

For fun I still play with some embedded development, and would like to do another Android app. I built a couple simple ones years ago and generally Android development seems pretty pleasant to me, but I haven't done Android side projects in a long time because I can't really think of any apps I'd actually like to have.

I work on graphics drivers. They're hard write and even harder to debug. You have to be a huge nerd about graphics to get very far. It's a relatively rare skill set, but new, younger, nerdier people keep on coming. Most people in graphics are quiet and are just keeping the industry functioning (me). It's applied computer architecture in a combination of continuous learning and intuition from experience.

I'd take a 50% pay cut to work so close to the hardware in my day job, if there was any demand whatsoever.

Coding work spans FPGA (SystemVerilog), Linux kernel C, userspace C, Python, and yes, some web services and Browser JavaScript also. I also work on the network engineering of the cloud service and on the Linux OS image.

Easily the most fun I’ve had as a developer and I’ve worked on lots of different types of commercial software projects before. Not all the world is web apps, embedded work can be very satisfying if you’ve not considered it.

  - Kubernetes consulting
  - On-prem CI for hardware-in-the-loop for radio transceiver firmware using NixOS
  - Firmware for high-power EV chargers in Rust
  - Zero-knowledge cryptography for a blockchain

Full time work: GPU driver development and integration for a smartphone series. It's fun to see how the sauce is made.

Eventually: hope to pick up Rust.

I'm trying to get back into computer networking - both physical cables and the computer code sides of things. Over the past 5 years beginning in the covid lockdowns, I've been watching a lot of the application layer stuff that was written over the past 10-15 years (the stuff HN usually does) slowly blow up. Usually because some REST API or something either broke or got depreciated somehow. This has been affecting both cloud and desktop apps I use, and has made me see the real value in refreshing my lower level network knowledge.

Heck, I'm honestly thinking about getting a CCNA now (or some other non-degree universal cert).

You can check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/@soncsd

Compressing Lamport Signatures is a side-project of mine too.

I’ve been with the team for three and a half years, and it’s been a very educational experience.

Seeing a lot of people here who work in embedded. Would definitely be interested in diving into that world a bit more. Seems like a lot of fun being that close to the hardware.

https://ironcore.dev/

Previously I was working on the ingress components of Cloud Foundry, a Platform-as-a-Service offering.

https://www.cloudfoundry.org/

The difficult "grunt work" is in keeping the native binary small (~5MB or less) and working on Windows, Mac and Linux at feature-parity.

[0] https://terminal.click

(Germany/Munich)

Now I'm doing legal stuff, management and fintech plus web apps servers. Cheers.

I'm building a better primitive for infrastructure via microvm's (think virtual machine but fast and easy to use).

I am about to launch a complete rewrite of this: https://github.com/BinSquare/ERA

Though the end-use isn't web, we can't deny that much of development still goes to building web-services and consumer app.

They varied in complexity from little 8-bit microcontrollers to 64-bit server-class blade PC's orchestrating dozens of smaller controllers over serial networks. Written a lot of C++ to the point where I'm just about sick of it.

I've also done the odd webapp, desktop or mobile app from time to time (C# is fun!), but it's been mostly embedded stuff paying my bills.

I don't actively write code these days though, as there are better quants working with me, but I do take the time to go through our strats every day and stress test them. Our codebase today is also wildly different from the one I started writing for initially 5 years back, so no point in me staying back and pulling down the rest of the team behind with me. So nowadays I mostly play around with building small toolkits for internal use within the company.

But yes, while there is a heavy skew to the web tech., there are enough of people who do the things.

Currently I'm roped to my old hat of a typical SMB sysadmin and.. there are not fun 5hings for the profession.

Currently rebuilding a VFX studio replacing Windows with Linux with a bespoke PXE system and then implementing a Data Vault to secure IP we receive from movie studios.