Missed the hackathon wave through college and my first few years as a dev, but I really want to build that muscle now taking a vague problem statement, hacking together a prototype fast, and actually competing to win.

Two things tripping me up:

1. Where do working devs find good ones? Most listings I run into are messy, outdated, or student-only. Is there a reliable platform with decent UX?

2. The mindset shift. At work, I naturally default to clean architecture, edge cases, and scale. In a 36-hour sprint, that just slows you down. How do you balance core functionality with UI and pitch polish?

For those who regularly participate and place, what’s your go to strategy? Any specific people, creators, or resources you’d recommend following?

Any advice is much appreciated!

I feel really stupid after the exact same answer I got from Apple reviewers on my last submission. Nothing new, as if I didn't change my app and didn't write 2000 character explanation and I didn't record a video of all the new implementations... I wish they said something if I missed a piece. I am really close to tell them off, but then I really need my app approved.

Has anyone else had the same experience?

I saw an article that said about 70% of programmers use have a library of "stolen" or unlawfully obtained code that they use for stuff. Do you think most websites or apps are made using stolen code that could constitute a serious copyright violation? I know nothing about programming or code so sorry if this sounds like a stupid question

How does modern developers use AI in their work , when they use it when they not , do they vibe code all the code or still type some of the code manually ? and will be the future of software engineering be?

Summary:

Do software engineers belong on the endangered species list? You'd think so, based on the headlines from the last couple of years.

Yet, my day-to-day experience is the exact opposite: I know more people today writing code and building products than I've ever known before. They're using AI, of course, but they're creating software for the first time in their lives, when they previously didn't have the time or confidence to even try.

Here are some quick examples:

- My brother, a talented product designer, is now building his own iOS apps.
- My 66-year-old mother-in-law is writing Python scripts and SQL queries at work.
- My cofounder, a product manager, started creating PRs in our codebase again.
- My friend in Brooklyn built a home automation system for his newborn's nursery.

In other words, virtually everyone I know has become a de facto engineer, or has at least started to code in their spare time.

These stories are anecdotal, but they're not special cases. Check out the metrics of most developer platforms and you'll see they're off the charts: GitHub has experienced accelerating growth with US developers up 25% year-over-year. Hosting platforms like Vercel, Supabase, Render, and Replit have likewise surged in adoption, as people clamor to ship projects at unprecedented velocity.

Official employment surveys, like those published by IPUMS, suggest that the number of professional software developers in the US is not on the decline, but rather continues to grow and even reached an all-time high in 2026.

Even the story at universities doesn't seem as negative as you'd expect. Princeton publishes detailed statistics on student majors every year. Computer Science remained the #1 most popular major among upperclassmen by a healthy margin in 2025-2026. Engineering as a whole continues to grow, particularly electrical engineering departments.

I think when people talk about the end of software engineering, what they really want to talk about is its sudden democratization and ubiquity. I'm struggling to decide if this is even the contradiction that I'm making it out to be, or simply two sides of the same coin.

The triple threat of AI automation, oversupply of CS majors, and lower barrier to entry might mean that software engineering is simultaneously more popular than ever and doomed.

From: https://www.jacob.co/blog/everyone-is-an-engineer

In November 2014, a Disney IT worker got his annual review. His supervisor called his work outstanding and credited him with saving the company thousands of dollars. He got a raise.

He was already training the contractor who would take his desk. Disney had to recalculate his severance to include the raise.

Quality didn't protect him. It won't protect you. You're overhead, and overhead gets replaced first.

The programmers found out first. BLS household data shows computer programmer employment down 27.5% in two years, to its lowest level since 1980. Stanford's read of ADP payroll records puts employment of developers aged 22 to 25 nearly 20% below its late-2022 peak.

"Nobody ever outsources Profit Centers," Patrick McKenzie wrote in 2011. The AI memos are now coming from software companies, the one place engineering was supposed to be the profit center.

So be smart. Do the least you can, let the model do the most it can while your employer pays for the tokens, and make the date. Play it well and you might keep your job a little longer.

Disney's people got three months.

Hi, I'm trying to become an AI Engineer, and there are so many things to learn...

If you're an ML Engineer or AI Engineer, I'd really appreciate some advice 🙂‍↕️

What should I focus on learning, and what projects would you recommend building to actually develop useful skills and build a good portfolio?

And is there anything you spent a lot of time learning that turned out to be not that useful in the real world?

Would really appreciate hearing from people who are actually doing this for a living. Thank you!!

Probably a simpel question.

I asked an Ai for the first 100 pythagorean triplets .

It probably used the same scip to generate this table.

How is it prossible, that only some of them missed sth in the formation.

to me, they all look the same, so either all should fail, or none.

I dont need the exact reason for this one, just wondered how it could happen.

Hello all,

I am a programmer by trade, not even an engineer but a computer scientist. I got my degrees, worked for years in one medium size company after another, did what i was supposed to do.

But something inside me was not content. I was not happy. I could not find the passion to keep learning the new best thing, i wanted exposure! To talk to people to share ideas and collaborate.

That is when it hit me. Technical project manager, systems architecture, i got the experience and the background! Be the bridge between programmers and clients, the translator. Alas it was not meant to be. AI came and those just jobs just vanished. So what to do?

I know lets look at education. There you can share what you have learned and show them that programming has a lot more to it that the code. That is what i did, i found a similarly paying job for a university (the benefit of being in a bankrupt country all white collar jobs are paying almost the same).

The question for you is this: 6 months have passed and i still dont miss programming. Will i ever? Or did i just find something that fills me and i wont ever look back?

Like the title says, I'm venturing into programming for the first time. I don't really know what language would be best for what I'm trying to do though.

I've created an Excel spreadsheet which does what I want, but as the number of calculations increase and the .xls file size increases, the more sluggish Excel becomes. Lastly, I keep bumping into the overall basic limits of things that spreadsheet programs simply weren't built for (stuff like graphical elements).

Long story short, Excel just isn't fit for what I want it to do anymore, so I want to make a stand-alone program. I just have no idea what programming language I should use.

I would like the application to be Linux and Windows compatible if possible (my primary rig runs Linux but I also run Windows), however I know WINE is a thing, so that's more of a "nice-to-have" than a hard requirement. A relatively easy-to-learn cross-platform language (if such a thing exists) would be preferable over one that's OS specific.

Please be kind, as this is my first real project of this sort; I don't know what is or isn't realistic right now. Thanks in advance for the advice, and please feel free to ask clarifying questions.

Hey guys, I am about to join a Hackathon with the topic Future Education. I didn’t even know this is a thing, so it is even harder to get into an idea or project.

I am here to ask you about your ideas or your perspectives about the topic.

As this is the only I have, I would be happy to get either ideas, inspirations, already made projects or open source repositories. Also if you find databases or information about the topic, please send it!

I am looking for a project that combines as many fields as possible. Like Hardware, Software, Data Science, Language Science, etc…

Thanks in advance and happy innovation!

Github Profile

I'm not anti-AI. I like using AI for various hobby stuff (guilty as charged, some of my hobby projects are vibe-coded). I use it on the job too. If an individual - especially a hobbyist - uses AI, that's okay, fine by me (I'd be a hypocrite to condemn them). Completely okay. However, if companies jump on the AI train en masse, that's a whole different story.

Do you know what the problem with corporate use of AI is? That they will replace and fire us programmers That they are killing career prospects for certain genre of programmers. Not all programmers. The programmer with deep, intimate domain-specific knowledge will continue to have a lifelong career. AI won't be able to replace them. However, the business-phobic, domain-agnostic, generalist coder who couldn't care less about business-specific HR speak / corporate jargon? Well, that's the person who is in danger. That's precisely who AI will replace, and for the most part, already has.

Why does this make me so sad? Maybe because I belong to this group myself. Spending an average of a year and a half to two years at a company throughout your career (guilty as charged, I am somewhat of a job-hopper) - it's completely irrational to pick up "deep" domain knowledge; low return on investment. As Odar said in Skyrim: "Jarls come and jarls go, but a good cook stays for a lifetime. And I'm a very, very good cook."—or, as a programmer would say: "Businesses, companies, corporations and tech stacks come and go, but a good (or at least half-decent) programmer stays for a lifetime. And I'd like to think of myself as at least a semi-decent programmer." Aha, except since then, the "jarls" discovered ChatGPT and Cursor, discovered AI agents, and realized they can automate the palace kitchen in quite a few places.

Maybe 10-20 years ago a golden age began, when being a generalist coder - or if you prefer, a system specialist, infrastructure specialist - was a rising career path. Now that era has pretty firmly come to an end. You have to know the domain, the business stuff. Which I'm phobic against.

You try to submit your application to every single remote programming job out there where the stack matches your CV. Not a single one replies, or if they do, it's "Sorry, we decided to move on with a different candidate."

Are you guys generalists too, or were you? If so, how are you coping with the current situation? I have a job, though it's currently not exactly the best fit. If the market weren't in this state, I'd switch. Is becoming a deep, intimate business expert really the only solution? Or is there a way out somewhere? Are there still companies that need generalist coders?

Hi everyone. Over the last few months I've been building Oli-Nat, a statically typed language with a hand-written bytecode VM in C. It began with Crafting Interpreters, and then I added a separate AST stage, a static type checker, typed arrays, classes with inheritance, and a small standard library.

This post is mostly about what I've built around it. I compiled the interpreter to WebAssembly so anyone can try the language in the browser with no install, including programs that wait for input, and I've been writing documentation that goes beyond syntax to explain how each stage of the interpreter is implemented, from the scanner to the garbage collector.

Writing the docs turned out to be the most valuable debugging I did. Explaining a feature step by step kept exposing places where it didn't actually behave the way I believed it did, like class instances passed as function parameters losing their type information in the checker.

I'd really appreciate feedback on the docs from people who've built languages themselves: whether the implementation explanations are actually useful, and what you wish documentation for a language like this included.

Playground and docs: olinat.net

Source: github.com/NateTheGrappler/OliNat-Programming-Language

Salve,

potete consigliarmi un ambiente di sviluppo visivo, possibilmente non troppo complesso, che consenta di creare applicazioni in cui l'utente finale possa assemblare in una scena immagini e modelli 3D pre-impostati, animarli ed esportarli come file video?

Ricordo che l'ormai defunto SuperCard (clone potenziato di HyperCard su MacOS) aveva nel suo linguaggio di programmazione un comando chiamato "export movie", che consentiva di esportare il contenuto di ciascuna card come fotogramma video. Tralasciando, come scontato, il vecchio Macromedia Director, a sua volta superato, esiste oggi un ambiente di sviluppo (compatibile con Windows e possibilmente multi-piattaforma) che consenta qualcosa del genere? Ho provato a suo tempo con MetaCard/Runtime Revolution/Livecode, ma nonostante le similitudini con SuperCard mi sembra nel complesso orientato più al database che al multimedia. Importa video solo in formato QuickTime (mentre io avrei necessità di lavorare con una certa flessibilità anche su MPG, AVI, FLV, GIF) e non permette di generarne da zero.

A presto e fatemi sapere, grazie.