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I have 6 months to fully invest in any cert or tech stack. I don’t need to work.

I’ve been working with Salesforce for 10 years. Kubernetes is interesting me.

I feel too reactive with my work. Either waiting for people on what they want changed or handling unexpected bugs. When I’m not waiting on anyone or I understand the issue, I can work a lot and get into a flow state pretty easily. This is when I’m the happiest at work.

I’ve been at my current gig for 9 months and they have many applications, some 20 years old. Their corporate IT hierarchy seems too big for the company. The CIO has 6 people under them, and each one of those people have 10-30 people under them. My boss is one of the 6.

I want to innovate and help the company be profitable. I want to be helpful. I don’t know what steps to take to become more proactive. My feeling is I need to do a lot of reading of whatever documentation there is and create new documentation if what currently exists is lacking.

I’ve been working as a programmer for 10 years and think I’m done with it.

I feel like the golden age of being a programmer is gone. With constant learning, AI, and competing in a global market because of remote work, it’s super volatile.

Yet my neighbor is an electrician and he has endless clients. He can work 80-90 hours a week if he wants to. He has stable work. He just became a manager and is now making more than me.

I've been getting into the habit to write 1-10 sentences at the end of my day that attempt to anticipate appropriate responses if someone asks me about work over audio/video the next day. I'll sometimes add links. Ideally I'll have a to do list to start my day.

This habit really helps with having a productive morning. I don't really need to think for the first 3-4 hours of work. I can just focus on building and fixing.

I wish I could post the 1-10 sentences on a company blog so I can eliminate meetings all together. Only schedule a meeting with me if something is very unclear or it is demo day.

Have you ever tried this style of communication with co-workers? If so, how did it go?

Any resource recommendations would be much appreciated!

Auto shipping household essentials via Amazon has been a big time saver. Getting groceries delivered is another.

I wish there was a way to outsource managing my money and dealing with bills.

I think I’m one. I used to be a developer, but now I spend most time in meetings, creating tickets, and pushing tickets over the finish line. I’ve noticed I’ve had to drastically improve my writing skills. I function as a support agent + developer + consultant.

This role feels like I’m wearing too many hats. I don’t mind. The team is only 4 people. No one has the knowledge I have so I feel special on the team.

Any book recommendations for what I’ve described would be helpful! Thanks.

I was able to claim citizenship by decent in European country. I plan to work remotely for the American company as a US citizen, but live in Europe.

If you do that, what’s it like? How do handle taxes? Anything I should know?

I charge $115-130 an hour. All work is 100% remote. I customize Salesforce.

I think my rate is pretty good, but am wondering if I should charge more or if there is other tech I should specialize in that could get me a higher rate.

All my 8 year old wants to do is play Roblox or watch YouTube. They taught themselves how to play Roblox, so I know they are capable of learning other things.

Can anyone recommend something like a YouTube series that starts at the very basics on how to learn something new?

For 1.5 years I’ve been assisting in the maintenance and enhancement of software that was built by a consultancy almost 3 years ago. No one on my team was part of the initial design, build, and launch. The documentation for the software is lacking and there is no one who I can go to to get confident feedback on how features should work.

Part of me want to leave the job cause it seems like a hopeless situation, but the pay is great. I want to turn the project around but that seems impossible cause there doesn’t appear to be a “true north”.

What can I do?

I'm an application architect for a brand new application. The application uses tons of data from multiple external systems. New data tables needed to be created for the application too. The person that designed the application is not technical at all. They only designed the front-end and I designed the data model based off it.

I did the best I could with the information I had and we are slowly starting to see a working prototype, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions that I'm trying to figure out. The project is behind. I want to take responsibility for it being behind. But at the same time the project seems understaffed and it appears too much is being asked considering the size of the team.

What could I have done differently?