bluewalt

In my adult life, I've observed that most of the people I meet are from work. Having worked from home for two years, I've noticed that I've hardly met anyone new. I wonder whether indie hackers generally need fewer social interactions or, conversely, if they manage to build a social life completely independent of work. And how.

I've been closely observing seed-stage startups in Paris, and many of them (perhaps one in two) are currently looking for engineers skilled in artificial intelligence. This is quite new; it wasn't the case at all a few years ago.

What I don't understand is how these startups seem to be finding their recruits without much difficulty (otherwise, the salary offered would be much higher, compared to web development, for example). How is it possible that despite this strong and sudden increase in demand, the supply is able to keep up?

Have engineering schools anticipated this and trained all their engineers in AI? Have web developers managed a rapid career shift just with YouTube videos? Or is it that startups claiming to do AI are just connecting to APIs after all (and perhaps I could apply as a web developer too)?

I'm a 35 years old Software Engineer with multiple experiences in startups. I think I'm average (or good) in many areas, but almost nowhere an expert. I dabble in everything: back, front, devops, and even outside of the web, I started a business, I have some product skills (UI, UX), marketing, business, etc.

And I actually liked this polyvalence, until now, because it became very difficult to find a new job that takes advantage of my versatility. The profiles sought are always specialized in established companies. Almost no one is looking for a "jack of all trades."

I would probably be a good fit being the co-founder of a new startup, but I can't afford not being paid for many months right now.

At this stage of my life, I am starting to regret my versatility while I sincerely thought it was a strength.

What would you do?

As a curious developer, my knowledge is scattered between many external resources I consumed and want to keep at my fingertips: blog posts I read, Youtube videos I watched, Stack Overflow answers I read, Github repos I follow, etc. My knowledge is NOT the notes I took, but these external resources I consumed and loved.

But over time, I forget. I don't know what I know, and as soon as I need something like, I google it. For example, it could be the 10th time I google "efficient logging with Python". I may come across a link I already clicked, or not.

To me, it would be much more efficient to be able to search among all my external resources I already read and decided to keep, because it is limited to quality contents that I have already filtered, and that I already read, so that memory will activate when I read it another time.

At that point, you could tell me to use bookmarks. And it's what I do. Then 6 months later, I end up with 200 bookmarks I will not sort. And even if they were sorted, I will be too slow to find something in them with no tagging, I and I would use Google anyway.

In a ideal world, It would be easy to save and tag external resources (one click from the browser), and then, browse and find them back easily.

Do you have this feeling too, or it's just me? If so, what do you use for this?