seal_of_approval

It feels like people are a lot nicer here than on Twitter and Reddit, and even when people disagree, it's generally civil and not an all-out flame war. Also, there's no algorithm promoting outrage all the time.

For me, the anticipation of toxicity was a huge deterrent for me ever participating in real discussions, but here I feel like I can be myself.

I think it's healthier this way.

Hey, I'm a self-taught programmer who started at age 11 and ended up learning webdev. I'm in my early 20s now.

A couple years ago I suffered a neck injury that forces me to work remotely, as I can't sit or stand for long periods. Rather than speculate on what horrors my new future may hold, I got a setup that lets me use a computer laying down and started working. I had one goal: design and build a good solution to an interesting problem. So I did.

I built a big search engine website that indexed millions of user-generated creations for a pretty popular video game. The lack of one was a common complaint, and I had built the one and only solution. For the first time ever, you could just type in what you wanted and instantly find it!

Almost immediately after launch, thousands of people began using my site, and multiple YouTube creators reached out to me (most of them with between 100K-750K subscribers) and made videos on it. One of the videos is a great explainer on exactly why my site is so useful and what value it brings.

Although it's nothing special, here's the stack I used:

• TypeScript
• Next.js
• React
• Meilisearch (Not sure if you'd count this, but that's the search engine, and it's technically a database)
• Firebase (I'm gonna learn some real backend for my next project though, sorry Google)

I made a few interesting connections from this project, including a former software engineer and a popular YouTube creator who took interest in my upcoming project.

I have several other projects too, including a special contraption generator for the game, which was a very difficult but satisfying problem to solve. It's far more technically impressive than this project, but I chose to highlight this project because it's my most popular. (Also, I'm being vague with these project descriptions to avoid doxing myself.)

I plan to continue building big projects for now, but I want to know if it's possible for me to get a job. On one hand, I built a very useful product using modern technologies and got a lot of recognition for it. On the other, I have no college degree, a debilitating disability, and I don't really know that many people.

My instinctual reaction is to believe that my projects have very limited significance in the eyes of a prospective employer. I have no degree; I have no referrals. In today's economy, why take a risk with me? But perhaps my trauma has made me cynical.

So, what do you think? Could I still get a job?

I've been getting a lot of these messages lately:

SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data

So I decided to look at the network requests in the browser console. After all, what JSON data was it trying and failing to parse?

Well, turns out that it was pretty much always:

Timeout occurred while waiting for a slot to become available

I don't do a lot of backend work, but I suspect that the lack of slots might be referring to the server running out of resources to process all of the ongoing user activity concurrently. Could we be running into scaling issues?

It really feels like Lemmy is alive because of you.

When I first checked out Lemmy, I wasn't expecting there to be so much content, so much discussion, and so much community. But I've spent the better part of two days glued to my screen, browsing content all day. I've seen so many posts, so many interesting discussions about the fediverse, and of course, plenty of memes. It really feels like the start of something incredible.

I've gotta get back to work soon, but wow. I think this whole fediverse thing really is the next step for social media. If I find some extra time, I'll definitely consider contributing to Lemmy's source code to help this project and the FOSS ecosystem grow.

Model: Craiyon (It used to be called DALL-E mini)

I wonder if it's this person again lol

It feels like this is how social media and the Internet should have been all along. Truly run for the interest and good of humanity, and out of the hands of corporate control and profiteering. People, out of their own generosity and goodwill, host their own instances and let others use it for free. It's such an awesome example of humans helping each other and working to create abundance for everyone to enjoy.

I believe that everyone putting their time, money, and effort into building up the Fediverse - the developers, server owners, mods, and everyone else who keeps it alive and interesting - is helping to make the Internet (and by extension, the world) a better place. You all are awesome. Keep up the amazing work.

Also hi, I'm new here. I found out about Lemmy today, and I was so intrigued that I spent all day learning about it lol.