Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 473: Mental health support and overcoming FOMO of taking a break from work

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Jamison and Dave! I am not a developer, but my question is hopefully transferable. I sit in between lawyers and developers. I advise on technology that can be applied to legal processes and I support our teams in using a range of platforms and AI tools to be more efficient across their work. I have ADHD (late diagnosis at 22) and often have trouble with executive function, remembering details, progressing large projects with no deadlines, and remembering verbal instructions. Have either of you ever had a neurodivergent person on your team? If so, how did you support them? What environment helped them to work best? Also, what frustrations did you have and how could they have mitigated them? Any help would be appreciated to help me avoid driving my manager insane (I live in constant fear that one day she will snap and I’ll be fired even multiple years in). 😂 Hi Dave and Jamison, you’ve made my runs very enjoyable over the last years, thank you so much for that - even though I doubt that laughing out all the time is great for my performance. I’ve been in web development for 7 years now and a Lead Fullstack Engineer at a consulting firm. Being a “lead” currently only means that my team mates seek my opinion and guidance on topics, without me having any increased responsibility. In September, I’ll move countries (Europe to Australia) and will be on parental leave until mid ‘26 when I’ll have to look for a new job down under. I feel quite stressed by recent developments (AI), already have the feeling of not being able to keep up with all the new things (ask my 300 open tabs of articles I want to read), and fear that I could loose touch in my time off. How can I deal with this FOMO? And which topics would you look into in the upcoming months if you were in my place? Show Notes https://blog.jsbarretto.com/post/software-is-joy https://medium.com/@djsmith42/the-3-highest-roi-technical-skills-for-software-developers-21b412d79aff

it takes more than 1.21 gigawatts to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 473 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast about all the non-technical things that go into the software development of many many gigawatts and gigabytes and gigaflops and all the other gigas i don't think i've ever thought about power being involved in my job except now with ai consuming all of the right power suddenly suddenly 1.21 gigawatts is uh it's relevant you're like that's one developer on my team yeah yeah well that's our uh that's our ai team member yeah clarence with all his custom memory and personality he's developed yeah we connected clarence to the local town clock tower

on the perfect night when there was a lightning bolt set to strike in 1955. And we're so glad. Did Clarence go back in time, the AI developer? I don't know, but I'm just trying desperately to tie this whole thing to Back to the Future and not succeeding. I mean, time travel is, it's hard to get continuity right. Yeah, it's not my fault. Should I thank our patrons?

I was hoping you would. Okay, thank you to the folks that contribute at the prodigious yet still surprisingly affordable amount that we shout them out every single week thank you to reba rebe grease rep is that a different language oh you know what it's a pig latin or something i don't know time to google this oh no it's some kind of youtube brain rot oh for kids it's like a kid's show it's not brain rot per se but it's like it's like what you see little kids watching on their ipads and in restaurants okay so our three to eight year old demographic statistics are gonna increase yeah that's what i gather from totally okay it'll

really it'll really be a hit with our our toddler and young child demographics all right anyways assaults on fringe flyers is merely unconscionable nice matthias my actual name on linkedin is yami debugging in the dark Connie the mobile development ordinaire first of his name quote or one equals one drop table

myomics Jacob Shandling Bjorn there's a very particular smell coming from your desk please create a spike to investigate the missing semicolon

Christy the world's okayest programmer Noah lab hearts every time I change my name and you don't laugh I get a little sad inside now you're happy

yeah Alexander Kuznetsov Nick Molyneux unsalted french fries are morally are not morally objectionable yum if the service org uses a subservice org and the controls at the subservice org are necessary pretend it's not javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel seaman i want you to know this coup was not

personal it's just business you're still invited to taco tuesday kind regards your boss doing my part to make dave's heart swell that he should probably get that checked dan the optimal name that begins with d from drone deploy also i'm not a crab chase w norton unsalted password hashes are morally objectionable. Never is not just a crater on Mars. I like chicken, I like liver. Please deliver. Trashpanda python-summit.ch 16th October, a Swiss Python conference.

Kyle C. Boss, Ken C. Dodds, that guy over there, Jenny Kim, the stochastic parrot. Quinton, we have not heard from you in a month. Please go see Susan in HR ASAP. Jonathan Kings, nigh beautiful function of user documentation. Unsalted morals are objectionably French. Should williamangel.net add a cookie banner vote now? Only doing this

to impress Kevin, Brayden Keynes, John Grant, Brittany Ellick, and Beetlejuice Cumberbund. thank you thank you thank you wonderful we appreciate you we need some dumb i feel like i've made this joke before we need some dumb like youtuber name for our fans of like oh it's like the the legion you know they're not just people who like the show they're they're the armada of glorious elites or yeah well we we have a name you may recall but it might not it might not soft skillets yeah yeah i like that i think that's pretty good i'm not totally sure it has the grandeur you're looking for no i think it's perfect like it's it's self uh deprecating in the

right way all right soft skillet nation yes yeah soft skillet nation yeah that could be our new sign off yeah until next week soft skillet nation do you want to read your first nope r for do you want to read the first question i guess it's all of ours i do but first i just have to comment that as soon as i thought about a new sign-off line i just immediately thought of the the obnoxious youtube what's up guys i hate that i hate it so much what's up soft skillet nation it's your boy like oh my gosh i hate it well if you ever hear us starting the show with that you'll know that jameson has lost his mind or i replaced him with an ai okay yeah now i really will read the first question this comes from an anonymous listener

who says, Hi, Jameson and Dave, I am not a developer. But my question is hopefully transferable. I sit in between lawyers and developers. I advise on technology that can be applied to legal processes. And I support our teams and using a range of platforms and AI tools to be more efficient across their work. I have ADHD late diagnosis at age 22. And often have trouble with executive function, remembering details, progressing large projects with no deadlines and remembering verbal instructions have either of you ever had a neurodivergent person on your team if so how did you support them what environment helped them to work best also what frustrations did you have and how could they have mitigated them any help would be appreciated

to help me driving my manager insane i live in constant fear that one day she will snap and i'll be fired even avoid driving my manager oh did you miss the word yeah well here's my first answer to this question is read all the words okay let me reread that um any help would be appreciated to help me avoid driving my manager insane i live in constant fear that one day she will snap and i'll be fired even multiple years in and then we have a laughing face emoji at the end there just trying to convey the emotion you did it i felt it oh good it hit you right in the field it's the mark of a good actor yeah good voice actor yeah a good made for radio actor read laughing face emoji a lot insert your own emotions

here yes to your question i was diagnosed with adhd sometimes i'm still like i don't know if this is real i feel like everyone was diagnosed with adhd during the pandemic also i think there was some huge spike in it so i'm not sure if it's just a cultural thing or so that's when you got your diagnosis? I think it was, but I, it might've been before. So this listener says late diagnosis at age 22, but you were even later. Yeah, I was, I was in my thirties. I think it was before the pandemic actually, but I mean, maybe I was diagnosed before it was cool. I mean, one of the symptoms of ADHD is that you can't remember whether things happened pre-pandemic or post pandemic. Yeah. Actually, I think that is one of the symptoms of thinking you have ADHD is you look

at every single action you take and behavior you engage in and attribute your personality and say well this is like my adhd i don't i mean no you can just do stuff sometimes um anyways i'm not answering the question i've also had several people on my team with mental health issues there was one time where it was a whole team we went on a team retreat and we were hiking through the wilderness and i can't remember who started but somebody started talking about some some mental health struggles they had. And eventually, literally every person on the team had divulged that they were diagnosed with some sort of mental health thing, which I don't know what that says about me. Like you need to have a mental health problem to be in a team with me, I guess. I don't

know. It's a, what's it called? Like an implicit hiring criteria that you've been subconsciously applying? I guess. Yeah. Or like to, I don't know, to survive. Yeah. Wait, what does that mean that I must have something diagnosable because we've been podcasting together this whole time. Maybe. You attracted me into this. Yeah. Maybe you just have a patient heart. Those are the two requirements.

You either have ADHD or you are patient with those who have ADHD, and that's what you need to work with Jameson. Yeah. I do have some of the traits of like kind of disorganized, chaotic, flailing a little bit that I see kind of cluster a little bit. And then I have worked with other people with those traits too. How did I support them? There were probably people that had issues that I didn't know about. And then I just tried to be a good manager to them, but I didn't really do anything specific. But if someone did divulge something specific, then we would usually talk about how to best manage it. What kind of ways do you feel like this happens or shows itself at work? What kind of situations are hard for you? How can I recognize that you need some help and sort of trying to establish trust? So I think if you haven't told your manager yet, you should definitely tell your manager. Is this one of those situations where you're assuming people are as good as all the people you've interacted with?

Yeah, I think so. But if you've worked there for years, I live in constant fear that one day she will snap. I don't know. I hope you get along well with your manager. I guess that's part of it. If you don't trust your manager, then you have a lot of other problems besides an ADHD diagnosis. True. I mean, from this question, I get that they're looking for support from their managers.

not just ways to deal with it themselves because they're asking how did you support people what environment helped them the most and and what frustrated like what frustrated the manager about it yeah things that frustrated me were if people were dealing with mental health issues and and just kind of disappeared oh yeah yeah that's yeah that's really frustrating it's way different to say hey i am i am ill and need to take a day or two days or whatever versus to just like not show up i know it's it's tricky sometimes because like the thing that recognizes it needs a break is the thing that is ill and right there's some uh some recursion going on there but i think that's what you get by being open with your manager about it is is you get to say and i might need

i don't know this specific accommodation and because i've talked to you about it i will feel comfortable saying hey i need this thing it's easier to do that if you've set the stage ahead of time yeah being being open about when you when you need something when it's not working well instead of just sort of like silently struggling and and letting your manager pick it up from the output but not really know why or yeah like the worst case there is that your manager just has this sense of of frustration without having a being able to put their finger on exactly what yeah they're just they're just not doing anything yeah like why are they such a bad team member yeah they're they're just going too slow or they're dropping the ball a bunch or i don't know

yeah and knowing why can even if it's the same actions it can help you look at them differently as a manager and help you know what to do about them because if someone just like doesn't show up i mean i'm making up behaviors here but if they just like don't show up to work then i would be frustrated yeah if they have told me hey i need a day because my brain is doing loop-de-loops or whatever i think that's a lot easier to deal with totally i'll say on the other side of that coin so proactive communication is great and the other side of that coin is over using your adhd diagnosis can also be frustrating to a manager yes where it's like yes you can like we we you know i want to be a an empathetic supportive manager but if everything you do

wrong you blame on adhd i'm gonna have a hard time really supporting you because yeah there are some things that go wrong in your life because of your mental health diagnosis but there are also some things that go wrong in your life because of your own bad choices, you know, and in your work life, right? And so being willing to take full ownership for the things that go wrong without blaming ADHD every time, I think will help your manager trust more that when you say it's ADHD, it really is. I don't think I've ever done a thing and then felt like, oh, that was because ADHD was driving me. I've always felt like I had some control over my behavior and there's something i could do differently or better i don't know i feel like this is going to turn into old

men ranting at clouds but i do feel like with the rise of mental health awareness and the benefits that brings there's a downside of some abdication of responsibility and i've seen people kind of place the blame for everything that ever upsets anyone else on this external thing that's their mental health illness that they can't i don't know they just can't do anything about so they can't be held accountable and yeah maybe maybe that's the key you need to show that you are still accountable even if you have this mental health illness just like anyone would be i think it would be useful to try to answer this question yourself too like what environment would help me work the best what ways have i seen myself struggle or fail if i have trouble remembering

details what kind of systems do i want to put into place to help me remember these details or Or if I have trouble with these vague, large projects with no deadlines, which I'll be honest, everyone has trouble with those. It's true. Those are hard for everybody, but maybe a little harder for you. I don't know. Then you need to put more effort into making them less vague and large with no deadlines. Yeah, I agree. I think that makes sense.

And I think that's a bit of an exercise, right? Like figuring out what is your ideal environment. And I know a lot of people with ADHD diagnoses, and they all seem to tell me about slightly different environments that work best or worst for them. And so I think you owe it to yourself to do some exploration and kind of self-measure to see what truly are the things that work well for me and what are the triggers that cause me to struggle. I don't know, James. Do you think there's like a universal thing that everyone with ADHD struggles with? That they struggle with or that would help them? Sorry, a universal environment that is helpful to them or unhelpful.

Yeah, methamphetamine. That's the universal bad environment? No, that's the thing that helps everybody. Oh, okay. I thought you were saying get on meth. Yeah, no, stimulants. Okay, got it. That's the prescription drug of choice for treating ADHD.

Is it really? It is, yeah. All like Ritalin and Adderall and all that stuff, it's meth. Oh, those are the ingredients. acceptable white collar names for meth yeah they're i mean i have a bottle on my desk that says amphetamine dextroamphetamine uh-huh uh so maybe speed i don't know i listen i don't do drugs i only do drugs that come in labeled bottles that have the word fda on them somewhere yeah yeah i only do drugs that have costco on the bottle

so maybe i'm getting the particulars wrong of what illegal drug they're like but they are very widely prescribed for for adhd yeah they have downsides too so it's not it's definitely not a blanket solution another question that this question asker didn't ask which is kind of more on that accountability side of the equation is what can i do as someone with adhd to create an environment that works well for my co-workers because i work with several people with adhd diagnoses. And Jameson incident, incidentally, you are not in this category that I'm about to describe, but, uh, there, there are coworkers of mine who they jump topics really fast in discussion. I feel like I do do that. Well, maybe it just works well in podcast form. Cause I don't

get it from you. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably true. But I have, you know, I have coworkers who I'm like, okay, I brought up a topic. We're discussing it. We haven't reached resolution and they have left the topic. They have gone. Yeah. And it's like, okay, are you just going to like leave me hanging here you know so and i'm like i'm and i'm so orderly and so not adhd that i'm looking at my notes for our one-on-one and i'm like hey i'm thinking in my mind i've got this bullet point about talk about the due date for this widget delivery yeah and uh you have unresolved yeah it's unresolved and i can't move the next bullet unless we unless we get this figured out yeah that is challenging i think for people without adhd to to maintain the conversation

topic change tempo that adhd people naturally do not all of them yeah i find it really hard to avoid interrupting people do you really yeah i've tried to get better at it i still do it way more than i would like this is crazy because i consider you one of the least interruptive people i know well that's just because i'm terrified of you what you'll do to me if i interrupt you it happens a lot at work where we're in some technical discussion and i sort of i'm like oh yeah i get where this is going and i just get excited and want to kind of like show yeah i got it and let's let's keep going that's that's part of it sometimes i do that too despite having not having a diagnosis yeah i mean that's that's the thing like all

these things that people talk about with adhd are you can find population people in the population that do every single thing they might be clustered differently yeah in different degrees but i guess that's part of why yeah that's part of what you're talking about it's like find out where you struggle or where it's tough for other people and see if you can focus on those things and then take your meth and take your math yeah you know what they say uh or don't depending on how it affects your life and sleep and other things it can be bad for well i mean i've always heard that a a microgram of meth a day keeps the doctor away well have we answered the question i don't know i mean i lost my attention drifted and went to something else so i i couldn't really tell you

i'm trying to think back of what yeah what environment helped them work best i do think that's a little bit on you to figure out yeah i think you can collaborate with your manager but if you just go to your manager and say hey i have adhd help me work better it's not their job to be an expert on adhd they probably won't be able to figure it out but i i don't know jameson what are some of the things that help you work better um yeah writing stuff down is is like a core part of my workflow when i'm being effective because it helps organize my scattered thoughts i take tons of notes in meetings both as a way to pay attention and as a way to recall later on what we were talking about it's helpful for capturing those like tangents that pop up of like i can just

write that down and then keep listening and then come back to it later does your brain feel better if you write it down that it doesn't need to like go down that tangent in the moment i think so it's like a little bookmark like yeah i can get back there okay instead of like i have to pursue it before it it gets it's like a a puff of dandelion seeds or whatever it's gonna get blown away and dispersed by the wind if I don't go after it right now. And you must follow each one of the seats. Yeah, exactly. What about your physical environment? Nothing. I mean, no, I have headphones on. I mean, I basically always have headphones on, even if I'm in an office, unless I'm actively talking with someone else. What about hours of the day? Because some of

the people I know with ADHD, they're really great late at night. That's their most productive focus time. I'm really tired late at night. I don't think I have an hours of the day thing. I think i'm a morning person i'm just but i don't know if that has anything to do with adhd i thought everything is supposed to be tied back to adhd is that not is that not how that works no i don't know i don't know i'm not an expert on adhd i'm i'm barely an expert on me yeah i can tell you writing stuff down helps me a lot it probably would help everybody a lot though yeah it helps me a lot i have found some benefits like i do sometimes bounce around a little bit when i'm on a technical task and get sucked into other areas of the code base but that has a side effect

of me generally knowing things very broadly across a code base because i've i've just like followed those dandelion seeds sometimes yeah so i think there can be it has been helpful in developing over time a very broad knowledge of the stuff i work on so it's a superpower too i think in some ways it can be i don't know that's super cliche though i need it there's live laugh love and then right underneath it it says like but it's a superpower yeah not a weakness yeah Okay. Okay. Well.

Now we've answered the question, right? Yeah. Of course, we now have to insert our disclaimer that we are not psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, but we are certified space psychologists. Yes. Now, if it was space ADHD, we could prescribe you space drugs. Yes. Space meth.

That only works in space. Yeah. It only works in orbital pathways. Yeah. It wouldn't work here. Yeah. Sorry. It's no good to you here.

Come to us when you're in space. All right. should i uh should i read our next question yeah if you can pay attention long enough wait no should i yes yeah it's me this one's me okay okay now i'm gonna make i'm gonna have to make fun of you for adhd now for the rest of at least this show i can take it okay i'm not self-conscious about it at all good this is from an anonymous listener who says hi dave and jameson you've made my runs very enjoyable over the last few years thank you so much for that even though i doubt that laughing out loud all the time is great for my performance yeah it is great it's a good abdominal workout

Weight lifting and laughing will kill you. Yeah, be careful, be careful. I have burst out laughing while lifting weights and narrowly avoided disaster. Well, to be clear, because of a thing I was listening to, not just because I'm a crazy person. No headphones in, just laughing to myself maniacally. Back to the question.

I've been in web development for seven years now and am a lead full-stack engineer at a consulting firm. Being a, quote, lead currently only means that my teammates seek my opinion and guidance on topics without me having any increased responsibility. In September, I'll move countries from Europe to Australia and will be on parental leave until mid-2026 when I'll have to look for a new job down under.

I feel quite stressed out by recent developments, AIs in parentheses here, already having the feeling of not being able to keep up with all the new things. Ask my 300 open tabs of articles that I want to read. And I fear that I could lose touch in my time off. how can I deal with this FOMO? And which topics would you look into in the upcoming months if you were in my place? Wow. Mid-2026 of parental leave. We're in mid-2025 right now. It is truly

a different world from the US. Yeah, that's amazing. So moving countries, then going on parental leave, and then looking for a new job. Does your employer know? You're moving and going on leave, and they're just like, yeah, we'll just pay you until you don't work here anymore. Their employer might be legally required to do that. Yeah. No matter where they live, I guess. I don't know. Well, congrats.

Yeah, that's amazing. You're lucky to have that. If I know anything about newborns, it's that you should devote all your time to learning about LLMs and AI while they're young. You only have one chance to have a newborn and learn AI. Yeah, you only have one chance to learn about AI while you have a newborn.

People on their deathbeds often say, I wish I had spent more time learning LLMs. Yeah. I wish I had spent more time following the AI podcasts. Congratulations on the child. Yeah. Fantastic. Babies rule. If this is your first child, then you might not do very much learning at all on parental leave. But here's the thing. Newborn babies spend a lot of time sleeping. Yeah. It's just when they spend that time asleep. That's the tricky part. Yeah. It's an extremely inconvenient blocks of time, but they still do it.

Yeah. Usually it's all of the time that you have to be awake, not sleeping. And then they're awake all the time that you can be sleeping. Yeah. True. True. I mean, I guess if you're on leave and you don't have any other kids though, then you just, maybe you just sleep when they sleep and you become a. Become an infant. Become a baby. Yeah. You can start eating from a bottle. Oh, good news. Your bathroom routine is going to change a lot. Yeah. It'll be really convenient for you and very inconvenient for whoever's taking care of you you could probably hire a service yeah so moving getting a new job in a known time frame and worried about losing touch because of this time away from work i mean i think that's pretty that's pretty generalizable not not just

i guess the specific part about being on parental leave is is you'll be quite occupied with important life stuff, but it's not like it's going to take up 100% of your time. I don't know what your living situation or family life is like, but I assume that you have a spouse or a partner and that you both have some amount of leave that overlaps in some way. So I'm assuming it's not you 100% of the time solo on call for caring for the child. Yeah, probably not. Let's go with that assumption because that definitely leaves time for study, which is a good segue to the question here is which topics should I study? And I got to tell you, this question is a little bit daunting for me to answer right now. You know, my answer to this question is probably

very different today than it was 12 months ago, even. And we're looking at a 12 month time frame here. It's like, what should I study now to be prepared to get a job in 12 months when my parental leave is over? And I'm like, boy, I have a hard time doing that, but, or answering that question i mean i mean i know one answer which is i'm stressed about ai i think if you are ignoring ai or or think it's a fad for use as a software developer you are wrong and missing out it has weaknesses it has downsides it has stuff it sucks at but it has only begun to change how software is written and i think i see some people feeling threatened by it and avoiding it because of that and i just think they're so wrong and they will become more wrong as it advances more

yeah i know that not everyone agrees with that but i think if this were me i would spend time getting really good at being a really effective ai enabled software engineer which is sort of a meta skill yeah totally is but it also involves kind of confronting your your fear and can be kind of expensive i guess it's a lot more expensive than just like playing with tech stuff you can run on your computer i know really for the for the first time in my professional life there's kind of a dollar barrier to entry now to learn a new skill i mean yeah like all the all the infrastructure stuff you can just like run all that in a local kubernetes setup mostly on your laptop yeah and a lot of these services have free tier options and yeah really cheap

not free tier options but kind of the the minimum entry point is dozens if not hundreds of dollars a month to get into ai seriously yeah i mean there's local models you can run they lag behind the frontier paid models and especially ones that you can run on your laptop those like more yeah i was gonna say like if you're doing that you're gonna get a really bad taste in your mouth for ai if you're running it on your laptop yeah unless you went and bought a hopper unit from nvidia yeah if you spend 20 grand on like a server rack for your house you can run it locally good news yeah now you can save the hundreds of dollars a month it would cost you to run locally or to pay a vendor lose touch my time off i think i've found it somewhat like

riding a bike i've had periods of time where i have written less code and more code in my career and i found it come back pretty quick me too i've never just dropped computers completely for a year though maybe that would be different but i guess don't do that well i mean when you when you've gotten further away from writing code it was because you were managing people who were writing code so still yeah still very close to the problem technical and yeah yeah whereas if you just go completely off code grid for a year you'll probably have a little bit rusty joints that need some work to get back into service yeah i don't think the core technology pieces are going to change much in a year i think ai will get better and the way you use it will evolve a bunch but it's also

possible if you just check out for a year you get to skip a bunch of the oh yeah like meandering yeah testing and trial and just like read okay here's what works now yeah it's been a year we have we have several new model releases and all these new tools and people have sort of figured out how to use them so even i don't know if you really just want to check out you can probably check back in and catch up with what works now a little bit that's a good point because i want to say it was about a year ago maybe a year and a half ago i had someone come and give me a demo of essentially a cobbled together agent AI development workflow that they had been creating on their own.

They had written a bunch of scripts that would gather context from your code base by taking files and pieces of files and putting them in a zip file and then sending them up to ChatGPT and getting answers and then bringing it back. And I realized all of that work was wasted because OpenAI was working on exactly that problem. Anthropic is working on exactly that problem as well. Cursor has been working on exactly that problem. And then if they had just waited six months or nine months

then they would have those tools in their hands that are way better i don't know maybe maybe it was good for them to kind of understand models better but at the end of the day they kind of meandered yeah yeah i i have seen the developer tools swallow a bunch of ad hoc junk i had sitting around that was nowhere near as good so that is possible too i already have the feeling not being able to keep up with all the new things i think i remember a time in my career where i felt stressed about this and i think i just gave up and and accepted that you know what i'm just not gonna i don't know there will be a five-year-old javascript framework that i have never heard of and has a thriving community and i'll just yeah hear about it once for the first time well after

it's peaked and then died right you'll read about it as a history footnote i'll be okay yeah that has happened a lot actually so i kind of got away from the front-end development world for a couple of years and i got back into it and i'm like holy crap what is all this stuff i mean i won't even say some of the names but i read i did like a rundown of all the probably 10 different technologies and i realized like a bunch of the stuff that i put a lot of time into learning are kind of on the way out now yeah and some of there has been stuff that rose to huge popularity that's now on the way out all in the time that i just wasn't focused on front end for like two years yeah so It is a very churn, churn-happy, frothy space anyway.

And like you said, Jameson, I don't think you necessarily need to ride the churn train in order to stay on top of what's current state. I've worked with people who are really good at, they just, I think they kind of dedicate their life to it. I'm thinking, how do they do it? And yeah, they just, that's all they do. They just consume all of the content about all of the new stuff all the time in this technical space they're interested in. and i appreciate their expertise and ask them questions about it and think man am i glad i don't have to i can read the summary six months later instead of yeah like the pull request that adds it sometimes that's it's it's useful to be on that cutting edge of the edge but i feel like

most of the time it's way more efficient to just like a little bit further behind it often is especially if you're making changes that your team's gonna have to maintain for years oh yeah And then you realize that it got abandoned, like a big part of your project got abandoned. Oof. Well, now we're just talking about JavaScript fatigue, like it's like 2015. Exactly. But doesn't generative AI software development feel similar? Although I haven't seen things die per se, but they evolve fast.

Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, I have seen, I mean, yeah, the tooling has evolved quite a bit. I think it's not quite the same in that you don't just, I mean, I guess you build like applications on top of models, but in general, they're easier to swap out than it is to change your javascript tech stack totally and i well you did talk about web development so i think we're justified in focusing on this i mean postgres has been like the database of choice to use for like a decade down web development and yeah there's there's a bunch of stuff that just hasn't changed that much it's it's really only a fairly small area of front-end frameworks and

rendering like css and styling technologies but like postgres is still important aws is still important that's true maybe this is a time to focus on fundamentals like like you said like pick out a technology that's still been going strong for a long time and go deep on that i was just about to say that i read a post that was making its way around the the tech circles a while ago writing toy software is a joy i will link it in the in the show notes can we still do that i don't know if i've done that in a long time yeah we can okay then i will and the summary of this is basically sometimes it's really fun to just write software that solves a problem it's been solved before it's you're not going to be the first person to make a game boy emulator or

whatever problem space you choose but you do have the advantage of being able to pick up a project that doesn't really have to do anything you don't have to go meet business requirements you can just pick a problem that will teach you stuff and go struggle with it and i don't think you you might never have quite the same ability to do that without worrying directly about how this is going to ship to users or, I don't know, what constraints the business will put on you. So I think I would maybe dive into just exciting stuff that makes me feel joy instead of how can I optimize for producing the most I possibly can when I get back. Producing the most shareholder value?

Yeah. I think if you write something cool or a bunch of different things that teach you stuff that are cool, then you'll learn stuff. Your skills will grow. That's a good idea. Yeah. That would also be really motivating, I think, to pick up a pet project. It's more motivating than like, oh, okay, what's the next chapter in the curriculum that I need to read about? Yeah. I think that's my answer then. I think I would still poke at AI just to kind of

keep up on it a little bit. Totally. If you don't like it, I have seen people go, they hate it so much that they make really bad arguments about why it sucks or why not to use it. And I think if you don't want to use it you need to have good arguments for why not which means you need to understand it a little bit more so yeah i would still play with ai but i think i would just find stuff that felt cool to create i agree i think that's a great idea well did we answer the question and snuggle the baby oh yeah those are the two things i would snuggle the baby there's actually a picture of me from many years ago when i had a baby programming on my computer with my baby sitting in my lap it's kind of really cute like sleeping that's adorable yeah it was kind of great

i think i have a picture of me playing video games with a baby i don't know if i've done it working i think you can you can clearly see i'm playing video games nice well question answered yes yes sorry yes we have answered it okay dave what should people do if they want their own questions answered go to soft skills audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our handy dandy form give us as little or as much information as you like bonus points if you give Jameson a compliment that makes me smile. And to Soft Skillet Nation, I say tagline. I like that.

I like saying tagline as the tagline. That feels good. Tagline. Outro. That's strong. That was emotional. All right. I'm trying so hard not to say the actual outro.

I'm just going to say outro. Okay. All right. Bye. We'll see you next time.