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55K miles over the last 6 years. One really odd issue (a faulty headlights control handle leading to occasional switching lights on at night just to empty the battery by the morning) replaced using manufacturer's guarantee years ago.

47 MPG on the highway (but it goes down dramatically when driving around town to ~35). My Limited trim has a glass cockpit with all the popular safety features. Its exterior also looks more expensive than it is and at the time was way cooler than Civic or Corolla.

It remains to be seen what happens around 100K miles/10 years though and how it compares to my previous Corolla experience.

I started taking community college classes related to electricity/robotics as the only desperate measure I can think of to prepare for the new brave world of mass unemployment among software developers and Industry 4.0. Those are the very same classes required for Electrician Trainees by the great state of CA.

I can assure you that it's a very different crowd from what I see at my day job. We're very used to a being among a self-selected group where something like an EE degree is assumed. Physics/Math majors are not uncommon including some PhDs.

And I don't mean just credentials. It's noticeable in how intellectually curious people are, how they digest information, how comfortable they are with basic school level math (e.g. complex numbers). Not to mention that textbooks at that level are a little watered down in comparison with your first year college textbooks.

I hear stories from someone working in basically government accounting at the county level. Which amounts to low scale manual data ETL and basic reporting.

They do rely on something that sounds like a COBOL mainframe from 40 years ago to me. They see people making the same basic clerical mistakes every year when towns and government organizations report their numbers. Like literally not being able to format numbers according to certain rules on the first try and such. Sending excel file in emails is the level of automation they rely on. They are all union jobs.

She was recently preparing for an obscure accounting certification. There's very little publicly available information to use and at most one textbook. She was asking her LLM (Gemini?) to formulate exam-level questions instead and explain the answers. She told me it worked spectacularly well.

I'm a little surprised by how easy people joke about residential electricians and plumbers in this context. To begin with it requires young and healthy back and knees. How many men after 40 and especially 50 are like that and for how much longer?

Secondly, in CA to be a real residential electrician you need to be C-10 licensed. Which requires all kinds of time consuming prerequisites to begin with. Some of them could be a challenge if you are not the kind of guy who knows a guy. Apprenticeships, unions, depending on your major 1 to 4 year of "hands-on, full-time journey-level experience" and such. Your best hope is probably that your EE degree from 20+ years ago still counts for something.

And there quite a few 20 yo candidates to compete with who are taking DC/AC circuits classes in community colleges this very moment. They are not spoiled with life-long office work experience.

The competition among people who'd like to be an industrial robotics technician at the Tesla Fremont Factory is very real too.

Ubuntu for experimentation with Robotics/ROS2. Windows for experimentation with FPGA/Vivado. A dual-boot 14" Lenovo E14 to host the festivities.

$1M is a newly built condo in the East Bay with HOA >$800/month. Not even an 80 year old 1,300 sqft house in the same area.

Pro: In the last ten years backend development has turned into AWS SDK-orientied programming mostly. Databricks-oriented in case of data engineering recently too. Between this and python/js popularity it is more of unskilled labor now.

Contra: I'm reading digital circuits and introductory FPGA programming books this summer - fullstack development for the robotics dominated future here I come ;) Granted some EE classes in your old major will help. But modern digital circuits and embedded hardware space also have a lot of similarity to your muscle memory as a software developer.

A typical Bay Area commute (e.g. to SJ or San Mateo/Redwood City) is 40+ miles one way. A typical weekend drive (e.g. to Half Moon Bay or Sonoma) is a 100-mile roundtrip.

20 miles to SF, 25 yoe (backend, data, basic frontend), been there done that and all I have got is this automated rejection email

Very few people want to re-create their production AWS MSK cluster from scratch. And that's the only way currently. MSK can usually upgrade Kafka brokers with minor performance degradation but not for this particular change.

If you have a use-case where you currently allocate ~1K threads mostly waiting on I/O switching to virtual threads is a one-liner ("Thread.ofVirtual()" instead of "Thread.ofPlatform()"). No more golang envy for sure.

Depending on how much memory is used by the Thread stack (presumably 1M-512K by default, allegedly 128K with Alpine base images) that's your 1G-500M heap space usage improvement right off the bat.

The migration from JDK17 to JDK21 was uneventful in production. The only issue is limited monitoring as a thread dump will not show most virtual threads and the micrometer metrics will not even collect the total number of active virtual threads. It's supposed to work better in JDK24.

The Spring Framework directly supports virtual threads with "spring.threads.virtual.enabled=true" but I haven't tried it to comment.

By the time you acquire enough experience to do it in 25+ years of lunches the job market starts showing less interest in you. But that's the only promising strategy in the LLM-dominated world I guess.

I learned about OOP from a Turbo Pascal v5.5 book circa 1993. Drawing triangles, squares, circles, all the good stuff. Turbo Vision library was a powerful demonstration of the power of OOP which made MSFT MFC look like a mess in comparison.

Not every SWE working in the Bay Area can afford a $1.5M house just to charge his car. Not to mention that the car would be twice as expensive (e.g. top Elantra 2025 trim at $30K vs Model 3 at $50K+).