jantypas

Perhaps you don't enjoy working for a software engineering organization. When the organization is concerned about methodology as opposed to getting the result, that can be a problem. Too often, I've been in organizations that found a new trend but never asked if it actually mattered. That being said, methodology does matter. We've all been around someone who just threw something together, it was our job to clean up the mess :-)

Believe it or not, UNIX isn't quite dead yet -- it's just resting. In certain embedded environments, we use things like what was once called BSD/386. WindRiver took a UNIX and worked to make it suitable for real-time requiremewnts.

Draw.io can get by, but for sequence diagrams, there's little better than WebSequenceDiagrams.com or in a pinch, LucidCharts.

Well, it's probably too late for me at 58, but when I grow up, I want to follow early Apple's best slogan ever -- Making Wheels for the Mind. That's what engineers do if we can -- we make tools that let other people do cool things, things we may not even see. Also, when I grow up, I will be able to stay up as late as I want, and sleep in as late as I want, and have Captain Crunch all the time :-) (Right now, someone says no.)

My fault.... One thing I would suggest -- this is cool, but can we move away from Qt and move to NCurses? This is useful because it means I can use this over SSH.

Let's step back a bit and not ask about the mechanics. Twitter was, and, so far as I'm concerned, the nervous system of the Internet. It's main strength is saying "Hey, you were interested in this -- go to this URL". It's a pubsub system. There are many places, many industries that don't care about the latest celeb or Elon, but they do want a signaling system -- and they want it secure and encrypted. As an example, the oil and gas industry has to communicate with about 200,000 stations. The messages are simple -- why not a private Twitter for them? Sure, they could use NATS or Kafka on a private net, but why not this?

I'm not sure any language, book, class etc. creates the empowerment. I work in several languages and frameworks, and I don't feel any more powerful than when I was working with Unix and K&R. I think it's deeper than that -- software is its own universe -- you run that universe within the limits set by logic. Hardware is similar but you have to buy things and they can die and they're not easily repaired. Software is "zero-cost" if you don't count your time and effort (!!) compared to other realms.