jbothma

Any evidence of that?

I don't have a lot of answers, but to echo what you're seeing, it seems a lot harder to get a foot in the door than 15 years ago when I was getting my first freelance jobs. This is compared to people I know searching now. It feels like for those basic starter jobs, there's a sea of agencies and individuals bidding less. I know it's a worrying time.

I'd suggest you at least get very familiar with AI tools like copilot and cursor. Get good at using them and leveraging them for efficiency. Also get a feel for their limitations. Within those, there may be opportunities. Beyond that I think as always, participate in professional networks - meet people in tech, contribute to open source - connections help you stand out when there's a whole globe of competition.

Are they actually verifying identity when you subscribe?

If not, a little vamity badge doesn't represent much as a value proposition.

freudian slip

That doesn't bear out in interviews and the remuneration stage of hiring.

The main struggle is lack of sufficiently skilled applicants.

The problem might be our ability to attract them! But it's a tough market.

Send me your cv and let's see if a suitable project or task comes up.

[email protected]

> But take it from me, someone who has volunteered for civic tech organizations and have participated in ground work for political campaigns. The most positive impact you could possibly make is money.

I don't really agree. Perhaps we're incredibly lucky as a civic tech non-profit, but our limiting factor generally isn't money. It's skilled people who can take responsibility and deliver. So if OP is an experienced developer who is willing to look a bit beyond just code, but still bring serious tech skill and experience to the table, I'd like to talk to them.

Openup.org.za and civic tech in general. I work there.

See code for all and code for america.

Indeed. I think it's important to bear in mind that it's ok for the abstractions to differ, and for the view to translate between the abstractions inside the system and the abstractions or concepts presented to the user. But it's certainly the same exercise.

If we see coding as an exercise in describing the system in a way the computer can execute but most importantly, other developers can understand and maintain, developers are simply another persona, and a card sort between developers would elicit the abstractions and names we should strongly consider using for things in the code. Same methods as information architecture for users.

Design has gotten blurry - is UX part of design?

I kinda see these parts as part of (non-dev-technical) design and designers differ in the degree to which they own these

- visual design towards a design system - abstract system of "this kind of thing looks like this so that the user can see it's this kind of thing and it looks good"

- information architecture - actual things we have on the site or page or app or system, and how we organise them so that they make sense and match the user mental model

- ux design - the use of the above two to sure it both looks good, and people find stuff, and are able to use stuff

- copywriting - hopefully happens somewhere in there

Specifically, dokku provides

- configuration management as env vars

- reverse proxy routing traffic for a given hostname to the correct container, swapping to the new container upon deploy

- plugin for tls cert generation using letsencrypt

- zero downtime deploys - it starts and smoke tests a new container before taking down the old one on deploy

- plugins for running databases and connecting your apps to them

Very handy!

What might be nice is a quick way to delete stuff if you accidentally send something sensitive to a public instance.