michealr

I have worked freelance in similar situations.

Personally, I find it really fun. It's a nice mix of development, design, and organizational understanding.

What I want to do is divide up the project. Usually, these legacy systems don't have clear division points; it's all a big bundle of interdependence. But in my experience, there's usually some less impactful secondary functionality that can be spun off.

That will allow you a few things:

Figure out what you quantify as success for such a project. Its limited scope makes it easier to identify the endpoint. Allow learnings about the legacy system, and perhaps identify what elements you can extract from it—not necessarily code, but in previous work, I've been able to wrap or scrape data in certain areas to provide a sort of external output. Figure out how to work with devs, manage your own time, and educate your organization about what you're trying to do. The third and last point is critical. The failure modes for development are obvious, but the political and design impacts are less so:

1. Lack of experience

2. Poor scope

3. Overly complicated solution

etc.

But the real failure mode is political. You need a developer with some political acumen as well. There's going to be a lot—and I mean a lot—of interviewing people about how exactly subsystem X fits into their workflow. You need the political skill to navigate that, in terms of getting buy-in and quality information.

Downstream of the political dimension, in my experience, is the possible design solution. The actual interviews with people and the regular, constant contact with staff about their job are critical to building something that replaces the existing system but doesn't replicate its design failures.

One mistake you want to avoid is building something too similar to the old solution and missing out on critical information about how the job is actually done.

Also, I'm not currently looking for work—enjoying my current role—but if you want to hit me up, feel free. I can at least impart some experience on what to do.

Remarkable in similar situation, Irish + Polish learnt because of wife and extended family. Found when it comes i18n with the present codebase, I have inherited, it needs a lot of work, but it was immensely helpful to have two backgrounds in particular tricky languages, relative to English.

In quickly scoping out what needs to be worked, and where the inherited setup clearly falls short. Don't think knowing a great deal about other languages is necessary though for the same effect, just enough to smell something might be a bit trickier, like know say the case system in X language shows up in different ways, verb + pronoun order is not predefined.

To counter your counter and to refocus the point on the potential improvements for the NHS. I think the parent is correct with regard to the NHS there are a lot of issues with it. And with meaningful consequences for people's health and well-being, but having followed discussions about it there seems to be an overt focus on comparisons to America and American healthcare costs. The UK and by extension the discussions on issues with the NHS would be better served by comparing and looking at healthcare costs and outcomes of other neighbouring peer countries. Such as the Netherlands or France. Or even further afield in the likes of Singapore.

Note, I'm neither from the UK nor America, and looking in from the outside this aspect of the UK discussion comparing and contrasting with America seems to be the wrong idea.

Would you have a write up in more detail of what you did, even high level. Seems cool thing to do

As others have said, its a grab back of things, with various types of success. Of course no one true silver bullet. The common things of good sleep and excerise always a good idea, regardless. Perhaps even team sports, but personal interests will vary this.

I would say feeling ok with a certain level of personal experimentation, but don't let it neurotically consume you. You have already managed to navigate life to this point. Not everything needs to be changed and not everything needs to be queried.

Trying to dramatically change things can perhaps backfire. Fitting in something related to your existing interests, but with an extroverted forcing function aspect can help.

If you know a technical topic pretty well already, seek to present on it, or teach some intro workshops. Generally, seek to find things that would exercise certain anti shyness muscles.

One thing I found personally helpful was learning a language via immediate focus even at the beginner stages with talking, there are numerous online language learning sites with lessons delivered via video chat. Would say 30 minute lessons initial are ideal.

For me shyness feels like a certain analytical process turned inwards, like I'm DDOS my own brain. The excessive nature is the issue, not necessasrily the mere act of self analysis. Finding activities where I had to moderate that excessive tendency helped for me to recognise the difference

Therapy is always an additional option, but dependent on the person and the needs of course.

Like others I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, 31, 10 months ago and I have been taking medication since then. I am also in EU.

Nothing major to add, since there are some good comments from other commentators. Retrospectively I have realised ADHD has been perhaps an advantage in some areas. But additionally an absolute self sabatoge generating machine for the seemingly simplest of things.

Currently near the end my contract, being thinking more about the future. Full stack dev too. If you ever just want to chat and share stories of ridiculous periods procrastination, self doubt and future plans I'm always willing to chat.

I know speaking things out loud for me has lifted the veil of self doubt that can descend upon one after a bout of ill directed attention.

Interesting, did Microsoft bring the research any further?

Analytics wise, I'm ok with being restricted, other commenters have mentioned looking at WASM as a possible workaround. So local does seem to make the most sense, practicality wise

A thought, the possible scope of services in the data notary or data escrow side of things does seem like an underexplored product category.