ravioli_fog

I personally see plenty of hype but I've also been following the trends and using the tools "on the ground". At least in terms of software these tools are a substantial shift. Will they replace developers? No idea, but their impacts are likely to be felt for a very long time. Their rate of improvement in programming is growing rapidly.

Do feel AI is overall just hype? When did you last try AI tools and what about their use made you conclude they will likely be forgotten or ignored by the mainstream?

> Defold seems interesting, but unlike Heaps and Godot it hasn't yet been used for any game I've heard of

Is this true really? It appears to have been bought by King (Candy Crush Saga) and used internally (see the Defold about page). So while it may be associated with mobile/casual gaming it was worthy of being purchased and used by an otherwise successful company -- at least along some metrics.

Acquiring anything usually has a period of investigation and inquiry which Defold passed.

Seems at least worthy of consideration next to Heaps and Godot.

Others have made great points. I'll offer a practical approach that worked for me.

I found criticism was difficult because it came as a surprise. It seemed to me as if the person giving the critique was using criteria that I wasn't made aware. This felt unfair.

The surprise, not the criticism itself was the struggle.

my solution was two-fold:

1. Eliminate the surprise by "shopping" my work around early and often for feedback. 2. By doing step 1 I would learn the "hidden criteria" that others would use to judge my work.

At this point I am rarely if ever bothered by criticism. Since I ask for feedback early when I don't feel "done" there is nothing at stake. Early criticism doesn't stick and just feels like we're working together on a solution.

If you go up the mountain and work alone, for a long time, criticism will feel worse. I do the opposite. Might work for you.

I suffer from impostor syndrome as a self taught engineer.

For me the single best remedy is mentoring/teaching others. Helping someone learn a new skill while pair programming can highlight not just the knowledge of the topic at hand but also a lot of ancillary things I've learned and boost my confidence.

Even if you are working with another skilled engineer there is something that they may learn or be impressed with and as a result I try to pair as much as possible.

As a bonus I find I am much more productive with another set of eyes/brain on a range of tasks, especially in COVID times.

This sounds like a really tough time you are going through. I hate that for you. I hope you feel better tomorrow.

I imagine you are very good at your job, better than you think. I also imagine you are more capable than you believe. One note about devops and modern [insert popular technology/methodology] is that as tech people we love to share but we often don't share with the proper context. "I love X!" we say, instead of "I love X and work at company Y doing Z in order to solve Q under S constraints!"

Large companies deal with incredible scale, copious data, and as far as I can tell create only complex solutions. This is because the challenges they face are complicated, so... no easy wins. Is your company FAANG size? Maybe start to learn Kubernetes, if not... ignore it for now. Don't feel the stress of learning solutions to problems you don't have. Look for the UNIXs not the Blockchains.

The best quick intro to the modern devops/cloud developer stuff is easier. Learn a bit of docker. Learn a bit of AWS, Google, Azure or Digital Ocean. Make little experiments, or simply ask people who care about it. You don't have to know everything, no one expects you to. Trying to "cram" a bunch of complicated technologies into your brain while you are afraid and hurting isn't easy.

Feel better friend.

Yep, that's it! The first thing I made was a roguelike with Godot and I had the same issue w.r.t procedural content and "static" content being disparate.

Someone on reddit showed me this same tip.

You can even change values on the remote tab and have them reflected live in your game, which is fun for prototyping.

> - You cannot inspect the scene in the editor visually while debugging. This is what I miss the most coming from unity. Some things are really hard to debug this way, for example if you use procedural generation.

Does this include looking at the [Server] tab in the editor once the game is running? That shows dynamically created nodes at run-time.

I'm sorry you are feeling anxiety and somehow "less". I've felt like that. I know others have too. It sucks, but its common and it will pass.

As for everything else, the biggest lesson that I have learned from my mentors this year is that everything is relative. For every choice you can make as a developer there are pros and cons. This language or that one. This framework or another, the list goes on and on and on. In fact making choices is a big part of everything we do. Naming variables is hard, primarily because we have to choose the best name. But how do we choose?

Learning how to make an informed choice is a powerful skill. The power I think, is from learning how to make a choice that once made, is satisfying to you. In other words the choices are hard and anxiety inducing: because they are choices. A silly assessment, but true. Pain is unfortunate because it hurts. Choices create anxiety becuase we have to make a choice and live with an unknown outcome.

So the hack, the trick, is to spend less effort on choosing and the majority of the effort on defining the context around the choice.

To your final statements: "I just want to work without feeling bored or overwhelmed. Any suggestions?"

I would say you should really evaluate the space of boredom, and the feeling of being overwhelmed. Spend most of your time just defining this. Give it a day or to and think about it, sleep on it.

Were you bored because you were just doing tutorials for no clear reason? >> Pick a project or outcome not an implementation.

Do you feel overwhelmed when you don't know what is next? >> Find a mentor.

Obviously these are just guesses, I don't know your situation. And if you just want another human to bounce ideas off of let me know.

I initially wrote a whole bunch of words... but people vary wildly. Circumstances are different.

In my own experience I made the "world" of finding a job very small and personable. I got interested in a niche language, found the local community for language and met the other developers and business owners.

In that time I've worked with others, often remotely, that are also a part of this same programming community. It would appear to me they took a similar approach to what I had done but they did it online.

I would find programming communities that value individuals and are in need of qualified candidates. PHP/Python/Java might not be that community.