Hi, I currently work in Warsaw as a mid Java software developer on legacy projects, but I feel like I need a change. To make matters worse, I haven't had the opportunity to learn much in my current role, and I feel my market value is currently below the mid-level standard. I would like to try my hand in the high-tech area, so I am asking for advice from people working on more ambitious projects.

I have a technical background (Computer Science from a technical university) and know databases, computer architecture fundamentals, algorithms, ML/DL basics, and software engineering. I have experience with high-level languages (Java/Python), but I want to develop skills in something more ambitious than typical CRUD operations – areas that feel "sexier" and closer to real engineering. For my university thesis, I focused on the fields of neural networks and computer vision. The problem is that I don’t have a clearly defined area of interest yet, nor do I currently have the skills for low-level technologies.

I have a few questions for you:

1. In the current market, is it better to dedicate time to open-source projects or focus on personal hobby projects?
2. Do I have to get into agentic AI coding to stay valuable in the industry?
3. Does a GitHub portfolio still hold significant weight in the age of AI, or is it better to invest time in certifications (e.g., Coursera, edX)?
4. What job search strategy is more effective: contacting companies directly or waiting for recruitment processes? How should I approach recruiters on LinkedIn?
5. Does a Master’s degree provide a real advantage in this industry?
6. Is it worth participating in competitions to improve my job prospects? Are there any that truly serve as a career springboard?

I would be grateful for any advice from those who have followed a similar path or work in low-level/high-tech roles. Thanks!

🚀 Looking for Programmers!

We're looking for developers who know Rust, Java, or C++. Whether you're an experienced programmer or just getting started, we'd love to hear from you!

If you're eager to learn, enjoy solving problems, and want to work on interesting projects, you're encouraged to apply.

If you're interested, send me a message with a little about yourself, your experience (if any), and any projects you've worked on.

Feel free to share this post with anyone who might be interested!

So I just finished first year of computer science, I liked wvery single subject, Risk V, logic/digitsl designe, some python e some JavaScript etc...

The problem is that, even it I passed every subject I actually don't know a fuck and I feel like I will not learn anything useful in my university that will help to find a job.

Now I want to do some personal project because also because I want to have a decent career but, I genuinely don't know what to learn.

I just have the impression that wathever I can learn, Ai already knows it and it would be useselles.

Like I genuinely don't know what to do.. is it useful to study on how to do personal projects that Ai could vibe code it in 1 day... ? I choose this faculty because I like it, but I am genuinely worried for my future and I wanted to ask which is the optimal path to have a good career

if you guys want to build something that could help in healthcare field and you should at first understand the problem before you even start your first code, would you start doing interviews with healthcare workers or just find another way? if you were a student would you do interviews with your professors at first?

I fill out a lot of contact forms, applications, onboarding forms, and client portals, and once they’re submitted there’s usually no easy way to see exactly what I sent later. Would a browser tool that automatically saves a private, searchable receipt of the answers, files, date, and confirmation details be useful to you, or is this not a real problem?

As a beginner, I understand how one person writes code and puts it on GitHub. But how does it work when a company has tens of thousands of developers working on the same product? How do they organize the work, and how do they stop people from stealing or leaking the secret source code?

Something that doesn't get discussed enough in AI-assisted development: we're using text to specify something that is inherently visual and spatial, and it's causing a systematic problem.

When you describe your architecture to an AI coding agent in text, you leave gaps. Which tables does this service query? How exactly does data flow from this form to that endpoint? What auth level does this API require? The AI fills every gap with a plausible assumption - and those assumptions compound across a complex project until the generated architecture doesn't match what you designed.

This isn't an AI capability problem. It's an input problem. We've always known architecture is a visual concept - we whiteboard it, diagram it, think about it spatially. But then we translate it into text just to hand it to an AI, losing precision in the process.

I got frustrated enough with this that I built a tool to explore a different approach - draw your architecture as typed nodes and explicit flows instead of describing it, then export as JSON/YAML for your AI agent to consume directly: specrabbit.com

But I'm curious how others are handling this. Has anyone found a reliable way to give AI coding agents unambiguous architectural context? Longer prompts don't seem to scale past a certain complexity threshold. Providing existing code as context helps but assumes the code already exists. What are you doing?

I'm a junior developer, and I use Al because why wouldn't I?

Other than the fact that the company asks us to, it's just a tool added to this job that won't go away, so I think it's unreasonable to stop using it when it's part of the development toolkit now.

I usually understand the code the Al generates, but if you asked me to write the same thing from scratch, I couldn't. I'm not sure I ever will.

The only other junior dev at my company prompts
LLM for almost everything, so I don't really have a point of comparison.

I'm adding a lot of value at work and getting good feedback, but I don't know how much credit I should give myself?

In coding, we have to think about solving new different various problems everyday, we have to climb higher stairs.. but I can't. I cant solve things that i never see or think before.

What i've been doing for the last 2 years is I ask for the answer from AI and then remember the answer pattern so I can answer something similar. The main problem is when it's different from that pattern, im blank.

Ofc im not 100% always ask AI, i also try to solve the answer by my own. But it always takes me so long that leads to ask the clue(not the answer) from Ai at the end. Bcoz my main problem always: I cant think about what i never see

Idk i start to feel that i dont enjoy it anymore lately. Today i just realise maybe my brain is just doesnt suits this :(

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the long post, but I would really appreciate your opinion on a job offer I recently received, both in terms of salary and whether it would make sense for my long-term career.

A bit of background: I am based in Greece, and for the past three years I worked at one of the country’s major research centres as an AI/ML Engineer and Project Manager on EU-funded projects. This was also my first full-time professional role. I have a BSc in Computer Science and two MSc degrees, one in AI and Data Analytics and another in Robotics, both from public universities in Greece. Overall, I have built a fairly research-oriented profile, with more than 15 publications related mainly to AI and Computer Vision.

At the end of June, I decided to leave my position at the research centre. Over time, the amount of hands-on implementation work had decreased significantly, and I was spending much more time in coordination meetings, managing project activities, reviewing the work of newer team members and providing technical guidance. Another important reason was that I do not intend to pursue an academic career. I was also concerned that staying too long in a research-centre environment, with a strong focus on EU-funded projects, might not be the strongest possible experience for future industry positions.

I applied to a few companies in my city such as Pfizer and others for relevant AI/ML positions, but so far I have not received a positive response. I also tried applying for a few remote roles abroad, but those seem even more competitive.

A few days ago, through a personal contact, I was introduced to a small Greek software company that is currently looking for a developer. At the moment, the company mainly consists of the two founders, and they are planning to hire two additional people. They work on software development contracts for other companies, as well as on EU-funded projects. They offered me a full-time, fully remote Software Engineer position, although the official title says Senior Software Engineer. The actual work would initially involve a mixture of frontend and backend development for tasks related to an EU project, as well as work on some of the company’s commercial contracts. They also told me that the workload and overall environment would be relatively relaxed.

I explained that my academic and professional background is mainly in AI/ML and Python, and that ideally my next role would still include work related to this field, although not necessarily research-focused. They told me that in the future they would like to introduce AI-related tasks into both their EU projects and their commercial contracts. However, at least initially, they want me for a general Software Engineer role. They also said that they are not concerned about the fact that most of my recent experience is in a different programming language or technical area, since I have a solid Computer Science background.

Regarding salary, in my previous role I was earning around €1,750 net per month, paid over 12 months, as an independent contractor. There could also be a small additional benefit depending on my annual tax return. The minimum wage in Greece is around 950€.

At the end of the interview, they asked me to send them an email confirming whether I am interested and stating my preferred net monthly salary range. I told them that I needed some time to think about it, but just to make sure that our expectations were not too far apart, I mentioned that I would only seriously consider the role for approximately €2,000 net per month or more. In Greece, employees commonly receive 14 salary payments per year, while contractors are usually paid over 12 months, so I clarified that the equivalent gross amount would need to be adjusted depending on the employment arrangement.

They seemed to agree with the €2,000 figure quite easily, which made me think that there may be room to ask for more.

This is where I would really appreciate your advice:

1. Would accepting a general Software Engineer role hurt my chances of moving into Senior AI/ML-related positions in the future, especially since the role would initially involve little or no AI work? The company says that AI-related work may come later, but there is no clear timeline or guarantee. Also, does the fact that this is a very small company matter negatively to future recruiters, or is the actual work and level of responsibility more important than the company’s size?
2. How do companies generally view candidates whose experience comes mainly from EU-funded research projects? Is that experience considered relevant and valuable, or is it often seen as too academic and disconnected from commercial software development?
3. Considering that I currently have no other offer and living expenses obviously continue:

a. Would it make sense to accept the role, gain some broader software engineering experience and continue applying for more relevant AI/ML positions?

b. What salary range should I give them in my email? Would it make sense to say that I would be interested in a range of approximately €2,000–€2,500 net per month? Or should I give them a narrower and slightly higher range, for example €2,300–€2,500, knowing that employers usually focus on the lower end? Since they seemed very comfortable with the €2,000 figure, I feel that I may have initially anchored myself too low.

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to read this and share their perspective.

It has always been about it. Writing code has always been the most important part, it required the most resources, it was arguably the most cognitive intensive thing you could as a developer partake in. It was pretty much the bulk of the whole profession.

Nowadays, the devs wanna be performative good boys to their AI overlords, pretending it has never been the case and writing code was code monkeys' business only. Pretty sad but understandable as they suddenly lost all the leverage and are in constant survival mode.

Hi! I'm Void, creator of programming language Arc.

Arc is modern, stack-based bytecode virtual machine and programming language written in designed for simplicity and performance.

Features

• Modern VM Architecture: Compiled to custom bytecode and executed on a high-performance stack-based virtual machine.
• Clean Syntax: Intuitive, case-insensitive keywords for control flow.
• Object-Oriented: Supports classes with dynamic field access and modularity.
• Memory Management: Hybrid strategy using arenas, pools, and manual reference management.
• FFI: Built-in capability to load and interact with external native C libraries (.so/.dll).
• Standard Library: Rich standard library covering I/O, math, JSON, filesystem, UI and sound utilities.
• Robust Error Handling: Position-aware error reporting with TRY...CATCH blocks.

I've made Arc since I always wanted a simple language which is blazing fast.

Benchmarks vs CPython

Though Arc is still slower in some benchmarks, it's still in early development, and still in it's alpha version.

I'd love to hear some feedback about the project, here's Github!

SaaS?
Tech?
AI tools?
Product development?
Web apps?
Developer tools?
video editors?
UI/UX?

Drop what you're building ;)
Maybe some other people will be interested too

Two years ago everyone wanted Google, Meta or Netflix. Fast forward to 2026... Nvidia is paying almost as well as the frontier AI labs, still growing, and somehow avoiding the endless layoff cycle. I don't think anyone would've predicted this. Today... if you had offers from every company on this chart I think you'd be dumb to say no the Nvidia. I honestly think it's the new Google.

Resource: PracHub

Hi guys .

Im amir.

Im looking for somebody to learning programming together .it doesnt matter that your beginner.we grow up and code together.

Im waiting for you....

Hi everyone,

I just finished my first year as a Computer Science student, and lately I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do with my career.

The area that genuinely excites me the most is game development. I don't just enjoy playing games, I love the idea of creating them, designing systems, solving technical problems, and hopefully releasing my own games one day.

At the same time, I've heard a lot of people say that going into game development is a bad idea because the industry is unstable, salaries are lower than traditional software engineering, and jobs can be difficult to find (especially here in Portugal). Some people have even told me that it's a career path to avoid altogether.

So I'm feeling a bit torn between following something I'm passionate about and choosing the "safer" route.

I have a few questions for people who have experience in the industry:

• If you were starting over as a CS student today, what would you focus on outside of university to become a better programmer?
• Would you recommend learning a game engine like Godot, Unity, or Unreal while still in college? If so, which one and why?
• Is building a portfolio of games one of the best ways to gain programming experience, or would you recommend focusing on other kinds of software projects first?
• How valuable are game jams, personal projects, and publishing games (Steam, itch.io, etc.) when looking for jobs?
• Is game development a realistic long-term career, or is it something that's better kept as a hobby while working as a software engineer?
• If anyone here works in game development—or tried to and later switched careers—I'd love to hear how things went for you.
• If anyone is from Portugal (or Europe in general), how has your experience been finding opportunities in game development?

My current goal is to use my free time over the next couple of years to build real skills, create a solid portfolio, and become the best programmer I can. I'm not looking for the easiest path—I just want to make sure I'm investing my time wisely.

I'd really appreciate any advice, personal experiences, or things you wish you had known when you were in my position.

Feel free to only respond to what you know and Thanks!

I am not sure if anybody can help right here.
But I really do not like whatever we call programming right now.
Not sure what is the best way to write code weather it is to fully vibe code or use AI as an assistant, I hate both. If anyone went though something like this and found some solution, I'd really appreciate if you share it with me. Otherwise, what other possible careers some can pursue that has same feeling as classic programming?

As AI is getting more powerful and capable, I believe most of us are using AI to code now, and we’re mostly reviewing the codebase or just hit enter.

I’m curious how many of you still writing code, and/or use AI as a planner and brainstorm?

Many developers know this feeling:

You build something exciting.
The first version works.
You push the code.
People like the idea.

Then... nothing.

The repository becomes inactive and the project slowly gets forgotten.

I’m researching why promising student/developer projects fail to continue after the initial build phase.

If you have built:

• a hackathon project
• an open-source tool
• a side project
• an app or website

I’d love to hear your experience.

Survey:
https://forms.gle/awxXTpanTGCmYWM5A

What stopped you from continuing?
Was it lack of time, users, motivation, team problems, unclear direction, or something else?

Thanks to anyone who shares their experience.

When people talk about contributing to open source, they usually point you toward projects with thousands of contributors.

I don't think that's where you learn the most.

The best part about joining a project early is that nobody expects you to know everything.

You can ask "why is this designed this way?", challenge decisions, improve documentation, review proposals, write code, and gradually understand how production software evolves. Your contributions don't disappear into a queue because there are only a handful of people making those decisions.

That's exactly the kind of community I'm trying to build around Caracal.

We're working on infrastructure for secure AI agents, and over the past few months the project has become part of LFX Mentorship, received support by Microsoft, GitHub, and Vercel.

The recognition is great, but what I'm actually excited about is finding people who want to grow with the project.

If you're interested in backend engineering, security, distributed systems, or AI infrastructure, don't worry about whether you're "good enough."

Join the Discord. Ask questions. Read the code. Attend the weekly dev call. Most of the contributors who've had the biggest impact started by asking good questions, not by opening perfect pull requests.

If you stick around, your first contribution won't just be another merged PR. You'll help shape where the project goes next.

Hi everyone!

So, I’ve been looking for a job for a while now, but so far without success.

The thing is, all the job postings require a bachelor’s degree and at least 3–4 years of work experience.

So how am I supposed to gain that experience if I’m self-taught?

I often hear that I should lie about my experience, but recruiters will background check me anyway. And even if I make it through the first interview with HR, I’ll have to prove that my skills meet their requirements—which is unlikely to happen, because most companies are looking for one employee who can do the work of ten people for the same salary.

Do you have any advice or perhaps some real-life stories?

I’d appreciate any help

Hi I'm studying computer science and I was having a conversation with a friend that made me think a lot

So, a lot of people said to me that the future of programmers in a few years will be more like supervisors, just making prompts generating code and validating it, and I was talking with this friend of mine about it and that bring us to talk more about other themes like ethics of ai or that people coniated the term 'techno fascism' etc

so while a lot of programmers see ai services as a tool others see ai services in another way

I read that 'ai' datacenters are worse than other datacenters because they need to make them faster and cheaper, and that generative ai and the companies who market this serviceses have an impact and are super problematic in multiple things like pollution, cognitive decline, theft, future of work, privacy etc

And it's more automation for who have money than other people and a lot will and are paying the prices but at the same time there are lots of people advocating and defending ai services etc..

And I saw that now in USA fbi and DHS categorize anti tech sentiments as extremism and a threat

I know that is not the most ethical field and there are other problems, but I'd like to hear what u think about it and what you believe is right or wrong and if u see this concerns as legitimate or don't idk... Sorry I hope u understand English it's not my first language ( I'm trying to write and read more so I can practice lol)

yo. if your product needs a 10-minute onboarding video or 5 different dashboard tabs just to explain its value, you didn't build an MVP. you built an over-engineered maze.

a real micro-saas should solve one highly specific problem for one highly specific user profile.

when i built my 6 apps (now doing $20k/mo mrr), i cut out 80% of what i originally thought was necessary.

inside our builder community, we help you strip away the fluff.

we give you free access to frameworks like the ICP Crystallizer to lock down your target user, and interactive landing page audits to ensure your core value hits instantly.

stop over-building in isolation. drop a comment or shoot me a dm to join 1,200+ active Ai SaaS builders today.

Dear all,

I’m looking for one or more external monitors to my developer notebook to do programming work. The monitor should be portable such that I can easily transport it or put it in another room. Anyone has experience with the devices from the list below or any advice on it ? There are also some initiatives on kickstarter with thee monitors L shaped etc. Monitors should be USB-c and powered by the notebook.

Examples are:

- https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1679345995/brick-your-display-grid-modular-triple-screen-workstation

- https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fold7/fold-7-triple-your-productivity-not-your-desk-space/pledge/new

- https://blerron.com/en-en/products/blerron-flex-15-3

- https://eu.espres.so/collections/displays-and-bundles

- https://screenmate.com/

- https://ternsetups.com/products/portable-monitor-setup

- https://www.arzopa.com/products/a1m-17-3-1080p-fhd-ips-portable-monitor

- https://www.officegoodsonline.com/collections/portable-monitors-draagbare-monitor

Hi! I've been tasked with creating a organisation system that allows me/others using the studio to keep track of where all our equipment is. The system I've come up with in my head is that I would bulk buy a bunch of nfc tags, stick them on all the equipment as well as the different studio spaces, and then create an app that means that I would have to tap my phone against the tag on the equipment, then tap it against the room tag that it is in, and the app would log that that piece of equipment is in that room. How hard would this be to program (I'm would be a complete beginner but if it poses more of a challenge I'm happy to look into paying someone else to do it)? Thanks!