Location: Netherlands
Remote: Can do! Happy (maybe happier) with onsite too.
Willing to relocate: Yes! I have an EU passport and right-to-work in the UK until summer 2026, but likely extendable.
Technologies: Python, Java, Django, HTMX, Tailwind, Docker, PyTorch, PostgreSQL, more probably - I'll learn anything that's right for the job!
Résumé/CV: https://gaveit.org/s/jeZYmpYGcdBmFFE
Email: See CV
I just graduated from a Master's in AI, with some bio and neuroscience sprinkled in. I've been programming since I was 14 (11 years ago now - wow) and well yeah I love it. I love making things that people use! I'm now looking for a job, but honestly, for my 40-hours-a-week, I want to work on something impactful. Climate tech! Medicine! Energy! Maybe AI? Big data...? I don't know, I think pure tech/software companies can also be great, but reading the posts on the 'Who is hiring' threads doesn't exactly fill me with excitement.
But sometimes pure tech really scratches that itch, you know? Startup culture sounds super fun! Or I spend too much time on hn, idk. I'd love to make use of my relatively generalist skills, and just try to make something that people use. Ideally, even improve their lives.
I'm probably being way too optimistic on what I can realistically find, especially at this stage of my career, but hey you gotta start somewhere. If anyone's reading this - hi! Thank you for reading whatever this is, I think I roughly just want to give an idea of my uhhh... vibe.
Final (serious) note, because at the end of the day I am looking for a job: I try to write clean, performant code, using the right technologies for the job. I care about creating well-designed, intuitive programs. And I care about getting things done! If that's a piece of software, or using software to achieve something else, I'm happy to do it.
I was about to start a new project with Next.js... is anyone willing to give me some advice?
I'm about to start building an e-commerce site (30-50k poster print designs, i.e. no inventory), and was leaning towards a Django backend (because I know it) and... some sort of SSR frontend. I'm not really a frontend guy, but taking this as an opportunity to learn it. This article obviously does not inspire confidence in me choosing Next.js - would someone have any suggestions/pros and cons of what to use?
I currently see the options for doing SSR as:
- Next.js: well-represented in AI training data (though recent versions had breaking changes? I'm not sure), but annoying to actually use (according to this article/general sentiment I've found online), and pushes you into Vercel? (I barely know what that means)
- SvelteKit: best DX and nice to use, but might be less present in AI training data?
- Django templates + HTMX: possibly limiting? Less maintainable once you get to a certain size? I'm not sure.
In my opinion (9 years FE exp) you should build your ecommerce site in shopify or wordpress + woocommerce or some other off the shelf tool. It will be up before the evening's out and you won't be spending that much extra than you would have anyway, and everything will Just Work (tm) and look pretty good (chuck out 50$ for a nice wordpress theme and you're golden).
If you insist on rolling your own, Django + templates should be plenty. Lots of existing code for integrating Stripe or whatever. AI will be fine at it. You could potentially investigate medusajs or prestashop. Here's a list that could be fun to investigate: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab... but keyword is fun. You should build it in wordpress because that is a bombproof solution running like half the internet and will save you endless amount of time.
If you're doing this as an exercise to learn a new tool, leave the AI to the side as you're robbing yourself an opportunity to delve into docs and gain more domain knowledge. And absolutely do not touch nextjs with a 10 foot pole, it's an absurdly overwrought tool. The only people that should learn nextjs are people working at dev houses that churn out a shitload of full stack apps for clients that have the budget to shell out for vercel's hosting costs. And even then imo they should just be using django + react + vite + tanstack MAYBE.
HTMX is cool but I'm not sure the point, again if for fun why not, but I would ask yourself: you get your site up and running and you spend the next year scrambling around putting things in boxes and printing shipping labels, and then in 2026 Thanksgiving right before the holiday rush something breaks in your app and you want to fix it but HTMX/nextjs/whatever have gone through 2 breaking change upgrades and so have 4 different libraries they rely on and actually the most up to date version of two libraries you rely on are not interoperable right now because they depend on different node versions or some other bullshit, and now what do you do?
I was 100% on board with WordPress/WC at first, and had already started building with it, but was immediately coming into issues. Just Work (tm) was my expectation, and was most definitely not what I found.
- I used the product variations feature, 18 variations per product, and all of a sudden the "Duplicate" button took 15 seconds! I learned this is because each variation is it's own thing, so it was making 18 new things (still insane it took that long, on my beefy dev pc). I can't imagine 30-50k products * 18 variations * metadata stuff working fast in any way.
- In avoiding product variations, there's plugins for adding product fields, and plugins for pricing rules, but clicking around to do stuff, or maybe writing php that integrates with plugins that I'm clicking around in... it's not the way I want to spend my time developing. It especially integrates terribly with AI tools, which at this point are an important development tool for me.
- I don't want to have a 1-to-1 mapping between products and pages. This doesn't fit the WC model well (or Shopify for that matter).
Generally, I can imagine an experienced wordpress/PHP dev being able to overcome these issues, but if I'm learning something anyway, I'd personally rather learn a proper frontend framework (be it any of the options you mentioned). Leveraging AI tools also matters.
I appreciate your response! Gives me more confidence in maybe sticking to Django + templates. But from what I've seen, and also in discussions with other developers, I think wordpress is out for this project. Thanks again :)
Well, fine, what would you recommend instead? I've never had issues with wordpress as long as I stay away from their stupid block editor thingy but you've much more experience than me so I'm curious your opinion.
Sonnet 4 and gpt5 are both good at SvelteKit. You might have to specify that you want to use Svelte 5 in the llm instructions for your editor.
Use Context7 mcp to get Svelte 5 docs if the agent messes up something you know should work.
The new experimental remote functions solved a big pain point with sveltekit, so I no longer have any reasons not to recommend svelte and sveltekit to people.
Vanilla Django would get my vote. Your description doesn’t sound like it needs a heavy frontend. Sprinkle in some scripts as needed. If you really want to learn front-end, Next is really just the worst place to start or finish or anything in between.
If already know Django, go with Django and sprinkle in some HTMX as necessary. You’ll get 95% of the benefits with a fraction of the effort compared to a modern Javascript SPA. And it’ll be a breeze to maintain. You’ll also save so much time never needing to debug a bundler, minifier or ESM/CJS issues.
Use what you know. Build the backend first. You probably won't know what the frontend requires before this.
Once you know what is actually going to be on your site, you can style the output with CSS and add the necessary interactivity with JS. Browser APIs have mostly standardized as compared to the bad old days. Using them directly instead of libraries or frameworks will keep your site lean and fast.
All of your CSS, HTML and browser API knowledge will continue to serve you for the years to come. In a few years, people will be arguing about a new magic framework.
You should definitely run through the Rails tutorial at least. I rediscovered Rails this last year (and checked out Django/Laravel) and it's really awesome these days.
To some extend they are, sure. A framework is there to assist and help you. If you mess things up, then to some extend the framework wasn't very helpful or even distracting.
That sounds like a good candidate for Django using either Datastar or HTMX with web components (Lit/React/VanillaJS) as an escape hatch for really interactive bits. Instagram, Threads, Doordash, EdX, Octopus Energy, etc. have all running Django at scale for years.
Night lenses! Yeah they're pretty crazy (I'm in the process of getting them and a friend of mine has them). 10 hours is low though - they're supposed to easily make your vision last all day, even two. My friend says he only really stops seeing well after 3 nights of not wearing them.
I tried them and they were awful for me. Didn't last the full day, caused terrible halos while driving (and that was BEFORE 90% of cars drove with LED high beams), were generally too uncomfortable.
Same results for me. Absolutely awful, vision consistently began failing by becoming noticeably blurry about 8 to 9 hours after taking night lenses out, and I couldn't drive at night because of headlight and streetlight halos even after "topping off" with those uncomfortable lenses during the day. As an enthusiastic night sky observer, trying to use those lenses was depressing.
I gave up after extended tries with three different lenses (I think it was six to nine months total), with my highly experienced doctor consulting with different manufacturers and researchers from around the country. Turns out my pupils naturally open up too wide, made worse by corneas that apparently are not thick enough to retain the reshaping all day. These issues, incidentally, make me ineligible for the popular cut-n-burn style of eye surgery.
On the bright side, it was indeed completely reversible and I've suffered no effects of any kind after about two days of non-use. That was a bit over a decade ago.
Tried it out for a bit - recently upgraded to Max so was willing to try one of these run-stuff-in-parallel tools.
It wasn't great.
- Installation using the provided binaries just fails on my machine - I have Ubuntu 22.04, which apparently has too old a version of glibc. Building from sourced worked though.
- Every time I want to open a new chat, it brings me back to the project list. I don't want to click on the same project every time!
- Scrolling is awful! It's slow, and it often doesn't automatically scroll down as the chat is generated so you have to do it yourself.
- There's no title or anything across sessions. If I'm now working on multiple things at the same time, I want to know what I'm working on quickly!
- The log/text entries take up so much space. Something like this would benefit from a much more compact view - it shouldn't use my entire screen to show me 1 TODO list and 1 tool use.
- Unlike the video, the code changes are all wrapped in a "AI Summary" entry which tells me what it did in a few words, with no option (that I could find) to open the code itself. Confused, couldn't find a setting for this.
- There's multiple UI bugs, and it's sluggish overall.
I didn't use the Agents stuff, which (given the video starts with it) might be the main focus? But as it stands, for my attempt at running multiple Claude Code sessions at once, this was too buggy to really work. Someone else mentioned https://conductor.build/, which might be more what I'm looking for, but unfortunately it lacks Linux support.
I hope it gets better! I could see myself using it after a few more releases, and I'm rooting for them - just sharing my experience here for others who are considering trying it.
I don't think anyone was arguing this - Pebble simply went bankrupt. FitBit just bought some of their IP/assets I think. There was no expectation of them buying it and continuing support or development.
Some say that if FitBit hadn't bought them, the Kickstarter supporters that still hadn't received their devices, wouldn't gotten their money refunded from Pebble.
The burger is already in the store. The way the food industry works they'd probably kill the same number of cows every year to preserve the size of their asset (the farm/heads of cattle) and get a subsidy from government for the crop loss that didn't sell.
I think this removes any amount of human-labeled data: no RLHF and stuff like that. You can use their technique to create an unsupervised reward model, and use that model to RL your way to having a useful assistant LLM.
The paper is very accessible (it's mostly written by Anthropic researchers), and Section 4 summarises their findings really well. They were themselves really surprised by the results:
> We were initially very skeptical of these findings, because they seemed clearly too good to be true, and suspiciously close to training with actual labels. To ensure we didn’t accidentally train on the labels, (1) we re-ran the experiment several times on different datasets, (2) we copied the dataset into a new file, excluding any labels before re-running our algorithm with that file, and (3) one coauthor independently replicated the findings on the Claude 3.5 Haiku base model using a different codebase.
Yup. The people i know on this didn't even get it for the weight, but the behavior changes. This isn't letting them eat the same stuff and lose weight, this is changing what they want to eat.
They went from ADHD driven boredom eaters to not even thinking about food.
I have ADHD and the dopamine dysregulation really makes it hard to avoid eating things with sugar in it.
The semaglutide really helps, I'm on a lower dose of it 0.5mg/week and have been on it for over a year. I've lost a fair bit of weight but that has stabilized. It costs me ~$30 per month and I save much more than that on eating less food.
For me it really helps with chronic fatigue which was destroying my life. I think it really is a wonder drug for people with auto-immune issues. I was insanely sensitive to it when I started which I think is common with people with ADHD so I started really low and only very slowly worked my way up.
But sometimes pure tech really scratches that itch, you know? Startup culture sounds super fun! Or I spend too much time on hn, idk. I'd love to make use of my relatively generalist skills, and just try to make something that people use. Ideally, even improve their lives.
I'm probably being way too optimistic on what I can realistically find, especially at this stage of my career, but hey you gotta start somewhere. If anyone's reading this - hi! Thank you for reading whatever this is, I think I roughly just want to give an idea of my uhhh... vibe.
Final (serious) note, because at the end of the day I am looking for a job: I try to write clean, performant code, using the right technologies for the job. I care about creating well-designed, intuitive programs. And I care about getting things done! If that's a piece of software, or using software to achieve something else, I'm happy to do it.