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I thought the point of ASCII art was that it could be exported into Notepad. is the website mainly for aesthetics/art as opposed to inserting diagrams into READMEs now?


> I thought the point of ASCII art was that it could be exported into Notepad.

I don't think that's ever been the point of ASCII art. It's just art made with ASCII characters, that's it.


Yes this website is mainly for aesthetics and art. I will however add a feature that will generate the relevant chars / line breaks of a given still image, so that it can be exported to notepad.


When would you expect to put a video of a diagram into a readme file?


Any damn time I want, notepad is the next best thing to freedom that we have!


Do you have links for one-click assembly too like Macrofab and PCB.ng? Taking a day to place parts with tweezers and hot air is a major pain point.


Not yet, one day I want to add links to these new type of assemblers.


How did you find the niche? Any reading material I should see?


I had a CS degree but was working outside the field in pharmaceuticals. I was having the problem myself and wrote a crazy Excel spreadsheet with tens of thousands of lines of poorly written copy pasted code to do it. I knew that there would be a market for it so I contacted an old classmate of mine who rewrote it much better as a web service.

That is why I think CS and software engineering should be part of every college degree, so that people can see the opportunity for software where it exists. I wasn’t good enough to be a programmer but I had enough knowledge to see an opportunity whereas most people thought “hm, this is just how this is done.”


Reminds me of this AMA answer by @patio11 [1]

> Here's an exercise you can do: do you understand what a life insurance agent does all day every day? Make it your mission for a week to do so, well enough to explain it to a close friend who has no access to your sources. All you have to do to learn this is read and make conversations happen. (People are happy to talk to you!)

I really need to take that seriously, and talk to people in a lot of different industries.

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/im-patio11-patrick-mckenz...


Anyone trading with a rangebound bot will have made money in the last two weeks with these stagnant prices. The heavy regret for me set in later when my rangebound bot sold Litecoin and Ethereum before they tripled.


Use the code: pigletbeta3 for 6 months free access, provided you give feedback at least once a month.

It doesn't have that same issue you describe.


Cool, I'll check it out


Note: It is in Beta, and we have limited data. Thus, expect a work in progress.

Right now we need funds to continue development and add more data. So we will be charging if you don't provide feedback - so please help us improve! :)


Developer here. Going by my time Rescuetime logs, 62.5% of my time is spent outside of the IDE or any other work related application. I do not enjoy this work and spend a lot of time walking around/thinking about the problem/surfing non work sites.


Thinking about the problem is working.


Where is the original thought? There were few hard numbers. There was way too much quoted material and no Gitlab thoughts on it. It looks like they made the post based on feelings instead of a metric like time or dollars.


I'm not the OP but I'm thinking of switching too. My reasons:

Often writing the code for microcontrollers can be overwhelming especially when it's full of bad style or I have to understand a new library. There is often a difficulty mismatch. I find myself hating my programming job for hours, only thinking about money.

I have never tried program management and honestly it sounds easier. I watch my bosses just ask me for time estimates then take credit when I succeed and blame me/fire me if I fail to deliver by that date. I want to put myself in such a favorable position. (Although if I own the company, I'm probably financially responsible for losses too)

Even if I get rejected 9/10 phone calls, is it worse than dealing with compiler errors and run time errors all day? How hard is it to talk to customers and relay it to developers?

It seems the only real hard part with management is 1) estimating the difficulty of tasks, 2) knowing if your programmers are really struggling or if they are just slacking off. 3) trying to extract ideas from customers who don't know what they want


While I'd never recommend staying a career that you hate, I'm not sure switching to a position you think is cruisy is a great idea either. That's a recipe for under performance and bad management.

It does sound like you've never worked with a good PM, I'm not sure if I have either as I do struggle a lot with what value they actually add to projects.

99% of the time its better for people to speak directly and not relay information through other (probably non technical) people.

Of course you do need to limit distractions but I think you can set expectations with people about what distractions do and how often they should distract you.

Also find that a lot of PMs try play power games, I really think they need a new job title like Project Coordinator or something that sounds a little less in charge.

Interesting to see this thread has a very mixed idea of what a PM is, a number of people mention things I'd expect as part of a sales or BA role. I wonder if this is part of the reason people find PMs useless is that no one really knows what they should be doing.


Don't forget that any position that deals directly with clients also takes the brunt of their wrath if they're unhappy. As a non-dev in a SaaS company, I was the primary point of contact for a number of clients and if anything went wrong, I was the first person to hear about it. Clients are not usually pleasant when something is broken or if their project is running late.

My advice is to not underestimate the toll that can take on you. Trying to convey the importance of a specific item for a client to a developer is difficult, too, particularly if the dev is already pretty busy.


It might be that you're better at the management side of things. But don't be tempted just by "grass is greener" thinking: Try to imagine that every job could be hard, that you jump in, discover you don't know what you're doing and you're under a lot of pressure to find a solution, to take action and write documents and schedule meetings and send emails. Will you be motivated to struggle and prevail? More motivated than your worst days in previous jobs? If your response to that is "bring it on," then the shift will be good.


I find this reply interesting, because as a developer I feel like #3 is pretty much the only hard thing I have to deal with: translating human intention, which is sometimes paradoxical, into code. It can be hard enough when it's your intention, it's even harder when it's someone else's, and can be a huge time sink when it's multiple someone else's. Corner cases especially, where there is no answer that can completely satisfy all the stakeholders, becomes a balancing act.


6/10 Total. Rationale:

3/4points Pay feels fair

1/3points surrounding people are funny, interesting, or mentors

1.5/2points difficulty of work is matched to me

0.5/0.5points purpose of work is meaningful

0/0.5points I exercise creativity

I wish I did more than just sit in my chair all day and look at incorrect printf statements and compiler errors. I want to try fun things that I have to be creative about, like marketing or sales or video editing. I don't want to be a programmer my whole life. But I don't even know where to start. It would be nice to be paid to learn at other places too.


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