Learning new programming languages is an awesome way to expand your programming brain. If you want to stay in the same scientific computation niche, you can check out Julia or Mathematica. If you’re just looking to broaden your horizons, the world is your oyster. For me, learning Clojure really cooked my noodle but made me a much better programmer since it taught me functional programming.

Also, just read other peoples code! You can learn the conventions that way. Though for you it would best to find other products within your niche, because I’m not sure if general web dev code would be super helpful.

There are techniques that are broader than any single language’s conventions, and I think learning those are how you can improve. That’s hard to teach, though, and it comes from experience with a few different languages, in my opinion.

And honestly, I can totally respect the “conventions be damned” attitude, because at the end of the day, you’re trying to make something that works, and if nobody else is reading that code, you’ve made the right trade-off.

I’ll suggest Elixir. It’s a language that runs on the same virtual machine as Erlang, which has proven to be great for ultra-reliable and excellent at managing many, MANY concurrent processes.

Elixir itself builds upon this great foundation with a syntax similar to Ruby, but entirely functional. It’s a delightful language to read and write.

There’s no way of knowing if anything we’ve determined via science is “correct,” we’ve just developed a model that is consistent with our observations. There are still plenty of unanswered questions in astronomy.

One of the all-time classics! I think all devs should read this.

There’s a really nice app called Daylio which lets you track this stuff, and generates reports for you pretty similar to this one. I’ve been using it for years.

Oh you’re so right, I never use those so I completely forgot :X

In Elixir & Erlang, they don’t even have a for-loop construct. You have to use recursion. And I think that’s beautiful. I also think tail-call optimization is beautiful.

There are lots of really cool voting systems that don’t have the same weaknesses that first-past-the-post does. Check out https://ncase.me/ballot/ if you want a fun interactive explanation of several.

Space Engineers but not a buggy mess with player scripting that isn’t in C# of all things.

Element supports video calling and it has been working great for me.

1. I moved to Lemmy during the Reddit API debacle, and it’s been great. I’ve even started interacting with posts which I almost never did on Reddit.
2. I moved from xitter to Mastodon, but I don’t really use either anymore; it’s just not a form of social media that brings me joy.
3. I asked several of my friends to try out Matrix, and they tolerate it and message me there instead of Discord. I do a lot of video calls with my girlfriend through Matrix (via Element) and that’s been perfectly reliable. Matrix has actually worked better than Discord for me, since I use Linux (Arch btw) and my webcam frequently has green flashes in Discord but not on Matrix. I had that issue on Fedora as well so I think it’s a Discord for Linux problem.
4. YouTube is the last great hurdle….

I’ve been using Matrix for the last few months, via Element which supports some newer feature like video and voice calls, and it’s been great. My only complaint is that their Video Rooms feature is kinda flaky with video, which is weird given that one-on-one video calls are rock-solid. Voice-only in a Video Room is reliable tho. Video Rooms are still an experimental feature that you have to enable in your settings.

I’ve seen a couple of Discord servers that use a Matrix Bridge to sync up Discord chats with Matrix Spaces. The only downside to that is that bridges and bots don’t support E2EE, which if you’re bridging to Discord, isn’t much of a downside anyway.