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ogou

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Berlin is one the cheapest capital cities in Europe. As such it attracts a huge amount of immigrants. That low cost is reflected in the pay. An experienced full stack developer would be fortunate to get 90-95k euro annually. That is plenty of money if you intend to stay in Berlin, but is not something you can save up and build a future with or transfer to another country. Also, housing is a huge problem there and it can take 6 months to find even a basic flat. I am an American developer that lived there for many years and my co-workers were usually Turkish, Polish, Ukrainian, Iranian, Russian, Lebanese, and now Indian. It was rare to find an actual German coder.

I had a hard time with German work expectations and management style. Also, their engineering approach is thorough but incredibly slow and over-built. The environment is hierarchy and credential based with little room for individual initiative or creative problem solving. I was used to improvising, experimenting, and thinking outside the box. It was not a good fit.

People need to understand just how saturated San Francisco is with ads for AI companies right now. I know what these companies do, but I'm still amazed at how niche and bizarre the ads come across. They use an enormous amount of public space to advertise something only relevant to a few hundred people. Locals have a deep resentment of these companies.

I have seen company descriptions in job ads that list college achievements of founders. They are invariably young Asian men. I understand that it's a cultural signifier and don't judge them. But, I also understand that I will never hear back from them because I don't share that background. So, I never apply to any job listing that references college experience of either side, other than wanting a degree in general.

I have done festivals before, so I knew what to expect. One thing I had this time was accepting credit cards and apple pay through an NFC app on my phone. Most people paid with apple pay and were glad I accepted it. Being in a sales booth is awkward at times, but I made friends with the other exhibitors. I had some good conversations with people.

I've said it before that Mistral is underrated. They are looking at real world use of LLMs and tooling. Bespoke models are very appealing to lots of non-tech centered companies and state agencies. Also, Mistral's actual platform is useful. While others are watching performance leaderboards like this is some eSports stream, they are building real world uses.

I was working on a site to mashup Spotify playlists. I can't stand the "weighted shuffle" Spotify uses. It is also useless for niche genres or experimental music. Last week, I got it all the way to launch and then had reports of login problems. It turns out that Spotify changed its developer terms last year and I can't accept public users unless I'm in their partner program. That has a requirement of 250k MAU. So, everyone was declined when the tried to login. I'm limited to just 5 users. That sucks, but I invited 5 friends to use it and we just bang out epic playlists.

Spotify announcement: https://developer.spotify.com/blog/2025-04-15-updating-the-c...

The app: https://sprogeny.com/

This turned out to be a huge waste of time. I built this without knowing that Spotify changed their policy for independent projects last year. I can't get it out of dev mode unless I register as a Spotify partner as a company AND maintain a minimum of at least 250k MAUs. So, I'm limited to 5 users that I have to enter their account info by hand. What a bummer. Still, I really like the background animations I came up with.

  Location: San Francisco
  Remote: Hybrid or Remote
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Full-stack web, but recently React Native, Svelte, and RabbitMQ
  Résumé/CV: https://joshuacurry.dev
  Email: (on dev portfolio above)
I offer high yield with low drama. 15+ years experience across the modern web stack. Looking for contract work.

Recently featured on CNBC for an AI project I made: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/30/these-2-job-seekers-built-ai...

0 > 1 project I just launched: https://sprogeny.com

Lots of creative software has custom scripting with it's own syntax, like Photoshop actions. I'm glad to point Claude at things like that. Inkscape has an extension API that would be interesting to vibe code with. This is not the real danger for creatives.

Right now we're seeing moves to record behaviour by operators of all kinds of software. That will eventually be distilled into sets of automations for agents to use. To me that's far more labor targeted and extractive than generative AI.

Most commercial websites, especially tech, run multiple A/B experiments in parallel to optimize signup funnels and tier conversions. Even so, there should always be a source of truth for people. We should have some way of verifying what we get for what we pay. There are laws about this as well.

This guy's casual and crass response is a sign of disrespect for customers. Unfortunately, that is pervasive in the industry. The bubbles these teams work in are corrosive to empathy and real world impact.

Thanks for the compliment. Linocuts and monotypes have been considered printmaking for hundreds of years. Those pen plots are also collaged and modified by hand, so not only mechanical. I see all that as traditional printmaking. As for having nothing to saw, there can be a lot of fulfillment in exploring basic themes, like geometric shapes or silhouettes of animals.

Everything is fandom now. I grew up around people obsessed with Nascar and NFL. So much of the discourse sounds exactly the same. It beats listening to people talk about their dogs though.

Don't sleep on Mistral. Highly underrated as a general service LLM. Cheaper, too. Their emphasis on bespoke modelling over generalized megaliths will pay off. There are all kinds of specialized datasets and restricted access stores that can benefit from their approach. Especially in highly regulated EU.

Not everyone is obsessed with code generation. There is a whole world out there.

It's more than time. That program requires explicit authorization from them. It's designed for larger corporate integrations, not developer experiments. I seriously I doubt I would get approved even if I went through all the paperwork. It's not just a matter of just signing up for an API key.

As for your plan, gathering user data is probably the main thing they want to prevent.

Manually. I went to my profile and saved 4 key pages as html. Then Claude converted those to markdown. Took less than 5 minutes. Automating that would have been more trouble than it's worth. The LinkedIn API is fairly useless unless you're in their partner program. Scraping could have gotten my account blocked because ToS violation. That core information rarely changes so it doesn't need to be dynamically imported anyway.

A RAG-powered chatbot API that answers questions about a developer's professional background. I built it with Hono, LangChain, Mistral AI, and SQLite. I serve it on a Svelte site for my dev portfolio, but it works as a general API as well.

I dumped all my job background info into it: resumes, LinkedIn, cover letter snippets, GitHub repos, recommendations, projects, languages, volunteering, personal work, and even the story of building the thing itself.

It uses structured markdown files I created from all that as a RAG context. It doesn't automatically ingest LinkedIn or other services.

Here it is live:

https://joshuacurry.dev/

Here is the anonymized and secured API repo for general release:

https://github.com/lucidbeaming/chatjc

  Location: San Francisco, CA
  Remote: Yes, prefer on-site/hybrid in SF
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Svelte 5 & Sveltekit, React & React Native, LangChain, Typescript, Node.js, PHP, Python, Linux admin, WCAG, UX/UI, Writing & content creation
  Résumé/CV: https://joshuacurry.dev
  Email: see dev portfolio above
15+ years frontend and full-stack. Lots of experience at content companies. Teaching, writing, video, and DevRel experience. Leadership experience. Recently leveled-up with a bunch of AI middleware courses.

The maker movement evolved. It didn't disappear. Once the tools became accessible to a much wider audience, such as children, it became an integrated aspect of education. It also became a cultural tool. The author is focusing on a very narrow path to monetization and manufacturing. That wasn't the goal of the movement at all. That was how startup pitches tried to capture the movement and extract value. I see 3D printing machines that create structures out of adobe now. Huge ones. I see whole niche industries coming from laser cutters and CnC machines. People who started on Arduino boards now build music synthesizers and modular synth components. That movement continues and now offers a wide array of dividends.

You're right, none of these new tools are disciplines. They are vendor specific approaches that are very recent. That's part of my overall point. Who is out there with 2+ years of very narrow tooling experience at another company at a senior level and is available for a rando startup (or desparate enterprise looking for bolt-on AI features) at a fraction of the pay? Not many, I'm sure. We can level up, do training, and maybe stand up a demo project. But that won't satisfy an ATS scan. It's unrealistic.

This is a good tooling survey of the past year. I have been watching it as a developer re-entering the job market. The job descriptions closely parallel the timeline used in the post. That's bizarre to me because these approaches are changing so fast. I see jobs for "Skill and Langchain experts with production-grade 0>1 experience. Former founders preferred". That is an expertise that is just a few months old and startups are trying to build whole teams overnight with it. I'm sure January and February will have job postings for whatever gets released that week. It's all so many sand castles.