The Art && Science of Ruby·Feb 5, 2026 Vibes and Engineering
The Jobs Crisis
My job, as I have known it for the past twenty-five years, is no more.
As someone who's only ever worked at small companies [1] or on my own, I probably had to do much more than software developers at large corporate places.
Most of my work life, I've been a solo freelancer, which meant I would spend my time:
* marketing (which for me was mainly in-person networking - the absolute best way to get work)
* pre-sales (talking to prospects about what they wanted, then figurCollabor8Online·4] but I never really _got_ it. I could make the computer do things, but it was a struggle and I never felt like I knew what I was doing - the code never sat right in my head. One friend, Ben, who had the ST, started getting frustrated with the limitations of STOS and started learning 68K assembler[5]. Meanwhile, one of my magazines had an article about [Smalltalk
