I’m looking for honest advice from people already working in dev roles. Any advice, even the brutally honest kind, is welcome.

For context, i'm a CS grad, worked as an IT/office personnel for a small company, and left for personal reasons without much a backup plan. Part also is that that I want to move towards the dev side.

Right now I’m on a contract project for a client, but I know it won’t sustain me long-term. I’ve been applying steadily for 4 months, building personal projects and strengthening fundamentals, but the pressure is starting to get to me.

I’m close to considering a career shift. The market feels saturated, and the AI hype adds pressure. I know many will say 20s age is still early, but I want to raise my chances. I'm trying my best to be enthusiastic in what i'm slowly building is to be rewarded.

1. Is it still worth pushing for dev careers as a junior right now in the Philippines, or should I pivot?
2. For recent hired juniors, especially if you weren’t a fresh grad, what made the difference (projects, referrals, certs, networking)?

I want to connect than keep guessing.

Sa mga nagsimula mag-freelance na web dev habang student pa lang:

1. Did you start with simple static sites/portfolios, WordPress, or full-stack CRUD systems?

2. Saan kayo unang nakakuha ng client na hindi sobrang barat (local referrals, FB groups, or cold outreach)?

Curious lang kung ano yung pinaka-realistic na starting point ngayong 2026. Salamat sa sasagot!

Stack used is T3 Code, REA, Opus 5.5. Had it decompile my peripherals' apps and then built the taskbar app from that.

Right now only for personal usage but once I get it to support most brands of peripherals, might release it (very unlikely lol)

i am a software engineer 5yrs exp

So i got laid off last september and I always bombard applications sa job market , and until now unti lang at halos wala parin tumatawag. grabe hndi ko to ineexpect, 1year ago lagi pa may natawag within a day.

Gusto ko nlang gugulin yung ipon ko para makapangibang bansa at magwork nlang ng ibang linya 😭😭😭

kayo ? ano experience niyo ngayong panahon na ito?

I'm developing a large-scale enterprise operations system, carefully handling authentication, authorization, RBAC, database design, business logic, security, and actual organizational requirements. I'm currently around 25% done.

Then someone presented a similar system, claiming to have completed it in just a month. The presentation looked impressive at first, but during the demo, I noticed UI flaws, such as text overflowing its containers. The overall design also had that obvious AI-generated look. And the management is now discussing the nationwide operation of this system.

I talked to her, and she openly admitted to using Claude AI for practically everything through prompting.

I use AI too, and I have nothing against it. But there's a difference between generating an impressive-looking prototype and engineering a reliable enterprise system.

It got me thinking: Can strong presentation skills and AI prompting overshadow actual web development skills, even when the resulting software falls short of industry standards? Will AI-assisted coding eventually replace developers, or will solid engineering skills still matter in the long run?

i would like to thank Claude, Chat GPT, Open Claw and Grok Bot!! 😍😍😍

Six months ago I was a high school history teacher. I spent my evenings grading essays, writing lesson plans, and trying (and mostly failing) to build simple tools that would make my job less chaotic. I had ideas for years. A shared resource library that actually sorted itself. A parent communication tracker that didn’t live in twelve different Google Docs. A way to auto-generate differentiated reading assignments based on each student’s level.

I couldn’t build any of it. Every time I tried a no-code tool I hit a wall. The moment I needed something slightly custom, the whole thing fell apart. Hiring a developer was out of the question on a teacher’s salary. Learning to code properly felt like signing up for a second full-time job I didn’t have the energy for.

Then I started using AI agents.

Not the “chat with me and get a code snippet” kind. The ones that can actually plan, write, test, fix, and deploy. I described what I wanted in plain English, the same way I’d explain it to a helpful colleague. The agent broke it into steps, generated the full application, set up the database, handled authentication, and even wrote basic tests. When something broke, I just told it what went wrong and it fixed it.

The biggest pain points that used to stop me cold just… disappeared.

The knowledge gap. I never needed to understand React, PostgreSQL, or deployment pipelines. I only needed to understand the problem I was solving.

The endless debugging loop. Previously, one small error could cost me an entire weekend of Googling and frustration.

Now the agent diagnoses and repairs most issues itself.

Scope paralysis. I used to freeze because I didn’t know where to start or how big the project should be. Agents force you to be clear about the outcome, then they handle the path.

Maintenance fear. Updating something I didn’t fully understand used to terrify me. Now I just describe the change and the agent implements it while keeping the rest of the system intact.

Time. What used to feel like a multi-month side project now takes days or even hours for the first usable version.

I’m not claiming I’m suddenly a senior engineer who can architect massive systems from scratch. I’m still the same history teacher. But I can now turn ideas into working software. I’ve built tools for my own classroom, then improved versions for other teachers in my district, and recently started helping a couple of local small businesses with simple internal apps.

The shift feels bigger than just “I can make apps now.” It feels like the barrier between “I have a useful idea” and “the idea exists in the world” collapsed. For the first time, the limiting factor isn’t technical skill. It’s clarity of thought and willingness to iterate.

If you’re a non-programmer sitting on ideas you’ve always told yourself you can’t build, the landscape has changed more than most people realize. The tools are here. The agents are capable. The only real remaining skill is learning how to talk to them clearly.

Still feels a little surreal typing this. But yeah… I’m building software now.

Gusto ko lang mag-vent kasi ubos na ubos na energy ko haha.

​Ako yung main dev sa project tapos 1-on-1 ko lang ka-work 'to si PO (US-based senior, halos 15 years na sa company). Bigla na lang magpina-ping for a "quick sync," tapos magiging 2-to-3 hours na daldalan at overthinking sa requirements.

​Yung 10 minutes lang sana na clarification sa chat or ticket, ginagawang podcast session. Ako pa naman yung type na bigyan mo lang ng malinaw na context, matatapos ko agad yung task nang maayos. Di ko tuloy maiwasan ma-annoy kasi imbes na nakakapag-focus sa coding, nakaupo lang ako sa call habang nagya-yap siya buong shift.

​Ako lang ba nakakaranas ng ganito? Paano niyo baina-boundary-han yung ganitong klase ng PO nang di naging bastos? Hays.

10+ years developer, mostly building apps for companies and clients. Matagal ko nang gustong gumawa ng sarili kong app, pero like most developers, ang dami kong unfinished side projects haha. Last month, I finally published my first personal app sa App Store and Google Play. And of all the things I could've built, expense tracker pa talaga. I know, another one HAHAHA.

It started from a personal problem. Kami ng wife ko, hindi talaga consistent sa pag-track ng expenses. Mahilig din kami mag-picture ng receipts para sa warranties, kaso kapag kailangan na, natatabunan na ng ibang photos sa gallery. We've tried budgeting apps before, pero tinatamad talaga kami sa manual input. So instead of spending a few minutes every day recording expenses, I spent weeks building an app para hindi na namin kailangang gawin yun. 😂

Basically, picture-an mo lang yung receipt, then the app automatically extracts the merchant, date, total, and other details. Naka-save na rin yung receipt mismo para madaling hanapin later, especially for warranties. Built it with React Native/Expo, using on-device OCR and some heuristics para ma-extract yung data. Offline-first siya, locally stored lahat, and no account required. Nag-add din ako ng optional cloud feature para kami ng wife ko, pwede nang mag-access ng same receipts kahit magkaibang phone.

I've handled production releases throughout my career, pero iba rin pala kapag sariling app mo. From developer accounts to payments, subscriptions, and store requirements. Medyo hassle din haha. Nag-try din ako ng konting marketing through Reddit, mostly posting and commenting sa relevant discussions. Minsan subtly mentioning the app, pero kapag masyadong obvious, ayun downvoted haha.

Anyway, one month later, 50+ downloads across both stores, 2 subscription trials (which are literally just me and my wife lol), and ₱0 revenue. May ilang active users naman na hindi ko kilala, which is pretty cool.

Aminado ako, I still randomly check my analytics hoping may bagong downloads haha. But honestly, masaya naman ako. Naging habit na rin namin ng wife ko na mag-scan ng receipts after every purchase, which is something we never managed to do with traditional budgeting apps. Mas aware na rin kami ngayon kung saan napupunta yung pera namin, and hindi na rin kami nahihirapang maghanap ng old receipts. So kahit walang revenue, the app actually solved our problem, and that's already a win for me. Na-add ko na rin sa portfolio ko, so bonus na rin haha.

Sa mga devs dito, nakatapos na rin ba kayo ng personal projects? And sa mga maraming unfinished side projects like me, ano usually yung reason bakit hindi niyo natutuloy?

Eto na yung sign mo para tapusin yang budget app or habit tracker mo HAHAHA.

When did you first start to code and why?

Was it for a hobby? What attracted you to it?

Was it for college? High school? Were you forced into it by parents or by the economy at the time?

For ex. My domain is https://domain.com
And my website name is Domain. Google search result is displaying domain.com for the site name instead of Domain. Also how long does it take for the favicon to update because it still hasnt updated on my end.

Do you think you will still have your job a year from now? Two years from now? Are you still going to push through with programming / software dev and try to keep learning? Or are you starting to look at alternative sources of income? The client I work for is giving me less and less work and they are now using Claude more and more to add features to our apps. It's scary and I feel they will let me go soon. I am thinking of changing career but this is alll I know. I've been a dev for 15 years now. And I'm 40 now, so starting over with a new career is going to be hard. How are you all doing? Is your outlook positive or negative?

Hello po, as a student na wala pang bank account. Is there a way to buy pro plans in github copilot through mobile wallets po sana like gcash and such.

Whenever I chat to my workmate, I always receive chunk of AI generated reply. It doesn’t bother me at first but even if the question is so simple where I am expecting a single sentence reply, I will receive 3 paragraphs of AI generated text.

I am starting to think that we will not only lose our critical thinking skills but communication skills as well.

Norm na ba talaga ito sa industry?

Hi! It's a free solo side project with no ads and no monetization, so I'm mostly here to learn.

It's spillo.fun, an anonymous freedom wall where posts disappear after 24h. There are no accounts, no comments or DMs, and only six reactions.

Some build details:

• It's self-hosted on my own server and exposed through a Cloudflare Tunnel (cloudflared), with no open ports.
• There's no login. Returning visitors are recognized only by an anonymous cookie.
• Posts auto-expire after 24 hours.
• Moderation is a report button plus a slur filter that normalizes leetspeak and repeated letters, using word-boundary matching so Tagalog words like "pakisabi" don't get blocked.

Questions for you all:

1. How would you handle spam or rate limiting without accounts?
2. Is a word-list filter enough for Taglish, or is there a better approach?

Roast it, thanks! 🙏

I'm working on a Go-based worker that processes multiple large-file transfers concurrently over HTTP. Work arrives in bursts, and each task involves downloading data from a source and uploading it to a destination.

I'm trying to optimize aggregate throughput and task completion reliability without causing excessive queueing, deadline failures, or unnecessary retries.

The current implementation allows concurrent workloads without an explicit transfer semaphore limit. I'm considering testing a bounded limit of 16 active transfer workloads, along with retries for transient HTTP and network errors.

I'd appreciate feedback from engineers who have built high-throughput Go services or distributed workers.

A few specific questions:

1. Concurrency: Under what conditions would you prefer unrestricted concurrency over a semaphore limiting active workloads to 16? What metrics would tell you that concurrency is too high?
2. Throughput vs. latency: If aggregate throughput is already near the available bandwidth ceiling, can a concurrency limit improve task completion times, or would it mostly introduce queueing?
3. Retries: For transient errors such as HTTP 429, 500, 502, 503, 504, and temporary network failures, what retry policy would you recommend? How do you avoid retries amplifying an existing overload?
4. Semaphore lifecycle: In Go, would you hold a semaphore slot throughout the entire logical task, including retry backoff, or acquire a slot separately for each network attempt? What trade-offs matter?
5. Deadlines and cancellation: How would you ensure that tasks waiting for a semaphore don't consume their entire deadline before transferring any data?
6. Benchmark methodology: How many independent runs or observation windows would you use before trusting a performance improvement? Which metrics would you prioritize?

My initial comparison would track aggregate bytes transferred, completed tasks, failure rate, P50/P95/P99 task duration, queue wait, and actual concurrent transfers.

I'm especially interested in practical engineering experience, benchmark design, and failure modes that aren't obvious from simple throughput tests.

Thanks!

Back in April, I had this random thought: What if we could put our everyday frustrations and impossible wishes into a shopping cart?

Like overthinking, losing your glasses, or wishing for the ultimate jowa. 😂

So I built a silly little website called Hay Nako Cart.

Recently, I revisited it and gave it a makeover. Now you can browse imaginary products, add them to your bayong (Filipino shopping basket), and check out without spending anything.

No actual products. No payments. No deliveries. Just imaginary shopping for very real feelings. 🤣

Here's what it looks like now.

https://haynako.kermee.com

Would love to know what ridiculous item you'd add to the store!

I am currently working on a personal project, and kaya nmn sya ma vibe code and will finish within hours pero where's the fun in that diba? I am using Chatgpt in doing this project pero trinry ko muna wag gumamit ng agent, and only use AI as somewhat of a teacher/mentor teaching me step by step how to build and what each lines mean sa kada functions. Pero feeling ko I am missing a lot of essentials especially sa architecture, version control, and deployment and sometimes Chatgpt does not keep track if I ask a different question. Would like to know if I'm doing this right or am I just overestimating my expectations even though kakasimula ko palang sa project na to. Do you guys have other techniques na ginagawa in learning + building a project?

the advances in ai is exponential. i know it and u know it. claude can now do what you can do, it can probably do more than you much more a swarm of ai agents. next year we will see the first agi's and super intelligence. you need to seriously ask yourself if theres a job waiting for you when you graduate that is related to you it degree.

Hello

I created TypeScript libraries for creating lexers and parsers using regular expression and context free grammar. These libraries make it trivial to develop an entire front-end for a programming language interpreter or compiler.

Slex

Slex is a lexer / scanner generator for C-like languages. It is essentially a regular expression engine implementation with additional nice features for programming language projects.

The first implementation compiled each rule into a tree which is tree-walked to determine if the next token can match. While it worked, it was slow since each rule had to be visited with the current input string, and failures lead to backtracking.

To alleviate the issue, the library now supports compiling all rules to a single DFA. This improves scanning performance by up to 90% since every node in the DFA knows that token rules can be emitted at the given state.

Sparse

Sparse is a parser generator that allows developers to easily create LR(1) / LALR(1) parsers and parsing tables. Since it fully integrates with Slex, defining entire languages can be done with a set of DFA and CFG rules.

It gives the user complete control over the created abstract syntax tree (AST) by deferring node construction when a CFG rule matches. It also offers a complete error handling API, making it easy to present syntax errors to the user.

The initial version of the library only supported LR(1), but LALR(1) output is now supported using the brute force algorithm to merge similar states. Using LALR(1) yields a ~35% performance boost over LR(1) with the same input and the same grammar.

Note that LALR(1) table generation takes longer since it has to generate LR(1) beforehand before merging similar states together.

AI Disclosure

DFA compilation and LALR(1) table generation were implemented with the help of Qwen3.8 27B running locally on another computer with OpenCode as the harness. Each repository contains its own AI disclosure. Tests were implemented to ensure output is identical between old and new implementations.

The first implementations of the libraries were written by hand for a university project in Java and rewritten in TypeScript also by hand.

Currently the new features are being used in my Minecraft compiler project without any issue.

Hi everyone! I built a tool to solve a problem I kept hitting: OpenAPI generators that work fine the first time, then become a pain on the 5th, 10th, and 50th generation.

steadysdk generates typed TypeScript clients from OpenAPI 3.0/3.1 (and Swagger 2.0) with a focus on long-term maintainability:
Safe regeneration (your code is never overwritten)
Name locking so method names stay stable
Custom regions for helpers that live inside generated files
API-level diff + changelog with breaking change detection
CI-friendly --check mode and a GitHub Action
Zero runtime dependencies

It’s open source (MIT), published on npm, and already tested on large real-world specs (GitHub, Stripe, OpenAI, Kubernetes, etc.).

Repo: https://github.com/euruuuuu/steadysdk

Install: npm i -D u/steadysdk/cli

It's an early 0.1.0, so I'd really value feedback, especially from anyone maintaining clients for APIs that change often. Issues and PRs welcome.

I recently ran into a problem with my GitHub account, and honestly, it's frustrating.

As I remember it, GitHub required me to set up 2FA a few years ago. Back then, I was still a junior developer, and I didn't really think much about the recovery process. I probably saved the recovery codes somewhere and moved on.

I was still able to log in normally on my usual devices, so I didn't think much about it. Years later, I needed to clone a project from one of my repositories, logged in again, and suddenly GitHub was asking for my 2FA code.

The problem? I couldn't remember where I saved it.

I've used multiple computers over the years, and some of them don't even work anymore. I tried searching my drives, but I still couldn't find the recovery codes. I don't even remember whether I saved them on a computer that's now broken.

What frustrates me is that there doesn't seem to be another straightforward way to recover the account once you've lost all your 2FA methods.

Why can't there be another verification option, like sending a recovery link to a verified email or using a verified phone number, with additional checks to make sure the account actually belongs to you?

I know email and phone verification aren't perfect, but surely there could be a process that balances security with account recovery.

People forget things. We replace our devices, lose old files, and sometimes don't realize how important something is until years later. Not everyone fully understands the consequences of losing their recovery codes when they first set up 2FA.

I'm not saying 2FA shouldn't exist. I'm just frustrated that a security feature can potentially lock the actual owner out of their account, with no practical way to get back in.

Has anyone experienced this with GitHub or another platform? Were you able to recover your account after losing your authenticator and recovery codes?

Salamat nga pala sa nagtest at review nung first generated card game ko na chronicles of the covenant. Dahil sa tuwa ko, nagdesign naman ako ng makakarelate mga kagaya kong wfh na developer. Sana hindi kayo maburnout kapag natry niyo to.

Hi! I'm currently developing a digital-products marketplace using Laravel and PayMongo Hosted Checkout v2 with QR Ph. This my side project which I want to to test or simulate on how systems with payment really works (I use AI in development and I didn't notice up until late development na slightly complex pala ang mag maintain ng one source of truth and handling super niche edge cases pag pera ang involved haha)

I've already implemented payment initialization, webhook reconciliation, checkout expiration, and duplicate-purchase protection. However, I have two questions about PayMongos behavior that I couldnt find definitive answers to in the documentation.

1. Can one Checkout Session produce two successful payments?

PayMongo allows multiple PaymentIntents within one Checkout Session when a customer retries payment.

If a customer opens the same checkout URL in two browser tabs and initiates separate QR Ph payment attempts, is it possible for both payments to succeed? Or does PayMongo automatically prevent another successful charge once one payment completes?

I'm planning to let customers return to their original checkout URL after leaving the payment page, without creating another Checkout Session.

2. Can a payment still succeed after its Checkout Session expires?

My application automatically expires abandoned checkouts through PayMongos API.

In TEST mode, Ive confirmed cases where:

Checkout Session status is expired.

The checkout reports no payments.

The known PaymentIntent is cancelled, with no payment or next action.

My concern is whether a QR Ph payment initiated before expiration could still settle successfully afterward.

I want customers to be able to purchase the same product again using a new order after their previous checkout genuinely expires, without risking duplicate charges.

I also observed that an expired QR code doesn't necessarily mean the whole checkout has expired. One of my earlier TEST checkouts generated another QR and eventually accepted payment.

I've contacted PayMongo Support but I dont really know kung gaano katagal bago masagot yung ticket

Has anyone encountered either scenario in production or TEST mode? Super appreciate any firsthand experiences, documentation references, or recommendations on handling payment retries and checkout expiration safely.

Thanks!