Being involved with programming 2025 is weird. If you've run into this page by accident, sorry, I'm going to ramble— but it has felt that trying to make it as an individual contributor in programming feels almost like trying to be famous in NYC.
I understand my first hot take is false in numbers, but in anecdotal experience it feels true to the bone. Especially for a mid-career individual. The audacity of employment lately is out of control. I guess with AI robots from employer ATS to savvy candidate's LLM sending messages to each other back and forth about who would be "an earnest hard-worker," how can anyone know whether anything is "real" or not?And why should anyone choose to waste their time when we've all removed the humanity from everything?
Today I want to focus a little on the humanity. The weird emotional parts of learning that people don't really talk about. My learning often blows up with emotions of rage, feelings "I was lied to," or despair that I hadn't dug into something at a younger age. Anyway, this is just a thought of the day—a weird, deeply human, and deeply flawed rant from my brain that I hope will relate to another's:
I've discovered that often "advanced topics" make more sense to me than small things that trip me up (and maybe activate something in my high-functioning but likely autistic brain). Pretty tragic that I let a seventh-grade rural WV math teacher destroy my confidence in math, but I use that as a guiding light for "revenge on math." For instance, this below and all the math that goes with it makes sense to me, and I'll fight anybody who just shrugs at it and goes "whoosh."
Maybe I'll type out all the numbers later to increase my own understanding and prep for anybody with open ears. I don't know. It depends on what serves me, as I know nobody's exactly reading this post for an epiphany. Maybe, ideally, you're just curious about what's going on in my life and now you deeply regret it, haha.
In any case, yes, complex math, calculus, statistics—all of that is coming together.
However, something as rudimentary as the naming conventions at IEEE does/DID NOT make sense to me. These acronyms are already confusing and cumbersome enough, but to pile on arbitray naming conventions has really taken my brain for a wild ride. It get the gut feeling that acronyms serve very little purpose besides muddying waters, a sort of lazy-speak we've accepted. We can be dumb enough to turn a switch on or off and I suppose that's enough. So many Youtube University videos, bootcamps, and so many professionals in this field commonly don't have the answers to my greedy mind (and they don't need to have the answers) but my "toxic" trait is needing to understand pedantic information. I'm even doubting in this moment I have the full story after nearly a day of research, but this is the scenario:
Why did you name the standards IEEE 802? What is the 802 and why is the "802?" A simple Google search doesn't easily yield a human answer specifically telling me why it was 802 (so far in 2025, wait a couple months) with the details of comittees etc. Maybe I needed better phrasing, better keywords, but I'm convinced the real "job" of a successful techie is to know how to ask the right questions— to a computer or human alike. So here's my best human approach answer.
Having "802" doesn't necessarily mean there are 801 other IEEE standards. In fact, there might be more with all the subsections.
IEEE 800 DOES exist. It was some kind of rule about power/engineering, but nobody focuses on that one because it's not as popular. Likewise, IEEE 801 exists. It had something to do with telecommunication, but now that standard is basically obselete. The reason we call the well-known IEEE 802 standards "802" is because it was the next available identifier for the "800 series power systems and electrical engineering" category within this organization (IEEE 900 for instance, covers software engineering and anything adjacent to that). Isn't that kind of dumb and arbitrary? Maybe it's just my brain.
Maybe it feels confusing to a layperson because it is so proprietary. As many successful individuals say, tech is "learning a gigantic vocabulary list" to keep up with the jargon. My annoyance stems from moments when the depth doesn't feel easily accessible. This may subside over time, but it is what it is for today.
This pattern of annoyance also goes way back, but it reminds me a bit of "Primavera P6" and their naming process (they were only up to P4, but they felt they'd come so far that they needed to skip a number. Gross). I'd spent way too much time trying to find free versions of Primavera P5 to practice with. It does feel though, that in other spaces, people and committes follow our rules, even if it may not seem so at first. "IPv5 failed to become an official protocol due to its limitations. " This quick and dirty Google search gives me the quickest, cleanest answer as to why we jumped from IPv4 to IPv6. The Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) folks do a wonderful job of following number sequences, and you can follow a linear path from start to finish as each standard is born.
End rant. This won't matter in a week, but it feels nice to put a cap on the tinest annoying mystery of the day.
In other completely unrelated news I really want to get this, but I won't. But it will live on the blog and maybe eventually I'll fall prey to the purchase, haha.
https://www.amazon.com/AUGELRE-Alligator-Crocodile-Dimmable-Decorations/dp/B0D8HQRGF9
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