In Germany both Shift and Gigaset have had user replaceable batteries for over a decade. The rebrands like Volla and rePhone, obviously. The Finish Jolla has a new phone with battery, camera lenses, etc. Typing on a GS5 with Sailfish. Repair of display was easy to perform.
I'll agree as a 90% typist dev. There is a certain class of problems I've sovled for a dozen times. And as often forgotten. Mostly parsing. Recently, I had a local qwen just build data (from html) because I wanted to concentrate on the code that ingests it. Win win. In the end, I thought the python it used a bit verbose so I might return to it to flex some awk muscles, but in the moment, I could focus on the code I wanted to write.
Well, sometimes it's not a choice you have. I am arguably still a hobby programmer, but was forced by circumstance to go pro. I could not earn enough in graphic design to fix my teeth. Still managed to retain my love for the underlying mathematical (lambda calculs) and do to this day. I was always an enthusiast even as a manager. Now I do volunteer FOSS maint on numerous projects. Some embedded, most Linux phone adjacent. A circle.
Thanks for sharing! We're blessed that such a hobby is lucrative enough to pay our bills. Not many hobbies are, and usually this leads to wage suppression as there's too much supply. My pet anecdata is how a violinist playing for the BBC Symphony Orchestra would earn roughly 30k despite being a top tier orchestral violinist.
Programmers are comparatively blessed that a relatively arcane and niche craft ended up creating trillions in value and the growth in demand for the skillset outpaced supply of the skillset. As such, it was possible to have your cake and eat it. But this was the exception not the rule. Tech has been glamorous for over a decade now: you have people from other industries moving over at all levels and armies of MBAs keen to rentseek internally and externally, and a fat pyramid of aspirational career coders coming up as graduates. And thus we see craft in software fading out.
You could argue that the same wage suppression does somewhat play out insofar as open source software is capable of producing far far more value than paid maintainers earn.
I'm running SailfishOs on Gigasets assembled in Germany and they have G5. It's a port and I don't have android support at all. I maintain a number if apps and it feels like ownership. Also have a spare Jolla with droid stuff, but use that max once a week.
reply