Elon Musk & Twitter, Tech job market, my writing projects

I find it sad that Musk's purchase of Twitter is turning out so badly. I read that advertisement pre-sales for next year are very low, thus the urgent need to cut expenses. I don't dissagree with Elon Musk's original idea of having an uncensored platform, but the execution is not good. My best wishes to everyone at Twitter (and other tech companies) who have lost their jobs recently. The job market was crazy-good for a few years, and now I expect it to more like after the 2000 dot-com-crash, at least for a few years.

I advise people to take a different approach to managing their careers. As fantastic as online (often free) classes are for teaching useful stuff like machine learning, front end development, etc., this has also greatly expanded the global talent pool. Now more than ever, I advise learning through doing your own projects. I have literally done this myself for the last 40 years: I spend my own time experimenting with tech that both fascinates me and might be useful for my employer. Take control of what you want to learn and work on even if initially it is unpaid work.

I have been using my Mastodon account https://mastodon.social/@mark_watson but I have plans what so ever to give up Twitter (you can follow me at https://twitter.com/mark_l_watson). I rely on Twitter to get tech news, thanks to the awesome people I follow. I am working hard to also follow awesome people on Mastodon.

About 12 years ago, I used LaTex to write a semantic web book, but in 2 editions: Common Lisp and Java. It was very cool to have 2/3 of the manuscript common text, and about 1/3 unique to the programming language. For the last two evenings, I have been revisiting my old manuscript materials because I am thinking of updating the material and also creating additional editions for more programming languages: Python, JavaScript, and maybe Swift and Prolog.

I had forgot how cool TeX and LaTex are. It was very easy to start working with again, even after a 12 year gap.

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