I switched to the security industry without even realizing it when I was hired to work on IAM software. It's not pen-test security, but it's a great way to get into the industry for a software engineer.
What kind of digital ocean plan did you get for your setup ? I've been thinking about putting together something similar but the price to get a reasonable amount of space seemed prohibitive.
There are a few movies that inspired me when I started learning sales: Glengary glen ross is one of them. The boiler room. Wolf of wall street. Not sales lessons per say but that'll get you into a state of mind and motivate you devour sales books.
I guess you just need some mentoring to get some skills/structure. Difference between hacking and engineering is the "structure:. I can't find the right word in english, I would say "rigueur" in French.
Any if you can't find mentoring at your current position, try some books. My first mentors were Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer) and Martin Fowler. Start with them, or find your own.
Code mindfully, go deep to understand every little detail of the code you write or read. Ask questions. A lot. Don't stop at the first draft. Don't stop a the first pass of questions.
Keep at it for a while. That one day you'll wake up with the feeling that the code you write yesterday was good. And hell if it's not a beautiful day to make it even better!
Get some CS background if you feel you miss it. https://teachyourselfcs.com/ gets one Hacker News every now and then.
Work on architecture/design. Try to understand design patterns for example. Be critical. Try to understand architectural decisions of the code you read.
Don't understimate the efficiency that comes with really being fluent with a language but do not give fluency too much credit either.
This is a lifetime journey. Improve step by step, little by little, every day. But improve mindfully. Get a direction. Get learning goals.
It's not a "try harder" it's juste question of better orienting the energy maybe.
That's my 2cents.
Good luck, I'm sur you can get, better you just need guidance.
I'm doing a lot of interview as an interviewer these days mostly with junior candidate.
The guy in charge of those before me was the kind that use aha question with no relevance whatsoever. Pure ego trip. If that guy had interviewe me I would have said "I don't know" a few times and eventually get up and leave.
For my candidates, I tried a few things. Now I've got it down to explain to me your last project. I ask questions until I've understood every little detail of the project. Then we code a few simple "exercises" with increasing "difficulty". The candidate is allowed google, documentation, questions, anything. Then we read code. A piece of code with a "bug" or a feature to add.
The key is to make them talk about concept from impérative, fonctionnal and object paradigm and interact like a junior and senior dev would in a dev team.
I found that junior candidates react pretty well to these. Some of them thank me for having had the opportunity to learn about new things like functionnal programming. It's pretty cool and I feel that make them want to join us most of the time.
You could consider the marketing factor: early work from lesser musician is designed to sell. Then when fame is there, maybe they can focus on something more driven by their artistic désires.
The stones released a classic blues album lately. That was purely for them not so much for selling. They can afford that because of their huge fame.
I completely agree. It always breaks my heart to see locked up animals, be it a cat not allowed to go outside, a dog confined in an appartement with only one outing a day in the urban concrete or a bear in a cage in a zoo. Makes no difference to me.
I firmly believe animal rights movements should discourage pet owning but it's often the other way around, at least from where i'm from.
Discouraging pet ownership, while I agree with it, would put you into an extremely fringe category akin to advocating veganism. The world just isn't ready for that level of compassion for animals. We still live in cultures where five minutes of pleasure for our taste buds trumps all ethical concerns.
It's extremely socially acceptable to get two dogs in your tiny apartment and keep them in kennels while you're at work for 9 hours, and again for 9 hours overnight. People will even come out of the woodwork to convince you that the dogs actually prefer that.
I also think we need to dial back breeding. Breeders just dump unwanted animals into street/pound circulation while breeding the most gimped animals (purebreds) out there, the last thing we need.
I don't discourage pet ownership, in fact I think it's an extremely positive thing for many reasons. I do encourage making responsible choices when it comes to pet selection.
When you see an upside down toilet in a museum and art enthusiasts in awe and say "I could have done that" you express you incomprehension : why is something so trivial admired? I thought I had to do something exceptionnal to get admired. The answer you get is "But you didn't", yeah because I didn't think a toilet had value.
You feel mocked by the artiste. Cheated.
So yeah, creating is hard and it's pretty hard to understand how hard before you tried it yourself but still people should be able to express their total incomprehension of the enthusiastic response de see around them for weird stuff without getting dismissed by a "but you didn't".
Yeah. The debate over Fountain is really a proxy for wider and more important debates about social class, the value of labour etc.
When someone can take a toilet, say it's art, and then it sells for >$10 million, it feels to a lot of people like some parts of society are just deliberately mocking them, rubbing their face in it. They're so rich they can flush $10 million on what looks like trying to grab some brief attention, or be what we now call a social influencer, whilst many other people who work hard every day to develop some truly difficult craft end up with far less or nothing.
Nobody who hates Fountain hates it because it's "not art". They hate it because someone managed to convince a whole lot of rich people to pay them way over the odds for a toilet. It looks and feels like some sort of long con.
This is my main problem with the "but you didn't" objection. I could have made that, in the sense that I am clever and imaginative and creative enough to look at a toilet and say "wouldn't it be funny to take this toilet and put it in a museum and call it art". It's not a high bar. I could not have made that, in the sense that I lack the power to get things into museums, no matter how much artistic merit they have, and the existence of Fountain confirms that this skill is orthogonal to creating things people want to look at.
Damien Hirst takes this mockery you mention and makes it the very focus of his "art". He took a skull and coated it in diamonds and called it "For the love of god". Even the title seems to say "jesus, how far can I push this?"
Before that I worked on military software