r/webdev

This will mostly be a rant at the beginning, so feel free to not read if you want.

Long story short, I got laid off from my job around two years ago. My manager told me that I hadn't done anything wrong and that my work was great, but they're letting me go because they wanna cut on the costs.

After getting laid off, I spent nearly two years applying for work, doing interviews, and getting constantly rejected. At one point, I was so desperate that I worked for a company for free for around two months as an intern, hoping it'd eventually turn into a job. It didn't. Instead, the owner decided to use Claude to continue the work after I was done.

So yeah, I'm quite burned out.

At this point, I've a pretty strong resentment toward AI and the people and companies aggressively pushing it. From my perspective, I'm watching the same technology that was supposed to "make developers more productive" contribute to making it harder for people like me to find work.

For context, I've a master's degree in computer science and over four years of professional experience in software development, mainly in web development. Yet here I am, two years later, still struggling to get back into the industry.

And before anyone says, "AI can't replace developers," I know plenty of non-technical people who are now building full-stack applications entirely through AI. For some people, that's a hard pill to swallow. You could argue that maybe some of these apps aren't always great, scalable, or production-ready, but the reality is that a lot of people and companies don't seem to care. They just need something that works well enough.

And honestly, it feels like you don't even need an experienced developer for many architectural decisions anymore. People can ask an AI what stack to use, how to structure their database, how to deploy the app, how to build the backend, and so on. Whether the results are always good is almost beside the point. The barrier to building something has dropped dramatically.

I know that's probably going to piss some people off, but that's how it looks from where I'm standing.

It honestly feels like life is rewarding people who put in the least amount of effort, as long as they have enough money to burn on AI subscriptions and tools, while people who spent years studying, working, gaining experience, and trying to become good at their profession are being told to just "adapt" or get left behind.

I've basically accepted that my original career-path and ambitions are over, so I've started looking at other options. Recently, I got into Unreal Engine and indie game development. Ironically, that's also getting flooded with AI, so there doesn't really seem to be an escape from it.

Still, game development has brought back some of the passion I used to have for programming before all of this. I genuinely enjoy learning it, and I'm currently working toward making my first indie game. I'm hoping that maybe I can eventually make an income from it.

Yes, I know AI could supposedly help me make more things faster. I just don't want to use it. I don't want to support the companies or ecosystem that, from my perspective, helped make my own situation worse.

And if game development doesn't work out, I'm seriously considering switching to nursing because I'm running out of time. The truth is, I'm not particularly interested in nursing, and it's not a career I'm passionate about. But at least it seems like a field where I might have a better chance of actually being employed and making a living. Or at least, I hope so.

So I'm genuinely curious about other people who have been laid off, quit their jobs, or got pushed out of their industry:

What are you doing now to make a living?

Did you switch careers completely? Are you still working as a developer? If you are, how did you survive the layoffs and keep finding work?

And for the people who are still successfully landing jobs in this market, what are you doing differently? Is it networking, referrals, freelancing, applying to hundreds of jobs, moving countries, specializing in something specific, or just pure luck?

Before AI, the premise was simple: new features and support will take X hours, our rate is Y, customer pays X*Y.

Now, when new features are added much faster due to agentic coding, assuming you want to keep same revenue stream, how do you justify costs now?

Sure, we can tell customer that it pays for a feature itself and responsibility still lies on agency, but I see that as very vague.

Edit: as for us, we more agressively push retainers with a fixed monthly fee

For context I'm a freelance full stack dev, currently working solo on projects for small clients

Am I the only one recently experiencing that every client I have I am constantly arguing with ChatGPT/Other AI's?

My most recent client (not technical at all) send me a 12 page technical document, along with 3 other 12 page documents after I had started the project, these documents were directing me on database structure, schema expectations, workflow sequencing, and many other technical requirements, which she had no idea how to defend upon questioning on a call. She also requested an ERD which is fine, however after sending a extremely client friendly dumbed down version of the ERD, I recieved 6 questions all over a paragraph long which she (ChatGPT) wanted me to respond to in detail, along with another 30 pages total of documentation over 2 documents.

I have recieved over 70 pages of documentation in 2 days and I have called off the project after 3 weeks due to constantly explaining my thought process and arguing the technical direction to an AI which I'm assuming she hasnt provided all the context to, it also keeps trying to expand the scope after every new message.

Am I the only person experiencing this, this cannot turn into the new normal.

Hi! I'm a high school journalist writing for the Yale Daily News Summer Journalism Program about why AMC's ticketing site has crashed three times this year during major movie releases. I'm looking for general expertise on why high-traffic sites tend to fail under sudden demand spikes. Would anyone with SRE/DevOps experience be willing to answer a few quick questions? Thank you.

I’m coming from a mostly WordPress/PHP background and I’m currently trying to properly learn the modern JS stack instead of just stitching things together until they work.

My current setup is a homelab with TrueNAS, Docker/Dokploy, Traefik and GitHub.
For WordPress development I’m used to having everything nicely contained in one Docker Compose project, developing there, then pushing/deploying from Git.

Now I’m trying to move into a stack based around:
Next.js / React for the frontend
Strapi as the backend/CMS
PostgreSQL
Puck as a visual editor
Docker Compose for the full project
GitHub → Dokploy for deployment

At the moment I have a basic three-service stack:
frontend
backend
database

It works, but I’m still figuring out what the “normal” developer workflow is supposed to look like.
For example, I’m currently running the frontend and Strapi in development mode inside Docker, with source folders bind-mounted into the containers so I can work on the code over SSH.

The same repo is also deployed through Dokploy, which made me realise that development and deployment probably shouldn’t be treated exactly the same way.

So I’m curious how people who work with React/Next.js + Strapi actually structure this.
Do you normally:
run Node/Next/Strapi directly on your dev machine and only Dockerize databases/services?
run the whole development environment inside Docker?
use separate compose.dev.yml and production Compose files?
keep Strapi and Next.js in one monorepo or separate repos?
use next dev / strapi develop in Docker locally, but next build / strapi start for staging and production?
develop against a local Postgres container and then use a completely separate persistent DB for staging?
use Dev Containers or something similar instead of manually exec’ing into containers?

I’m especially interested in how people keep the workflow simple when the goal is to build a reusable project template that can later be cloned for different clients.
I’m not really looking for “just use X because it’s trendy” answers. I’d love to see how people actually structure their Docker Compose files and development workflow in real projects, and what you wish you had done differently when you first moved from WordPress/PHP into React/Next/Strapi.

I seen many stupid usages of MongoDB at my job and started wondering if anyone was brave enough to build an ecommerce platform based on that or any other noSQL DB?

i don’t understand the logic behind access and refresh tokens, if access tokens are made short lived for security purposes, doesn’t refresh tokens being long lived defers the whole purpose? or is not as big as an issue since refresh tokens are only stored in http only cookies?

Some research I did for my thesis that I thought this community would find interesting ^ ^

Hello! I have an idea for a personal second-brain kinda app that is highly customized for myself, and I intend to access it both at home from my Mac and remotely through my iPhone. I have a question - what is the best way (or specifically stack) to go about this? Ideally I want a free option, but if I have to pay, I'm okay with a budget of under 10 USD per month (amenable to higher budgets provided that I have room to host other stuff as well). TIA!

I've always hated reviewing PR's, and back in the days before AI the workload was REAL. Now there are a lot of tools to help with it but despite that, every time I have to review a PR I struggle and it just burns me out really quick. However I notice some people love doing it. They comment on every little thing and have all these nitpicks. I'm starting to think there are OCD type of people who actually really enjoy the feeling of making sure everything looks as it should and oftentimes these people are the best manager/lead types. While other people just like to release features and they don't like to micro manage things so much.

Curious about other people's opinions about this, do you love or dread PR reviews?

And before anyone says it, yes I know full well that loving to review code is an asset in this industry.

This is a question I have thought about a lot lately. If it wasn’t for the repositories hosted in Github and other platforms, none of the models would exist now. Specifically, I don’t remember agreeing on anything that said something about training AI models with my data when I started hosting code on Github, more than a decade ago. Yet it’s a wide known fact that the data hosted there has been used for training for a long time.

These models are used commercially and may produce substantial fragments of copyrighted code because internally, they still contain copyrighted data.

Even if the training is done on only MIT licensed code, then upon use, the original author’s name must still be reproducible.

Can someone explain this to me?

Ive been freelancing since 2018 as a fullstack dev. I used to make $80 - $120k USD/year, but this year I'm barely going to reach $15K usd.

Is the market that bad or is it just me?

Curious to hear people’s opinions on this one but since Covid a number of roles have adopted a WFH/Hybrid work policy. Some already had them but I personally have found I am much more productive working from home. When looking for new roles I see quite a range of office, wfh and hybrid work and honestly since Covid I have had absolutely no interest to return to a full office setting. Any other devs find this? Because I don’t fully work in a dev only place, it’s mixed with sales people and what not so there are constant phones ringing, interruptions, pointless office chatter.

- Module Federation provides better performance, but no strong runtime isolation.
- iframes provide strong isolation, making independent deployment more reliable.
- This matters especially for large, legacy codebases where enforcing boundaries in code is difficult.
- A typed communication SDK, routing, and smart chunk splitting can reduce the performance cost.
- For large legacy applications, iframes can be a better tradeoff than MF

I don't really know what to do while the agent does it's thing.

I've tried reading the code it produced in the previous prompt as it's working on the next one but the pace is too fast. There was this CISCO study that showed devlopers can realistically review just 200 LOC/hr before defect rate gets exponentially higher and the AI can 10x that in code, unit tests, CI configs and very very exhaustive documentation (specs, ADRs etc).

You can't work on something else on the project, or use the time for reading (say comp sci principles) because by the time you form a thought on what to do, the AI already prompts you for an approval or asks you what's next.

The "waiting window" is too small to get anything done and too big to just wait. So I end up just scrolling through YT shorts, browsing reddit etc. Then I figure out the AI has been waiting for my input for the last 10 minutes.

I don't know what to make of this. Yes datacenters suck. Yes AI is totally hyped. But i'm not blind. AI clearly has very good use cases. I'm just not sure how to execute on those use cases. And plenty of times, it feels like productivity gains are offset by these second-order effects (procastination, a feeling of being detached from your code etc).

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Has anyone hosted with WordPress and used WordPress' internal mySQL server for their website? Database access is available in the business tier of WordPress (host) but I wondered if the user access (username/password) for the database changes if I go back to a lower tier later. This isn't a high traffic website so I can't justify paying for the business tier every month. If not, I can look into other options. Again, the hosting provider is WordPress.com