The barbell strategy is a risk management and investment approach that involves focusing on the two extremes of a spectrum while avoiding the middle. It's often visualized as a barbell, with weights on either end and nothing in the middle. This strategy can be applied in various contexts, but it's most commonly discussed in finance and risk management.
I never got introduced to a lot of technical things formally. Back in the 80s when I did my undergrad, systems were much more primitive, limited and you basically had to learn a lot more to do whatever could be done. I was shocked and amazed back in 2010 when I learned that there was a different job for database administrators and database developers. What fresh divided and conquered hell was this?
Yet and still there was so much of computering that I felt I understood in the realms of applications but little that I actually wanted to pursue. So as it turned out, on the technical side, I have not had to look for work since somewhere around 2003. There was always somebody who knew me from my enterprise software stuff, specifically multidimensional database design, development, etc. I grew accustomed to billing $100 per hour on my own and double that working for reputable consulting organizations. Why learn anything more? The only thing new to learn was AWS - but primarily so that I could configure all of the above on my own without the constraints of some customer’s limited on-premise hardware, networks, security, storage and general lack of UNIX literate functional people.
That was then. Now it’s safe to say we are in a programmer’s glut during times of uncertainty.
So I have a barbell strategy. To paraphrase John Boyd shoot for the stars and dig a bomb shelter. In order to be free you can be rich or you can reduce your needs to zero. So I’m putting my 25 years of experience on a resume directed towards making me a director or analytics. I am also building my homelab and becoming the next generation of full stack developer. Crazy right?
As long as people covet data, there will be data pipelines to be dug and maintained. These are the sewers and aqueducts of the next digital generation. It will be structured, unstructured, generated, crowdsourced and scraped. That’s a lot of integration. And since there are millions of coders, there are going to be hundreds of packages and partial solutions. But here’s the other thing. I think as I’ve said before, that enterprise and academic sized problems can be modeled and built by the next generation full stack developer on a homelab.
This past week I started using a few new tools to start building XRepublic and documenting, finally, the systems I dream of building.
Vue.js
I already use Warp which talks to the frontier AIs and I’m very comfortable using o3 for configuration tasks. So basically all of the UNIX admin stuff I never had the patience to memorize I have. I’ve taken the next step and am in the process of choosing between Cursor and Windsurf for my AI assisted coding. As such I’m having it build modules under Vue.js, but I’m using Typescript and Python. What’s really new for me is having to spin up frontends and backends on different instances. That’s because of something called CORS. I learn something new every week. But one of those is that uv doesn’t often work well here. I may ditch it. Still, Zed is my primary IDE, and I still use Claude 3.7 along with standalone GPT 4o. I don’t trust any of them; I make them fight it out in front of me. I may have to get Gemini in that battle too.
Databricks + SAP
This either explains a mystery that my old boss saw coming and he kept it from me, or that completely blindsided him. Either way I predict the eventual end of HANA or upping the price of an unnecessarily complex stack; a deeper form of lock in than ever.
Collate
I’m going to use this and/or OpenMetadata as my standard. I’ve already got 500+ repos and god knows how many data models. I really have to get my own data catalog working. I admit that this is a cry for help. But that’s the first step, right?
Dodeca + DuckDB
I have completely dropped that ball. I apologize. But I will pick it up. I promise. Speaking of DuckDB, hints are dropping that Motherduck is going to breakthrough distributed ducklings to the next level. I basically am sold and don’t believe there’s anything these guys cannot do. Well, they can’t get the market for ducktitioners like me going fast enough. But I will have 2 years of experience this Christmas. I should actually try out the new connectivity to PowerBI. But I still haven’t figured out ragged dimensional hierarchies. Hmm.
NSBE Mentorship
I should be connecting soon with this year’s mentee[s]. I think I have been a good influence and answered a few questions. It has more recently resonated with me how few black American computer science dudes there are. In the whole of my career, after 30 years, I have only worked with fewer than a dozen.