Devvers, lend me your ears...eyes...ears? Whatever, just listen. The past six months have been rough for me personally. Health issues always suck, but they're a real pain in the ass when they almost kill you. Something like that can change the way you look at the world. That being said, it can be a surreal experience when you are suddenly forced to acknowledge that you do indeed matter, even in a small way, and that you can only ignore your body and mind's signals for so long before stuff hits the fan. I just got out of a critical care unit Monday and need to share the good with those who may need it just like I do. Because what is a community for if not support, encourage, and unconditional love (some of ya'll like to be prickly enough to only get love unconditionally sometimes. You know who you are, and I dig you anyway 😋)?

So, here's what we're gonna do: Anybody who reads this post that inherently thinks what they do, either personally or professionally is too small to matter. For all of us out there that think "Junior Developer" translates to "coffee-getter with no talent or skills". For anybody that is having a harder and harder time refuting other's assertions that DevOps/QA/Front End/DBA work is just the crap that is put in place to annoy the "real geniuses" so that "the company can feel good about including non-critical staff in important work". For any person in tech that is female, brown or black, wears a hijab, dashiki, or yukata to work, or is just otherwise looked down on because of external crap or having the gall to value your cultural or religious traditions over the extreme views or ignorant opinions of others, this thread is for you. Whether you have an invisible illness that people think you are faking or a visible difference to your appearance that people think you should change, we're gonna show the "boss" in all of us.

Here's my contribution: Right now I am currently building a system for a client of mine that has one of the most low-level and accurate testing suites for GMOs in plants. They are tasking me with giving them a "market snapshot" of who the players are in the Corn Ethanol biofuel market globally so that they will better know how to make decisions with their products and services based on where their target customers are moving as an industry. To do this, I am putting my Data Junkie skillset to use by finding the company information (location, employee count, gross income, stock price, etc) of all the players in the US. Below is a screenshot of the runtime of two scripts that do this by extracting that particular data from the websites of the 204 players in the Continental US. The top runtime is a solution I designed and created for this purpose. The second is of a "copy and paste" solution I found online that is lightly modified to perform the same task as my custom solution.

"Hey wait, Jake. Are you grandstanding here?" How dare you ask that entirely true, accurate, and appropriate question! But seriously, that what this thread is about. I am a lone-wolf, back-end, guy-who-builds-stuff-that-is-never-seen-and-never-acknowledged kind of guy. And I have been for many years. Tooting my own horn is something I'm not usually comfortable with. But here, in this thread, BRAG YOUR BLOODY HEADS OFF. Because every now and then, we need to shout to anybody who will listen how damn smart, creative, and clever we are. Nobody is going to do it for us, so go nuts! Post screenshots or tell stories of things you've done that you think are really cool, innovative, clever, or elegant. Talk to me, and the community about your pet projects or nifty solutions that you're too nervous are not "cool" enough to get positive attention from your colleagues. They are not only cool enough, but they are too cool for those guys. So tell us, and don't be modest about it 😁 😁 😁! I very much look forward to your submissions!