As someone who’s spent their career gluing react libraries together, something like this does make me wonder how good some people really are with computers. It’s all the same assembly instructions in the end
Sometimes that kind of work has a lot of impact. For example, people at Google used to joke around about how they hire PhDs to write HTML, but it was important HTML. Just like I'm sure the React libraries you're gluing together are being used for important things. The work I'm doing right now is flashier, but I had to make a lot of personal sacrifices in order to be able to do it.
I think thats the rub these days. With such an impressive mountain of free and indeed proprietary software, the money is going to be mostly in how you glue it together to solve a problem for a
business. Getting something in a low number of bytes is not rewarded when gigabytes of storage are so cheap.
To create something that doesn’t fir this mould has to be more like a “recurse centre” project - a labour of love you have to finance yourself.
The physical HW, i.e. RAM and HDD storage is cheap but price you pay for accidental complexity is high.
E.g. when your non-tail-call recursive calculation eats away all available memory. And you need to persistently store the intermediary results - just a handful of long integers in a dbase. And that dbase must be set up and maintained. That means dealing with access rights, usernames, passwords, replication, backups etc. In every environment: prod, tests, on every development branch (separately!), etc.
In another dimension, read / write operations mean yet more side effects to deal with. And on top of that, dealing with intermediary results means yet more accidental complexity in the source code.
So no, the workaround for "the memory limitation problem" can be in fact the most expensive part of a project. And now imagine, the data grows day by day...
There quite a few outliers and 10x programmers when you consider that there are millions of programmers. most of us are somewhere in those two quartiles in the middle. Be happy with what you can do and always try to improve don't try to compare yourself to the Einsteins of the world, you'll always be disappointed. be happy that you're good enough to be a professional but always be a little bit restless.
