My experience has been quite the opposite. Like OP, I am a middle aged developer. I have decades of experience in the industry and with open source/side projects. I think there is so much good new software being developed by single developers (https://opensourcesecurity.io/2025/08-oss-one-person/). When there is one person its an itch to scratch, not a business plan.
I do think the type of projects have indeed changed however, so maybe OP is looking in the wrong place, or has become steeped in the corporate world (see Middle Aged).
Look at app stores, f-droid, vscode plugins, github repos, frontend frameworks, distributed databases, Linux desktops, TUI apps, text editors. There are more projects than ever. They may not be as low level or as widely used as system kernels or programming languages, but there is so much code being written for personal needs.
I actually think the fact that these are not widely used is important. Higher level constructs and AI have made programming much more accessible. Non-devs are making one off apps just for their family. Or using LLMs to quickly churn out scripts to automate home assistant or common desktop tasks.
I personally have built several projects from my long-running ideas list that I never would have had time to do before without the help of AI. Savr is one (https://github.com/jonocodes/savr). For someone like me who has built that same CRUD interface for every company, AI has been an amazing motivator to work on new interesting things and less repetitive drudgery.
The conversation here has been really interesting since it shows we all have subtly different abilities and issues around slow processing.
I am a senior/staff software engineer with 20 years of experience and who would be considered a top performer. Quick wittedness is something I rely on but technical thinking is always slow. White board interviews are nearly impossible. So finding work is ROUGH.
I wouldn't call my self the class clown, but I am often the first one to crack a joke and people look to me for lighthearted fun. I often hope this will save me in interviews as I rely on my past work and personality are my strong traits. All of the jobs I got through this, or from a personal referral. Never through a technical interview.
My way of coping with this has always been to work more hours then everyone else. It helps that I am also more passionate about what I am working on then those around me. I work on open source in my free time, while my co-workers have barely heard of Linux. If it were not for my love of the craft, I be miserable in this industry.
I first noticed this all when I was a kid and started taking more advanced classes. I’d have to take copious notes and deeply review them after class to make sure I knew what was going on. While my friends would listen once and ace the tests. I was also always behind on reading speed since I had to read things 2 or 3 times before the words really registered in my brain.
As a side note, I recently worked with a real version of the oh-so mythical 10x programmer. And he was a college intern! Running loops around the rest of us at our startup. He was doing the work of several of us older programmers. I think most of it was do to his 0-friction processing of information. Read, assimilate, code. Interesting to watch. They do exist.
I'm self taught programmer, I don't code professionally but feel confident that I can build any software related widget I ever dreamed up. That said, coding interview stuff I have seen is like gibberish and I don't see how it correlates to the day to day job of building software. Maybe some types of software (lower level systems stuff and such come to mind). It seems like everyone online discussing it feels about the same too. So honestly not sure if that's signal or noise for you, lol.
Tailscale and Plex do not play nicely, particularly since Plex implemented a bunch of shit to try to charge users for accessing their own files outside what it considers a local network. Switching to Jellyfin is on my maintenance list. It's very understandable that if you had given a family member access to your Plex server before this year and it "just worked" you might look now at Tailscale as a way to put them on your LAN and then decide that the complexity isn't worth it, given the hoops that Plex had apparently gone through to make that a non-viable option.
Fuck Plex, by the way. Good on them for building up and turning themselves into a streaming service of sorts. Add value and I'll pay for it. But suddenly one day your free mobile viewer app updates and requires payment to stream your own mp4 files? Seriously, they can go to hell. No one streaming movie files to their family is doing so because they love paying middle-men, by the way. And no core function of Plex can't be done freely.
I don't want to defend plex too hard, but I was super confused by what you were talking about:
> But suddenly one day your free mobile viewer app updates and requires payment to stream your own mp4 files
I have a plex server that a dozen of my friends and family use and none of them have to pay a cent to access it.
Then after thinking about it a bit longer, I remembered that plex was making some kind of distinction about "members of a household", apparently called Plex Home [1].
I'm not sure what benefits you get from using it, since I haven't bothered trying to see what it needs to work.
Long story short, however, is if you just have your family members sign up for their own plex account, then add them to your plex server as a separate user, things will continue to Just Work and do so for free.
I haven't found this to be the case. I use the free plex server on Windows and MacOS, and connect to my home boxes from my phone. Prior to April 2025, I could stream on my phone from my Plex servers anytime. Since the last update, attempting to stream from any device that's not on the same LAN as the server pops up a window asking you to subscribe if you want to stream "remotely". This is even in cases where nothing is being sent through Plex's servers except for signaling data. It is only possible to stream over the internet for free now if you tunnel to that server, make it your tailscale exit node, and use the web app, not the mobile app.
I'm not sure what the deal is with Plex Home but maybe they grandfathered in some kinds of older accounts. At this point though, it no longer appears to be a free option to easily stream from your home server if you're setting it up fresh or have a regular account.
Ah ok. Admittedly I dont host a media server so it sounds like Plex brings new challenges.
I would just prefer to not have to public expose a service for a single user. In my case when sharing an image server to family it has been easy enough to walk them through installing tailscale on their windows desktop that they use. I love adding friends and fam to my tailnet. It then also makes it easier to log in and troubleshoot their issues later too.
It looks like CFs solution for restricted public access is CF access controll, but thats still publicly exposed. Their non-public option is WARP, but that requires installation on the client machine. At that point your user setup is even harder then tailscale.
Awesome to see this getting more coverage. I am very interested in local first and I am working on several progressive web apps based around this. One app depends on file sync, not database sync and the best I have found is remoteStorage.js. Its not perfect, but its very much the missing piece I was often looking for.
If you had to use sqlite without library, you can trivially call the c api from python directly with the ctypes builtin (or compile a python module with c api)
Oh man. I have been working on a side project just for this purpose. The aim is to create a pocket like experience (with additional functionality like handling other media types) that is local first, unhosted, and more future-proof (no lock in).
All data is stored entirely on your device, and you have the option to sync it to your own storage provider like dropbox. This means you don't need to have the technical know-how to setup and maintain a server.
Its not usable yet, as I have rewritten it several times, but in the current iteration it is a client side PWA, so cross platform. Just started a new job so had to take a break for a bit.
