Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to My 20-year-long journey from Tester to Software Engineer
Hello Dear HN Folks. I would like to share with you my journey from testing to software engineer in test, then build engineer, DevOps engineer, cloud engineer, and software engineer today. It took me from 2004 to 2024 today. It was quite the ride and I tried to write down my experience during this journey. I still have doubts, fears and everything. I wanted to inspire those who also wished to embark on this journey that it's not impossible. It is hard though. Not gonna lie. And I had some luck along the way for sure. But with passion and stubbornness and determination one can go to places.…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. My 20-year-long journey from Tester to Software Engineer launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1AF
I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam:…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 2
Strategies and reflections on software engineering
2016 · softwareengineeringdaily.com · its alternatives →
- 3TY
I was just browsing through the "Who got hired?" thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36160198) and it caused me to think about all of the things that happened in my real life due to HN. In 2012 I was hired from a post in the "Who's Hiring" thread that turned out to be a complete life and career transformation. It was at a very famous company that everyone here has heard of and used. They were pre-IPO and I got to be a "part" of that IPO. It exposed me to people smarter than I had ever met, and allowed me to learn from them. It allowed me a path into "big tech" that I…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 4LS
Almost eight years ago I launched an online “Linux sysadmin course for newbies” here at HN. It was a side-project that went well, but never generated enough money to allow me to fully commit to leaving the Day Job. After surviving the Big C, and getting made redundant I thought I might improve and relaunch it commercially – but my doctors are a pessimistic bunch, so it looked like I didn’t have the time. Instead, I rejigged/relaunched it via a Reddit forum this February as free and open - and have now gathered a team of helpers to ensure that it keeps going each month even after I can’t…
2020 · its alternatives →
- 5IS
I’m starting a weekly newsletter writing about career advice for junior developers. I’m at the point in my career where I feel like I can share my experiences and give direction on what I learned and what junior engineers should focus on when it comes to the soft skills. I won’t be getting too technical but I may post every now and then about certain algorithms or design patterns I think junior developers should be familiar with. I'll mostly focus on what I had to learn about on my path to becoming a senior engineer. I had to figure it out along the way and there weren't a whole lot of…
2018 · its alternatives →
- 6IM
I'm documenting everything about my process. From learning to code, to building the app, and all the way to my outreach efforts. I'm learning as I go and sharing it with everyone who's not a programer, and is daunted to build a software on their own. Trust me. If I can do it, anyone can! You can find my updates on: https://Claritask.com ...as well as video updates on https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdmqmifW4kIcPclXigay1dQ Would love to hear your feedback on my progress and if you have any suggestions on what I can do better. There's so many task managers out…
2017 · its alternatives →
- 7
Here's a video of it in action https://twitter.com/i/status/1667355251773526016 I didn't end up using it that much back then and no one else seems to have cared it existed, but it was a project I used to derust my programming skills and I'm to this day proud of the flamboyant design. To anyone reading this: you don't have to let your old code rot away in the graveyard of distant memories just because times change. With enough persistence and a little perseverance anything is possible. Code doesn't have an expiration date. -day
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
After about 10 years as a developer, interviewing many devs, and reviewing hundreds of resumes I decided to write a guide that I wish I had when I was first starting out. Completely free (just enter $0 as price) If you find it helpful, would love it if you: - Leave a review - Share it with a friend who might also benefit!
2022 · jkchu.gumroad.com · its alternatives →
- 9MP
My weekly(ish) video logs tracking my progress of building a completely sound statically typed language and structural editor. The motivation is to make lots of invalid programs unrepresentable.
2022 · petersaxton.uk · its alternatives →
- 101P
This project took me 1 year to complete, all by my lonesome self. What do you think? Comments appreciated! www.enrad.io
2016 · its alternatives →
- 11SC
Hey HN, I spent 30 years writing CAD plugins in C++, mostly in Visual C++ 6.0. Then the industry collapsed. And I lost an intellectual lawsuit, my income dried up, and my marriage ended. Now I live alone in a trailer in rural Canada — still writing code, still surviving, trying to crawl back. This is a short video I made (50 seconds), documenting a quiet moment from this strange life. If you’ve ever hit rock bottom and kept going, you might relate. https://youtube.com/shorts/dDLSd3pfIYI?feature=share Thanks for watching. Just sharing — not selling anything.
2025 · its alternatives →
- 12IE
Hi HN! I spent the last year traveling and feeling purposeless after shutting down my last startup (Zage YC S’21) in Dec 2022. There were some obstacles I couldn’t overcome and decided to return investors 50% of their capital. To afford (and justify to myself) traveling, I started consulting as an engineer and product designer. I started (https://backspace.nyc) and it was a good time. I (and some friends) built a handful of AI experiences and learned a lot along the way. The hardest thing about running a services business shipping and selling AI experiences powered by LLMs was…
2024 · loom.com · its alternatives →
- 13
Personal blog | cto insights & programming tutorials
2025 · generalistprogrammer.com · its alternatives →
- 14RI
Hi HN! I'm a developer who noticed that I haven't done much experimentation lately. I decided I wanted to change that this year. This month I built a simple resume builder with the main goal of practicing front-end development, and to scratch an itch I had when updating my resume. :) After it was functional enough, I casually shared with some friends to express my enjoyment of crafting something just for the sake of having some fun. To my surprise they ended up asking how they could send to others. So I went one step further, due to my pure excitement, and hosted it on Netlify to make…
2022 · resumecreator.io · its alternatives →
- 15
I had a successful startup exit five years ago (we got very lucky) but recently realized I'm most happy when building software products. I spend the last ~2 months building this as a fun way to get back into software development; and to find out what all the kids are up to these days. I am also a passionate life-long Japanese learner so this project was really fun. It's been nutz how different things are now with all the AI whatnot. This for sure would have taken me a year, without all the AI. I did not spend much time doing market analysis or any of that jazz. Mostly because I was…
2025 · seikai.tv · its alternatives →
- 16
Hello everyone, I have always loved coding and in the couple I was thinking of making an open source project and it turned out to be awesome I hope you guys like it. I present Explore Singapore which I created as an open-source intelligence engine to execute retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) on Singapore's public policy documents and legal statutes and historical archives. The objective required building a domain-specific search engine which enables LLM systems to decrease errors by using government documents as their exclusive information source. What my Project does :- basically it…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
I wrote up a retrospective on my time working as a founder at DirectAI (https://directai.io). We learned a lot and I wanted to share some things I wish I had known ~18 months ago.
2024 · brooks.team · its alternatives →
- 18IB
I've built a job platform for technical roles called "Cracked Engineers". If you want to land a job with some of the world's best AI/tech startups - my goal is to make this the go-to place for that. YouTube walk-through can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmuIOdES7mQ A huge thank you to Weaviate (Bob van Luijt & team), Unsloth AI (Daniel Han & Mike), OpenPipe (David Corbitt), Julius AI (Rahul Sonwalkar), Jimini AI (Luis F Voloch) for using the platform while in beta and posting first paid posts. So, why did I build it? Well, over the past period a lot of…
2024 · crackedengineers.com · its alternatives →
- 19A2
Hey Hacker News, I have finished this after 2 months and made the entire thing free (up to 2 projects) for you all to try out, all you need is an account. Thansk and enjoy, Dan
2024 · flourishfreelance.com · its alternatives →
- 20
Howdy friends. I've been a zero to one product manager for 12 plus years and along the way I kept borrowing pieces from different discovery frameworks until I had a methodology of my own, one that actually raises the odds of an idea succeeding. This does not replace user interviews obviously, but it leads you in the right direction. Looking forward for your feedback
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Hi HN, I've been working on this for a while and it was hard to decide when to stop, either on the way information is presented or when to stop with adding entries. It's not meant as a blog, but rather as a reference that keeps growing. Link: https://thehardparts.dev Currently I've created 4 main section: - Failure Modes: ways project go wrong - Red Flags: early signals that are worth taking seriously - Tech Decisions: common and not so common trade-offs for hard choices - Playbooks - guided approach for situations that repeat I've also focused on creating links between them to…
Apr 2026 · thehardparts.dev · its alternatives →
- 22
Over the past three months, I’ve been working with my dad on this app as a way to learn Cursor, shadcn/ui, and Next.js. I’m currently studying UX design at the University of Michigan, and I’ve been really impressed by how much vibe-coding tools have advanced over the last six months. This work journal includes private AI-generated insights with scheduled summaries that can be shared with your team or manager. You can also choose to make a summary public—like I’ve done here for my work on this web app: https://www.workjourney.ai/summary/mkblt2zt-hn2kdbus If anyone has…
Jan 2026 · workjourney.ai · its alternatives →
- 23GG
Last year I was looking for a new role. I sent out applications, did the prep, waited. What came back was mostly nothing. Not rejection emails, just silence. The job listings I'd applied to stayed live for weeks. Some for months. As a software engineer, I decided to dig into it properly. I built a system to continuously track job postings across companies, logging posting dates and measuring how long roles stay open before closing or don't. After 35,000+ listings across 200+ companies, some patterns are hard to ignore. Some listings have been open for 700+ days at companies you'd recognize.…
May 2026 · csvfirst.pythonanywhere.com · its alternatives →
- 24MF
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.wtfsoftware.wtfgeneratorfunnypics I submit it as a proof that in 14 days anyone can become a (crappy) programmer :) I'm 32, educated in humanities, I work in a bookstore and in my entire life I have never tried programming. Just a typical user, I knew basic HTML, like adding bold to text etc. Few months ago I started lurking on hackernews, I read about CodeAcademy and decided to learn how to code JavaScript. Fast-forward 14 days: Wow, it's easier than I thought;) Here's my first app. It's written in Javascript and compiled in Appcelerator Titanium.…
2012 · market.android.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released alternatives
- Software Daily - 10 Philosophies for Engineers alternatives
- Thank You, Hacker News alternatives
- Linux sysadmin course – eight years on alternatives
- I started a weekly newsletter for career advice for junior developers alternatives
- I'm not a programer and I'm building a Saas task-manager alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →