Feels like an era of engineering grinding

Sorta the opposite of the dotcom boom era when there was a monolithic and simple new technology that any idiot could build on and many did

Now it’s 5-6 very distinct technologies that idiots can’t even begin to grok and takes a kind of high skill dedicated grinding to build on

I hope the rewards are correspondingly bigger for the higher effort input

One plus is that all kinds of engineering are now orders of magnitude easier to learn and tinker with due to good online resources and AI copiloting and much cheaper parts (for hardware)

In the dotcom boom you had to go to paper books. Mostly poorly written, phone-book sized, and obsolete in 6 months. You had to get paper catalogs and order parts by phone.

Jury out on whether this plus makes up for the tech itself being much harder.

Blogger at ribbonfarm.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

I don't know man, in the dot com era, while the tech was by today's standards incredibly primitive and in theory "simpler", it mostly didn't work at all. You had to jump through a lot of hoops to achieve any kind of scale or reliability. And like you allude to, it was nearly impossible to find any information to help you in the process.  To do anything serious you had to build stuff up from the very lowest levels. Really big pain. Don't miss those days at all.