chrsig

Some background on me: I've reached a point where I quit my job of 11 years without notice due to sheer burnout. Shortly after I was hospitalized for a bit.

I'm trying to recover, getting back into healthy routines.

I'm also suffering quite a bit of imposter syndrome due to not having a 4 year degree.

I'm suffering from a lot of analysis paralysis trying to select a side project for a portfolio. Once I decide, I get another layer on how I'm going to implement it. And eventually it winds up feeling like I'm better off not doing any of them.

In my last job I was responsible for a mission critical service in the form of an apache module. Which I can attest is a rather hostile environment. So I'm pretty battle tested in the c/c++ arena.

In my spare time I've reveled in physically based rendering. So I've got enough trig & calc in my head to be dangerous.

My asks of HN:

- What are interviews like these days? How important is it to have a visable portfolio of working projects?

- How much of the AI hype is HN nerds nerding out about AI versus actually implementing AI, versus gluing AI apis together?

- How do you keep yourselves engaged with pet projects? My github is a field of projects 1/4 of the way completed before I lost steam on them.

I need some hope that future employment is possible.