Ask HN: Who here is not working on web apps/server code?

I build ETL pipelines and all kinds of ad-hoc data processing software. These range from python projects to thousand-line shell scripts. The jobs run on machines above >1000 CPU core counts - what you would consider a mainframe or big iron.

Web stuff will burn you out. In my case, that happened 10+ years ago and I've never desired to go back [to building web products].

Electrical engineering and science qualifications. Work on signal processing (FPGA/DSP/CPU), Radio hardware and firmware for WiFi/LMR/LTE. IC design. Radar systems. Counter-drone systems.

The work can be interesting, but intense when in the thick of building a system. There is less competition for jobs compared to pure web/programming, but also less jobs in total. The option is always there to take a web/programming gig if the specialised work is hard to get. Potentially pay is lower than some of the big US web companies, but that's probably as much from me not chasing dollars to the exclusion of all else. Some people/companies don't see this work as deserving of the same/better compensation as web/programming, as it is not as easy to understand and they won't pay for what they don't understand. Find the right employer/client and it can be lucrative.

I was a web developer until 9 years ago. It was Django & jQuery, but React came with factories of abstract factories, and I happily quit for geospatial development and analysis.

Earlier it was geodata imports from OSM or private sources. Now it's mostly routers and GPS tracks. Interfacing with OSRM & Valhalla via C bindings. Road graph analysis and algorithms. I wrote a router myself, comparing different routing algorithms. I also developed a pedestrian traffic model for entire cities, for retail. I also did various ML models. My languages are Python w/ GeoPandas & CatBoost, Rust, Go.

I was hired for full-stack development, but ended up getting moved to a different team working on a desktop application in C++/C#. I've ended up preferring the desktop work a bit more. The problems I have to solve tend to feel more interesting, though that could just be a product of the environment I'm in and the app we're making.

Seeing a lot of people here who work in embedded. Would definitely be interested in diving into that world a bit more. Seems like a lot of fun being that close to the hardware.

Embedded developer here, automotive-related. C, some Python for tests, some shell scripts, CMake, etc. for CI. Review of hardware schematics, reading datasheets, reading various standards documents (USB, various SAE standards, various ISO standards, etc.) is required. Firmware updates take weeks of testing, even though the unit tests run in seconds they can't catch most errors the system can encounter in practice, and simulator tests don't catch things like increased temperature raising power consumption without an expensive thermal chamber. Factory production sets hard deadlines on quite a few things. All together, that means it's a more deliberate, slower release cycle.

Working in a Data Engineering/Operations role which focuses heavily on financial datasets. Everything is within AWS and Snowflake and each table can easily have >100M records of any type of random data (there is a lot of breadth.) General day to day is creating jobs that will process large amounts of input data and storing them into Snowflake, sending out tons of automated reports and emails to decision makers as well as gathering more data from the web.

All of this is done in a Python environment with usage of Rust for speeding up critical code/computations. (The rust code is delivered as Python modules.)

The work is interesting and different challenges arise when having to process and compute datasets that are updated with 10s of TBs of fresh data daily.

Doing embedded development using C. Thoroughly enjoy it.

I was once in a group that was switched away from the work we were doing and repurposed to do web work. It was a bad experience, but not because it was web work. The code base we were given was in terrible shape and we weren't allowed the time to adequately fix issues. Thankfully I no longer work there.

I work on the software stack for a biological computing platform (think: tool for programming with human neurons in a dish).

Coding work spans FPGA (SystemVerilog), Linux kernel C, userspace C, Python, and yes, some web services and Browser JavaScript also. I also work on the network engineering of the cloud service and on the Linux OS image.

Easily the most fun I’ve had as a developer and I’ve worked on lots of different types of commercial software projects before. Not all the world is web apps, embedded work can be very satisfying if you’ve not considered it.

I have minimal experience with modern Web tech, though I used to run a couple websites in the old days.

My main job currently is in game dev, writing C#. Working for a small studio with flexible roles, I sometimes also take the opportunity to use other tech, like actual web stuff. A couple years ago I wrote a simple HTTP API for some internal needs and that was the first time I did modern web.

I've worked in the embedded space and adjacent. I've done automotive (Autosar), I've done some bare metal applications and I've maintained a custom Linux system for a series of embedded products. I've also worked on tooling (native desktop applications) related to some of these embedded uses.

For fun I still play with some embedded development, and would like to do another Android app. I built a couple simple ones years ago and generally Android development seems pretty pleasant to me, but I haven't done Android side projects in a long time because I can't really think of any apps I'd actually like to have.

I work in RF comms. Most of my work is in network simulation from the transport layer all the way down to the physical layer to prove out radio performance before expensive flight testing. I also work on error correction schemes as the networks I develop may be lossy compared to the internet at large.

I used to work in web dev, but I enjoy my current work a lot more. Most of my web role was just taking mockups from the UX team and translating them into code which felt mindless. Now I get handed a system and am asked to squeeze as much performance out of it as possible which I find much more interesting.

Side project(s): Grokking Windows development from the top of the stack to the kernel; everything from Win32, WinUI, WPF, COM, to user- and kernel-mode driver development. It's fun to write drivers in modern C++. Also, massively procrastinated, Vulkan/D3D12 cross-platform game engine written in C++23/26, work-in-progress.

Full time work: GPU driver development and integration for a smartphone series. It's fun to see how the sauce is made.

Eventually: hope to pick up Rust.

Embedded systems / IoT / Smart Home. Lots of C. There’s still backend and mobile but there’s a LOT of C and firmware at the core.