2. if all works out, I'm booked for the next 24 month straight - if I do not have clients' projects I have more than enough own projects to work on (I actually wish for some time off for years, but it never happened)
3. I do not live in the us, but in a rich economy and I am comfortable financially; compared to many people I know I live a simple life, why is probably why I do not need to charge $100+ or more - I'm in the top 10% wealth bracket already and looking forward to three more productive decades.
I know people with way less experience charging more, but I'm in no rush.
I was lucky that my open source contributions led to some interesting short and long term engagements. If I'm already into something, it may be that I find it interesting - no need to search.
I believe, if you can maintain a genuine interest in certain, contemporary topics than you will probably have an easier time to stay relevant.
Today, depending on your interest, I'd probably would go deep into the "devops" field, since that's quite technical, fast moving but with lots of stable parts (like operating systems) and there's demand and will be for some more time.
There's also always a way to stay relevant by just being very good at a very particular thing - even if there are only a few jobs. I remember mainframe people advertising that if you know your way around z/OS you'll never have to search for a job again.
In my ears, knowledge graph sounds a bit grandiloquent. I do not have a definition, but I know that when talking about knowledge as it is embodied in people, it's quite a subtle thing, hard to formalize and to be honest, something relatively rare.
Why can we just call these things fact databases?
Add. Knowledge evokes a lot of other associations as well, for example that what we are able to know changes over time. That a time has a certain underlying grid, into which certain factual stories appear and later disappear.
> Why can we just call these things fact databases?
Because (in theory) they are much much more than that.
In practice the semantic web/data space has a problem of building complicated standard on top of complicated standard (as well as having a Java implementation monoculture, which doesn't help that). That also makes it hard to formalize all the non-trivial statements that are part of our knowledge.
And yes, there are subtle aspects to knowledge, that is usually not capturable easily in manually formalized knowledge graphs, but that's where pairing knowledge graphs with ML-based methods (e.g. vector search) can really shine.
A Knowledge Graph is the data in the database, not the tech.
You can absolutely implement this in a RDBMS. There are some advantages to a proper graph database though.
But SPARQL is a dead-end - I don't think anyone is really using that in practice outside a dew public demonstration apps. To a large extent this is true of RDF too: triples are useful, RDF gets in the way.
We participated in a huge RfP for a pharma company which planned RDF KG infrastructure for the next couple of years with 500 billion triple capabilities.
Biomedical, finance, defence, automotive -- all of those industries are using RDF/SPARQL. Just because your problems are not big or complex enough doesn't mean this tech is not used. It takes a certain organization size for Knowledge Graphs to make sense and pay off, that's why most industry users are Fortune 500-level companies.
Those are easy to implement on top of RDBMS. Query performance is a different thing, which can only be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, but you can go a long way with good indexes.
A few companies need real time analytics on really big graphs. Most don't and shouldn't waste their time with fancy Google-scale databases.
My perspective on the Nx debate: As developers we can do a lot of good. Over the course of my career I helped millions of developers (through my writing on the net) and tens of thousands people use my code and programs to run things smoother or more efficiently.
I'm not that technically brilliant, but I enjoy finding ways to make the efforts worthwhile and I feel that gives me already a small edge.
I happily pay for sourcehut, not only but also because sourcehut aligns so much with the software world I am hoping to see more of.
Imagine just 10% of the revenue involving software globally would go into supporting all excellent open source projects that millions of people depend on on a daily basis. What a beautiful world that could be.
