I’ve been hiring freelancers for a while, for engineering and design work, and it always seems difficult to find and hire great people. In my experience, talented freelancers tend to under-invest in improving their chances of getting hired. …

Over the last couple of years I’ve noticed a consolidation in programming language choice in commercial and open source projects. The software industry is always changing, but there seems to be persistent interest and investment in a few languages: JavaScript, Python, Java, and Go — the “Big Four.” I started…