Thats me!!!! More than 20 years of hobby programming.
It has never been a better time to be a recreational programmer and I have never been more excited with all the changes! As someone that started making html pages with dial-up, I am just gobsmacked with LLM's! Programming has helped me immensely in my career as a professional firefighter and I hope to have a second act in tech... we'll see!
In my professional DevOps role I'm firefighting all the time, and in my professional programmer role I'm arsoning fires all the time, but I'd also love to hear how real firefighters apply programming skills!
I can't speak to firefighting, but in many ways emergency medicine is remarkably similar to debugging software: you're presented with a problem, it's manifesting some symptoms and you have to determine the root cause. Sometimes a clock is ticking.
If you actually enjoy the process of debugging, discovering root causes and fixing things, emergency medicine can be quite rewarding & fulfilling on very human level.
Fair warning: There are also some really bad experiences you will never un-see, if you're not ready for that I would stay away. Seeing death is objectively worse than the most catastrophic datacenter outage.
You're not wrong. I haven't worked in medicine but I've saved a number of lives over the years just being in the right place at the right time, being situationally aware, and thinking quickly.
I administered CPR to a stranger who was overdosing on pills and resuscitated them until emergency services arrived and could take over, after hearing someone screaming for help while I was taking a walk.
I ran into an old high school acquiatance who told me he was on psychedelics, came upstairs for a moment to say hi, another old acquaintance was there, also tripping. I was inside the apartment for maybe 60 seconds before I saw the second person's eyes flick for just a split second toward a pair of sharp scissors on the table. Without hesitation, I lept for the scissors at the same moment as him, we both grabbed onto them and he tried as fast as he could to slice his neck open with them. After a few seconds of struggle I managed to shove him off, hand the scissors to someone else and then restrain him until I felt he was no longer an immediate danger to himself. That's actually not the only person I've been in this exact situation with, another friend was under the influence and tried the same exact thing and I had to literally beat him into submission and keep watch until he came out of it.
One time I heard screaming and came outside to see two neighbors in a domestic incident. The male was trying to kill the female and his mom was preventing her from escaping. I managed to get her off the property, call the police and get him charged. After a summer vacation, I came back home and heard more shouting. I run outside to see the same male wearing heavy boots and an ankle monitor, a few seconds away from kicking in a glass door to kill his girlfriend, who now was holding their newborn child. He kept saying he was going to kill her. I raced over and tackled him to the ground when he was about five feet from them, already having broken the glass door. His friend and mom kept trying to get me off of him and I started screaming so other neighbors could hear that if someone didn't call the police, I was going to have to kill a man in defense. I was bashing his head into the concrete to keep him from escaping while his mom and friend were pulling at my legs. Eventually he slipped away and cut the ankle monitor, and the police had to go on a manhunt across the city for days. The whole time his mom is trying to get me arrested, telling the police I had cannabis in my apartment.
I had to break into my neighbor's home once to take on a burglar who had locked her out of her home, brought him to heel, tackled him and got the cops over. This guy turned out to be experiencing a mental breakdown so we spent some hours convincing him to get into an ambulance and I don't believe he was charged.
I stopped a public shooting after I saw two people arguing after a block party and heard one go, "I'm a veteran, I don't need this shit." I had JUST finished restraining a large man after he'd assaulted my friend, and handed the guy over to security (the second time; first time he broke free from them and I had to come tackle and restrain him a second time). I hadn't even put my booksack back on before I was slinging it to the ground again to race towards the guy who was running over to the trunk of his car. I dived onto the trunk and he tried fighting me and demanding I get off or his car, and I kept kicking him off and said, "Listen, the only person who might die tonight is you, if you don't fucking get in your car right now and drive away." Turns out he had a loaded AR in there with several mags. I got my friend to remove the other person from the situation, the guy was an immigrant and didn't even understand he was about to be shot and killed. After that, I threw a punch at this guy and told him if he didn't get in his car I was going to fucking kill him. Finally, he got in and left. Most of the very packed crowd never even realized what happened and that someone almost fired off into the crowd.
I had to give my own sister CPR after she cut herself down the arm, showed up at my place at 4am and nearly bled out in my arms. She was probably one minute from death when emergency services met me in a parking lot. I had to pull over to give her CPR and couldn't make it to the emergency room. The really sad thing about this one is I regret saving her life. If I knew now just how much she would later hurt me and my girlfriend, how much she would try to completely ruin my life and even attempt murder on us, I would have let my sister bleed out in my arms and not administered CPR or dressed the wound / used a makeshift tourniquet. This was last year so I'm still processing this one.
There's a few more big ones but this is a long post, you get the idea: always be aware, always be quick to respond, trust your instincts, use your environment, commit yourself totally to the present moment because it could save lives. And take walks.
About your sister, feel free to discard this thought as we don’t know each other at all: You did the right thing to save her; somehow separate that from the relationship animosity (not sure how); but it’s 2 things, don’t combine them.
It has never been a better time to be a recreational programmer and I have never been more excited with all the changes! As someone that started making html pages with dial-up, I am just gobsmacked with LLM's! Programming has helped me immensely in my career as a professional firefighter and I hope to have a second act in tech... we'll see!