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Re:On finally learning to program at the age of 40 by mcv on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @07:53AM (#24407488)
I think there's a lot of room for programmers with deep domain knowledge about some topic. If writing software for lawyers or law-related issues, I'm pretty sure experience as a lawyer can be very useful.
Re:On finally learning to program at the age of 40 by client4 on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @11:29AM (#24409366)
Just interviewing other lawyers for their “if it existed I would buy it” software would show there’s a lot of opportunity. A friend of mine has been looking for a service that emails her whenever a local municipality does something with easements/property access.

This actually took me down a long rabbit hole of how local government software is horrible and someone could crush this area — my only concern would be lack of traction as local governments seem to prefer operating in obscurity/making it difficult to hold them accountable.

Re:On finally learning to program at the age of 40 by blaser-waffle on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @10:49AM (#24421626)
Funny, I know a guy doing just that, former roommate He was mostly writing code for things that handle municipal water supplies and other water monitoring stuff. He worked for a code shop that built the original system and after he left he kept doing maintenance work on the side until he went (mostly) full time at it.

OTOH, he's basically a one-man show, and has implied that if he had to scale -- e.g. add 3+ people -- then the $$$ wouldn't go as far. By himself it's a decent paycheck, though.

The problem is municipalities are all different, with different state/local requirements, and they often don't have the money or operational depth to support deeply customized software. I grew up near a park that had to shutdown for several months because they couldn't get enough funds together to have people mow the lawns; where would they find the money for custom code?