aicioara

https://andreicioara.com/

I've been writing for fun a few years ago, then one of my articles got really popular because it ranked high on search engines and it still receives a fair amount of traffic.

Since then, even though I wrote more articles, I discarded them because of this new "pressure": nothing really feels as good as the articles that I already published. I have not published anything in 4.5 years, but I keep promising myself that I'd start again some day.

Any feedback or criticism on the current articles is welcome.

1. The economy will continue to stay somewhat flat. There will not be any major recession, but also no miraculous overnight recovery. Inflation will drop slightly, but it will remain higher than targets. Interest rates will hover around the current values. Home prices will continue to drop, but folks waiting for a "market correction" to get their first property will still not buy.

2. Crypto market will continue to stay flat. Maybe some more exchanges go under, but even if they do, new exchanges will spawn replace them. There will be more "breaking news", but all of it is a re-make of a piece of news that already happened in a different form during 2010-2022.

3. Many startups will either close business or get acquired at bargain prices by competitors. Some will make sense ("can't believe anyone invested in that") while others will be complete surprises and somewhat disrupt the day-to-day life.

4. Most Bay Area companies and startups will focus their hiring to either some of the newer tech hubs across the US or abroad (particularly Europe) and completely halt hiring in the Bay Area. All of these companies will be fully-remote or somewhat-remote. Because the average tenure is 2-4 years, and because families take longer to uproot, it will take until 2025-2027 to actually see the Bay Area population start decreasing. Companies that will still hire in the Bay Area will be remote-unfriendly.

5. Machine Learning achievements will continue to show up at a similar pace as throughout 2022. More and more companies will pop up to repackage these technologies into well-marketed consumer-facing services - logo generators, fiverr replacements, blogspam filters, search engines, language translators, coding mentors, etc.

6. "Impersonal social media" - TikTok, YouTube, Twitter - where you do not personally know the content creator - will continue to grow in popularity, leaving behind an even bigger need of "personal social media" - where you keep in touch with people that you actually know. Maybe some company, either existing or new, will fill in that gap. Maybe not.

Also curious

What a coincidence. I implemented the exact same thing yesterday. It also happened to be my TIL for that day: how to create a Github Action.

My setup turned up much simpler, as I did not have some of the constraints that you wanted.

https://github.com/aicioara/til/blob/master/github/github-ac...

Assuming that financial growth is your main motivation, here are few more examples:

- Change industries - move into finance, look for small proprietary trading shops. Depending on your skill level, this may (or may not) yield better total compensation levels

- Lower your taxes (may not be possible if you are from the US, but I did not make any assumptions). You can do so by changing countries, changing legal entities

- Lower your cost of living through remote work and geoarbitrage. 350k in NYC may buy you the same life as 200k in West Chicago. Bonus points if you can remote from Asia or South America. Morphing into this arrangement from an on-premises job is easier than looking for remote work right away

- Diversify active income streams - 2 part time jobs might give a better yield than 1 full time. Make sure there is no conflict of interests

All of these will eventually plateau, together with your development skills. At that point, the only way to grow is to diversify into skills that scale better (go into management, go into consulting, start companies, teach courses).

Hope this helps.

I assume continuously changing lanes on a 4+ lane road, such that you don't rear bump fellow drivers. This must be done if you're driving at 130 mph, while the rest go at 70. At those relative speed differences, the rest of the cars look stationary. (note the sarcasm)

If you mean under 20 years old: how did you establish a reputation at such a young age and in particular how did you get your first client?

Was 2nd client easier to get. How about the 50th?

I had that happening. For me it was an allergic reaction which slightly blocked my sinuses and reduced the air intake. The allergy was previously undetected because I do/did not use the same cosmetic products that my partner uses. A antihistamine nasal spray may help, but check with an ENT.

https://astralapp.com/ should be a better link where the project is explained.

Curious about the $2.5/mo database deal. What is that service?

Thank you for sharing and best of luck with your business!

As a hacker with no design background, reading Design for Hackers [1] was life changing. I finally understood that design is just a set of rules and that really modelled well on my engineering mindset.

Add to that frameworks such as Bootstrap CSS and opinionated website builders such as Weebly and I finally overcame a major limitation in my skillset. I could now actually build what I wanted to build, knowing that it looks decent and I can focus on what is under the hood.

If the web all looks the same, it is probably because it is built by people like me who need a rigid framework to work within.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-...

Haven't had a chance to try the app yet. Any idea why the name? When I read Lasso, I do not necessarily think of 15 second videos with overlayed soundtracks.

I keep an "ideas folder". Some may call it an idea notebook. Every time I think of something cool I add it there. The reality is that 90% of the content is crap, but the rest of 10% is good enough for my next project.

For the ideas themselves, it's usually some pain point I have. A solution for a personal pain point is a project. A solution for a pain point that I share with thousands other people is a business.

I saw some people are motivated by curiosity: "I wonder how a music synthesizer works, so I'll just build one myself", but that is not motivating enough for me. I guess it depends from person to person.

It's like the internet is all work and no play.

I guess it depends on your filter bubble. There is still a lot of silly chat on Discord, Slack channels. Still a lot of jokes on Reddit and 9gag. Funny videos on YouTube, etc.

I tend to hang out in the digital marketing and self improvement circles and I agree with you. Spending too much time there feels like the internet is all work and no play. However, there is life outside as well.

I'll just add my favourite debug flag for NodeJS, which I argue should be the default behavior.

    node --trace-warnings main.js

Life saving for me.

I am the author of the article. Happy to have a discussion here.