avenger123

A lot of what you are saying there is truth to it within certain contexts but all social media now has themes for your generation around success and what a meaningful life is. It is incredibly easy to spend a lot of time absorbing the likes of Gary Vaynerchuk, the whole startup culture and countless other notable people on YouTube, podcasts and elsewhere and end up with these types of sentiments. What you have to understand is that what is sold is distilled to it's simplest form and is not meant to be particular to any individual situation.

I'm not suggesting that your beliefs around work and what a meaningful life are outright wrong but instead that it is very much not representative of what reality is. Life is a spectrum of color and hardly black and white. For everything you've said there is countless people living lives that would disagree with you.

The most concrete recommendation I can give you is first to be mindful of what information you consume. It's very easy to look at social media and feel that your life is amounting to nothing based on how many people your age may be doing noticeable things and showing it off. I know it's hard to ignore this. Dig into it and really analyze these people's backstory. I'm not saying that there are not some people are just fortunate in life and everything drops in to place. That's a given that there is, but these people are the exception and not the norm.

Second, if your goal is do a tech start-up then go ahead and join local or virtual start-up groups and really talk to the people in these groups and tell them how you feel and what you want to do. If you actually have concrete ideas then try to build a product and go for it. Ideally, build a team or join another startup team. Do it. Get it out of your system. Please, don't shortchange yourself by placing your whole identity around the success or failure of it. Most importantly, don't do it in a void. Go out there and join these groups and soak and learn as much as you can from them. You are young right now and looks like you have the umbrella of your parents to help you. For your parents, tell them this is an itch you have to scratch and that they should give you six months to a year to sort it out.

After a few months, you may be in a completely different mindset.

I definitely can relate to Point 4. I think one way of countering this is to focus on a platform versus the base technologies. In particular, I am thinking along the lines of doing development work with the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics or SAP. The years of experience are valued more and the rate of change is inherently slower. The obvious downside is that the development work itself may not be as interesting but that can be mitigated somewhat on the projects one takes on within these platforms.

Many different thoughts on the subject.

Some of my thoughts:

1. It's been interesting few months with COVID and many people have been dealing with difficult situations all round, especially around mental health. We've all had more time to reflect how are lives are and the gaps. Know that social media and especially Tinder amplify all these gaps. Also know that Tinder is gamed. Assume many levels of exaggeration and outright lies from whatever pictures and profiles you are seeing. I'm not saying that everything you are seeing is a lie but understand it's not the full picture. So I would suggest stop using the App and others like it. Also, just accept that this is a totally exceptional year and you are not alone with what you are going through.

2. Welcome to the club. We all feel like failures in our life's at some point or another. It doesn't escape anyone regardless of how rich we are or how many friends we have, etc. It comes to us all at one point or another. Accept this for what it is - a desire and a need to change your current self.

3. You have a sense of what would make you more happier. More social interactions. Traveling. Doing more activities with people. Developing more friendships or deeper friendships. Lots of great thoughts on how to do these things. So take baby steps and start doing (exercise, working out, joining activities with others, etc.). Don't throw away what gives you joy in terms of programming and math. Lots of us try to figure out what it is that gives us that joy and you're lucky, you know already. Keep at it but start to take time away from it so you can do other activities. Accept that the feedback loop for going outside your comfort zone isn't going to be quick. Accept that it will take time for you to make changes in your life and it is hard. It's weeks and months and years process. The best thing is you are young and have the time to do it.

Adding my thoughts to this.

I have been using one of these for the past few years.

https://shoplifeformchairs.ca/collections/high-back/products...

Although it's a Canadian based company, they have dealers across the US - https://relaxtheback.com/apps/store-locator

Anything that is adjustable with a chair can be done with one of these. It's unfortunate that they are expensive and marked as "executive" chairs but the chairs are a couple of notches above Aerons and the SteelCases in comfort and adjustability.

The first acceptance should be that making worthwhile change in your life will take time. So, I would consider taking this out of the consideration. Just assume that it will take you time.

The second consideration should be a reflection on your part. Do a simple thought experiment. Assume either outcome has happened already. Which one makes you feel good about your life more?

You are conflicted since you want a quicker solution to your situation and unfortunately for most of us that's just not possible. So take the quick part out of your thinking. Give both options equal time regardless of whether it's true or not. The second consideration then becomes effort and monetary cost. These you have to be brutally honest with yourself and consider how hard you are really going to work and how much you are willing to spend. In terms of positive outcomes, again assume both will happen. Life is strange. We change, things happen, shit happens, etc. So assume things all things considered both outcomes can happen.

Your thinking is muddled because you haven't set the foundations for how you want to think about this. I've given you some suggestions on how to do that.

Perhaps spend as much time as you need in reflection. Either with yourself or with the help of a therapist. It seems you're on shore and looking out to sea to a ship that is out of reach to you but you feel you should be on but it's not possible for you to see how to get there. Once you are on that ship, you feel your life issues will be solved or you'll be in a much better place happiness wise.

Unfortunately, lots of money doesn't solve life problems most of the time. Especially the inner life problems.

Reflect on your life. What's missing? What's the gap? Focus on those things.

I assure you a bigger house, a nicer car or lots of money in your bank account doesn't make your inner life better. I'm making the assumption that you're financially doing OK already.

The hardest thing to do is for us to reflect on ourselves and ask the why questions. It's easy to focus on something else and make that the target.

Call it intelligence, smarts, IQ, talent or whatever you want. We are all born with a certain level of it.

The sooner you realize your limits the better. The issue with most of us is that we don't push hard enough to understand what those limits are. As you've seen, you've worked hard and now know your limit.

But frankly, what's the issue? You're not good enough to pass a leetcode interview? Guess out, most people writing software aren't able to either. If all you do is compare yourself to the Wayne Gretzky's and LeBron James you're always going to feel inadequate. Ask them why they are so good and they will tell you that it's hard work and dedication. Because it's more fulfilling to say that than to say "yes, it is those things but heck, I'm just naturally good also".

Read "Flowers for Algernon" for some perspective. Personally, I always remind myself that the intelligence I do have is a gift because there are those with no fault of their own that are far worse.

If you don't enjoy programming or just want to do something different, be honest with yourself.

Your conclusion is right - The is reality not everyone is lucky enough to be intellectually gifted to succeed and not all hard work pays off.

But the issue is you've boxed what success means you to so much that it's suffocating you.

Most of us writing software are failures if we use passing a Google interview as a metric.

Thank you for sharing this.

We are all human. Just because I don't understand why someone would spend their whole life studying beetles doesn't mean I don't respect that they find it engaging and worthwhile.

You are making the classic mistake of projection. Accept that people are unique and will find different things engaging even within the most "mundane" areas of software.

This is really right on the mark. Real accounting involving trusts, tax shelters involving various corporate structures, the intricate tax code knowledge required to understand and take advantage of loopholes is quite technical.

Having been exposed to what it takes to do this level of accounting via direct conversations with someone who does this, they can't wait to move on from it. It's not a good fit for their personality. It really is a back office type of work that can get quite lonely.

I took some time to view your site and your Show Startups page.

I'll comment on your Zero to Century project as it's launched.

I think the gist of what the OP is asking is working on a startup idea that can potentially be very viable financially.

There's a lot of companies doing what your Zero to Century aims to do (stickk.com) comes to mind - which you may already be aware of.

Looking at stickk as an example, their approach is more generalized (ie. any commitment and not one tied to a particular activity) and thus a much bigger market. For your product, the question comes simply to what is the size of your market that would potentially pay for your accountability service for bike riding. The second question is how would you even reach this market.

Is it possible that this product would reach $50K, $100K, or more in a year in revenue? How many months, years would that take? How much marketing effort is there in terms of time and cost? I don't know the answer to these but considering you are targeting B2C and competing with products like Stickk my intuition tells me it would be hard.

So, I guess one constructive feedback I can give you is that I see a lot of projects that you are working on. It seems that you enjoy building these projects. I don't see the type of deep critical analysis that would indicate that you have a path to substantial revenue.

Out of the projects you have listed, which one could actually generate $100K a year in revenue after 1-4 years in the market? Personally, I start with that question and go from there. Just based on cursory look, it seems that this question is at the tail end of your analysis.

Others have put forward great recommendations.

I would like to add a word of caution. Please spend as much time as you can understanding the complexity of your MVP and try to map that to what it should cost to build. Without having a good estimate of how much it should cost you will either spend too little and get extremely sub par results, or spend way more than you should have (more likely scenario) and get barely usable MVP. It's easy for dishonest parties to take advantage of your lack of knowledge and quote you an extremely high figure for what you want to do.

So my recommendation is to find someone with the right technical background that ideally has done many projects that may be similar to your MVP and that can put together for your an overall high level design and give you estimates on how much it would cost to build it based on hours and even tech stack used. They don't have to do the work but it should guide you on your next steps.

Having gone from considering weightlifting a simple set of exercises to now understanding the complexity and nuances of it, this is great advice.

I'm not sure how much value there is to just state "Build physical strength" and the main take away is to do deadlifts. I think there isn't any doubt from a health perspective that doing weightlifting has benefits for overall health but the program someone should go on is dependent on so many factors. Also, why can't it just be "Stay physically active". I would say that has further greater benefits than even weightlifting. Doing half an hour to an hour of moderate cardio activity every day or a few times a week is great.

My recommendation for someone wanting to seriously get into weight lifting is to do your research. There is definitely a lot of "bro science" out there but fortunately there is also a great set of resources out there that is firmly in the realm of solid science.

Here is some Youtube channels that are very solid on approaching weightlifting grounded in real practice and science: Jeff Nippard, mountaindog1 (John Meadows), Greg Doucette, VitruvianPhysique and Renaissance Periodization.

A good book is: https://www.amazon.ca/Science-Development-Muscle-Hypertrophy...

What I have personally found is that for me there is two primary focus points: reducing the risk of injury and keeping consistent with the program. Reducing risk of injury comes down to knowing your own limits for what exercises are comfortable and not going hard with attempting to do max reps all the time. Personally, I don't do any traditional squats and for deadlifts I use a trap bar. Being consistent is much harder. Making a schedule to be in the gym three to four times a week is really hard.

So, yeah, if you want to get started with weightlifting, spend a few hours with those Youtube channels. Picking a class of exercises as a one size fits all is definitely not the way to go.

This sunlight alarm [1] has made a big difference in my sleep quality. I am a heavy sleeper and have a hard time waking up sometimes even if I get the right amount of sleep. I have been using this now for over five months and it's brought great stability to my sleep. I workout in the morning and now I can consistently wake up.

A set amount of time before the alarm is to go off, the alarm simulates a sunrise and can play FM radio, a repeating sound (ocean waves, Nepal bells, etc.) and at the alarm time can do your typical loud alarm. I have this set for 20 minutes before I wake up to start the sunrise. By the time I am ready to wake up, its full brightness and I am ready to get up.

There is also a sunset feature for going to bed.

I also never thought that having an alarm being controlled by my smartphone would be such a great convenience feature but with this type of device it's a perfect match. I don't know how someone could use this device to it's full potential without the app.

This model is the most expensive but I have seen baser models with the core features. I do see a model now at Costco. I would recommend trying it out if you're struggling with bringing consistency to your sleep.

I used to feel these types of devices were a gimmick but for me it's been worthwhile.

[1] https://www.philips.ca/c-p/HF3670_60/smartsleep-connected-sl...

I assumed you are a man so apologies if not!

You are in a wonderful situation. You are being a great son, enjoying good time with your parents. Don't throw that away. First of all, be thankful that you are comfortable and not manically driven for more.

How do you think living like a bum would improve your life? Let's say you do that. You will get a job but will it be the right job? Or are you now more concerned with just getting any job so you can pay the bills?

Look at it this way, you can right now be in the exactly same situation, except you are in a non-ideal job, living alone, in a small place with little future prospects, with the same level of motivation.

So see your situation as a strength, not a weakness. How's your health? Are you at good healthy weight? Are you exercising regularly? You have the time to take care of yourself. If your health isn't optimal, that's a worthy goal to focus on.

In terms of work, if it's a question of making money, why not keeping going for the contracts? You have the flexibility of being a great freelancer. Pick an area, get skilled and just take on contract work. This is your leverage. I hate to say it, but just do it. It seems you have the luxury of being picky and so you are. Take a contract or job that isn't ideal but in the ballpark of what you want. What's the worst that will happen? You'll end up back where you are now.

In the end, you don't need to be barely living in order to push yourself. We all love the stories of the rags to riches in life but that's kind of the aberration rather than the norm.

It's never too late to get healthy at any age. I've realized this after many years but have finally started to take it seriously.

I follow a lot of literature and social media around fitness. I think the rise of social media has made fitness seem out of reach for most people. Seeing these fitness personalities usually being in the top percentile in terms of genetics for body weight, muscle definition and just looking amazing makes the rest of us feel like it's not something we can do easily. Having most of these people spout their pseudo science also doesn't help. It's hard for any sane person to understand what to do, whether its diet (keto, low-carb, water fasting, carnivore diet, etc.) since there is so many possibilities.

As I've grown older I've realized that staying fit has so many benefits that it might as well be the best anti-aging change we can make for ourselves.

If you're over 25% or more body fat, it's worth figuring out how to bring that down to 20% or less. See how far you can go. Not all of us can get to 12% and maintain it without feeling like we're starving ourselves but I think the higher range is doable.

I've realized for diet and exercise there is no one answer for anyone. The wisdom of eat less, exercise more seems to be the ultimate truth.

What that looks like for each person is unique. Personally for me I've tried all of it. I've done the 7 day water fast, intermittent fasting, low-carb eating, etc. At the end, as long as I'm eating within my maintenance calories relatively good clean food it doesn't matter for me which one I do.

For exercise, I've settled on three total body weightlifting sessions with half an hour cardio session on the non-weightlifting days.

So, the best thing you can do as you getting older is figure out what works for you. There is so many ways of eating and exercising and sometimes it takes a while to understand what works for your body.

I just bought a firewalla blue device that handles this. It's a bit expensive but it really is a no hassle solution. So far I don't regret the purchase.

I'm evaluating fusionauth.io myself. It seems it would fit your requirements. It's not fully OSS though.

You've asked a question without an easy answer and answers that will be different for everyone.

It's easy to live life in our society where we are the center of our own universe. Having a child disrupts this notion quite radically. Your life is still your own but now a child is affected by what actions you take. So you now have a responsibility to this other human being. Every person handles this responsibility differently. One way to look at this responsibility is transactional. I think your two points fall into this category.

Another way to handle this responsibility is to understand that child is now dependent on you and is an extension of you in every way. They will grow up to be become their own but you played a significant part in bringing them into this world and have a significant role in shaping them. Their happiness is your happiness and your happiness is their happiness. And unfortunately, sometimes it's the deepest unhappiness and tragedy that any human can face. I consider anyone that has healthy children with being greatly blessed.

So to answer your question, yes, kids can make you extremely happy and kids can also make you extremely miserable. Where you land on this depends on so many factors,some that are in your control and others that are not.

One thing I will say is that we can choose to be a parent but we don't choose our children. They can be born healthy or extremely unhealthy with a terminal disease, or other medical conditions. It's a gamble. Raising a healthy child will certainly have a higher chance of being happier. Raising an unhealthy child would certainly be in the range of unhappiness to abject grief.

I speak from personal experience but I can say that a relationship with a child isn't the same as other loving relationships in ones life. I don't know how to articulate this but being a father or mother brings out the best in us more so than other relationships. I can say I have experienced a fuller life as a result of being a parent (with measures of happiness and unhappiness). I am more human as a result of being a parent.

It's really hard to give good recommendations without knowing your particular circumstance but here is the thought process I have gone through around the same issue.

First of all, I think the standard advice of get enough sleep, eat healthy, exercise and stay within a reasonable weight (15%-20% body fat - lower if you can manage it) will solve the physical aspect of the energy equation. If any of those are off balance for you, get those sorted out. It will help you immensely in all areas of your life.

I also will assume you have strong motivation for working on your side-project. If it's to hopefully launch your product, learn a new skillset or whatever, if the idea of working on it doesn't itch in your brain all the time then sort that out. I think if you don't have a strong internal motivation for working on your side project there is no way that you're going to spend one hour a night, let alone four to five.

I'll go with the idea that you're trying to build a software product (let's say some kind of SaaS). Come to peace that building the product cannot and will not have the momentum of a rabbit but will be the lowly turtle or the snail. Accept this and be ok with it.

I think the biggest factor of success when working on the side on something is planning beforehand. I believe to build motivation for working on the product in your free time you have to know that you are making progress and there is light at the end of the tunnel. Planning is a critical aspect of this. To achieve this, you have to put on your product manager/architect hat and really figure out what the feature set you are building needs to be for the MVP, how much of what you are doing is going to involve learning new tech and/or how much you can do with what you know.

If you can validate your idea beforehand in some concrete way it will automatically be a motivation booster. If you cannot, focus on the most basic MVP that you can go to market with and accept that it may go bust. From this a good set of development tasks can start to be developed. Put an estimate on each of these and try to come up with a rough enough of hours. Let's say it's a 1000 hours of effort. Now, you can break that down into a date based on how much you can commit.

In terms of how much you can commit, I think we all know ourselves best. I certainly can't work 4-5 hours on my side project on top of a full day of normal work. I also certainly don't view those people with any kind of admiration. I need time with family, to exercise, get enough sleep, hang out with close friends, to chill, etc. and those take time. For me, I can't neglect those things. Be true to yourself and look at your schedule. Be critical about it. Realistically, how much can you commit using the week as a guideline and not daily. Can you do 4-5 hours a week? Great, do that. Start with that. There is good possibility that you will increase your weekly hours once you see progress.

Assuming the 1000 hours and 4-5 hours a week, now you kind of have a target date that you can measure your progress. Take your high level development roadmap and start breaking it down to a point where you can start actual work. Break it down into steps. These can be coding, reading, design work, researching, whatever that involves the side-project.

Personally, for me, I use a simple markdown file, open in Vim with the following:

# Next Steps [ ] Item one [ ] Item two

# Completed

Date [x] Item three [x] Item four

Date [x] Item five [x] Item six

# Review as Needed [ ] Task or design decision that is important but not relevant right now

# Defer [ ] Task that was part of next step but for whatever reason is deferred. Reason is provided.

When I am working, I will move items to the the Completed and add new items in the Next Steps near the end of the work session. I found this is the simplest and completely ceremony free. I tried Trello and other sprint planning type tools and I'm not that type. At the end of the day, you need to start working on your side project. If Trello or some other planning tool works for you then use it. For me, I realized I was wasting more time with the tool versus doing real work. The simple file gives a great overview of how much I've already done and when I start working again, I just look at the first line in the Next Steps and get going.

I think personally what has been the most effective for me is to just start working on it with a plan in place. I know that it's going to be months before I reach my development goals but I'm ok with this. As long as I can say, that I made progress during the week however incremental, it was a good week.

The lux level on this is 315 which I believe is the highest. For me, this hasn't been an issue as it is right beside my bed. At this point, I believe the ocean waves have become a signal to my brain that I need to start getting up. I did have to experiment with how many minutes before the alarm goes off to turn on the ocean waves sound.

I don't have an elaborate setup as yours but I have found the most dramatic improvement by getting one of these:

https://www.philips.ca/c-p/HF3670_60/smartsleep-connected-sl...

It's a sunrise and sunset alarm clock. I wake up at 5:15 AM on a daily basis and 20 minutes before, the light starts with increasing brightness. At 5:08 AM, I have selected ocean waves for the sound and at 5:15 the loud alarm comes on.

It's been a dramatic change for me with this. I would normally get 7 to 7.5 hours of sleep but would have a very hard time waking up and more often than not, would go back to sleep.

With this arrangement, it's been really wonderful. I now tend to be mostly awake before the main alarm comes on and I am able to just get up.

I know this is not a inexpensive option but there are other models without the bells and whistles.

I think is somewhat of a solved problem via PressReader.com or it's variant. Depending on where you are getting access is free if you have a library card.

Whether using it via browser or dedicated apps, it's as close to reading a real newspaper as can be. I particularly like the low-noise way of aggregating comments on articles. If there is comments with an article, a little indicator with the the number of comments is shown which can be clicked to read or ignore as desired.

I have slowly been transitioning to full remote work and I have been contracting for a while already (I am in Canada). I think I have a good opportunity in the coming months to transition to a remote engagement with a US company. Any insight with the best approach to do that? I am aware of the different freelancing websites but I'm wondering if there is strategies that can accelerate the process. In my particular case, I normally do six to one year contracts (with renewals and an engagement usually lasting for a couple of years) so would be looking for something similar. This would be for senior development role.

+1. What a great endorsement for the book. Your two paragraphs capture so much and in such a delightful way that it's hard not to want to buy the book.

This is exciting. I can see myself getting into this. Dabbled with Objective-C but it just didn't excite me.

If Apple's intent is to boost their developer base, this is one tremendous boost. It seems to have the best of both dynamic and static languages.

This is a total gray area at this point. I had no idea who this guy was before this post and now I know more about him than some of my close friends and all by his own admission. I'm glad Beanis added his viewpoint, it doesn't give too much away but provides a more nuanced understanding of what the issues are for this guy who is obviously technically very capable.

Definitely all valid points. I don't have any side projects that can potentially turn into a full business at the moment, so I do have the time to learn. I'm focusing on Django and python for the moment. I think Postgresql is a great hybrid solution as you could live in both worlds (.NET and otherwise). Would be much harder to do with SQL Server.

I also felt a similar way in terms of wanting to keep my day job skills in alignment with my side projects. I think its actually the opposite. Picking up python and Django (or RoR) will make me much more valuable for my own work and otherwise. Microsoft certainly has its place for desktop applications but that's not my focus. Heck, even for that, I am seeing more applications in Adobe Air.

Also, it's just fun to learn these new stacks. I don't need to be an expert, just enough to get the job done and know when to ask for help. Another motivator for me is the ability to hire developers remotely to take on development. I would imagine this is going to be easier to do with an open-source stack versus Microsoft.

Don't get me wrong. Microsoft in the last 3-4 years is doing great work. If you happen to stay out of the Silverlight, WPF, SharePoint side of things it's not been all bad. ASP.NET MVC is now mature and there is enough momentum with nuget and open-source .NET projects that you can replace components if need be.

I'm fortunate to be on both sides of the fence. I don't intend to never use Microsoft tech for my side work but there is a lot to gain from seeing what's out there that isn't Microsoft.

I know that. I didn't make it explicit in my comment. The Microsoft tax I mentioned with Azure is the licensing costs. Microsoft isn't just going to give out SQL Server for free and just charge for the VMs and bandwidth. There is premium pricing for SQL Server and BizTalk and custom licensing pricing for SharePoint and Oracle software.

Being on Azure doesn't mean you get a break on the licensing costs. They just amortize the cost over the hour the VM is up.

EDIT: Fair point on the hosting cost being known and acceptable right from the start. I also don't mean to imply that you are not aware of the licensing costs, just wanted to make it clear. For real businesses, at some point it makes more sense to build their own "private cloud" and at this point these issues become relevant but for most start-ups, it's likely just not going to be an issue.