ioddly

I bought a Beelink mini PC to replace the cloud VM that hosts a few things for me. I'm tired of resizing my little EBS volumes, and want to store more data. At the discounted price, I should be saving money in about a year with substantially better specs... not including the cost of my time in figuring out backups and all that nonsense.

I only use it as a light tracker of what I've read, but I'm moving to Obsidian for this purpose. The main thing it does for me is be a relatively good way to search up metadata about a book (author, year published, etc). Is there something more open? (Looked at LibraryThings, but its API does not seem to be available currently).

You're in a position where you can comfortably take some time off and explore what to do next. Your spending + assets seem to me like you're comfortably financially independent even factoring in paying your own healthcare, not approaching it.

Go for it. Don't put pressure on yourself to start a business, just take some unstructured time off, experiment and see how you feel.

I've had this repo starred on GitHub for a while. Sadly it doesn't seem to have been updated, but it's a good start: https://github.com/Yonaba/awesome-one-person-games

How are you finding it so far?

I set out to build my own contenteditable based editor and after a couple weeks of banging my head on it, I do appreciate Prosemirror's very rigorous approach. I suspect it might be the best choice for me as well.

Yep, I think this is the fifth? I've lost track honestly. I do use it daily, but I know I can do a lot better. The next one probably will not have any noticeable Trello/kanban heritage.

I will say for those working on their own, I started to make breakthroughs on this when I stopped worrying about what other people might want for the eventual open-sourcing or SaaS and just made exactly what I wanted to.

I'm building it for myself, since I don't think anything will do exactly what I want it to. I wrote https://github.com/upvalue/meditations for this, but it's not nearly as powerful as I'd like and after thinking about this for a long time, I have a pretty solid idea of what I want to do for the next rewrite.

I expect to handle like 80% of what I want and the rest will just have to be bespoke code and other applications (e.g. I don't expect to handle finances -- I'll continue using YNAB but import from it using its API to display financial info in the same place as everything else).

Fathom has a self hosted open source version which I found to be fine. I checked recently and it looks like commits have slowed down so I'm not sure if it's maintained.

Fabrice Bellard: http://bellard.org

Notable: no social media, nothing like that. Just shows up occasionally with something that would take another dev probably a couple years to do.

No. It's never been easier to make high quality software. I can run my own cloud environment, make quality user interfaces, integrate with third party providers to trivially do previously highly messy things like accept payments or send text messages, all as a solo developer.

Not because I'm particularly good but because a lot of the foundational work is now available with `git clone`.

There's a lot of crap around of course, but that's always been the case.

Also, in my exp your manager, boss, lead has alot to do with the amount of stress.

To explicate a little, I've found stress mostly relates to the expectations of people around me, and has very little to do with the difficulty of what I'm being asked to do.

Yes. I just use my own journaling app which I wrote (sorely needs an update). I track some things through there (exercise) and other things using more specialized tools (finances). I do one every Friday, one at the end of the month, and one at the end of the year.

It's pretty valuable.

I've just got a syncthing set up with all my configuration and data.

"Spinning up" a new computer takes me an afternoon, which I doubt I could improve on enough by using more professional tooling to make it worth the time investment.

I'm trying to figure this out myself. I have freelanced for years from Houston and it's been fine. I avoided moving somewhere more expensive because my income was inconsistent, but now I have a salaried remote job and no excuse. It's harder than I thought it would be to pack up and leave a place.

I'm headed to Austin for a month today, hoping to try Vegas later this year as well.

I'll let you all know when I figure this one out...

I just tell them I'm too busy with work...which is eventually true.

I did two months ago on a freelance gig.

I have two pieces of advice:

- Avoid middlemen to the extent possible. Some (not Upwork) can be a good place to fill some hours, but in general they're not a sustainable source of good clients

- Freelancing in my experience was mostly about saying yes to many tech stack choices. I worked with a great number of technologies I never would've chosen for a personal project. I'm sure there are some people being paid to write Rust/Haskell on a freelance basis, but I doubt it's very common.

I'm curious how old those folks were. I was I would guess the only person without a degree in my department at my last job (definitely the only dev without one) and never felt this.

I used to use dwm, I switched to Awesome for some reason (I want to say systray). Both solid.

I use a laptop with a tiling window manager when I'm travelling or at the office, desktop with single monitor and tiling WM at home. Last job had 2x nice dells for each developer, never used them. Eventually they gave my desk to someone else because I worked remote most of the time and I never complained.

I may throw in the towel and get an extra monitor at home now since new job pays for home office stuff. I work primarily on frontend now and it'd be nice to have the browser open to whatever I'm working on permanently.

I'd also appreciate one phil@upvalue.io if anyone happens to have one. Have been lurking for a while and interested in participating.

I did this recently and it kept autocapitalizing/correcting things, and I kept wasting time reflexively changing them. There's probably a code syntax option buried somewhere in there but heck if I know where it is.

holding company meetings w/ minutes

How do you hold meetings with minutes in a single person LLC? With clients/subcontractors/advisors maybe?

I'm not being sarcastic, my accountant wants me to form an LLC and if doing this helps with liability I'd be happy to go through the ceremony of it.

Well there's how much you might be able to charge as a developer (and the amount of money you'd have to make as a freelancer to account for things that full-time jobs typically provide, like benefits, etc), and then there's what you can charge in a particular situation.

Is your friend likely to be able to pay you, say, $4000 for website updates? (40hr @ $100). How about $2000 (40hr @ $50)? You know this person better than we do.

I've done this once ever, I was being asked to build an extremely technically difficult proof of concept so I asked for access and it was granted. I had already worked for the client previously so there was some trust, and they were thinking of open sourcing the project once it was farther along anyway. I wouldn't expect to have it happen again.

I feel like most of these problems can probably be sussed out in other ways. Ask the developers about things that typically lead to a better codebase: do they do code review, testing, QA, etc.

Yes.

I'm making slow progress on one personal project that I use on a daily basis. It's small by the standards of bigcorp code but the value to me is large. Other than that I tinker around a little bit, start things with different languages or libraries.

Also I work remote so technically I write all of my code at home :P

Not familiar with GPs use case but TypeScript has a glorious compiler API that could handle the heavy lifting here.

SEEKING WORK - Houston, TX (US Central) / Remote

Hey there! I'm a full stack web developer who's worked with S&P 500 companies, agencies and individuals to create fast, responsive applications that combine tricky technical problem solving with solid UI/UX.

Current availability: Available starting May.

Recent hits:

- Led development of a search application with an expected $3.5m ROI, rewriting the entire backend to use fulltext search, improving response times by over 90%.

- Turned around a responsive redesign of a React/Redux application in a week for a SaaS company, allowing the company to renew the contract that was funding development.

- Prototyped a TypeScript-to-Kotlin compiler with the eventual goal of sharing code across three platforms, avoiding triplicate development efforts.

Here are some of the technologies I'm most comfortable with, for those of you CTRL-Fing down the page :)

    Backend => Python + Flask, Java/Kotlin + Spring Boot, Golang, node.js
    Frontend => React, TypeScript, GraphQL, D3, react-testing-library
    Storage => Postgres, SQLite, Redis
    Cloud & devops => AWS, Docker, Dokku

Or we can jump straight to email >> phil@upvalue.io << or a call >> https://calendly.com/upvalue <<

I don't think you need a whole lot of elisp knowledge to get started. You'll probably pick up a fair bit from writing your own config file, which isn't too hard. Then you can learn as needed from there. I use emacs for org-mode and still barely know elisp although I'm an experienced lisp programmer.

Remove attractive distractions. Which is mostly the internet.