HN user
If by "passive" you mean a lot of fun, I play bass & gig around town as well as running a non-commercial internet radio station - goatradio.org. Being a musician / audio engineer generates a decent amount of cash.
Angular is rock-solid and I think its biggest feature is refactoring. It's not a sexy feature nor anything you can market but refactoring front-end code is something we all do everyday.
It is incredibly easy to refactor logic into services and modules and hold to the fundamental systems architecture principle: low coupling and high cohesion.
My only advice is this: if you're doing in something in Angular that seems too hard or kludgy, you're doing it wrong... and somebody on Stack Overflow has already answered your question.
I simply ask "Why should I work for you?"
"You have enough savings to last at least two years." - fuck. me.
Always always always take cash over equity. Equity is a lottery ticket and needs to be treated as such.
Selenium or [insert favorite tool here] is pretty good - the tough parts are: 1) architecting the app to be testable 2) realizing that test engineering is a rather tricky discipline
it's worth repeating:
Take cash over equity. Drop acid or shrooms at least once. Don't get married young.
A hacker is really the red-shirt ensign on the away team
I personally hate the "take home test" approach to interviewing. I've had multiple such tests that take anywhere from 10-25 hours to complete because simply answering the question isn't enough; you need to give textbook correct answers and your code must be formatted perfectly with the requisite comments and documentation. In short, it's pretty similar to an upper-level college course's final exam; however, in college, you can get a good grade with a few mistakes; in interviewing, you get rejected for a few mistakes. I'm done giving a company 15 hours of my time just to get to a first interview; this is arrogant, condescending, and completely devalues my time.
The reality of hiring is you're going to make mistakes, like every other part of running a business. Even in an extended "interview" such as dating for a potential life partner, people make mistakes so I'm not sure how the hiring process can be quantified to remove said error. The interview process is so excruciating these days I often hate the companies I'm talking with.
While we're at it, the skills requirements listed with jobs today are astounding. My experience is that a company wants to hire a programmer with at least a journeymen's level of expertise in 6-8 skills. If you have 5 and are comfortable you can learn the other 3, you're dead in the water. Let's be honest, the latest Javascript framework isn't that complicated. The latest NoSQL database isn't that hard to learn.
The truly hard parts of joining a new company are learning how projects are managed, getting the political lay of the land, finding a sherpa to answer your questions in the first couple of weeks, and learning where you fit within the organization.
We'll be writing yet another goddamn reporting system for marketing. However, the coffee will be exquisitely made by Blue Bottle's autonomous cybernetic drone.
Take cash over equity. Drop acid or shrooms at least once. Don't get married young.
Poorly, I'm afraid. There's nothing inherently wrong with PHP per se. 99% of the problems with PHP are the result of it being a language that novice programmers can easily learn and become productive in. There's nothing wrong with that and given the alternatives, I encourage it. However, novice programmers tend to write garbage code and attempt to overcome lack of architectural cohesiveness with brute force. This quickly devolves into spaghetti code and soon, Murphy's law raises its head leading to the programmer crawling under his/her desk and considering a life as a llama rancher when the web app craters in spectacular fashion.
The lesson from this is that a bad programmer produces bad code. Nothing can save us from our self and Pogo had it right many years ago when he said "We have met the enemy and he is us."
I did something similar a couple of years ago called Blue Violin. It was a web app that recorded web events, saved them, then ran the test script. The source code is available at http://code.google.com/p/blueviolin/ - you might find some code of use to you. If you have any questions, you can find me at @JoshWatts or josh.watts at gmail.com.