alpy

I feel your pain, my fellow developer. But the truth is that the SaaS model is dominating the business world right now because it gives you full control over your customers (they don't own , you have all their on your servers). And you have a nice stream of recurring revenue coming every month/year.

And B2B is where the money is. I'd love to see more successful B2C tech companies, but the truth is, regular people don't need that much software to live their lives. And the few pieces of software they do need are already owned by the tech giants. If you want to build something your grandmother could potentially use, your best bet is to join a FAANG company. The B2B world, to be honest, is much more diverse, I feel like there is more room for smaller, niche products there. So I've been warming up to it a bit lately

Hugo (static site generator) has some great templates, I’m using one right now for my new blog. In the JavaScript ecosystem 11ty and Astro both have solid communities and a bunch of free portfolio templates

You don’t need anything unique or special, just a basic layout that wouldn’t be distractingly bad

I don't use Docker for any of my personal projects. I've found that a bit of bash and systemd can do pretty much everything I need. I used to be a big Docker fan, but at some point I realized that I was just avoiding learning proper server management and core automation tools (like bash, which isn't so bad, it turns out).

If you work with other people, then yes, definitely use Docker. It adds a layer of foolproofing that's much needed in larger teams, and it's basically a lingua franca for deploying things these days.

It would be interesting to know how it works for you in a real project. I often have to create types for undocumented endpoints, but it's always a guessing game. Without a proper spec or reading the source code, it's impossible to know if a field is nullable or not, or to distinguish a real text field from a string based enum