I would have my retinas checked by a retina specialist. Floaters may indicate retina issues that may lead to retina detachment. If caught early there are better options for remedy.
Try to focus on one specific technology that is popular in enterprise software and become an expert at it. Take one to three months if possible and just focus on that one thing. I'll use the example of front end development with Angular. Watch a bunch of youtube videos on it and read the docs. Set up a free github account and set up a free github pages blog and do deep dive blog posts on angular topics as you learn and also build demo apps that demonstrate your mastery of specific angular best practices. Put that stuff on your resume and present yourself as an expert on the topic. Side opportunities may open up as well. As an example see how this guy has set himself up as a django expert: wsvincent.com
One of the more difficult parts of self hosting with a service like digital ocean is managing your own database. Luckily DO just introduced managed postgres databases. Also you can use DO load balancer so you don't have to manage a load balancer and deal with setting up let's encrypt ssl certs, and only have to worry about deploying your web app. I wouldn't go with docker for production just yet because while docker is great for immutable servers and dev/ops parity, it makes things like secret management, logging and monitoring more complicated.
Don't know about books but you might check out thegreatcourses.com that has many videos that try to explain math concepts in a simplified manner by lectures from college professors
One good middle ground option may be installing and running your language/framework locally but running supporting data services such as mysql, redis etc in docker containers.
Laravel even more then rails and django comes with pretty much everything you need for modern web dev built in. Full auth system, feature and unit test infrastructure, background jobs, push notifications integrated with a scalable third party websocket service, integrated with vuejs, webpack wrapper and more. It also has a prebuilt development VM that has supporting services such as mysql and redis or you can use various docker solutions for that. There is also excellent laracasts video course platform with free series on getting started with laravel and there is also codecourse video casts that has examples of full blown websites built with laravel
The method I like to use is to intertwine MVP development and customer feedback together as I incrementally build an MVP. So you should start with identifying your target customer and get them involved in the building of the MVP from day one.
Ask yourself WHY the real live person you have identified to sell your product to would want to use your product. Then find out if that is really true by directly telling them this is WHY they should use it and monitoring their real response of either paying you to use it or not. If they don't then you need to find out why and adjust.
Try finding one person that you think has the problem you are trying to solve. Contact and talk with that person and see if you can build something small or even manually solve that persons problem. Expand out your market and product from there.
Only way to find out is to go talk to some small restaurant owners. Maybe there are some industry events that you can demo your service to restauranteurs.
I'd say the laravel/php and Ruby on Rails communities are the closest thing there is to that. Many of the people involved in those communities run sass businesses or build sass business tools.
Start by finding a small group of people that have a problem that you might be able to solve by writing python scripts or a simple web app perhaps built with flask. Joining a few meetups or online forums or looking for problems in your current job may give you an idea of how to connect with these people. Then it is a matter of throwing together the simplest possible app that could address the main issues these people are having and going and talking to them to see if they would pay for it and adjust your product based on their feedback
You need a very specific set of users that you can explicitly identify and know how to reach online that have a specific problem that your side project helps solve. Can you identify such a user? If not then that is your first job to find one. If yes then your job is to go talk with that user and find out if they are willing to pay and if not, how you can you tweak your project so that they will pay. Rinse and repeat
Laravel backend with vuejs components deployed to laravel forge is my choice even though I am an enterprise asp.net core developer. Check out laracasts.com for their new series on the newly released Laravel 5.7
A lot of advice here is about finding time to work on your product on nights and weekends. You also need allocate some time during the day for marketing and communicating with your target customers
Start with shipping from day one. Before any coding. If it's a web app create a new hello world project push it to a git repo. Get a cheap server from a hosting company deploy your hello world app to it. Point a real domain to it and install an ssl cert on it. Now you have an actual app running on the open web. From then on you can iterate by completing one endpoint/controller action at a time and immediately pushing that live and getting user feedback on it. Then on to the next one. One additional point is that you can get a generic domain name which will allow you to endlessly pivot your app without having to setup a new domain and hosting if you change your idea. This implies that you always have just one side project that will change over time and never work on multiple side projects.
For every 45 minutes of sitting get up and walk around for 15 minutes. While walking keep thinking about what you were working on to stay in the zone. For every 3 to 4 hours of working take a two hour break and do active things.
Also try to avoid using a mouse and go keyboard only. Wherever you sit, roll a towel and put it behind your lower back for support
He means pick a combination with one selection from each front end and back end category. For instance you can pick vuejs from front end and combine it with php/laravel on the back end
It's not the burden that is the main issue. While complying may add more cost and complexity, the real issue is the additional risk of the possibility of getting sued for improper implementation.
Yes there is something like the intersection of three overlapping circles. One is do things you like, the other is do things you are good at doing and the third is do things that will give you income that you will be satisfied with.
Don't think about entrepreneurship. Think about things that interest you.
Immerse yourself in those things and make as many strong connections as possible to others interested in the same things. Take advantage of the fact that you are in school where it is much easier to meet other motivated people. Opportunities will then start to present themselves.