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For VPS, I'm very happy with DigitalOcean and Vultr both. DO also has some managed services now (hosted dbs in preview, spaces etc). I use these for hosting personal projects and backups via Syncthing.

If you want more managed cloud stuff, serverless etc I'm alright with both AWS and GCP. AWS has more stuff overall, GCP's interface is much much nicer especially for a solo developer. I use AWS for work and some personal experiments, GCP for some personal experiments only.

What's battery life like? I'm building a (non-wearable) Pi with touchscreen but haven't been able to get a good estimate.

Higher than a manager at the same company? Be at one of the companies that offers a separate promotion track for engineering.

Higher than managers in general? Keep interviewing, raising your rate and you should get there. I mean if you work in software dev you probably already make a shitload more than a lot of people with "manager" in their title so just double down on what works.

I can speak to this from the other side. On two occasions I've been hired by a solo developer and small company to develop a library and a proof of concept while documenting and explaining everything I was doing so they could carry on themselves.

I found both of these an enjoyable experience and I was told by both that it was incredibly beneficial for them.

How I'd approach it: Honestly I would just check the HN freelancer thread and start emailing people, get a quote on a day's worth of whatever it is you want from them: code review, pair programming, etc. That's a relatively small investment that will probably give you an idea of whether this is worth pursuing, with them or in general.

I am personally fine with taking on anything that is >=1 day of work, some people probably won't want to do anything that isn't a much longer project.

In any case you're trying to find professionals that will respond professionally and should be able to break down how their time can benefit you. So just email some people and let them prove that they meet those criteria.

Lighthouse, available in Chrome devtools, includes an a11y audit although how thorough it is I can't say.

> I replaced my workstation and gaming computer with this setup and am finally down to one-device nirvana.

That's a tantalizing option, what kind of gaming do you do on it?

I'm at a point where I'm ready to have one computer, but while I don't do very much gaming any more I do like to pick up new games.

Pretty happy on a Thinkpad X230 over here. Cheap as dirt and upgradable/repairable. Battery life is a few hours with a fresh battery. If I got another I'd probably pick up an X1 Carbon.

After my last ASUS laptop I will never buy a non-business laptop again.

If you stick with the Mac, it's not as good as a real tiling WM but I find Amethyst helps.

I'm not sure what the price differences are in Europe but I snagged a X230 for ~that amount in the US and am fairly happy. My only regret is the TN panel screen; this can be avoided by getting an X230T or going out of your way to find one with an IPS panel (a lot of resellers won't state what kind of panel it has, though). I got mine from a company that only refurbishes Thinkpads and was pretty happy about it, so I'd suggest looking off eBay as well and seeing if there's any companies like that where you are.

As the article suggests, you can also upgrade it along the way if your budget increases.

For me it was TypeScript. I had terrible slowdowns in vim for whatever reason (was using a couple different plugins, and maybe things have improved since then), and VSCode is hands down the best TypeScript editor. I then found it to be a nicer experience for JS in general as well as C/C++.

I still use vim often but since I'm not a vim power user, the vim emulation mode/plugin for any particular editor is generally good enough for me.

Vultr will let you spin up an OpenBSD VPS easily, although as to how supported it is I'm not sure. I'm certainly happy with their Linux offerings.

I'm reading it right now and enjoying it. Overall the way I view these books is if I get something from them that is worth more to me than the $15 or so they cost it is of value, I don't have to agree with or implement everything in them whole hog.

I'm using Syncthing with a VPS & backups enabled to cover the passive backup angle. For a distributed system the whole setup was surprisingly painless.

Talk about ethics. You probably won't convince anyone to pursue STEM in a presentation but if you talk about things like Therac-25 you might leave an impression on those who choose to pursue it.

Let me instead suggest what not to do: use the internet or other low protein, high distraction forms of entertainment extensively. Set limits on them and disconnect after a while. If you have nothing else to do, that's fine too, because you'll now think about how you can fill that time in a rewarding fashion.

That said, since you haven't started yet, go ahead and veg out for a week or two when you do :')

Lots of good comments here, but I didn't see a code search tool recommended while skimming.

I use this one: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

But the important thing is to be comfortable popping open the console and using it. Makes it so much easier to "research" a particular part of code quickly.

> How often do you use a 'switch' statement whose cases don't always end in 'return' or 'break'?

I do, occasionally. I prefer the inverted golang switch where fallthrough needs to be specified, since these cases (heh) are generally the minority.

Vultr does bare metal servers. I haven't used them personally, but I'm a fan of their VPS offerings.

> When you are billing for a whole day/week that becomes much harder.

Daily/weekly are billing increments, not working increments. I still track hours internally; I billed a client last year for "one day" of work that took me a week due to other commitments. Made it clear up front that I was pretty busy at the time. He had no issues with it.

I typically avoid commute time and have a flexible schedule. It's still an hour and driving on 45/the beltway is stressful no matter what time you do it at :S

My issue with niche interests is not that there aren't communities out there, but that they tend to be fragmented. Facebook/Reddit attract a lot of users, but tend to generate poor discussion and long-term engagement. Specific forums and communities are much better in my experience, but much harder to get going and keep going. So overall I feel like there's a lot less discussion than there potentially could be.

I've ended up in a situation where I am commuting one hour each way to a client's office once per week.

This is my choice -- I could work totally remote, but I have found it necessary in order to resolve some issues to go in.

The difference is even more stunning when you are only doing it 20% of the time. I am fried when I get home, and commuting in Houston on a regular basis can take years off your life.

People get sucked into living like this slowly and don't realize how damaging it is.

I just switched to every other Friday off and it seems like it will help a lot. I can never relax until like Saturday evening and then Sunday it's like welp, back to work.

I'm unsure how it is determined but when I asked my .app registrar they said it should be $120/year for each renewal, which was less than I paid to register it. Guess I'll find out.

I believe in the original .app launch thread on HN they stated that premium domain pricing was based on machine learning. So...who knows.

> I hate the new interface and always browse on old.reddit.com, mainly because of the higher density of information that makes it easier for me to scan for posts I want to read.

I'm actually trying to "redesign" an app (I put design in quotes because I'm a dev and just trying to make a personal project look nice) and one of the struggles I have had is that high information density can look crappy at first but once you get used to it, is a better experience. So much nicer to have everything you care about in a single screen.

So I think you may have mixed up the acronyms here a little, as the post doesn't say CEO after the first mention.

But basically, I wouldn't ever work for free, and I'm just a lowly peon. Certainly not for a company with two million bucks in the bank. I don't understand how part-time or full-time status of any employee is relevant to whether or not you can be paid.

> - Again, for some other programs I use docker.

I use and recommend dokku + some CI/CD to manage deployment of dockerized services.

I am also interested in the answer to this question. I love the idea of having some kind of control panel and monitoring setup for my own personal servers but, in practice, there seems to be nothing out there that isn't overkill for me. I also love the idea of having my server setup described entirely in code so that it can be destroyed and reconstructed with ease, but...

I read recently that servers should be treated like cattle and not pets, which rings true, but I'm not sure if applying that advice is worth it for my personal stuff (currently running two servers).

To add to the other answers, the type-ability of hooks is so much nicer. useContext means I'm going to be using context a lot more in TypeScript code now that I don't have to add a bunch of type definitions to every component I want to use it in.

I have also pulled some good work off the freelancing thread. Only takes one to make it worth your while.

I'm currently building a small reminder and timer device with time tracking functionality. Touchscreen, maybe battery powered for a bit if possible (it'll probably be plugged in most of the time but it would be nice to move it around the house).

I'm sure there are phone apps that do this, but I hate my phone and I want to integrate it with one of my web applications to some extent.

It's been fun playing with and hits the sweet spot between convenience and price. A nice break from web development.

I have a small amount of professional experience with Scheme and programming language design & implementation which I put on my resume. I've found people bringing it up is a pretty good bellwether for interesting interviews and people who are good to work with. Has it gotten me in the door ever? I don't know. Go ahead and do it.