I don't see it in his (downvoted) comment. It's getting unhealthy. Nowadays you need to be super careful when you write to not possibly offend anyone the tiniest bit. It's fuc*ed up.
397 karma · joined March 20, 2021
My whole life is suspended. I hope I will get to recover. I will try to rest as much as I can. I believe I got this because I was working while being sick. Who the fuck know something like this was possible. They should fucking teach about this in school... don't work while you are sick or risk ending up disabled. Instead most doctors don't even know such illness exist.
I have been sick for 1.5 weeks (which is an extreme time for me by itself), afterwards I did not feel quite normal and got right back to being sick just after a few days, progressively getting worse. After another 1.5 weeks, I almost felt normal, only super-tired, I got to rest all day, only to wake up in the night feeling sick again. Another 5 days went by, to get back to the point where I feel tired but not sick and again, I went back to feeling generally unwell, although it may be better than the last time. It goes for 4 weeks now.
Most recently, I woke up, felt sick right there in the morning, feeling like I should rest rather than work but with great mental exertion I overrode it and carried a full day, with little to no rest, every minute pushing against that feeling and doing some light exercise too. At the end of the day, I felt like I did not sleep the entire night and as I went to sleep, I slept like a stone. The day after I got that tiredness feeling without feeling sick I wrote about earlier - which felt like progress.
I don't have extreme tiredness like you describe, but something is clearly wrong and it cut my weekly work capacity by half. I never had something like. I also have been hearing about friends of friends also feeling unwell for 1 month or 2 months.
I don't use a high-end laptop and I'm not eager to upgrade is because I can relate to the average user of the software I develop. I saw plenty of popular web apps feeling really sluggish.
[0] https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/ashleys-blog-2/simple-sof...
Currently I'm estimating the effort to be 5,500h. I really started in 2021 and will probably launch somewhere in 2026. So it is 5 years hustle to put almost 3 years of full time work while also making a living working for other people.
My self funding strategy was small time freelancing, which was ok for a short time, but when I found out it's going to take more time I'm spending now a lot of time to prepare to get a full time job instead and lower the personal life sacrifice. I guess if I had a well-paid job from the start and I was willing to sacrifice more personal life, I would get there faster - but either way it would take some time.
I do like working on what I'm working though and at best, maybe I could be done with it in 7 years from now - with a small acquisition that could make it easier to build the next product (or wrap it up as a failure in 4 years and still get tons of experience from that). In contrast, the more ambitious product would take 7 years just to launch it, however it's not that much of a difference on a bigger scale.
In the end, I think I'm sticking with the current product, for better or for worse. I already spent a lot of time on it, I have very limited resources and it's faster to ship, to get some success or fail earlier and use the experience (+ resources if any) to start working on a new product in 4 - 8 years, whatever it could be.
But it does get me, that things take time either way, things are hard either way, so maybe it's better to work on something with bigger potential. I have some more thinking to do.
The biggest performance improvement would probably be RAM usage. You don't notice laptop specs get more RAM. The usual options are still 8GB or 16GB. Until 32GB / 64GB is the new default, having a non-electron app will always be an improvement.
Personally I don't think it matters that much in the end, whether it is CPU usage or RAM, but if the editor was just as capable but faster, I'd switch. Code will never be rewritten from scratch and it will always be tied to Electron, starting a new text editor built with faster technologies could give a long-term edge the existing competitors would not be able to use.
- Have an emergency google account with stuff that is only relevant for the emergency, limited access, that you could login into from anyone's computer, not worrying that you would also compromise more important data
- Use Authy and remember its backup password for 2FA codes
- Use an offline password manager for important passwords, use an online manager with no 2FA for passwords relevant to an emergency situation
- Keep an online backup of all your data, encrypted, on some storage service in another region
- Have an emergency pendrive that has the encrypted backup of all your data and carry it with you all the time (I keep it in my wallet). Nowadays it's easy to get a 512GB pendrive. Bonus is if you are linux user and the pendrive also has a bootable system, so you can boot your entire system from a pendrive, on any computer.
- Remember multiple complex passwords and use them regularly - use muscle memory + have a recovery note just in case you forget it (see the last paragraph)
Note that it's unlikely for multiple things to fail at once. I.e. my laptop could get stolen or an external backup HDD could break, but it's unlikely to happen at once. All could be destroyed in a single event (like the post describes), but then there's the offshore online backup - it's extremely unlikely that it would be nuked at the same time (unless literally in a nuclear war, but that would be a bigger problem). You could also forget the encryption and password manager passwords, but again, it's unlikely it would all happen at the same time.
On another note, I did lock myself out partially and almost locked myself out completely, due to forgetting a password used for encryption. I mis-typed a password to one of my password managers once, then as I tried to enter it again and again, the pattern got scrambled in my brain. That was not that difficult to recover from. But I almost did forget the password that I use to encrypt my /home and all backups. I followed the lessons from the previous mistake, took some 30 min pause and retyped the password (after 3 unsuccessful attempts previously) and I logged in. Whew. From then on, I store a part of the password on a piece of paper, scrambled with other passwords and remember the rest. The point is, never trust on muscle memory alone to store the password. It's possible to make a mistake, once you make a single mistake, it's possible to repeat the mistake and untrain the correct password from your brain permanently.
I never did game development but kinda wish that I started my career with that rather than apps. It must be really exciting to build words and implement all that complex algorithmic stuff, but I got too much momentum with apps, maybe in another life :)
Did you track your time? Can you share how much hours more or less you put into it, or at least how it changed when you went full time? Did you do more than 50% of the work in the last year of going full time?