I've been bitten by the ops hellscape of microservices and various tech many times throughout my career, and it's definitely shaped how I think about designing and building software now.
I'm using a PaaS, so I didn't want to pay the extra money for a cron job. Maybe not a wise a choice, but here we are.
Totally agree about the issues I might face. I'm glad that the Clojure REPL is a thing, so I can test out all of a job's functionality before sending it off to async land.
Start smaller. You have to walk before you can run. I might be biased because I've tried and failed at a few startups, but this is what I'm doing:
Try building smaller / easier businesses first. Try freelancing or try selling something, anything, like a course. I think there's a very strong correlation between who can make it as freelance and those who can make it with a startup. The market is validated, and you'll get experience in selling, branding, marketing, etc.
Unless you live in Thailand or Bali, I don't see much option for mitigating risk here. Having a freelance/consulting business is going to do wonders for your entrepreneurship career. It'll give you more control over your work schedule, so you can keep making bigger and bigger bets. Just make sure you get high-value clients so you can make margin. Otherwise you'll be hunting for work all the time.
Last piece of advice: don't listen other people (LOL). Everyone has an opinion on how to be an entrepreneur and what 'true' entrepreneurship is. Focus on yourself and where you want to be and how to build a life where you can keep taking shots at the goal.
I've been self-employed for nearly three years as a freelancer / consultant.
Though, I have a course I've pre-sold during the recent work drought. These pre-sales have been paying the bills. So there's lots of pressure to deliver on them while still trying to line up freelance/consulting work.
I started doing this because I had big indie hacker dreams. Now I just think that I'm partially unemployable. What matters most to me is controlling my own destiny and Intellectual Property rights. Writing code is what fills me up, and It needs to be protected. Otherwise, I feel trapped, growing bitter and angry over time. So I'll keep doing this until I have more products.
My ultimate goal is to create a portfolio of products to pay the bills. I have no particular biased towards what. They could be courses, ebooks, or even games. 2023 was a special case in terms of cash flow (business cycle goes down), but I'm hopeful for the future, and my course sold decently well, so I think I'm getting the hang of this entrepreneurship thing.
Without getting too far into the plot, there are definitely dystopian elements, though the part in SF isn't really dystopian in the way that Bridge Trilogy is, so yea. Depends on what OP wants.
Context is very important in these kinds of use cases. If you work with something niche, I think these tools are less valuable because the training data becomes sparse.
For example, GPT-4 produces Javascript code far better than it produces Clojure code. Often, when it comes to Clojure, GPT-4 produces broken examples, contradictory explanations, or even circular reasoning.
Have you tried Cursor out of curiosity? No ties to the company and long-time dev (Scala mostly), just genuinely found it to be transformative to my development practice like no tool before.
https://blog.janetacarr.com I write a lot about Clojure and software developer with Clojure. I only have like a dozen posts though, but people seem to like them (mostly).
