I guess it depends on what is considered a "social network". I canceled my facebook a couple years ago and don't have twitter or instagram or anything else like that. I do however belong to some forums (vbulletin type sites) and pay for some extra perks on them. Like being able to post in the classifieds, etc... I notice that since getting off of facebook I started going back to forums that had specific topics. I find that the discussions on there are much friendly an about a specific topic.
We use a combination of splunk, solarwinds' server & application monitoring and new relic. We're about to start using prometheus for monitoring some apps that we've moved into containers. We also have several thousand monitors/alerts that are setup in ipmonitor that we're trying to get moved over to sam.
Maybe I'm missing something, but why even use Patreon, just ask for donations directly from people. As for the original question though, just because you have a job doesn't mean you shouldn't be rewarded for your open source work as well.
What I found helped me the most was find some real world things that you'd like to accomplish and just start digging in. You'll learn the things you need along the way. I don't usually find tutorials very helpful as they just tell me to type some exact thing and surprise surprise I get the response from the tutorial, that doesn't really teach me much.
You would actually be hard pressed to find ANY major codebase that isn't using at least one dynamically typed language in at least some significant capacity.
I've been using it for lots of things lately. The last thing was to process ebs volumes that get left behind when leostream deletes instances from it's pools. (we need fresh machines all the time, so that's why we delete these instead of re-using) We have it delete the machine from the pool, and the ami is set to not delete the volume. I use a cloudwatch event to detect this, spin up a new ec2 instance, attach the available volume, process some logs from it and then delete the new ec2 instance along with the volume.
I used to use a combo of python tools. Requests, beautifulsoup mostly. However the last few things I've built used selenium to drive headless chrome browsers. This allows me to run the javascript most sites use these days.
