I had side projects that died because the market shifted. When I was in middle school, I managed a small website for tabletop RPGs on a very limited market (a small European country), and the community was extremely toxic and kept copying my work and replacing the name in it, so after like 6-8 years of battling, I decided to close it. Now, after more than a decade, I plan to reopen it, uploading again my old stuff there as archives. I still have the domains.
Readit Newshuncyrus commented on I launched 17 side projects. Result? I'm rich in expired domains · Posted by u/cesargstn
huncyrus commented on I launched 17 side projects. Result? I'm rich in expired domains · Posted by u/cesargstn
I have now reached the point where I won’t buy the domain name until I get a prototype ready.
I’ve only bought one domain name since then and got the project out!
I think the domain name is your reward for finishing your minimum viable product.
I am doing the same. I won't invest until I have a working MVP. Naturally, finishing it afterwards is challenging with little free time, but it can be slowly progressed.
Ageism is still relevant, and probably will be. I see - and experience - that, if a senior has more experience than the tech department altogether, then it will cause tensions.
Also, most of the self-appointed C* level leaders (rich kid or l33tcode warrior) do not process well if someone has more experience and/or does not agree.
As I learned when I rewrote 10+ times my resume, you have to hide your experience and age because anything over 8-10 years is just not relevant anymore, or causes ageism (even ATS/GPT/LLM/AI/BOT give you negative points for the age). I have experienced this firsthand, since I have 20+ YoE.
Many companies sit on some cloud/managed infrastructure that often provides internal logging, like AWS CloudWatch, which requires a bunch of tricks, configs, and smart logging strategies, but can be cheap even for hundreds of log streams and millions of log lines.
I heard about Datadog, and how good and expensive it could be.
I met many companies that use ELK or self-hosted Grafana.
In short: inflated tech stacks, "quick and dirty" solutions, and too many inexperienced decision maker on the market
Longer: React became standard because people with actual no frontend knowledge (and taste) wanted to have building blocks, doesn't matter how bad, ugly and slow it is.
Next.js is hyped, because it does many things quickly (and dirty), a low learning curve. It does what PHP did 10+ years ago, and since so many new devs are in the market, for them, this is a new thing (you know, every joke is new for a new born...).
Next.js is pretty much just used as a baseline to load shadcn blocks/components, have a routing that does not require a backend, then push everything to be static (No, I won't mention that, if you can write decent vanilla JS code, how much faster, safer, efficient code you can write instead of that monstrocity).
How many bad startup companies are on the market (3-8-year-old companies that still state it is a startups and still looking for funding, without an actual user base) they tend to have "opinionated" leaders who basically have always some friend who recommend things that is pretty much just hype-train decision without actual experience or understanding the consequences.
Many companies burn hundreds if not thousands of dollars on infrastructure to fire up Next.js. And if you check all the features that are stated for it and compare it with 5-10 years old PHP solutions, you will realize, you can run the same product on a monthly 5 dollar vps too... (unpopular truth)