An Interview with the Mad Fientist: Programmers and Early Retirement
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On being extreme with finances: Personally, I'm pretty extreme. Every time I spend money, it's like the worst case scenario. So much thought process has gone into it beforehand. It's like, "Could I get it used? Could I borrow it? Do I really need it? Do I really want it?" And then, if all those things happen, then it's like, "Okay. I'll buy it." And then, I try to find it for the best price.
On the new iPhone: You don't need a new iPhone every year because, guess what? That iPhone 9 only made you happy for what, maybe a few weeks? And then, it was just a phone again until the iPhone 10 came along and you were like, "Oh, that's gonna make me happy." What's important is realizing that about yourself and looking at past purchases, thinking, "Oh, I spent a lot of money on that thing. Did it actually make me happy for very long? Could I have gotten it used instead? Did I need it at all?"
On favorite languages/frameworks: Ruby on Rails, definitely. I just fell in love with it, it was so much easier to get something built that was actually robust and it didn't feel like it was just gonna break, compared to all the .NET stuff I was doing before. It just made me love programming again, and I still use it to this day. I've built all my custom Mad Fientist stuff with Ruby on Rails, and it's just so easy to put something together, deploy it to Heroku, and then you've got something that's usable. That's exactly what I did for the FI Laboratory. I just threw that together and threw it up on Heroku over a couple of weekends. I always expected to make it nicer and better, but I just never touched it and now it's got 60,000 users, and it's just absolutely crazy, and I'm still hardly paying anything: $29 a month I think.