I love your work Michael Drogalis, I remember when you made onyx (didn't it start with a different name?) in clojure! I still to this day suck at clojure and never managed to get a job to work with in and I'm stuck doing Ruby, how about that!

Have been following your journey and hope you are successful on it. At least in term of a software developer I'm sure you are best class :-)

Taking the plunge is very difficult, hope you at the end feel like it was really worth it. "Your friends making more than you" isn't a really big deal if you feel that despite this, you are still more satisfied than working in a day job.

I do work in a day job and don't even make that much, but also lack the courage to run my business, as you've seen, even being a great and outstanding software engineer like you still (and smart overall) will still have no assurance of success.

Given that life will eventually end no matter if you have money or not, what matters is living life to the fullest and scratching those itches & desires before we're too old, sick and tired to be able to those things. Just like you did.