Life of a Tech-nomad.
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As someone who grew up in two different places (granted, they were strong opposites), and as someone who knew many children whose parents moved a lot, I'm warning you; It has a very negative effect on most children, loosing your friends/peers and not being allowed to "invest" in them. As an adult you might think, oh, well he can use Skype or e-mail then, and what's so bad about making new friends. No. Eventually most of them stop making friends, or make them very superficially. Your kids most likely won't have childhood friends, friends they trust, nor close friends. And no, family (or you) is not a substitute either.
> sacrificing the safety & comfort of a ‘normal life’ and just doing what it takes to make something happen
That's great as long as it's only your stuff you're sacrificing.
I do commend the bravery and spirit, but I'm strongly against including kids in it.
My parents moved again and again then divorced and moved again and again. I attended four different high schools and have no life-long childhood friends nor a "hometown" nor many great memories of family. My siblings and I were the casualties of their lifestyle and half of us are dead before 30. Our education and many other advantages of a more stable life suffered.
We moved at least every 5yrs - my dad was in the military... I also don't have a hometown and went to plenty of different schools around the world. I don't have any of the negative feelings about moving or not having a real hometown... nor did I have any issues keeping friends long distance or otherwise. Just to give you some perspective... not everyone has the same experiences.
I do have close friends, and I do have friends I trust...I've just met them all in the past few years. Do I wish I had a group of people I grew up with? Sure, and I envy that in some, but the great thing about being an adult is that you get to pick your own family.
I don't get this piece. If you're a developer, you should have the best development gears you can afford. Why have it so miserable to make it more of a punishment than a happy environment to work in.
> If you're a developer, you should have the best development gears you can afford.
There's also the school of thought that you should be using the hardware configuration you expect most users will be running and make sure your product runs acceptable on it.
Giving the devs highly powered machines just removes them from what the majority of users will experience. While most people still surf the web with Core 2 Duo machines many webdevs have overpowered i7 rigs with gigabytes of RAM. And that's why so many JavaScript loaded websites are unusable on anything but the latest quadcore i7 systems nowdays.
This might have been true for desktop software development, but not in this case. In the context of mobile apps, it's the testing devices might as well be low-end ones, not the development machines.
> If you're a developer, you should have the best development gears you can afford.
generalization.
This is true if you're doing heavy 3D rendering. For those of us doing anything from web to kernel development, it's almost certainly overkill.
I've been running years behind in hardware for over a decade; my workstation certainly isn't slow, but it doesn't take a lot to run Python interpreters and web servers; Eclipse is pretty heavy, but even a high-end dual core or low-end quad core with a couple gigs of RAM will handle it well.
Having more power than you need to work comfortably isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is in many cases pointless, and unless you're making money hand over fist or using your rig(s) for something else that's intensive (like high end gaming), it's an unnecessary expenditure that just doesn't make much sense. At some point all you're doing is hurting your own bottom line (and that of your company, if you have one).
You can use the extra computation power, DRAM and drive space when you do complex data analysis or run virtualization. I can either run huge data sets or have multiple VMs running to simulate various server configurations and test cases without having additional physical gear. And this is on a beefy commodity laptop that costs less than most Apple gear.
As for spinning up Amazon clusters, that's fine when you don't have to care about company/clients data security. We live in the post NSA revelation world and if you connect from overseas, your security is null and void.
;)
An 2008 Macbook might be sufficiently faster. Good for you.
I'm torn between thinking I'm putting too little time in my software business (solo developer), and thinking that I'm spending too little time with my family.
I don't want to believe I need to sacrifice my family life to be successful.
Absolutely. The problem is that if you go head-to-head with people that will go all out there is a chance that they'll be able to outgun you with a similar sized team.
In practice there are ways to offset for that depending on the situation, for instance, you could have more experience, better quality people you're working with, an established track record and/or a better launchpad.
So it's not just a one-dimensional (time put in) problem.
Thanks for writing though. I think too many people think success will happen within the first year or so and don't realize there are often pivots and things don't often go ... as planned.
Bottom line: What's normal is not the same for everybody.