CyberFonic

I too wrote something similar in Python a couple of years ago. BUT that's not the point. Your contribution is well documented and effectively shared with whomever might want to use it. That is of value to our community.

The purpose of a MVP is to gauge the market potential of a product. For that reason I would prioritize functionality over glossy looks. Unlike a piece of jewellery or art, a smartphone app needs to deliver some specific value, i.e. people will pay for it.

As @CMD30 notes, CraigsList did very well. That is because it delivered new and useful functionality. You can always polish the appearance once you gain traction.

I find the programming part Ok. It's the meetings and constantly being interrupted by managers that sends me batty.

When I had my pickup truck, friends would ask me for help in moving fridges when moving between rentals. Typical payment was beer and pizza so not too bad.

Depends on what you are implementing and how.

I find Lisp good if you have a rough top-down design and lots of bottom-up implementation details to suss-out. You can test each bit as you build and in passing you might implement a DSL for your domain. There are many compiled Lisps (both CL and Scheme) so performance can be quite good.

Generally, it is hard to deploy Lisp on client systems (if that is a requirement) without introducing many dependencies. Loko Scheme being an exception, since it (like Golang) compiles to a single executable with no dependencies.

GC and VMs are common in many alternative environments so that's not a point of difference.

If you like Lisp and your dev and target environments are suitable and you are a solo developer or have a team of Lispers then why not use it? In most general terms Lisp is no better nor worse than the alternatives.

WeWork imploded in 2019 - so that proves your appraisal. Didn't have to wait for 2020.

From an investment valuation point of view, any company whose shares are being traded at more than say 12 to 15 x dividend payments has people owning shares who are hoping that they will find an even bigger fool to pay for their shares than they did.

Just have a look at the SEC filings for whichever companies you are interested in and see for yourself. You won't have to look for long.

For me success is being happy and living within my means. Did go through the corporate drone phase but big income meant high cost of living so I actually didn't end up saving anything.

Once I made the decision to prioritise lifestyle, I went contracting. Only taking on projects that I liked and working for people I liked. Learning to say "No" was hard at first, but that too can be learnt. I charge for completed units for work, not by the hour.

Beware of thinking that success = having and spending lots of money. If you don't have good health, then you can't really be happy, etc. Important to remember that you can't spend your way to wealth.

I have to admit, I am lazy and tend to use the Debian packaged software with apt-get, etc. The only drawback is the some packages seem to be quite a bit behind the up to date versions on the project's git repository. Personally I tend to choose the convenience of the Debian packaged software to wrangling with fiddly dependencies during compilation.

Keyboards are a very personal choice. Personally I actually prefer to use the Apple Magic keyboard with my desktop Linux system. You can remap keys easily with system tools. Although my next best preference are mechanical keyboards, i.e. using Cherry key switches.

I have used by 13" MBP in a TwelveSouth BookArc with 24" LCD, a Magic keyboard and Touchpad. It works very well as a pseudo desktop. The only provisio is that you must have the power connected and switched on. The combo turns on when you hit the side button the keyboard or touchpad. Every once in a while that doesn't work and you need to open up the MBP to get things running. I think it is a BlueTooth glitch; I have a similar problem with another Apple Magic keyboard running with a Linux system. Then again, BT seems flakier on Linux.

Timely warning! I was looking at Surface at the store waiting for the New Year sales.

Now I'll just stick with a ChromeBook.

Facebook is an advertising platform. You might not be paying for it, but corporations are paying for the data and eyeballs. As it is often said: "If you are not paying, then you are the commodity being sold."

If you are not charging then you don't have a business and investors want to see revenue and a return on their investments.

With the small number of active users, perhaps you should look at selling your technology to a company that will be able to spend on marketing.

Used to use my iPad with PlainText for taking notes; SimpleMind for mind mapping; KeyNote for presentations and of course Chrome for web browsing.

Since I can no longer upgrade the software due to Apple's forced obsolescence, I have relegated the iPad, in a Logitech holder, to being the home automation console and using a Lenovo tablet for business purposes. But for the most part I prefer to use a ChromeBook when not in the office. I find the ChromeBook to be far more practical than the iPad ever was.

I invested 2 minutes of my time and found:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/live-streaming-on-aws/

and

https://aws.amazon.com/mediaconvert/pricing/

Assuming you trial a MVP using AWS those two pages might give you some indication of ball park costs.

If you are looking at co-lo provisioning then you will probably need to plunk down in the order of USD10,000 to USD50,000 to test the waters.

Either way, in the long term I think your per minute per connection costs will probably be in the order of the AWS costings. After all, they do that sort of thing on a massive scale and have a great deal of experience.

Good luck with your planned venture.

I'm sure there will be many useful suggestions. Mine are limited to some specific issues:

Power: strongly recommend that you install an intelligent UPS. That is one that can shutdown the server on command once the battery power is below a set threshold.

Non-fixed IP address: the simple solution is to configure one of the many dynamic DNS services. Most firewall/routers have support for this feature.

Internet facing server: Although you can use DDNS, I personally would rather have a well firewalled server doing suitable pull requests.

Gmail: you can configure either LDAP or POP3 and periodically copy down all your emails. POP3 is a bit simpler to set up, whilst LDAP has more features. You could use Thunderbird or simply a suitably configured SMTP daemon.

Duplicate files: the 'fdupes' utility can be very useful. However, I recommend doing a backup before you run it. There are scenarios when a malformed command can delete more than you had intended.

Backups: no matter how much storage you have on your HTPC it would be prudent to configure scheduled backups to external hard-drives which then you store securely, preferably with at at least one set at another location.

I agree with the points by @codingdave. and I have a further observations :

If you are an early startup stage employee, surely you would have an established relationship with the founders. If so, then you should simply bring them up to date with what is "really happening". If you have been sidelined a long-time ago, then you have too look at how and why. Is there anything that you can do to transcend the more recently hired "management".

If in your assessment your solution can make millions, then you have to ask why hasn't it yet? Are you overvaluing your contribution or are the various problems the stumbling blocks?

As for stock options, etc. At the end of the day you have to consider dilution, etc. They often end up being worth a lot less than you might think.

BTW: Yes, I think you are suffering from acute burnout. Might be a very good idea to get professional health support before the stress impacts your physical health.

I never liked having to install Flash plug-ins. And I hated all the gunk that was created with Flash. So I quarantined a single older notebook to run the few Flash dependent apps that I needed to use from time to time. Ok, so much for my bias.

Technology has moved on a great deal since Flash was first released to address the shortcomings of the HTML standards of the day. We now have WASM, HTML5 and ES6. For games there are both 2D, 3D canvas operations and SVG. From an infrastructure point of view, support is far better than Flash is able to offer in 2020. I expect that authoring tools will catch-up and surpass what was possible with Flash tooling.

First things first, your health is important. See a GP and possibly also get a referral to a suitable therapist. You appear to be severely depressed and understandably so. So professional help is critical.

You are not alone. Many of us have had similar setbacks to you. Recognise the sunk cost fallacy aspect of it. What has happened is in the past. Extract the learnings from the experience so that you will embark upon new projects and not repeat those mistakes.

"It's darkest before dawn." -- let the sunshine in and pick a new adventure.

I thought that the concept of NodeJS was fantastic. But in everyday use, I found it bloated and many of the libraries of rather dubious quality. After trying to use NodeJS for several projects, I have gone back to using mostly Python based servers with a couple of performant servers written in C. Have experimented with Go, but so far I haven't used it for any production servers.

I cannot find Linux laptops on Dell's .com.au site. Never have in the past either. Has MS totally pwnd Oz?

After spending a great deal of time and effort in tracking down some obscure bug and fixing the code, a bit of venting using emojis is almost a reflex action.

Perhaps you don't need to spend. People who spend far more than you also limit their future options. AFAIK very few people aspire to live their entire lives working in a succession of jobs.

Have you considered simply investing your surplus income and finding where your passion lies? Once you know what you want to do far more than shuffling off to work everyday, then you will have the capital with which to follow your dream life.

The fact that you wear different hats suggests that you are more hands-on than the typical manager in a mid/large company. In order to progress you might need to show leadership, P&L accountability, business knowledge. Technical prowess is rarely the path to upper management levels.

If advancing your career is your ambition, then you might need to side-shuffle into a role where you do more management and direct others to perform the roles that you current perform from time to time.

There are a lot of forums and other resources out there. In my experience they are focused on specific technology or application niches. The resources for home automation are very different to that of industry 4.0, etc.

Perhaps if you were to be more specific, then it would be easier to suggest suitable resources.

In my view one way of economic thinking for developers is to look at the specific value that their work delivers to the client or a specific business niche.

I see myself as a problem solver. Most of the time the solution is a system of systems with some programming included. The programming is a means of interconnecting the subsystems and coordinating their functionality.

Most developer jobs quickly become monotonous as well, especially at the entry level.

You say you have 3 years experience with CFD, yet not much programming experience -- that doesn't exactly make sense to me.

Have you looked at how CFD is similar to the flow of money, goods, music, video, etc? Making career changes based on what you already know, but in a different field is far more effective than restarting at the bottom on a new profession. Perhaps you could look at what areas of application appeal to you more than automotive and then look at how you could apply at least part of your existing expertise to that area. Once you have that sorted, you could focus your programming learning within that domain and thus start looking for work in that new area.

The Theranos investors were impatient to make it big. Would they have had Edison's persistence for 1000 attempts at making their innovation work?

Elizabeth Holmes's talent was to exploit the gullibility of greedy investors. History is replete with fraudsters using illusionary innovations to hoodwink investors. The Theranos management team are merely just a recent example.

I have owned a Fitbit Alta for over 2 years. When I got it I wore it all the time, except when it was charging. The strap broke after 3 months, bought a replacement strap and that is now held together with twine. Now I only wear it when going for a long walk, i.e. over 100 minutes.

The sleep tracking function was OK, but I think it is not robust enough to be worn 24x7 (less the 5-6 hours it takes to recharge). From various tests, the step counter seems to be in error more than the claimed 5%. I still use the phone app to track my weight using a conventional (non-Fitbit) digital scale and entering the values manually most days.

It's one of those techy things. When you don't have one you think of all the benefits. After months of ownership the novelty wears off and it is all rather mheh. Fitbit keep sending me emails to upgrade to their latest and greatest. Seriously, you can buy a Seiko Kinetic watch for the price of a low end Fitbit and the Seiko will work for decades without even needing a new battery. Why keep buying ever more expensive smartwatches?