aregsar

Flask could be one option

Try to transition from developer role to a system architect role.

I found this link that shows how htmx and alpinejs integrate with django. https://www.saaspegasus.com/guides/modern-javascript-for-dja...

You can use wsvincent.com blog and Django books if you go the Django route which I would recommend. Combine that with htmx and alpinejs.

Outsource that stuff and focus on your business value proposition. Start with simple vps on digitalocean or aws or use a service like heroku. Example services for monitoring are sentry for error monitoring, papertrail for logging and pingdom for uptime monitoring.

Try transitioning from full stack web dev to back end architect working with microservices and cloud infrastructure

I would take a look at Laravel. It has built in auth{n,z} options and you can deploy it easily with Laravel Forge sass that can deploy to multiple cloud providers using boring MySQL, Postgres and redis. And you still retain control of your infrastructure on the cloud provider. You can also develop locally using laravel sail docker dev environment.

For the life of me I don’t understand why you would do this on the weekend instead of Monday morning when you are getting paid for it, since this work is being done for your employer. Why would anyone trade their weekend time for free for someone else instead of spending that time enjoying their life or on something that would benefit themselves financially. Life is too short.

In software engineering there are always trade offs between approaches. There are no silver bullets. Context matters. OOP vs Functional, Monolith vs micro services, DRY vs duplication, Unit tests vs integration tests, and on and on. Don’t blindly adhere to what is claimed to be the best way or the right way to build software

You might try petite-vue

A beginner friendly stack if you like (modern) php 8 is Laravel. You can use Laravel sail to develop using docker without having to install anything on you local machine except for docker of course. You can add in laravel breeze for basic authentication and add laravel Livewire and alpinejs to avoid having to use JavaScript. You can easily launch this stack either on laravel forge or use the digital ocean app platform to avoid high costs of Heroku or complexity of aws. There are many resources for laravel. I’d start with free YouTube videos. I have found codecourse.com a very good source of how to build a verity of decently complex laravel applications

For every 20 minutes in front of the screen, go for a 10 minute walk. This has the added benefit of keeping your eyes, back,shoulders,neck, wrists and most importantly your brain in a relaxed state while getting things done. The trick is to keep thinking about what your working on during your walks. It’s sort of like background processing. When you return to your screen afterwards you may have the problem you were working on already solved.

It would be better to focus on html and especially vanilla JavaScript first and maybe even Typescript then start with react. Knowing JavaScript well helps with react. Pluralsight offers a number of excellent courses in all web technologies including react but its a paid service. Another paid option is egghead which has a focus on front end tech.

Also by the creator of the railtutorial the learnenough.com series

You need to first become a domain expert in some area. Then try to look for problems and areas of improvement in that domain. Notice what kinds of problem users are having and what solutions may already exist. Get involved in the ecosystem surrounding that domain. This will be a source of inspiration and ideas for a solution that you can build. The next step is to build a prototype as fast as possible and get it in front of users you think will get value out of it and see if they will actually pay for the prototype. Keep iterating and try to grow business from there.

While there are good intentions here, what happens if China and Russia military get ahead of US military in this technology due to us limiting ourselves

I would take a look at Laravel which is php on rails with less magic and more built in features such as authentication and background jobs. The most important thing is that its community is growing rapidly and it has a BDFL ala DHH in Taylor's Orwell. Also there are really good fresh resources such as latacasts Codecourse and the Laracon conferences

You want to always be in default startup mode so here is my contrary advice to number 2 which also sets you up for applying number 7

Spend a week setting up your future startup efforts for success at the beginning and then focus completely on reaching your customers and iterating on your solution to their problems.

step 1: first protect yourself legally by setting up a LLC you can use http://www.legalzoom.com/

or might even try to get access to stripe atlas https://stripe.com/atlas/faq

also get your terms of service setup. here is a resource for that. http://snapterms.com/

2-spend a few hours getting a generic domain name that is easy to spell. here is the registrar I use https://dnsimple.com/ also get SSL certs. you can use dnsimple but a free lets encryt cert is even better. https://letsencrypt.org/

3-spend a day or two setting up continuos integration this involves a code repo such as github, gitlab or bitbucket. and continuous build and testing service such as cicleci, travisci or codeship (although all the repos are integrating build and testing features)

4-setup a hosting service such as AWS, digital ocean or heroku. Personaly I would start out with heroku as hosting service but to keep costs low with a bit more effort AWS proper or digital ocean can work as well. setup a staging server so that when you push code to your repo it is automatically deployed to your staging server and from there you should set it up to promote the code to production with a single command. I use heroku pipelines in conjunction with some simple automation scripts for this.

Also at minimum setup hourly backup and restores for any databases that you may use.

5-by the end of the week you should be able to push a hello world to your real production server out there on the open internet.

Now at this point you have a real platform out there in the real world to start iterating on. Start talking to your customers and build really small features and push them to your repo on a daily basis to get feedback from your users.

Since you have a generic domain name you can pivot in any direction keeping the focus on just the one project that you are iterating on.

One last thing. Start a blog related to your business and talk about what your mission is, your product features and your technology

"could it be that my interviewers have worked on SEO so much that it’s difficult for them to conceive of non-SEO related strategies for growing a user-base?" ...And from the rejection email "I encourage you to spend more time on figuring out customer acquisition (possibly through non-search channels)." So I don't think that "it’s difficult for them to conceive of non-SEO related strategies" is the reason, since they actually suggest the non-SEO strategy in their rejection email. I think that you need to view this from the perspective of ycombinator. The only investments for them that makes sense is a startup with high growth rate. (the very definition of a startup by PG). When you are playing the David against the Goliath of "Yelp" you can not compete on SEO. So you have to have an alternative DEFENSIBLE advantage to allow you to dominate your market. Another thing from what I have read over the years is that ycombinator looks for teams that are not married to their initial idea. In fact they prefer the team to the idea. So if in the interview you come off as very defensive about the validity of your idea that could be a red flag.