79 karma · joined October 19, 2019
I share your scepticism of the cloud, particularly AWS. They create this hugely complex system, charge the earth, and then rather than bend over backwards to help people learn, they have the audacity to charge more money for the training and certifications.
Rather than set up your own physical infra, I think it's reasonable to pay for a VPS. To me that's not 'the cloud'. Get a barebones linux environment, and you can do whatever you like.
My whole mantra is making fast and lightweight apps. Being able to create apps and services without needing the cloud, I think, is an equally valid characteristic that you might expect a senior dev to have.
It was more a psychology thing. Before, I'd wake up absolutely exhausted, be tired at work all day, come home, fall asleep on the couch, make dinner. Then, I wouldn't want to go to bed because the idea of that being all my day was, was just too depressing. I wanted a few hours of actual life where I could just relax and watch TV.
They say the first step to beating alcoholism is admitting you're an alcoholic. Well, the first step to beating my problem was accepting I'm a wage slave. Yes, I sell a significant proportion of my waking life to a company in exchange for money. Until I can win the lottery that's the constraints of my life, so I could carry on as I was, or work within those constraints and make the best of things.
There is no better feeling than waking up needing the loo, and you still have four more hours before your alarm goes off instead of four more minutes. Getting to bed early is 90% of it.
So at the moment I'm passionate about fixing my daily routine to finally get enough sleep, and get to work early, leave early, and hopefully have energy to do things in the evening.
I've changed all my clocks back one hour so that psychologically it's easier to stomach. I have a light set on a timer to turn on in the morning, and strict bed time.
I can work flexible hours, but somehow showing up at 9:30 I always felt like I was "late" and felt rushed, and then having to keep working until 17:30 felt hard too. Doing the exact same hours but arriving 6:30 to 7:00 means I now feel like I'm ahead of the game each day, and I get to leave early, and there's still daylight when I leave work which is a huge motivator.
Over November I'll be going on a hiatus of anything that I do just to fill time and distract myself to prevent boredom.
Also, working from home is not for everyone. It pains me to say it, but I can't work from home. All I do is have an existential crisis about my life and I want to be anywhere else doing anything else, the whole time. In the office, I just crack on.
Or less sarcastically, a dating site that actually works, where it doesn't revert to the whole game theory optimum strategy leading to the worst result overall.