Great advice. One point I’d add is to just let yourself be nervous. Once I accept that my voice will wobble and my hands will shake then nervousness starts to feel a little more like excitement.
I enjoy soldering.
I enjoy using solder paste, being a human pick and place machine, and then putting boards in the oven.
I enjoy building physical devices.
But then I had a hardware startup and learnt something about myself.
I enjoy building one or two of something.
I absolutely hate building anything more than that.
If you’re going to write a post about why self-hosting is better than cloud*, then it’s probably a good idea to make sure your site loads in under a minute.
* at least I assume what this post is; I’m still waiting for it to load.
I think this varies wildly depending on where you live. Where I live (Melbourne), just the cost of suitable housing (a/ near a school, b/ close to most jobs, and c/ with space for 1+ children) is so high that it makes it difficult for a lot of couples to even consider children.
> If she gets the most joy from Rust, that's what she should use!
In the past I’d try to justify why I’d done something a certain way when another way would’ve been faster / better / cheaper, but I now realise that (at least for personal pursuits) an acceptable answer to “why?” is simply “because I wanted to”.
> He says he is “not bad” at maths – by which he means he came top in the state of New South Wales in his year 12 maths exams
As an Australian that has worked with American companies for a while, this is a behaviour I’ve had to overcome. If you tell an Australian you’re “not bad” at something then they’ll take that to mean that you’re actually quite good, whereas many Americans will understand it to mean that you’re not good.
Offshoring has been around for decades, and if it produced the desired results at the desired price then employers would replace every expensive employee with a cheaper one (where possible). As it stands, offshoring is commonly used by large body shops, and a non-zero amount of work is done offshore, yet the cost for tech talent has increased (at least on average, the last year or two has seen somewhat of a correction).
There are definitely highly talented individuals in low cost areas, but they quickly realise they can earn a Big Tech wage, and are willing to relocate (often relocation is a bonus; as much as we complain sometimes, quality of life in a HCOL area is comparably quite nice compared to many LCOL areas).
The threat of hiring a bunch of cheap offshore labour is a bogeyman; companies would already have done this if it were feasible.
I have a theory that someone found a bunch of cheap generic toys (vehicles, dogs, etc) and realised they could sell a lot of them if they slapped a logo on the side and made a cheap, below average cartoon that showed them to kids.
I’m almost certain that there are other examples of this too.