There is an opportunity cost to starting a new business. Depending on market and your experience it can take several years before you get anywhere close to earning the same level of income as a mid to senior level FAANG employee. There is also the time commitment to dealing with everything outside of being an IC (taxes, healthcare, finance, marketing, disputes, legal).
To anyone exploring starting a new business I would keep the day job and suffer until you get to a point where the business is on a good clip and you can dedicate all your time to it. Otherwise spending 20 years at FAANG and enjoying your life is really not a bad way to live, in fact its a dream to 99% of the planets population.
Just look for companies that are profitable (read their financial statements) and have long average employee tenure (use linkedin premium, check company insights). I'm returning to a boring/old tech company because the benefits were better than any startup I worked at, I was making $400k-500k/yr, I had free time after hours and enjoyed my weekends.
I use web hooks now and they work really well for asynchronous situations. Spinning up a base app in node to do this is super simple and much easier to maintain than doing it in a kafka message bus.
Nice to see so many developers owning up to the "resume building" and being pragmatic about solving human/business problems versus technology for the sake of it.
Age 13-29, I mostly had oodles of free time to listen, explore music and a network of friends sharing their discoveries.
Age 30-40, I got really busy and had more people involved in my professional and private life so it became harder to fit in music exploration (something I really enjoy). And less friends sharing their music.
I think streaming has a lot to do with this as my parents had a monthly record club they organized. A bunch of friends with their kids got together at someones home, made dinner, drank and listened to new music in the background.
SBF was a bright kid that was further enabled by his parents and the environment he grew up in. Imagine taking peoples life savings and being on speed while arbitraging exchanges? Thats some real hubris to not reflect that you might make a mistake at some point. The intellectual arrogance further indicts his parents who likely cheered him on.