Niche e-commerce site for a health product I import. I am only one of two people who sells the product in my entire country. I make about 75% margin on each order, $50-200 per month. It's just a handful of trips to the post office every month. I think its fun.
I also wonder how much of this is self-inflicted by programmers and company culture re-inforces it. I am not one of those people who _love_ to code in their free time. I like to close the lid of my computer and go outside and work out and smell the air and watch the clouds. The less eyes on the screen the better. I get the feeling that most programmers are not this way.
I built an app with Neo4j once. It was a Rails app, built it from scratch in Neo4j.rb. I was hired by business where the owner hadn't coded any apps in 15 years and was obsessed with the theory of the graph database and how it was so much "easier" than using SQL.
Suddenly, every useful gem that allows you to throw together an app in 5 minutes had to be rewritten from the ground up. Things like authentication, pagination, etc. which could be done in 10 minutes in a standard Rails app took days.
The worst part is that I was not permitted to contribute these customs gems back to Open Source. He was a very selfish person who used almost exclusively proprietary software and thought that any of the long hours we spent to rebuild all of these basic puzzle pieces to work with Neo4J would give other people a leg up or advantage - as if competitors out there would decide to build a direct competitor with our identical tech stack and we wanted to slow them down as much as possible... sorry boss, but if they wanted to build a competitor prototype they would just build it with an SQL relational database and have the entire app done in 2 weeks.
About 3 months into the project I mentioned to someone at a technology meetup that I was building in app in Neo4j.rb and he laughed at me. I was drinking the graph koolaid still at the time and tried telling him about the advantages. He told me that as soon as the app was deployed I would see how much extra work I would have in-store for me. To be fair, he was right. Migrations just didn't work the same. Eventually I was discharged from the company because I did not agree with the management's unethical business practices and continue doing shady things and agree with their moral jusitifcations for crimes so the app never actually saw the light of day.
I am sure there are many production apps succeeding with Neo4j, but in the end I just saw a project whose scope was 10x what it should have been. If you have a "slow" app that launches 3 months earlier than your competitor, you still win.
To everyone talking about medication in this thread:
I have always had ADHD but was intelligent enough to get by through my schooling with bad study habits. I "got away" with it so to speak, with cramming at the last minute and being able to retain lots of information while my peers had to put more dedication into it. It seemed up front like a solution but in reality I was only cheating myself.
Once I got out into real software development world, I just couldnt sit down at a screen for all the hours I needed to without wandering away, so I got an official diagnosis of ADHD and a perscription of Vyvanse.
I spent 5 years going off and on the medication. There is nothing else but vyvanse that will let me sit down and churn out code for hours and hours on end, but it makes your mental state absolute hell and you will burn out. It was a short sighted solution and the amphetamine dependency and withdrawls I experienced. When I finally managed to quit I was such a mental mess I had to take 6 weeks away from work with mood swings.
Additionally to note, the amphetamines make it more difficult to learn new thing but make it easier to churn out what you already know, which isn't the most effective thing in our field.
In the end, what do I use now to medicate? Intense physical excersize. Daily. Lots of it. Tire out your body. Seriously. Fight against every one of your urges to lose focus and stay on task for generated short bursts then switch tasks and environments.
There is not feeling in the world better than being able to be productive without amphetamines after feeling you 'need' them because you 'have ADHD'.
I've been microdosing and taking full trips upwards of 300ug over the last year and turned my life around. I've been able to conquer my inner demons , learn to love development again and break ground on personal motivation and roadblocks and problem solving.
I was prescribed vyvanse and tried modafinil for a while and found they harmed more than helped in the long run , based all around getting me to enjoy mundane tasks rather than chase the excitement of challenges that acid gives me
Toronto is currently full of dispensaries on every corner. Some are open late and you're always close to one, independent local businesses with people in the community making money and spending it locally.
It will be sad to see a government monopoly turn weed distribution into the LCBO style. Expect prices to go up to $15-20g, cut down the number of locations and closes at 9pm.