> Now that we got close to the date to make it official
> he's sort of soft-backtracked on his initial enthusiasm
He agreed. According to you, now he is trying to unagree.
Run. As fast as you can. Sounds like he was agreeable during the time you were used for free labor and it sounds like you recently finished something for him that he no longer needs you.
> spent about a week in the evenings and on the weekend (for free) helping out because of my personal interest in the field he's working in and to see if we'd get along further.
> helped automate part of his process, saving him manual work and I've started building out a new backend as well since his code was hastily written and is just a bunch of isolated scripts.
Did he ask you to do these things or did you look for things to do?
For some strange reason, it seems like the first choice of those cost-saving business owners usually tends to be bad devs and then the irony is that it costs them way more in the end.
Even better: Their code can also just not work at all and waste months of your time to the point that you are willing to spend more than $100k to fix everything by getting help from someone you know.
Yes that really happened in real life to a business owner I know.
You could take the first step to spend good money to hire a good technical person and pay that person well. Because it will pay off in protecting your IP.
Coincidentally, I also created a dynamic resume generator.
Mine is web-based and comes with a GUI to handle the filtering and display.
To the people reading here:
You can upvote my comment if you want me to host mine up for you to use it.
If there are enough upvotes to show demand for it, I will make the time to host it.
Even if their videos are wrong
Sorry there's no shortcut for that