0. Founder
1. MacBook Pro 2019; Asus G56rj; Asus F15
2. Still using them, MacBook is old~ish, but still working, the heavy lift for containers, etc running on a separate home-lab machine, but still good. Battery is not decent anymore (~2-4h). The Old g56rj is my homelab (16gb mem). The F15 is for local LLM & stuffs that requires a dedicated 4xxx GPU (image processing, compiling, local ai tests)
I had side projects that died because the market shifted. When I was in middle school, I managed a small website for tabletop RPGs on a very limited market (a small European country), and the community was extremely toxic and kept copying my work and replacing the name in it, so after like 6-8 years of battling, I decided to close it. Now, after more than a decade, I plan to reopen it, uploading again my old stuff there as archives. I still have the domains.
I am doing the same. I won't invest until I have a working MVP. Naturally, finishing it afterwards is challenging with little free time, but it can be slowly progressed.
Ageism is still relevant, and probably will be. I see - and experience - that, if a senior has more experience than the tech department altogether, then it will cause tensions.
Also, most of the self-appointed C* level leaders (rich kid or l33tcode warrior) do not process well if someone has more experience and/or does not agree.
As I learned when I rewrote 10+ times my resume, you have to hide your experience and age because anything over 8-10 years is just not relevant anymore, or causes ageism (even ATS/GPT/LLM/AI/BOT give you negative points for the age). I have experienced this firsthand, since I have 20+ YoE.