Great to see such initiative by Basecamp. This is good for devs around the world. GitLab sits on the other extreme with their "open salaries": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924957
For a person who is initially starting with Linux. I'd suggest you to get familiar with the terminal. I'd also ask what your primary use case is. If you are a software developer vs code is a great editor to download.
1. Want to resize your server? you can do it.
2. Want to create a new server and move some kind of elastic IP to point to this new server? you can do it with most cloud providers
3. Want to backup the whole disk, very easy to do it.
4. Want to spin up a 1000 instances for an hour? cloud servers can do it.
5. Want hourly pricing? cloud servers can do this.
One things that has helped me in the past is going anonymous and creating a project and just shipping features without thinking a lot about architecture and code quality. Making sure that I made progress every day.
I have given up my free time which I used to spend enjoying movies, television etc,. I don't get that much time to do that. Most of my time is consumed in the startup that I am building, my kids and a bit of contracting work. But, I am happy :)
Everyone has different definitions about "success" and "being happy". I can tell you as a father of 2 kids, that having kids has been one of the greatest things that has happened to me. I am really happy when they are around me. I am 32 which is relatively young but even I can't match their energy levels, this is only going to get worse. So, I am happy that I've had kids earlier than most fathers.
My definition of being successful is being happy and content. I make decent money and have a happy life, that is successful enough for me. What are you going to do after you retire with all that money? You should do that thing now!
I don't think GitHub Pages or S3 can support authentication using auth0 for static pages. This could be an interesting service, which allows you to put your website behind authentication from auth0. What use cases would need this kind of a setup?
Yeah, The first app that I am building has a lot of competitors. So, it is not really a question of whether the market is there. I definitely need the confidence If my startups are going to be successful :)
I saw the link to it from your profile. Interesting concept. There are variations of this available: https://fieldbook.com/, Airtable, etc. I'll send you an email :)
There is auth0 (https://auth0.com/) for authentication, and many hosts which support basic auth. What kind of use cases are you thinking when you say access control?
Why are you even thinking about it? Do you want to have the ability to downvote? In that case you should probably have a higher karma. Instead try to participate in useful conversations so that you may learn something from it. Karma just for the sake of it is really meaningless.