As programmers we have one of the nicest jobs in society, there’s a lot of shit that we don’t have to deal with (figurative and literally), I’m very grateful for that.
If you want to go with a simple company outside of Croatia, maybe go with a UK Ltd, easy and cheap to set up and run. I used Sleek https://sleek.com/uk/ for that.
But if you live in Croatia, I would go with a local equivalent of a Ltd + Paddle/Gumroad/FastSpring.
I’m kind of in a similar boat in terms of tech stack. A few things you could do:
Try to get into https://www.codeable.io/. Haven’t tried personally yet, but might in the future.
Have a look at low-code/nocode tools and become an expert in one of them (Shopify, Wix, Webflow, Zapier, etc.)
Concentrate on landing pages and reach out to marketing agencies to ask if you can contract with them. Might be the easiest way to get a fulltime job as well.
Ignore the requirements and simply apply for some of the job ads. Especially for older big companies, many of them are likely to run on your stack and simply put things like cloud in because the hiring manager has heard that’s what they need to do.
Same here, love Codeigniter. It’s the perfect combination between not using a framework and having most of the features you need. I remember learning everything by reading the manual in one evening and I was ready to go the next day.
I worked on projects with Laravel as well but it never clicked for me. It feels to me that Codeigniter is one level of abstraction lower which I appreciate