I've been working on a similar project - open source interface design tool with SVG as document format. Glad to see others think it's a good idea, too.
There's an impressive amount of functionality just in the alpha release. Looking forward to seeing how it evolves!
Will be interesting to see if this becomes the Google Reader replacement missing all these years. Substack is uniquely positioned to offer this kind of product.
I got started on Freenode IRC channels - someone had a question and it turned into a couple of years of freelance work. I went through marketplaces, but even 10 years ago, the race to the bottom made them an unprofitable channel.
Freelancing lets you build up a portfolio of work, build relationships with people who can give you work or referrals, solve problems in different domains with different tech stacks, and test yourself as a sole proprietor. It helped me get a lot of experience in a short time.
Times change and these days I would only recommend freelancing for people starting their careers or for people who need some income quick. There are a few issues: you usually won't be trusted to work on mission critical parts of the business, clients care less about quality than you do, sometimes you have to take work that's incompatible with your career goals, and price-sensitive clients can be difficult to deal with when it comes to payment. Looking back, I'd likely do it again, though I'd charge more and be more selective about projects.
Right, the hung nodes issue is probably least related to kops (though it'd be great if in the future, kops could leverage something like node-problem-detector to mitigate similar issues). Of the other issues, the incorrectly applied cluster config (kops decided to update certs for all nodes and messed them up in the process, then proceeded to mess up the Route53 records for the cluster) is the most serious one, and also not likely easy to reproduce. Apart from that, kops has been an excellent tool and we've been very pleased with it.
We've been running a small Kubernetes cluster of < 30 nodes that handles a variety of workloads using kops for almost a year now. kops is a significant improvement over other provisioning tools like kube-up.sh and kube-aws and has simplified infrastructure management a great deal. We can provision a brand new cluster and a couple dozen services across multiple namespaces in less than an hour - kops helps a lot with making that process smooth and reliable.
We have run into some issues with kops. Customizing the Kubernetes executables, e.g. using a particular Docker version or storage driver, has been buggy pre-1.5. Upgrading clusters to later Kubernetes versions has left some of the kube-system services, like kube-dns, in a weird state. Occasionally we encounter issues with pods failing to schedule/volumes failing to mount - these are fixed by either restarting the Kubernetes (systemd) services on the problem nodes or by reprovisioning nodes entirely. On one occasion, a bad kops cluster update left our networking in an unrecoverable state (and our cluster inaccessible).
I don't think there are any missing pieces, the initial configuration is what usually takes the most time to set up. You'll have to become familiar with the kops source as not everything is documented. As far as running 30 clusters with a 2-person team, it's definitely feasible, just complicated when you're constantly switching between clusters.
There's an impressive amount of functionality just in the alpha release. Looking forward to seeing how it evolves!