Very similar situation. I have been cancelled, and I can't face going back to employment, but finding a way to earn a crust as a solo engineer is proving somewhat hopeless. At least I'm not paying tax any more. Checkmate Rachel Reeves.
It's true that (these days) typically, a senior dev will be handy with AWS. It's certainly not true that a senior dev is defined by being good with AWS. I bet Linus Torvalds isn't a big AWS guy.
I share your scepticism of the cloud, particularly AWS. They create this hugely complex system, charge the earth, and then rather than bend over backwards to help people learn, they have the audacity to charge more money for the training and certifications.
Rather than set up your own physical infra, I think it's reasonable to pay for a VPS. To me that's not 'the cloud'. Get a barebones linux environment, and you can do whatever you like.
My whole mantra is making fast and lightweight apps. Being able to create apps and services without needing the cloud, I think, is an equally valid characteristic that you might expect a senior dev to have.
This is cool. I'm actually working on a trivial web-app that will be similar. I'm just doing it as an exercise before I undertake something a bit more ambitious, but I'll be drawing inspiration from yours.
I've never seen the point in spending time and effort learning and memorising a bunch of vim commands. If I need to do more than simple edits to a file, I'll have a graphical desktop installed and use vscode.
I tend to use nano if using a CLI as it's more intuitive.
I've not tried anything like melatonin. I originally believed that if I normally go to bed at 1am, trying to sleep at 10pm would have me just lying awake, and the only way to change my sleep cycle was to force myself to get up early, so that I'd be tired earlier. That turned out not to be the case.
It was more a psychology thing. Before, I'd wake up absolutely exhausted, be tired at work all day, come home, fall asleep on the couch, make dinner. Then, I wouldn't want to go to bed because the idea of that being all my day was, was just too depressing. I wanted a few hours of actual life where I could just relax and watch TV.
They say the first step to beating alcoholism is admitting you're an alcoholic. Well, the first step to beating my problem was accepting I'm a wage slave. Yes, I sell a significant proportion of my waking life to a company in exchange for money. Until I can win the lottery that's the constraints of my life, so I could carry on as I was, or work within those constraints and make the best of things.
There is no better feeling than waking up needing the loo, and you still have four more hours before your alarm goes off instead of four more minutes. Getting to bed early is 90% of it.
I'm a night owl, always have been, always will be, but we live in an early bird world, and fitting in with that is worth a lot.
So at the moment I'm passionate about fixing my daily routine to finally get enough sleep, and get to work early, leave early, and hopefully have energy to do things in the evening.
I've changed all my clocks back one hour so that psychologically it's easier to stomach. I have a light set on a timer to turn on in the morning, and strict bed time.
I can work flexible hours, but somehow showing up at 9:30 I always felt like I was "late" and felt rushed, and then having to keep working until 17:30 felt hard too. Doing the exact same hours but arriving 6:30 to 7:00 means I now feel like I'm ahead of the game each day, and I get to leave early, and there's still daylight when I leave work which is a huge motivator.
I'm similar, I remember when I was a teen the way I'd obsess over things, now I just don't care about anything. I can't get excited. I think part of it is ageing, part of it could just be loneliness or depression, but I also think the way we can always distract ourselves with random crap on the internet is really bad for us.
Over November I'll be going on a hiatus of anything that I do just to fill time and distract myself to prevent boredom.
You regard a country having its own currency as a privilege? When the UK was a member state, the EU mercifully ordained that they could have our own central bank? This view/attitude was a big part of why people wanted to leave.
Start using it yourself, raise some PRs, get them to review it, bring up diffs on the screen, just ease them into it a bit. If you're confident using it, that might help them learn to trust it again.
Basically everything from the age of 11 onward. I can't think of a single thing I'd do the same if I could do it all again, but probably my biggest would be not to go to university. I was too young and naive and the absolutely last thing I wanted to was work hard and study, and it had the biggest impact in terms of the direction my life took.
If management aren't on board, and have an aggressive road map, and it's pulling in $20mil, it deserves to fail. Their on borrowed time, and likely they're the reason for the current situation. Run like the wind.
Dicing with Death
A series generally about dangerous roads in countries around the world, but largely focusing on African countries. It gives a view of sub-saharan countries that I've never seen anywhere else.