I'd argue physical channels and access are even less secure. People are broken easily (you can't trust anyone) and surveillance is everywhere and more sophisticated than you imagine. My first job was at a US-based video surveillance company owned by Israelis and used by casinos, stadiums, and entire cities. I have an idea of what it's capable of :)
What we need is a truly secure and private method of communication and payment. We're close on both.
There's a difference between becoming incredibly good at frontend and knowing enough to get things done and be a productive member of a team (ie, not get fired like the OP).
"I don't do X type of work" is pretty unrealistic and comes across as more stubborn than anything else. This is especially true in a small/scrappy company up to medium size companies where you're expected to wear multiple hats.
Maybe at Google you can get away with being the "person that does X-only" but that doesn't work in most companies.
Your job is to do _the thing_ if that thing includes front end work, then you do the front end work.
It depends on your threat model. If your threat includes three letter agencies and nation states then you're right-- don't use Proton. However, 99.9% of people don't have that threat model. In that case, Proton is better than most other providers out there (for email, vpn, etc).
It would seem the best way to put an end to the ES fiasco is to simply release what you have (and post the update to Kickstarter)?
If the engine and tools are 90% complete, it's better to release 90% of something than nothing at all. The backers would no longer be able to call it a scam. It's probably the only way to put it all to rest.
"Senior" holds no weight with me. I've had plenty dumb founding conversations with "seniors".
My favorite was at the company that was self hosting their code. The senior team lead wanted me to help him find a memory leak that plagued the product for months. Customers were told to restart the application every few weeks (this was a C++ application).
I sat down with the senior and looked at the code. I spotted the error.
I was like, "You know when you do new[] you need to use delete[]?" as all of his deletions were without [].
I live near Intel HQ and I know many Intel employees. Everyone I know has been interviewing at other companies for the last 8-12 months. I haven't met a single person that had a positive thing to say about Intel and its future.
You need to start by copying. Find a page and try to reproduce it on your own. Keep doing it and you'll get to the point where you're comfortable doing your own designs.
I am currently maintaining three SaaS products I built with Go. It's a great tool for the job.
One was with Go with vanilla HTML/CSS/JS (with Turbolinks classic for snappy page loads/transitions). The other two products were built with Go and HTMX+AlpineJS+Tailwind CSS.
In retrospect, I'd like to remove Tailwind as it bloated the HTML a lot and rebuilds are slow (~300ms to ~500ms per-build). Alpine has its uses, but I don't think I used it enough to really need it.
My favorite quote on perfectionism and one I often think about,
"You know, the whole thing about perfectionism — The perfectionism is very dangerous, because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in … It’s actually kind of tragic because it means you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is." - David Foster Wallace
Anyone that has built and shipped something has likely struggled with it. You have a great idea. You build it and it's never as great as it was in your head. You need to ship it anyway, but doing so means getting over that perfectionism. Some can. Most can't.
What we need is a truly secure and private method of communication and payment. We're close on both.