Back when I started, in 2002, all the local companies were Microsoft goons. Asp.net blah.
And I was the idealistic Linux PHP MySQL guy, version 3 back then. Life was simple and good.
I had work from local people and I got introduced to a local dipl. graphic design studio of 3 people. I created a guest book in PHP with design in 4 hours. I didn't know that the visit to that company was a test, because I went wherever with my friend, the singer/DJ. I also did tour posters for him or rather the band, because it was fun and he asked me to.
One poster in particular created a lot of drama or let's say attention, when they were on an Africa tour. I put the heads of the groups members on a known image of religious statues, replaced the statues' faces. Well the religious folk didn't take it too well but the youth liked it and the concerts were full.
Anyhow I digress. I got the job and created quite a few projects. I ran my own hosting company.
Then I got involved with a girl who cheated on me and that changed my life. I didn't work for others anymore. The designer company split up and I was out of sources for projects.
With the same friend I partnered to create a site which generated enough ad revenue to live a good life. I wanted more, that is, to expand, because I knew this wouldn't last. We could've signed young musicians and created a record label, but he was content with working in a factory and have his side gig, where he's the star and blah. Eventually the disagreement got too big and the project ended.
I did PHP until 2013 then moved to Go because the stupidity in PHP and the wrong type of dogma just became too much, and Go was great. It took a lot of burden away vs the PHP craze, the OO fetishism, fucking dogma of stupidity.
But Go's ecosystem was barren. I wanted years on writing routers and libraries. I got into AngularJS, because the Google+ hype was real. Then moved to Angular but oh well. And finally Vue as my go to choice of frontend framework, with Quasar. On the backend I use Go with ent and either postgres or mysql, but also mongodb.
Nowadays all the companies in the area are PHP joints or C# or react frontends.
I can't get in touch with them, they're stuck in their beliefs, are too arrogant to even consider someone with 20 years of hands on experience knows better.
So I just work for myself, and check jobs, which are ridiculous in their requirements. I love building stuff, but I hate the whole IT industry. The stupidity, the dogma, the hype and the arrogance.
It's like, the PHP jobs are 90% shopware e-commerce and have literally no big requirements, but I hate PHP. As soon as you cross over to Go land, it's all cloud, microservices, broker, grpc or similar and of course Docker and Kubernetes. Because they all read the hype about k8s and cloud on their golf courses. I'm sick of it.