231–240 of 243 posts
For example, if I am working at Google/Amazon/Microsoft. What side projects won't get me into legal problems?
Can I work on search, email, virtualization, etc. without being in conflict of interest?
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I want to share something here since not having enough time is a theme for me. As the child of immigrants I have a guilt about spending money - overcoming this I'm starting to look as money as a way to buy more time, so I don't feel bad a number of things e.g. getting healthy takeout (I still cook because I like it), having my laundry done for me, even buying software, etc. It's just efficient. I don't know if anyone…
Love this comment. In a similar vein: like everyone else here, I work the typical 9 to 5 then work on side projects nights & weekends. I agree with the spend money approach! Invest in software to become more efficient, save time avoiding manual tasks. I'm eating healthier nowadays, which means time needed to cook. However, I save some time by using InstaCart to deliver groceries to me. That's huge! Last, taking a goo…
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Once you have children, everything changes. I went from having 5+ hours of free time each day to -5 hours of free time every day. You have to get super efficient with everything in your life. Cut out the things that aren't the most important things. Kids (especially when they're between 0-7 years old) take up an enormous amount of energy and focus. You'll learn tricks to improve your performance and squeeze more time…
Quite true; and it's oddly frustrating to me to notice how much time the pre-kids version of me wasted. There should be a way to borrow someone else's kids for 6 months or so, force yourself to carve the waste out of your life... and then wait another decade before having your own kids.
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> If anyone has been in a similar situation, I would greatly appreciate advice. You can't have it all. A wife & kids, a full time job, a social life and an open source hacker reputation. Many of the biggest names in open source have none of those other things.
Doesn't Linus have all of those?
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I did the quit and focus thing. It ended up working out, but just barely. I was underwater for a while and my marriage about to fall apart.. I'm not sure I'd recommend the same path even though it did have a happy ending (co-founder of a well funded startup, a cash bonus that wiped out my worst debt, and my wife and I are back on good terms). Wish I had better advice, but it is a hard problem. If you only have 3-5 ho…
That sounded like your wife was going to leave you because you were underwater doing what you wanted, and she changed her mind because you were solvent again. If that's case, assuming you already knew the kind of person you were married to, the quit-and-focus option was quite a gamble. I'm glad it paid out.
You see, when you are bootstrapping your revenue is contingent on making deliverables, getting customers (or in my case, donors), and otherwise doing time consuming work. Once you have depleted your savings and maxed out your credit cards, then you really start to feel the life-or-death, make-it-or-die pressure. At every given moment there is permeating risk that if you don’t push this update, if you don’t win that customer/donor, if you don’t make such a looming deadline, you will fail. And failure means the bank taking your house, losing all credit for 7 years, being unable to put food on the table, living on the street, and—let’s face it—owning up to defeat.
If that weren’t complicated enough, my wife started her second pregnancy at exactly the same time. Every moment that I was asking my wife how her day was, what the doctor had told her, playing with our other toddler, cooking dinner, or generally just being present was progress not being made towards that deadline, that customer, or a completed product.
There’s a pressure and a mentality here not too dissimilar from the gambler that keeps betting double-or-nothing with exponentially increasing risk, chasing the Martingale of success. Before long your entire life is on the table, and you’re rolling the dice. I made it to that point… and then rolled a natural 20. I got lucky. Sure, I “made my own luck” in the sense that a positive outcome was only possible because of all that work I’d put in. But possible does not mean probable, and the upward-trending outcome I am currently enjoying was very, very low probability. I got lucky, and I recognize that.
But a year ago? I was deep in a hole and doubling down, while totally ignoring other responsibilities and being unavailable to my wife, daughter, and newborn child. I was trading time now for an imagined future, at terrible odds. I think it was her who had more reason to wonder what kind of person she was married to, and I am eternally grateful that she stayed long enough to make it through.
We’re now well funded, making waves, and gathering customers. I’m pulling a steady paycheck and have wiped out the worst of my bad debt. I have a good comp plan with not insignificant equity. But with the information available to me at the outset, I don’t think I would make the same decisions again. I certainly wouldn't recommend someone else to do something so foolhardy. Some things are just not worth risking, no matter the reward.
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Yea, it is indeed not responsive. But I think Antirez is affording his time more on his "side projects" rather than making it responsive.
I think he means not 'responding', not complaining the website doesn't resize for different screen sizes (responsive).
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I don't mean to offend, but have you considered what your child might think of you when they grow a bit older and find this comment?
Ideally he won't think anything of it because I've spent so much time with him we're working side by side building his first business by that point.
I'm working on a side project now that will eventually be an open source project. I think it could benefit a lot of people. My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night I want to cook dinner, run, socialize, drink a beer with a friend, or work on an art project. I don't particularly want to configure Ansible or read the OpenVPN docs. At most I can get 3-5 hours of productive work per week on t…
> If anyone has been in a similar situation, I would greatly appreciate advice. You can't have it all. A wife & kids, a full time job, a social life and an open source hacker reputation. Many of the biggest names in open source have none of those other things.
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> I really, really enjoy my sleep :). This is certainly very practical advice, but it requires that I'm disciplined enough to go to sleep earlier the preceding night. That's difficult but certainly possible. Then work late and sleep in :-) I can't do a lick of useful work before 10 (which isn't great, since my job starts at 8:30), but I can cram 2-3 hours of good stuff in after my kids go to bed every night. Try diff…
The idea with getting up earlier is that, assuming you're able to get up to do it, you'll get it in that day. If you leave it for the end of the day, or even after work, you might not. I know I've had many days where I've come home from work completely drained, and can't really get myself to do much more than reheat food for dinner. I'd be willing to wager I'm not alone on this.