We sound similar, I've had some adventures on AngelList. Made an absolute killing, back when that was possible.
My total lifetime "ate it" figure is only $2k, and even that one the client kind of eventually offered to pay, but I just let it be because I wanted to put as much distance between myself and them for other reasons.
Best advice in the article? "Trust your gut". If something feels vaguely off, I walk away immediately. I can see those non-paying incubators coming a mile away. Biggest indicator beyond gut: do they have existing contractors who seem happy? Ask them pointblank if they're getting paid. Easy as that. And of course, if they are paying you, but then stop paying you, or delay paying you, then stop work immediately.
Prescribed workflows apply solutions from the wrong direction.
Determine what's impeding your organization, devise a solution.
The last guy I encountered who evangelized something like this had smart frames and a Lovecraft anthology prominently perched in the background of his Zoom shot.
> But if you’re down, Spotify is down, social media is down… then “the internet is broken” and you don’t look so bad.
In my direct experience, this isn't true if you're running something even vaguely mission-critical for your customers. Your customer's workers just know that they can't do their job for the day, and your customer's management just knows that the solution they shepherded through their organization is failing.
It's really quite funny, many of the ACTUALLY vital systems to running the world as we know it are running off of very different softwares. Cloudflare appears to have a much higher % of non vital systems running on it than say something like akamai.
If akamai went down i have a feeling you'd see a whole lot more real life chaos.
i also find the sentiment of "well we use a third party so blame them" completely baffeling.
if you run anything even remotely mission critical, not having a plan B which is executable and of which you are in control (and a plan C) will make you look completely incompetent.
There are very, very few events which some people who run mission critical systems accept as force majeur. Most of those are of the scale "national emergency" or worse.
>There are very, very few events which some people who run mission critical systems accept as force majeur. Most of those are of the scale "national emergency" or worse.
And why should anyone be surprised? It's been about 80 years since "The buck stops here."[0] had any real relevance. And more's the pity.
LLMs will not abstract away framework choice. They will concrete it away. React is for humans. You'll know we're out of the AI stoneage when coding models just generate direct machine instruction, because their output won't need to be touched by humans.
