My first coding experience was in the mid eighties, 20k of BASIC rendered on an old TV set, saving to tapes and doing backups using pencil and paper haha!
From then on I have always been sort of a superuser, and after I got onto Linux with WMware to tame the shitty Windows apps I needed to produce layout in late 98 or so I never looked back. Got onto OSX for my creative and everyday work in 2000 too.
I've done frontend work on many CMS-es, also monetized open source with seed funding and all of that jazz, wokeness and the inherent chaos of the field killed that off.
Before 2020 I ran two teams and four companies, one was a B2B photography and later video production company, the other was a pure dev co-op.
These were two completely different beast, the creative one was existing in a perpetual tsunami of chaos, the other suffered from the opposite, with an engineer doing our bookkeeping haha! He was better and worse than any auditor...
In 2020 I simply walked away from it all and YOLOed hard into Bitcoin and gold. I did try to get the co-op going since it would be the perfect structure with a history to do something in the space, actually it was sort of a hidden tax haven as well as a regulatory safe space.
Now all of this is gone, and I'm rebuilding whatever can pay the bills alone. Which is not the same as having even 1 business partner at all, choosing a direction and staying the course is sooo much harder...
Right now I've got a VPS running that is very private, its running a good open source panel and I'll build some landing sites and such using Grav, Wordpress and Drupal.
For my own projects I will also set up a paywall for at least one of these, hopefully accepting both sats over lightning and Monero. There are plugins out there, and maybe I will re-sharpen my skills by getting involved in the practical application and code for these.
Also for my photography I will get into Arweave. Like or dislike it this will be a key piece in my own process of rebuilding myself, since I will both be selling NFTs of ~35 years of photography as well as using this as a bridge or door opener towards my old network.
What I'm looking for here are leads, opinions, criticism, encouragement or even shootdowns haha! Anything is welcome as it is far easier to get going with some feedback rather than nothing.
I'll finish off with some questions that might make it easier for anyone to come with feedback:
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Nostr. Whatever happens I will be super active with Nostr. I want to get used to doing logins on any php-system, but so far I've not even been able to find a library, its early days of course!
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Bitcoin Lightning. Since I'm a Rebel Nomad I do not think I will ever run my own node. If so it would have to be on a server, so my thinking is that I should rather get experienced with the implementation and marketing of Lightning. Where should I begin?
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Arweave. I need to set up any project where anything gets stored on Arweave. Anyone know about half finished projects or such that would be a good starter? Anyone have an idea where they have no means to pay coders? Maaaybe I could pull something off with a few weeks of clumsy coding :-)
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Sites for sats. Now this is where I might be useful. I've worked with a lot of CMS-es, and I've always been better at following best practice than WP and script monkeys. I would be happy to get something like this going if there is a market, and if it makes sense in terms of providing a clear cut service. The eternal problem with ordinary webdev is of course that most customers need education, communication and project management can easily kill any margin!
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Anything around images and photography. Would open source DAMs for sats be an idea? What can be done in terms of super easy UI both for creators and viewers? Is it possible to get something going that won't be just another hopeful project that dies when it doesn't scale beyond a dozen idealistic users?
Of course I'd be happy to get into any of these the open source way, been there done that, but this time around I also need to make some sats every day on my own... Which seems to be doable now!