I've seen this argument come up frequently and I find this is just a weird hill to die on. I can see where the author is coming from as far as taking you out of the experience, but QR codes and NFC absolutely have a place in the restaurant ordering experience and I'm here for it.
Plus, if you’re writing the front end in react or something else, that’s essentially the “other endpoint”. You’re just moving that back closer to the source of the origin.
This is definitely possible, and this is definitely already happening. It may be hard for some people to even tell the difference between an AI generated script/audio vs 100% human curated.
AWS beanstalk allows you to run on very cheap instances, even cheaper if you get a plan and commit to a term.
It’s not a 1:1 experience, but I’ve enjoyed it as an alternative to Heroku for sure. Alternatively, you could spin up a server and install dokku which is pretty close to a shipping experience, but still requires some maintenance and hand holding.
I switched from heroku to dokku (and DigitalOcean) last month. Overall: easy to adapt from heroku since so many of the concepts (and commands) are the same.
I tried to get too fancy and set two web services on the same app (since the DO droplet was giving me more CPU and 4x the RAM for half the price) but they seemed to battle each other for control of the database and/or were exceeding resources. So I chilled out and used 1 web service and set CPU and RAM resource limits. And... it's been smooth since then! Much faster than heroku, too.
Price-wise: we were on the $50/mo dyno plus $9/mo postgresql, and with DO we beefed up the managed database specs, and now get 4x the RAM on the droplet, and the total cost is the same as heroku.
We do still have a free tier staging server on heroku that we only use a couple times a year.
Oh shoot, I just remembered that I use staticman for processing comments on a couple jekyll blogs, and those use free heroku tiers. Argh!
Have you considered doing payment processing, then the output goes to the users preferred payment method? So say my customer pays with a CC (via stripe or braintree on your end) - you could pass that payment along to PayPal, stripe, crypto, etc.
To me, that would be a useful alternative because all I'll need to do is enter my CC info, or preferably use apple pay which is much faster than me needing to ensure I have paypal, zelle, etc. installed.
I'm probably in the minority here, but I know for older people paying by CC is going to be easier than using an alternative payment processor.
This is really cool! I tried building something more basic than this a few years back, but this looks a lot more mature. I'll definitely be following and testing it out on a few small projects.
Thanks @dougbarrett! Let me know when you give it a shot! I'd be curious if there's anything your implementation that you'd like to see in Bud. Hit me up at hi@livebud.com or on twitter @mattmueller.
If I were you, I would stick with applying for senior or management positions if that's what you're looking to do ultimately. Are you interviewing or are you working on your resume?
If you have any long-term clients in your portfolio, maybe break those out as subsections within your resume under freelance/contract work. Instead of having many bullet points for freelancing, you have it broken out by company/project.
I'd suggest working on the proof of concept projects in your downtime with the language you're interested in working in. Unfortunately, I do not see many PHP jobs (that I'm interested in, at least). Still, I'm seeing many Go, Python, Ruby, Java, and .NET jobs, and you seem to have familiarity with most of those languages.
I think an excellent senior developer can understand the core concepts of what's going on in the application even if they're not an expert at writing the code, so I would lean on the fact that you bring prior experience with several different languages, and over many different industries. You'll be able to share pain points you've run into, best practices you've learned over the years, etc.
Best of luck in your job hunt; stay focused and keep your head up - don't devalue yourself!
Congrats on the build! I had a similar idea and worked on a similar project a few months back: https://infreq.social/ it obviously doesn't have the same polish that your project has, but the mission as far as what the end goal is for the frequency of the user viewing posts, and the ideal way of monetizing the platform are very much the same.
It's great to see that I'm not the only one with this crazy idea!
