Here is what he needs to do. If he is a good mobile developer and knows English to pass an interview, first thing he should find a good-paying remote job. Couple of good places to start with are workatastartup.com and linkedin. Once he lands a remote position, he should spend couple of months to learn the company and workstyle and make himself comfortable with his job duties. After that he could easily find several hours a week for his research. Considering the fact he has no dependants, he should be able to do the work, do his research and generally live pretty decent life.

Main goal for him should be securing his life first (food, place to live) and only after that he can think about reaching his goals.

Thanks! That's what I think he should do too. My question was basically if there are other options for researchers like him. Such that he could work on his work directly. Mobile dev is something he could do, and he could do it well, but it is unrelated to his primary research goals.

I'd recommend going through "Early history of Smalltalk" and "The Dream machine". First covers Kay's work and Smalltalk - how it started, what was the reasoning behind it. I'm still in progress with the second one, but it gives pretty deep dive in history of computing, covering a lot about personalities behind the field and their work.

I would add "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" by Michael Hiltzik.

It’s a fair comparison because many developers, including the author, would have to make a choice between languages, some of which would be GC and while others are non GC.

"for writing same tool" so..

There is one thing I'm always thinking about: a mesh network of autonomous devices that scattered across a field or a forest and a base nearby. These devices can have temperature sensors and someone can rather quickly see that something is going wrong either by temperature or if some amount of devices went down (say burnt in fire). I think those things called sensor networks or something like this.

I think there would be better luck using satellite imaging, both thermal and regular vision. You could then change the satellite to look for fires in different areas based on the risk factors - eg California might have gotten a lot of rain recently so you want to watch Montana. There are some restrictions on the satellite imaging, so that and cost would be a concern.

I am not sure how can this scale up, if a sensor can cover X square meters then you need a LOT of them to cover huge forests like Sweden has for example, not to mention the amount of bases, communication channels etc.

If it's on a tower on the peak of a hill, the coverage might be measurable in miles. That's the case with fire towers today. But yeah, even then scaling could be difficult. It might work for realtively smaller, more developed areas prone to fires, such as parts of CA. Maybe put them on existing cell towers?

It’ll be very helpful to hear what steps did you take before building your product. Did you try to reach out potential users with just the idea to discuss it? Also did you check other similar tools, what people like and dislike about it? Do your potential users have enough pain with current tools (or lack of them) to consider paying for your project?

Oh, man, you just have written my exact thoughts! I also have a problem revisiting my notes, ideas, etc. I was thinking about creating a note-taking app with reminder. I know, that there is a whole world of note apps as well as reminder apps, but i wanted to have specific tool. Also, what is the point to be a programmer if you don’t create things for yourself, right?)

Thought it were my "miss clicks"! Now its becoming interesting...

(i'm on mojave and latest chrome)

The site says: Sorry, we have failed you. Try refreshing!

Still up for me. Sometimes this happens, though, for a minute or two. It's a very high-traffic site.

Doesn’t work for me already couple of hours. Mobile app says can’t reach reddit. However old.reddit.com works :)

Hi! You probably don’t want to go with all users, you just need to pick matched once. When a new user signs up, you need to take his books and genres and find users with the same or mostly the same.

One think that I could understand to the time - there are no “hacks” in such kind of situations. There is no special routine that can keep you focused just by doing this routine. One thing we can do is constantly remind ourselves what we are doing and why. Every time you gonna start implementing new feature, make requirements and a plan. “I need my users to be able to log into the system. I’m gonna create login form, add empty-field checks and make request to the api”. Follow the plan, make it just work, deliver. Improve if needed. And don’t forget to always remind all of this to yourself, this is the only key - always working to be better. It’s hard, but there is no other way :)