That said, I'll take the word of encouragement that maybe a blog would be interesting. You can do some really fun things at smaller businesses because it's fine if it doesn't scale. I can actually save us money by 3D printing or laser cutting things myself, and have done some fun projects around that. A lot of the tech projects I do are pretty much solo endeavors, which is challenging but also rewarding - that self-hosted project you tried out at home will almost certainly be robust enough for work. I'm one of two people here who write code at all, so I get to make pretty much all of the architectural decisions myself, and even a shitty Bash script is probably still 10x better than whatever process existed before. I also manage our product and marketing teams (did I mention it's a small business, lol?), which means I get to shape our message and values, and even be our taste-tester-in-chief.

The one thing you do have to factor for, though, is what happens if you don't keep your health. The thing that kept me in tech a little longer than I hoped to be there was a parent with long-term care needs. I could live a happy life on ~$2k a month, but it took five times that just to keep my mom alive the last few years of her life.

Living that cheaply does require adopting the lifestyle. But cooking at home or eating a casado from the local soda instead of a US-style restaurant meal sounds preferable to me anyway.

I can't recommend leaving tech highly enough. My cortisol levels are so much lower than they used to be. I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours. I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it, which I sometimes do, because I actually enjoy my work now. I make a tangible difference for people, and get to work on things I care about. Instead of pleasing investors or VCs, I focus on maximizing impact and breaking even every year.

There are some things that are worse, mostly around compensation and benefits, but I don't really care. I'm lucky to have a working spouse with decent health insurance, so we use hers. We paid off our house and put a ton into savings while I worked in tech. I didn't get rich in the sense that people who work in tech think rich means, but I could probably sell my belongings and live a very good life on a beach somewhere in Latin America at whatever point I choose and never work again. That's likely the plan after my wife's parents are gone.

My advice, actually take the time to research the number you need to quit. Mine ended up being a lot lower than I thought it would be because I had been used to six figure salaries, but never lived above a five figure lifestyle.

I do wonder about this. Google AI Ultra subscriptions come with 30TB(!) of Google Drive storage at no additional cost. Aside from people who do a lot of video editing or want long backups of home surveillance videos, who has that kind of storage need for completely legally licensed content? I'm sure there are some data hoarders out there. But if I were going to back up my NAS to Google I'd sure as hell use a backup tool with encryption, completely negating the ability to use the files natively in Google Drive.

You'd be surprised how much some crops can yield in small areas. (Oh god, I used to actually like pickles before I realized how many cucumbers we were churning out last year.)

Where it gets space-intensive tend to be grain crops, which we don't currently grow because the ROI is so low, but have space to if life forced it on us. Protein can also be a little tricky depending on what your expectations are, but if you're okay with mostly beans and eggs, you'll be alright on well less than an acre for a small family.

It's also worth noting there are also huge fixed costs for credit card transactions. We're currently upgrading our pinpads and it's been an absolute nightmare to get the right parts in just for physically connecting the damn things to our counters, we lost almost a whole day of backend POS access for our vendor to push a required update, and I'm looking at more fees to be able to support other types of cards which require POS certification.

We strongly prefer our customers use cash.

A clone rater would be a great service to this genre, since many of the clones out there are somehow, just, really bad - maybe because the barrier to entry is so low?

Because sometimes it is hot.

I want more cold air blown on me at a higher velocity until I cool off, and then to be a steady state. Even if I had remotely started my car with air conditioning, which although my vehicle has the capability I never do, the seats and steer while and other things I touch will be hotter than the ambient air temperature and make me feel hotter until the car has been moving a while.

Barring a very good cause that the vast majority of the population can get behind, there will be riots when the bananas and coffee disappear.

We grow enough in our garden that I could probably reach "100%" pretty easily if shit hit the fan, but I'm about tired of eating radish greens right now even that being related to a national crisis.

Can I vibe code an image editor? Sure! I have, actually, just more as a curiosity. I got as far as a simple Canva replacement, and if that's what you need, maybe the question isn't can you vibe code Photoshop but rather can you vibe code Canva.

Photoshop is part of a gigantic ecosystem of tools, formats, and plugins that happens to have an image editor. More to the point, I've got an employee who has been using the Adobe ecosystem for decades, dating all the way back to the tools acquisition by Adobe. We have files that started as Pagemaker layouts in the 90s that are still in use. Could any given piece of new work be done in, say, GIMP? Of course! Does that get me out of my Adobe subscription for working with legacy files and having a Swiss Army knife for anything that might come along? Unfortunately, no.

I still use that domain for most corporate accounts. Currently, my wireless carrier refuses to believe I exist in some of their systems (but not others) because of it.

Fortunately, escalating complaints with large corporations with shitty practices is a hobby of mine.

There's no fundamental rule of a capitalist society that consumers have to make their choices out a narrow selection of options provided by corporate oligarchies between the criteria they would prefer to compete on. As a customer, I can choose which airline I want based on whatever criteria I want. Maybe I pick it based on pay ratio between executives and average workers, maybe I pick it based on whichever has the font I like best on their homepage.

Generally, I think it's not overengineering that's the issue, it's how the consumer need for that particular level of quality/performance is marketed to the wrong audience. Cars are the classic example. Most people who drive a car that was precision engineered for speed or offroading capability rarely if ever need that functionality.

That said, in a world of consumer good racing to the bottom and physical enshittification, I'll generally pick the item that's obviously well designed, even if beyond the capabilities I need. The alternative is often a slew of indistinguishable crap.

I do, and and I think that's part of the reason I feel guilty about not working. Why should I get an easy ride when other people did not? I suppose there's some small element of worrying that I'm wrong about my future needs . I know I have some skills that are still useful and I can put them to work now, but I'm less sure I'd be able to do that in five years. That part of it is probably not maladaptive, however, even though it probably comes from the same place of growing up with very little.

The flip side of it is I've accidentally joined the FIRE movement. Making a moderate tech salary for most of my time since graduating college but feeling guilty about spending means I'm now in my early 40s and don't really have to work anymore, or at least, could comfortably take any job I want without worrying about what the pay rate is. I don't really know how to feel about that. After my last job in tech I took about a half a year off before realizing I also felt guilty about not working, and took a job I wanted. But there are also weird feelings from working because you want to at a workplace where most everyone else is working because they have to.

It's pretty heavily fossil-fuel powered right now, but like most of the rest of the world Morocco is planning to capture most of its growth in energy demand with renewables. Because, getting back to the original discussion, it'd be idiotic to choose fossil fuels over renewables in 2026.