Articles are single-page pieces that give a whirlwind tour of a specific topic.
They're different from series, which go very in-depth, taking many detours.
So you want to do live streams. Are you sure? Okay. Let's talk about it.
Let's talk numbers
Being a "content creator" (sorry for those who hate that term) is a job, for sure, and many people do it, successfully, full-time, they pay rent with it etc.
Platforms like Twitch & YouTube would have you think that, if you put in enough effort, you can grow your channel from nothing to 🎉 profitable ✨ in just a few short years.
As of today, I am no longer employed by fly.io.
We're both very sad, and we've promised to stay friends and send postcards to each other over winter break. (I'm excited, too — Annie makes great postcards)
And yet, life goes on! Let's talk about the future.
Making a living
In theory, I'm supposed to take a breather. In practice, I have to (I'll take a month off from everything in early 2023 for health reasons).
HTTP does a pretty good job staying out of everyone's way.
If you're reading this article, there's a solid chance it was delivered to you over HTTP. Even if you're reading this from an RSS reader or something. And you didn't even have to think about it!
"Not having to think about it" is certainly a measure of success for a given technology. By contrast, . I wish I didn't.
I don't mean to complain. Doing software engineering for a living is a situation of extreme privilege. But there's something to be said about how alienating it can be at times.
Once, just once, I want to be able to answer someone's "what are you working on?" question with "see that house? it wasn't there last year. I built that".
One could say I have a bit of an obsession with build times.
I believe having a "tight feedback loop" is extremely valuable: when I work on a large codebase, I want to be able to make small incremental changes and check very often that things are going as expected.
Especially if I'm working on a project that needs to move quickly: say, the product for an early-stage startup, or a side-project for which I only ever get to do 1-hour work bursts at most.
Disclaimer:
At the time of this writing, I benefit from the fly.io "Employee Free Tier". I don't pay for side projects hosted there "within reasonable limits". The project discussed here qualifies for that.
Why you might want a remote dev environment
Fearmongering aside — and Cthulhu knows there's been a bunch, since — there's a bunch of reasons to want a remote dev environment.
It happened when I least expected it.
Someone, somewhere (above me, presumably) made a decision. "From now on", they declared, "all our new stuff must be written in Rust".
I'm not sure where they got that idea from. Maybe they've been reading propaganda. Maybe they fell prey to some confident asshole, and convinced themselves that Rust was answer to their problems.
Long story short: a couple of my articles got really popular on a bunch of sites, and someone, somewhere, went "well, let's see how much traffic that smart-ass can handle", and suddenly I was on the receiving end of a couple DDoS attacks.
It really doesn't matter what the articles were about — the attack is certainly not representative of how folks on either side of any number of debates generally behave.