My former coworker is at Project44 and says otherwise… unfortunately. I was going to apply until they sent me this text:
“Exec team varies greatly in aptitude from what I’ve witnessed. Some are forward thinking, some appear to be in over their heads. Frankly, everyone is solely focused on sales or recruiting.”
If I really need that capability, I personally would download a LAMP/WAMP/MAMP setup with all the docs downloaded but needing to Google things isn't inherently bad.
Just about any of them would do. It's like saying "I want to drive from Chicago to Minneapolis in a car. Which brand of car should I drive?" Just about all the car brands will get you there. ;)
At the end of the day, I recommend figuring out your preferred distro if you haven't already and going from there. Most major distributions like Ubuntu, openSuSE, and Fedora have Raspberry Pi versions.
If you're asking for optimizations, you'll find them in keeping as few processes running as possible, and you may get better speeds by hardware means such as purchasing a micro SD card with faster read-write capability or getting a cooling fan for the CPU.
Hope that helps, and props to making and running your own website from home! :)
The car metaphor still leaves a choice between driving a Rolls Royce or a VW Bug. They'll both get you there, but one is totally miserable in the winter. Although that is covered in your second paragraph.
If it is the 8G version, it might be worth implementing a ramdisk for the web server and web logging directories. That way the sdram doesn't get trashed as quickly, and response will be quicker.
Greetings! I highly recommend getting connected with FaithTech (https://faithtech.com/) as their Slack community may have the work connections you are looking for.