The HM Embody resolved the burning pain that used to set into my shoulders after 5 hours.

Please understand that rock bottom is temporary.

Entrepreneurship is a story of perseverance being extended long enough to meet luck.

Take time to recover and plan. Then get up try again.

College also serves as a buffer, giving you dedicated time and space grow.

The self-taught route is a viable path but if growth is what you want, the early stages requires more work than most realize.

More importantly: A lot of tech jobs get A LOT of applicants. Often the college degree requirement is simply a quick-and-easy filter. You might have an awesome resume, but without the degree, whoever's reading the giant stack of applications is just going to move on to the next one.

Being visible and present. Did this mostly by unblocking my team, writing ADRs for larger features, being involved during pre-grooming, and helping people via huddle or pairing.

Things also move much faster if you have frequent 1:1s and keep a log of your wins.

Over the last 2 years, I made ~$30k/year on projects that could be completed in a weekend (10 hours/week max).

It was fun to work on something outside my day job but it required some judiciousness to ensure I could meet my set time limits.

I found taking on bigger projects + a demanding day job pushed me to burnout pretty quickly.

Definitely takes some discipline. I’ve found the stress more bearable as time goes on, but it’s definitely a thing, and having a demanding day job can make it worse. Taking a month off here and there from side work can go a long way, though, as can taking a week off the day job to finish a side project ;)

Best advice here. It also takes less practice than you think for stage fright to go away.

Subsequently sending us into a future forecasted by Michael Crichton’s Prey

Anything you learn needs to be applied.

My advice I give now: start with CS50 and dive deep into all the supplementary reading.

Then build something every day.

Read books, watch videos, take a course. But above all, make sure you can apply it to something real.

`node-sass` was the fastest solution (node bindings to a C++ library) was deprecated a few years back.

`sass` (dart-sass) is the current iteration but it’s an order of magnitude slower for larger projects with many small scss module files. I’ve seen it add +10 to 30 seconds.

`sass-embedded` will be the next iteration for dart-sass but in its current form still suffers from similar issues.

I believe using postcss for nesting support + css variables is a better alternative, considering that css will likely get native nesting support in a few years.

https://www.w3.org/TR/css-nesting-1/