This article and a lot of opinions I hear like this are incredibly ignorant. There's nothing wrong with using Rails in a "classic" way as everyone seems to call it.

I do think calling Rails' method classic and these new frameworks "modern" a bit ignorant. If anything Rails is "modern" and these new frameworks are just that, new. Being new does not mean you're modern. It means you're new. A trend. You'll likely be gone tomorrow.

You can write Vim plugins in other languages as well.

This is a little unkind. Vim has actual APIs for most things you'd want to do. Ex: https://github.com/camgunz/u300Blog/blob/master/u3b.vim#L307

It's not complete coverage, but it's not "the API is just a thin Python wrapper around Vim commands as strings" as your comments suggest.

It looks to me like more than half of that is a thin wrapper around strings.

I'm not trying to be mean or mislead. I've used vim for decades, and emacs too for that matter. My favorite editors by far.

Haha yeah I'm not trying to be shitty with you.

Vim gives you buffer, window, cursor and range, plus eval and command. The eval/command stuff is a "shim", insofar as you have to wrap them yourself if you want more programmatic access; like you'd have to do `def getcwd(): vim.eval('getcwd()')` But for a lot of what you want to do, you're messing with buffer/window/cursor. I wouldn't call it a full-featured scripting API, and certainly Neovim's is better, but your posts suggested all the scripting API was was just an entry point to ex commands. There's a lot more than that, to the extent that it covers most of what you want to do.

Write a bot to send a random /giphy to #general every 1-2 hours, you'll fit right in.

Oh, so you work at Google.

From your experience, do most remote interview loops have take home projects like this or do they tend to focus heavily on whiteboard-esque programming challenges?

I've had 3 remote positions over the last 6 years, and all of them had realistic(-ish) programming challenges that I was evaluated on.

Do most remote job interview loops include whiteboard-esque coding challenges, or more focused on soft skills and project/contract based assignments to assess your skills?

Honestly, don't bother practicing "this stuff". Instead, spend your time doing what is important to you (family, friends, side projects, side business, whatever).

If you need a job, then practice. While doing your job, do it well. Don't waste your personal time on this "stuff". That's really a waste of time and effort.

I built a SaaS product that makes decent passive income ($3500~/month) and continues to grow.

I'm working on a second SaaS product at the moment.

Able to give any context of what the SaaS product is, industries it targets, average monthly user revenue or even how long you've been running it?

I'd rather leave the industry and product out, but I'll tell you it's an industry every one of you have been a apart of at one point or another, it's nothing special. I'd also like to say there were/are many competitors in the market.

The current pricing is about $10 per-seat/month. I experimented with a few pricing points, it's not optimal by any standards but it works so I left it alone. I wanted to make it as accessible as possible.

The product has been running since last November (2016). It was profitable within the first week and has been growing ever since.

I did no paid ads and no content marketing or anything like that. I basically cold emailed people I thought would be interested in it. It grew organically from there. Now there's a lot of blogs and people at conferences talking about it and I get traffic from all over.

As for how much maintenance/time I spend on it?

At this point I spend between 0-60 minutes a week on technical/code maintenance.

I spend 0-20 minutes a day (in the morning) on answering support/feedback questions and cold emailing potential customers.

It's not something I have to do every day, but it works well for me.

How many emails did you send to get your first paying customer? What was the respond rate of your emails?

I didn't keep track, but the response rate wasn't great.

How did you determine that there would be enough demand to justify spending time on it?

I looked at the competitors, the fact that there were many told me there's other people making money.

I tried their products out and decided I could do better myself.

I gave myself a fixed amount of time to get an MVP out in the wild.

In my opinion, you'll never "justify" the time. The only thing you can do is make your best guess, look at the evidence and just give it a shot.

If you're worried about time, sand box it. If you can't make it work, re-evaluate the project (move on or keep trying).

How much time do you spend on maintenance/customer support/upkeep for your first SaaS every week?

First and foremost, screw the green boxes on GitHub. They don't mean shit.

Second of all, there are many ways to "skill up" and that doesn't always mean creating open source side projects or experimenting with the newest fad.

After becoming a father I found I certainly had a lot less time but it forced me to cut out everything that didn't matter. That included watching tech talks, working on a bunch of small projects, getting my "commit a day" on GitHub, reading a large number of books, and so on.

Instead, I decided what I needed and wanted was financial freedom and I wanted to achieve that by building my own software business(es).

I stopped measuring myself by silly graphs or what others in the industry may or may not think of me. I stopped second guessing myself and I stopped worrying about my "marketability" or "maintaining skills" for hireability's sake.

Why worry about skills, marketable or keeping up with the fads if I work for myself? As long as I'm true to myself and I can build kickass products, I don't care about anything else.

Since then, I've built my own successful business and I am currently working on the second (second baby and second business!).

I use the same model now that I have a child-- you can't optimize or think too hard about it, you just need to do it. Doesn't matter what tools or methods you use. Could use a phone todo, a sheet of paper in your pocket, whatever.

Things I frequently do randomly during the day:

1. iMessage myself a note or todo so I won't forget 2. email myself a note or todo item, especially if there's an image or link etc. 3. write a quick note in the iPhone notes app