ccajas

I'm trying to get some idea at how old is usually the target for financial independence and how much does it actually depend on your current age if you haven't started your investments yet.

Currently I'm 38yo, out of work and my net worth is just under $1k. So I know the first step is simply to get employed for stable income- I don't have the mindset to run a business. I also don't know many people in high or low places- I like to keep to myself whatever chance I get.

But regardless, is a 10 year plan from zero to FIRE feasible? Can people still FIRE under 50 if they started their financial plan just before 40?

And is it unusual or bad if I don't?

I've been advised by some people that I should keep at least a Google document to list accomplishments and to update on a regular basis, as I work. I guess it's more so because I usually mentally recall my accomplishments for past jobs to write up my resumes, or rely on older resumes to recall work from past jobs. These resumes and my LinkedIn page are the most persistent documentation I have of my career.

Is it unusual to not keep track of your accomplishments on a more granular level? Do most people keep a personal "brag document" to recall things from past projects or items in case they come up with work later? Because at work I just go by the company and co-worker emails I receive.

Even when I was in college I wasn't too keen on following up on whatever notes I wrote down for class. At work I don't write down anything at all, whether quarterly, monthly, etc.

In the decade of 2000's we saw a plethora of graphical interfaces being used for web site and server management. We had Plesk, cPanel and WHM come into widespread use. To spin up a complete web stack all you had to do was open XAMPP, tweak a few control panel settings, and away you go. Similar with MAMP on Mac platforms. Uploading files could be done with a myriad of FTP software with drag-and-drop interfaces.

Then the transition to more CLI based tools took on strongly in the 2010's and its momentum does not appear to let up. The benefits of CLI completely are discovered in that you have more control, everything is more "exposed" and with more flexibility. About the most popular GUI tool that still stands today for web devs are IDEs.

I still find it peculiar that in the past web devs had more interest in user-friendly GUIs. It's peculiar because in the past, modern software development in general did start out with command line tools, but the recent past of web development was full of windowed apps, with tons of forms and visual interfaces. "CLI discovery" was rather delayed for web devs and I'm wondering why.

I have no experience with modern cloud services, professional or otherwise. I come from simple webdev for small scale apps work, involving small business clients. My experience managing things on remote servers involves, third party hosting companies that handle the infrastructure so we don't have to worry about data center uptime. Control panel GUIs like cPanel, Plesk are commonplace, to manage DNS and set up cron jobs, alongside GUIs for relational databases like PHP MyAdmin, and the occasional SSH into the server.

What is the best analogue to cloud services to Azure, AWS and GCP? I want to get skilled in at least one of them, explained in terms that can make sense for someone who has only used these older hosting tools. Perhaps to demonstrate a one-to-one analogue to the concepts found in cloud storage and computing for making the transition from this older form of website management.

I haven't gotten many answers to this question, but most tend to lean that they are not tech companies. The prevailing attitude towards them is that they don't treat their developers as "first class" and that generally underpay them, relative to the average developer salary in the rest of its job market. I argue that digital agencies ARE tech companies because they would not exist without the internet. Doing work on websites is always involved in the transaction for their B2B model. So what is your view of digital agencies in the context of tech companies?

I think modern PHP has improved in strides, and now isn't much worse than JavaScript. While it's not my first language of choice to go to anymore, I liked working with it. I didn't hate the language so much as the messy codebases I worked with it. And I would like to see what newer software is being made with PHP in a more modern way.

In most of my career, I've taught myself many programming concepts and different languages based on what I started out with. I'm comfortable with design patterns, many algorithms, certain monolithic applications, and know enough about databases to get a local app up and running fast. I've used a variety of languages and frameworks including JavaScript, Vue, React, PHP, and Ruby on Rails.

I am not so familiar the modern deploy and automate side of things. I cannot tell you, for instance, how to leverage AWS to optimize a website I made, once it goes online. However, more and more jobs are requiring it, so I must learn to stay on point. But I don't know what is "enough" for a good starting point with talking about it at web dev job interviews.

From 2008-2013 the deployment workflow at my jobs was similar: Setup DNS and databases with your hosting service, upload website files directly via FTP, and migrate database. Following that time, I rarely did any of that and almost all of my work has been in local machine space. If I needed to upload code to a source code repository, I use Git. If I wanted to demo a side project online, I use Heroku.

It's a big ocean to start Googling for tutorials for things like AWS, Azure, data stores and the like. What are some good starting points? Or books to read (I prefer free ones)? In a post-cloud, post-Kubernetes world, what is the minimum standard for entry in web dev jobs?

I frequently hear about interview books that are aimed at various kinds of tech companies and top startups. But if your resume isn't up to par, you won't get the chance to interview and use what you learned in those books. Your major roadblock would be your own resume. What books are there for improving yourself for step of the process? Are there such books that are about optimizing your resume to get you short-listed to top companies?