There are plenty of successful applications with bad UIs. Also, business logic is encapsulated in code - if that's borked, no amount of UI will save it.
If you are in the US, make sure you are up to speed on any county/local regulations and tax laws about running a business. Even as a freelancer and depending on your area, you may need to obtain a business license, pay gross receipts or any other such legal obligations.
Yup, the local markets often only cater to the entry-level, casual users. That's where their profit margins are. If you need something niche/higher-end your only options are to go online. Otherwise you get the usual response: "We don't have that in stock but can order it online for you. It should be here in 2 - 4 weeks."
That excessive delay probably isn't fundamental and probably represents an opportunity to improve logistics and get that down to 1-5 days depending on how niche and how centrally the customer is located.
Amazon is brilliant for charging the customer 120 bucks a year for shipping and not making them feel the pinch on each transaction.
Agreed, attacking degree programs is a red herring. Also, what kind of society would we be if the only subjects available to pursue were a select list of STEM programs?
> Also, what kind of society would we be if the only subjects available to pursue were a select list of STEM programs?
It's a sacrifice. I love art and music and spent many years pursuing both. I'm an old man now and many friends spent years seeking that out and unable to ensure their own survival years later.
It's not true, it's just a trite, condescending right-wing talking point repeated ad nauseum all over the Web whenever a discussion of minimum wage pops up.
> Mod_php was always faster at executing scripts. There is less overhead as you don't have to communicate like you have to with fpm.
The "overhead" of communicating via CGI to a PHP process has nothing to do with the speed of execution of the script itself.
> For light scripts this is far superior to fpm. On the other hand, always loading php does have it's downsides too as memory consumption can get quite high depending on the number of threads.
It's not far superior as the "overhead" of CGI is negligible in the real world. Plus you can pool processes for better scaling. Also, if you are using prefork with mod_php (which is the most probable scenario) it means you are forking an entirely new Apache process and not just "loading PHP" with each request.
> This is was also the reason for the fpm hype a long time ago: don't waste memory on php when php isn't needed. It had nothing to do with it running php faster.
It's not hype, because for a long time, mod_php required prefork because it was not thread-safe (even now it's still a pain to manage re-compiling PHP to be thread-safe for mod_php + Apache)...which means you could not take advantage of mpm_event or mpm_worker.
> I would never discourage anyone from self-employment
I would, especially if they are in their prime earning years and are trying to become independent contractors. Software engineering jobs command high salaries and benefits these days. The opportunity costs are just too high and the odds of sustaining a one-person contracting show for 5, 10, 20+ years is slim to none.
It's easy to change from independent contractor to employee if you really want. The experience on the CV is just as good and you probably get paid (a lot) more.
The only real risk is that during economic downturns it may be hard to find contracts but your employer could fire you as well.
It depends on the market. I worked with contractors back in 2008 who said it became easier to find work during the crash because they were seen as Capital Expenditure while Full-Time Employees were considered Operating Expenditure and were being laid off en-masse.
This benefit is always true, especially in locations where you can write off CapEx against your taxes. My main point was that if you are a contractor and want a perm role you can just apply for a permanent job. You don't even need to write whether or not you were a contractor in your application form / CV, the hiring manager only cares about your projects and roles within the project.
