You might not have been here 25 years ago when the dot com bubble burst.

A lot of us ate shit to stay in the Bay Area, to stay in computing. I have stories of great engineers doing really crappy jobs and "contracting" on the side.

I couldn't really have a 'startup' out of my house and a slice of rented hosting. Hardware was expensive and nothing was easy. Today I can set up a business and thrive on 1000 users at 10 bucks a month. Thats a viable and easy to build business. It's an achievable metric.

But Im not going to let amazon and its infinite bill you for everything at 2012 prices so it can be profitable hosting be my first choice. Im not going to do that when I can get fixed cost hosting.

For me, all the interesting things going on in tech aren't coming out of FB, Google and hyperscalers. They aren't AI or ML. We dont need another Kubernetes or Kafka or react (no more Conways law projects). There is more interesting work going on down at the bottom. In small 2 and 3 man shops solving their problems on limited time and budget with creative "next step" solutions. Their work is likely more applicable to most people reading HN than another well written engineering blog from cloud flare about their latest massive rust project.