Well I mean I've built an internet search engine from scratch[1] and I'm making a living off this successfully enough to have completely left the wagie existence for the foreseeable future, so I think I at least kinda walk the talk.
I'm far from the best at anything and make no claims toward knowing everything, but I do think I have reasonable breadth in my experience and work, and I don't think I could have built something like this otherwise.
[1] ... which is something that does not decompose neatly into black boxes and must to a large degree be built from first principles as goddamn nothing off the shelves scales well enough to deal with multi-terabyte workloads at the even a fraction of the speed a bespoke solution can.
But that's sort of my point: you're not walking the walk of others. You are a solo dev. You are working on a project that can be developed by a solo dev, both in terms of size and time frames. It is a greenfield project, so you have been there since the beginning and therefore have a lot of context and knowledge of rationale, history, motives, etc. that rarely anyone has in industry, and certainly not early on.
ok, I kind of knew that already LOL, but I don't have any questions that are more specific so I can't really complain. just gotta get after it i guess.
Yeah I don't know if there is such a thing as good advice in this regard, except the stuff that everyone is saying.
I guess "build something you want", the Temu-bought knockoff of the previous advice. It's not quite as bad advice as it sounds, as it's at least some validation of an idea, and much easier than playing 17D chess trying to predict the zeitgeist.
The luck surface area[1] also isn't quite as talked about as it should, but a good mental model if you're seeking serendipitous life-changing outcomes that I can get behind.
I'm far from the best at anything and make no claims toward knowing everything, but I do think I have reasonable breadth in my experience and work, and I don't think I could have built something like this otherwise.
[1] ... which is something that does not decompose neatly into black boxes and must to a large degree be built from first principles as goddamn nothing off the shelves scales well enough to deal with multi-terabyte workloads at the even a fraction of the speed a bespoke solution can.