Every time this topic comes up I say the same thing. If you've never worked on a farm and have some kind of romantic idea about it then you shouldn't do this. Farming is hard work. Modern farmers have college degrees, millions in equipment, and a vast amount of knowledge and experience you do not have.
If you're thinking of doing this and do not have experience go work on a farm for a year before you buy in.
Maybe they have saved enough from working in tech that they can grow vegetables for themselves in a very low scale way. Its nice to escape from the career you've had for decades. Sometimes its not even an escape from the career, but the career and the city you've lived in. Moving to the forest and growing some vegetables and raising chickens isn't that difficult. You certainly don't need "millions in equipment". Its exactly what I did.
I found it difficult to get a job in tech at the start of COVID after working in it for ~25 years. I moved to Michigan, and now live in the woods. My Cost of Living is a fraction of what it was. My mortgage is only 80% of what I was paying for rent in the SFBay area. Its peaceful and quiet here. It actually gets dark too. I no longer hear BART screeching on the rails at 2am or the constant flow of traffic. I.. do once again work in tech though at a much 'smaller' scale. My company is small and work demands don't dominate my life. I have balance.
This year I've planted ~200 onions, ~100 potatoes, ~100 garlic, ~60 strawberry. I have blueberry from a few years back starting to flourish. I have wild blackberry, and mushrooms galore. "touching grass" is a daily activity as we manage our small flock of chickens.
That's one type of farm. Depending on someone's financial situation and expectations, there are certainly other types. Taking up farming does not necessarily suggest that you're going to compete in the highly competitive world of agribusiness. I personally know a smaller-scale farmer who has a biodynamic farm and provides a high quality of life for his family. He has not invested millions in equipment to make this happen (not even close), but he certainly works hard. There's no debating that.
Every time this topic comes up a rhyme of your comment bubbles to the top and speaking from my own experience growing up in a winery. I can say: yes, it's hard, but no, it's not impossible to take up later in life. Stop assuming he just threw away his notebook and bought a tractor and stop spreading coffee table knowledge. Let people discover things for themselves, or even better, try finding things out for yourself. Because maybe, just maybe, you might discover that our differences are what make us unique and capable of achieving things in our own ways. There is no best practice for everything or everyone.
There's also the old joke about the farmer who wins the lottery. "I'm going to keep farming. And when the money runs out I'll find another way to keep farming."
I read someone who retires and "takes up farming" as retiring to a house in a rural location and maintaining a garden and maybe some small quantities of livestock.
IE someone who is not depending on the "farm" to be a commercially successful operation or is even attempting to run it as a profitable business.
A lot of people are heavily influenced by Youtubers and other influencers who conveniently leave out the earnings they get from their Youtube views, all while selling a romantic, self sufficient dream of living in harmony with nature.
In that regard Jeremy Clarkson paints a much more realistic picture, even though that show is very over the top and mostly scripted.
I grew up on a farm and was on track to take it over. I know how hard it is. And it was not the live I wanted, so I pivoted to online marketing and web development instead.
I’m a programmer with a degree in Agricultural Science so my opinion is oddly relevant to this subject. Please shut up and stop shitting on people’s dreams. Not everything is about profit and scaling. Anyone can and should learn to farm regardless of their background or education.
It's the two extremes of work. One is hard physical work directly associated with producing the things you need to stay alive, the other is purely intellectual work which is 20 levels of abstraction away from your necessities.
> Farming is hard work. Modern farmers have college degrees, millions in equipment, and a vast amount of knowledge and experience you do not have.
It depends on the scale, I know 80+ years old people living in the countryside, still splitting their own wood, growing their own garden/orchard, manually removing potatoe bugs from their decently sized potatoe field, cutting grass with a scythe, taking care of their chickens/goats/sheeps... they're 100% self sustained and use tools from the 19th century they inherited from their parents. They're in better physical and mental shape than most code monkeys I know while being 50+ years older
I see this kind of comment every time someone decides to take a different path. Pessimistic sounds smart I guess. Well, you are wrong. I have done it myself, started a farm on a whim a couple years back, and did just fine! And no I don't know what hard work you're talking about, I'm much healthier than I was sitting at a desk all day long.
My Thai girlfriend enjoys her farm, spends a couple of hours a day to work on it.
Of course, it's not our primary source of income, as that is my work as software engineer. For her it's a nice hobby.
I don't think you'd need a degree anyhow. Plenty of stuff can be learned online these days. And you don't need a lot of equipment either, if it's just to take care of yourself or your family. Depending on your community, you might also be able to rent some equipment if you need it at times (my girlfriend rents some equipment, tractor or some such with a driver, to cut the rice, about 2 times a year, as do most people in our village).
If you have a bit of a garden, can easily start as a hobby, I think.
>Modern farmers have college degrees, millions in equipment, and a vast amount of knowledge and experience you do not have.
Are we talking industrial scale? Because not every farming venture needs to reach that, and most smaller farmers don't have "college degress and millions in equipment".
And you can pick up a lot in a couple of years, I've had friends who made the switch (and extended family who worked on farming).
Not in the US though, but judging from the decent sized subculture of "living off the grid" (or close), it's probably even easier there.
Farm doesn’t always mean hundreds of acres and millions in loans. My neighbors across the street are farmers and live in a residential neighborhood. They have a quarter acre in the front yard for growing veggies and own a 1 acre plot just outside of town.
At some point sitting at a computer becomes unfulfilling and some point some people can’t take it anymore.
Yes, if you want to subscribe to the stereotypical unsustainable practice of running a mega farm. There is plenty of opportunities for farming on a small scale and selling your products locally or online.
I'm a little bit in touch with this particular demographic, and from what I've seen this has nothing to do with romanticism, and instead everything to do with a profound mistrust in technological civilization's ability to feed everyone into the near term future. Much closer to some sort of extreme insurance policy than anything else. There are systemic economic problems that can't be hand-waved away at this point.
Interesting side topic: did you know that while John Deere's top of the line combine is well over $1 million retail (and of course everyone else's models are similarly priced), that a model 42 combine from the 1960s will still go for under $1000 at auction, even as recently as last October, and is more than sufficient to harvest oh, probably even up to 50 acres over a few days? If one sells wheat or oats or whatever, there's no way to compete at market but if one only wants enough wheat to feed themselves for the coming year (and not have to buy seed again next), it's some absurdly small acreage. You might need like a fifth of an acre. There's still plenty of hard work, but mechanization solved some of the worst parts of that before we were even born.
You are thinking of big ag doing stuff like corn and beans with a combine. Farming can be as big or small as you want it to be. You can be a farmer on 1 acre of land. This is not a good take.
Corn or dairy cattle, absolutely. Oranges for concentrate, sure. Even cabbages for transport, right.
But there are other things there's demand for, or demand can even be created for, that do not have such vast efficient scales. Hand-reared escargot, or spinach grown within resonance of a woodpecker pecking at dawn, just two examples.
Funny how nobody ever says the same about software, which underpins the entire modern economy and has the power to irreversibly change the lives of billions.
If you want to make a solid living farming, then sure. However, hobby farms that break even or even lose money also exist and are probably the majority by sheer number. "Farming" can be as big or as small as you want it to be.
Distant family member of mine started a hobby farm in retirement and lived on it for probably 30 years until his death. He lived off his pension and savings, not his crops.
What you describe is how corporate farming is done in the United States. There are millions of people in Mexico, for example, who are farming, and they do not have college degrees or millions in equipment. They also work sunup to sundown, every day, with no vacations. "Right to repair" and John Deere are alien concepts to many of them.
This is a terrible, terrible misconception about what constitutes a farm and farming!
Yes you can 'farm' on an industrial scale, or you can 'farm' on your parking strip. You're right when it comes to the former, and couldn't be more wrong when it comes to the latter.
That's the same line of advice I give in most disciplines:
> Student: I've struggled with math in the past, what do I need to do to be ready for your class?
> Me: Take the previous class first. You'll get easy A's in both, you'll actually understand the material when you need it, and there's no real downside since you have a minimum of 120 credits to fill to be able to graduate anyway.
In some ways it ties into the "big fish in a small pond" theory of life. People who take that sort of advice have easy, stable lives. I'll keep giving it. Likewise, most people probably shouldn't jump into farming unprepared.
That said, life is short, and a year is a long time. If you can stomach the downside risk (losing every dime you poured into farming, having to work hard at it), by all means just jump in. There are vibrant communities willing to teach you everything you need to know, and you'll learn faster working on real problems you're personally experiencing than rote memorizing the tasks a seasoned master tells you to do.
If you want to mitigate some of the risks, perhaps start with something small enough you could manage it without millions in equipment (high-margin products like mushrooms and arugula -- and if you go with those, focus on distribution as a primary concern).
To be fair, most devs leaving the software industry won't have half the type of problems that actual farmers have - they have money, so they don't have the same pressures and they are typically doing some kind of boutique product.
I would love to "farm", but only as a retirement "job", and only with specific products.
My bias is not to go directly to factory farming or industrial agriculture, which sound depressing. I'd rather a smart and lazy approach, helping the land recover to a point and then stopping succession, as has been done with fire in the PNW mountain meadows for berry crops. I'm not under the illusion that the land-management practices of the Nisqually or Puyallup, say, didn't involve consistent work, just a different sort of work, one more within individual and small-group control.
If petroleum-fueled agriculture is "necessary", it's a mess we've gotten ourselves into.
Everyone thinks they're a born farmer until their first horn worm.
"I love tomatoes! I'm going to grow my own!"
wow what a coincidence so do these little baby moths
Don't get me wrong, growing your own food is neat, but you're going to trade the money you'd spend on veggies for time and effort trying to keep even a small back porch of plants alive. You have to be fastidious about everything from soil maintenance/security (from pests) to pesticide application.
When I started to study English many years ago, my mom gave me a book series titled America Today or something like that. The book was life changing as it made learning English so much easier than the Chinese way at that time and it taught me a lot about the US. The book 3 devoted many chapters to a day in someone's life, one of which is A Day in the Life of a Farmer. At that time, the US was the beacon of the modern civilization to Chinese people, a superpower that was far ahead of everything we did. And despite that the work of a farmer was still tough. They still needed to get up at 4:00am or early to take care of their livestocks. They still had to take care of their crops before the sun fully rose. They still had to handle many issues about their land, their equipment, and their business. They still had to do tons of intense manual labor. Despite all the toughness, though, the chapter also conveyed the idea that farming can be gratifying and fulfilling. I certainly appreciate this kind of optimism and appreciation, and the life an American farmer has a lasting impression until this day.
Running an industrial farm that makes money efficiently is different than living on a plot of land with chickens and cows, giving you a cheap lifestyle.
I agree, and I say the very same thing about software engineering. Yet there are plenty of managers who hire unqualified people coming from a 6 week coding bootcamp into teams with highly complex requirements and very skilled, experienced devs. So from that perspective, one would propably think that a 6-week farming bootcamp also gotto be enough :)
I grew up in a farming community, and whist it can be rewarding, if you are trying to make money, or be self sufficient, its fucking hard work.
Is it harder than programming? thats a subjective call. Objectively its physically harder work, mentally its way more varied. You need to be a welder, plumber, vet, horticulturist, builder, metrologist, and if you're doing properly, crooked accountant as well.
Would I take up farming? probably not. Would rather become a water mill owner? hell yeah.
To me the most interesting thing about this is that his github history shows he really gave up in 2021, with almost no commits since then.
I don't know enough of the context of these repos, their significance or ongoing use, but it feels weird to return just to archive en masse. I think it might actually be the least worst option - leaving it open as if you might return gives a false sense of the project, and passing to a successor is a lot of work.
We really put a lot on the heads of solitary people with the open source model.
As we argue over which of the software engineers in this thread knows more about farming, are we totally sure that statement isn't, at least in some sense, a joke?
20 years ago I read a few Wendell Berry essays on agriculture and it changed my life. I immediately believed two things: 1) if it wasn’t for computers I’d be an agrarian and 2) I finally had a better idea of conservatism in the sense that nature selects for conservative agrarians.
These ideas challenged my ideas of “turning it off and on again” and overall system design. I needed to prove to myself that I was more than a brain, and I was more than the “kid that was good with computers.” What was my body for?
I quit my virtualization/sysadmin job and moved to a farm in central Wisconsin, helping a small family with 4 acres of veggies for market, milked 20 goats and 2 cows, turkey, sheep … the whole works.
Farming didn’t work out long term for me but it taught excellent lessons and gave me a better foundation for understanding my satisfaction of being human, e.g. is the grass greener on the other side of the fence?
I knew a few developers who went that route, and they were glad the did, so hope he enjoys his life.
If first few were in the late 80s, back then it the trend where I lived was Pizza Shops in areas that were growing fast. The ones I knew that jumped were happy they did.
What are the upsides/outcomes for open source project creators? Because it doesn't seem great...
It can help you market yourself (if you have that disposition) for jobs/gigs. But will you keep up interest?
You can try (and probably not succeed) at starting a company around open source. Then all the baggage that comes with maybe needing to switch to a non-open license to monetize it.
You can really put effort to building a large maintainer base / community and get it into a foundation (ie Apache, PSF, etc).
You can ignore it, but if its successful, be nagged and harassed incessantly to merge PRs
Generally these paths are all hard / different... and it seems the stress of dealing with the passive consumers is either a massive headache, or something you need to try to monetize. I wish we as an industry did a better job supporting creators here.
I have some farm land that I lease out to a farmer for hay. Part of me imagines retiring early and living on the land. However, I checked up on it recently while the farmer was out there baling hay. It was 95 degrees and dusty. He told me he was pretty bummed because it was too hot and dry to fertilize earlier this year and his yield wasn't going to be as good as he wanted. Then in the short time I was there, the wheel bearing started acting up on his tractor and he got a flat tire on his rake after the valve stem fell out.
It would take a better person than me to make a living at it.
I am descended from farmers on both sides. When I was young dad made me raise some livestock to really impress on me how bad a job it was. I got up before sunrise to feed them before school and so on. When I went to sell them dad sat me down at a spreadsheet and had me enter all the expenses and the net profit was something like 10 dollars for months of work. Most farmers I know have a second job just to stay afloat, or do it only because they know the quality they can get is so much better than store bought stuff.
I'm don't think the author didn't literally went farming. But I have a story to share...
Many moons ago, I also romanticized the idea of doing something completely unrelated to computers, and started my own bakery. We hired a chef and someone to manage the operations. Started exclusively for deliveries, and we shortly opened it to dine-in orders too.
My contribution was mostly money, ideas, some logistics, and... marketing. I still had a knack for programming, so I spent hours setting up order delivery software (we deliver cakes to parties, etc), automatic Uber Eats orders to KOTs, and of course social media, Facebook ads, etc. Apart from social media and ads, the rest felt fun.
It was tedious work and we simply had competitors that had years of experience, good connections, and great suppliers. We were nearly breaking even, and I think I was more stressed than I was ever at programming related work.
My two cents if that if you feel like being a carpenter or farmer or to live in a small village running a cozy homestay, they all come with significant challenges. Starting from zero isn't that easy.
[+] [-] driverdan|1 year ago|reply
If you're thinking of doing this and do not have experience go work on a farm for a year before you buy in.
[+] [-] miah_|1 year ago|reply
I found it difficult to get a job in tech at the start of COVID after working in it for ~25 years. I moved to Michigan, and now live in the woods. My Cost of Living is a fraction of what it was. My mortgage is only 80% of what I was paying for rent in the SFBay area. Its peaceful and quiet here. It actually gets dark too. I no longer hear BART screeching on the rails at 2am or the constant flow of traffic. I.. do once again work in tech though at a much 'smaller' scale. My company is small and work demands don't dominate my life. I have balance.
This year I've planted ~200 onions, ~100 potatoes, ~100 garlic, ~60 strawberry. I have blueberry from a few years back starting to flourish. I have wild blackberry, and mushrooms galore. "touching grass" is a daily activity as we manage our small flock of chickens.
[+] [-] tmountain|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] BoredPositron|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jfengel|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] stetrain|1 year ago|reply
IE someone who is not depending on the "farm" to be a commercially successful operation or is even attempting to run it as a profitable business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_farm
[+] [-] spiderfarmer|1 year ago|reply
In that regard Jeremy Clarkson paints a much more realistic picture, even though that show is very over the top and mostly scripted.
I grew up on a farm and was on track to take it over. I know how hard it is. And it was not the live I wanted, so I pivoted to online marketing and web development instead.
[+] [-] connorgutman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lm28469|1 year ago|reply
> Farming is hard work. Modern farmers have college degrees, millions in equipment, and a vast amount of knowledge and experience you do not have.
It depends on the scale, I know 80+ years old people living in the countryside, still splitting their own wood, growing their own garden/orchard, manually removing potatoe bugs from their decently sized potatoe field, cutting grass with a scythe, taking care of their chickens/goats/sheeps... they're 100% self sustained and use tools from the 19th century they inherited from their parents. They're in better physical and mental shape than most code monkeys I know while being 50+ years older
[+] [-] cocochanel|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wsc981|1 year ago|reply
Of course, it's not our primary source of income, as that is my work as software engineer. For her it's a nice hobby.
I don't think you'd need a degree anyhow. Plenty of stuff can be learned online these days. And you don't need a lot of equipment either, if it's just to take care of yourself or your family. Depending on your community, you might also be able to rent some equipment if you need it at times (my girlfriend rents some equipment, tractor or some such with a driver, to cut the rice, about 2 times a year, as do most people in our village).
If you have a bit of a garden, can easily start as a hobby, I think.
[+] [-] coldtea|1 year ago|reply
Are we talking industrial scale? Because not every farming venture needs to reach that, and most smaller farmers don't have "college degress and millions in equipment".
And you can pick up a lot in a couple of years, I've had friends who made the switch (and extended family who worked on farming).
Not in the US though, but judging from the decent sized subculture of "living off the grid" (or close), it's probably even easier there.
[+] [-] latentcall|1 year ago|reply
At some point sitting at a computer becomes unfulfilling and some point some people can’t take it anymore.
[+] [-] destitude|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] NoMoreNicksLeft|1 year ago|reply
Interesting side topic: did you know that while John Deere's top of the line combine is well over $1 million retail (and of course everyone else's models are similarly priced), that a model 42 combine from the 1960s will still go for under $1000 at auction, even as recently as last October, and is more than sufficient to harvest oh, probably even up to 50 acres over a few days? If one sells wheat or oats or whatever, there's no way to compete at market but if one only wants enough wheat to feed themselves for the coming year (and not have to buy seed again next), it's some absurdly small acreage. You might need like a fifth of an acre. There's still plenty of hard work, but mechanization solved some of the worst parts of that before we were even born.
[+] [-] whalesalad|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] krmboya|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway211|1 year ago|reply
But there are other things there's demand for, or demand can even be created for, that do not have such vast efficient scales. Hand-reared escargot, or spinach grown within resonance of a woodpecker pecking at dawn, just two examples.
[+] [-] oopsallmagic|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] astura|1 year ago|reply
Distant family member of mine started a hobby farm in retirement and lived on it for probably 30 years until his death. He lived off his pension and savings, not his crops.
[+] [-] PuissantSheep|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 23B1|1 year ago|reply
Yes you can 'farm' on an industrial scale, or you can 'farm' on your parking strip. You're right when it comes to the former, and couldn't be more wrong when it comes to the latter.
[+] [-] hansvm|1 year ago|reply
> Student: I've struggled with math in the past, what do I need to do to be ready for your class?
> Me: Take the previous class first. You'll get easy A's in both, you'll actually understand the material when you need it, and there's no real downside since you have a minimum of 120 credits to fill to be able to graduate anyway.
In some ways it ties into the "big fish in a small pond" theory of life. People who take that sort of advice have easy, stable lives. I'll keep giving it. Likewise, most people probably shouldn't jump into farming unprepared.
That said, life is short, and a year is a long time. If you can stomach the downside risk (losing every dime you poured into farming, having to work hard at it), by all means just jump in. There are vibrant communities willing to teach you everything you need to know, and you'll learn faster working on real problems you're personally experiencing than rote memorizing the tasks a seasoned master tells you to do.
If you want to mitigate some of the risks, perhaps start with something small enough you could manage it without millions in equipment (high-margin products like mushrooms and arugula -- and if you go with those, focus on distribution as a primary concern).
[+] [-] giantg2|1 year ago|reply
I would love to "farm", but only as a retirement "job", and only with specific products.
[+] [-] shagie|1 year ago|reply
https://www.goatops.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26336880 (255 points on March 4, 2021 | 80 comments )
[+] [-] meristohm|1 year ago|reply
My bias is not to go directly to factory farming or industrial agriculture, which sound depressing. I'd rather a smart and lazy approach, helping the land recover to a point and then stopping succession, as has been done with fire in the PNW mountain meadows for berry crops. I'm not under the illusion that the land-management practices of the Nisqually or Puyallup, say, didn't involve consistent work, just a different sort of work, one more within individual and small-group control.
If petroleum-fueled agriculture is "necessary", it's a mess we've gotten ourselves into.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|1 year ago|reply
I was a staff architect at a public company and started a trash cooperative this year
I 1000% prefer making my neighbors better off than some idiot CEO and all the assholes on the board and investors
[+] [-] Kye|1 year ago|reply
"I love tomatoes! I'm going to grow my own!"
wow what a coincidence so do these little baby moths
Don't get me wrong, growing your own food is neat, but you're going to trade the money you'd spend on veggies for time and effort trying to keep even a small back porch of plants alive. You have to be fastidious about everything from soil maintenance/security (from pests) to pesticide application.
[+] [-] g9yuayon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] citizen_friend|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] littlecranky67|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] KaiserPro|1 year ago|reply
I grew up in a farming community, and whist it can be rewarding, if you are trying to make money, or be self sufficient, its fucking hard work.
Is it harder than programming? thats a subjective call. Objectively its physically harder work, mentally its way more varied. You need to be a welder, plumber, vet, horticulturist, builder, metrologist, and if you're doing properly, crooked accountant as well.
Would I take up farming? probably not. Would rather become a water mill owner? hell yeah.
[+] [-] hennell|1 year ago|reply
I don't know enough of the context of these repos, their significance or ongoing use, but it feels weird to return just to archive en masse. I think it might actually be the least worst option - leaving it open as if you might return gives a false sense of the project, and passing to a successor is a lot of work.
We really put a lot on the heads of solitary people with the open source model.
[+] [-] thih9|1 year ago|reply
Also, the tagline of that distro is "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."[1] - I call foreshadowing.
[1]: https://kisslinux.github.io
[+] [-] jpm_sd|1 year ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
[+] [-] karaterobot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] semireg|1 year ago|reply
These ideas challenged my ideas of “turning it off and on again” and overall system design. I needed to prove to myself that I was more than a brain, and I was more than the “kid that was good with computers.” What was my body for?
I quit my virtualization/sysadmin job and moved to a farm in central Wisconsin, helping a small family with 4 acres of veggies for market, milked 20 goats and 2 cows, turkey, sheep … the whole works.
Farming didn’t work out long term for me but it taught excellent lessons and gave me a better foundation for understanding my satisfaction of being human, e.g. is the grass greener on the other side of the fence?
[+] [-] teddyX|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] qwertox|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jmclnx|1 year ago|reply
If first few were in the late 80s, back then it the trend where I lived was Pizza Shops in areas that were growing fast. The ones I knew that jumped were happy they did.
edit: fixed typo to happy
[+] [-] janice1999|1 year ago|reply
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24541964&p=2
[+] [-] azhenley|1 year ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40720121
[+] [-] softwaredoug|1 year ago|reply
It can help you market yourself (if you have that disposition) for jobs/gigs. But will you keep up interest?
You can try (and probably not succeed) at starting a company around open source. Then all the baggage that comes with maybe needing to switch to a non-open license to monetize it.
You can really put effort to building a large maintainer base / community and get it into a foundation (ie Apache, PSF, etc).
You can ignore it, but if its successful, be nagged and harassed incessantly to merge PRs
Generally these paths are all hard / different... and it seems the stress of dealing with the passive consumers is either a massive headache, or something you need to try to monetize. I wish we as an industry did a better job supporting creators here.
[+] [-] ajdude|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] patwolf|1 year ago|reply
It would take a better person than me to make a living at it.
[+] [-] letmeinhere|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] plasticchris|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Ayesh|1 year ago|reply
Many moons ago, I also romanticized the idea of doing something completely unrelated to computers, and started my own bakery. We hired a chef and someone to manage the operations. Started exclusively for deliveries, and we shortly opened it to dine-in orders too.
My contribution was mostly money, ideas, some logistics, and... marketing. I still had a knack for programming, so I spent hours setting up order delivery software (we deliver cakes to parties, etc), automatic Uber Eats orders to KOTs, and of course social media, Facebook ads, etc. Apart from social media and ads, the rest felt fun.
It was tedious work and we simply had competitors that had years of experience, good connections, and great suppliers. We were nearly breaking even, and I think I was more stressed than I was ever at programming related work.
My two cents if that if you feel like being a carpenter or farmer or to live in a small village running a cozy homestay, they all come with significant challenges. Starting from zero isn't that easy.
[+] [-] bitwize|1 year ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs&t=2m35s
Not a bad idea, actually.
[+] [-] geenat|1 year ago|reply