livingpunchbag

Don't have kids.

Study algorithms for interviews for Big Corps.

Know where you're spending money on. What % goes to food, what % goes to hobbies, etc.

Have low-cost hobbies.

I'm much more experienced with Ruby and Python than PHP. I did something simple in PHP in the past simply because I didn't even know I could do something else.

But maybe PHP is indeed the right choice. Right now I am kinda considering Ruby with CGI.

Never heard of Firebase before. But I want to stay away from Google as much as possible. It needs to be something on my own hosting (Dreamhost).

I wanna stay away from Google as much as I can. Also, as I mentioned earlier I will probably add some kind of automation to access the page from Linux command line, and Google won't help here.

I am considering maybe learning Rails. I just worry if it would be too overkill or too complex for it.

I am also considering just using Ruby with CGI.

alias s='cd ..'

Coworking space was impossible for me. I work with lots of confidential stuff, nobody can hear my phone calls nor see my screen, etc.

I considered renting a super tiny apartment 1 block away from home.

I moved to the office when he was almost 2 years old.

Thinking about that whole situation still makes me stressed.

Solid advice. I'm the guy for the other huge comment. I absolutely considered renting an office at 5min walk from home. I almost did that (but in the end I moved and am working in the office). OP should consider that too.

First months are fine (given, of course, someone can take care of the baby while you work!).

Once the baby starts understanding more about the world, he will not be able to understand why daddy is locked in that room. He knows you're there, he wants to play with you. He doesn't understand the concept of work. He will bang the door very frequently. They love doing it while you're on phone meetings because they can hear your voice, so they remember you and go banging the door right when your microphone is open. They also learn to open doors pretty quickly when it interests them.

If you're working close to where there's a person taking care of the baby and the person is not his mom or someone you absolutely trust 100%, every time the baby makes a single noise your primate brain will focus on it. Maybe a cougar caught him! I had my mother-in-law taking care of him during the mornings, and although I trusted her, I knew she did not have the reflexes to properly ensure he wouldn't get hurt while he was learning to walk properly (~1 year). He would occasionally fall and hurt himself and cry. Absolutely EVERY SINGLE noise he made (even when it was not falling) would completely put me in "alert mode" and I would focus on him, not my work. I could only be able to better focus on work once my wife arrived home and started taking care of him. But it was still not 100% attention on work: I would still hear all his sounds.

The fact that my mother-in-law was taking care of him while I was at home working meant I had a lot of interactions with her. And let me say that: it felt like I was married with her, and not with my wife. The big problem is that I really would never ever marry someone like her! This was a major source of stress. And she did a lot of thing I didn't agree she should, and my wife didn't have the balls to challenge her because she was already helping us so much, so this ensured everybody felt uncomfortable (although, of course, I am thankful she indeed helped us so much).

In the end my wife quit her job and now I'm working in the office. This is not only because of the reasons above, there are other external reasons. While I'm at the office I can fully focus on work while knowing that my wife is doing everything she can to take care of him. And I won't hear noises that my primate brain will interpret as "your son is dying". Still, I attend early morning meetings from home and he occasionally visits the office while he shouldn't (the office door can't be locked, it's a rented house and I can't change it).

On the other hand, he cries every single day that I'm abandoning him while I'm going to work and it doesn't matter how many times I try to explain it, he doesn't understand why I won't play with him all day like his cool mom does.

No matter what you do, you're wrong.

I can confirm your first sentence with my own case. As the team grew, more non-remote people were hired, management changed to not-so-remote-friendly bosses and with them process that were remote-first started becoming local-first with (crappy) ways to allow remote people, and that has been killing the effectiveness of being remote on that team... And it's hard to grow past a certain point being remote.

OP here. What would be the advantages of moving to fastmail.com instead of staying with my Dreamhost-hosted email? What do they do better than those hosting providers that also provide email? Since I already pay Dreamhost for hosting, what would justify the extra $5/month? Are they inherently more secure?

A lot of people are commenting on owning your own email and having backups. Perhaps a compromise solution would be to have Gmail handle my domain email? I won't get rid of the advertisement/parsing, but at least I would be able to migrate to something else if they ever for some reason block my account, and I would keep their top-level security and anti-spam services. I don't know...