Before my recent career change I described myself as a full stack web developer (hey I built this blog). When I started building web sites professionally the work that a front-end developer did was considered a lesser form of software development, requiring a less academic set of skills than the developers who wrote code to talk to databases and serve APIs.

Now I'm not convinced that was true even back in the day, and it is not even remotely true now (I might go as far to suggest the reverse may be true). Just one of the skills you need for front end development is CSS, the code which defines how a web page looks. There is a lot to learn and to wield CSS well. continue reading…

I recently posted about my plans to take a "year off" to work full time on open source. The TL and DR of it was that I would live on savings while working on Rich and Textual, both of which where generating a bit of buzz in the Python community.

Additionally, I would work on a cloud service using both those projects which at some point would become a business.

Now this was a good plan. The money from GitHub sponsors which I had previously been donating to charity would take the sting out of not having an income for a while. While far from a salary (where I live), at around $1000 a month it would help pay a few bills. continue reading…