I quit my job in the Fall of 2020 and continued receiving messages from recruiters through last year—easily the best decision I’ve ever made.

I had spent far too long at an enterprise SaaS startup with a nice hybrid schedule and needed a major change. Right after leaving, I took a Machine Learning course and planned to build projects with React Native (my background was primarily in C++ and Python). However, a friend soon asked for financial advice, and that unexpectedly set me on a whole new life path as a financial planner. Definitely a lot of opportunity cost involved in that pivot but I have no regrets.

Last year, I did some consulting for a FinTech company, and I’d love to build again someday—especially now that LLMs make it even more exciting. For now, though, I’m fully embracing the ride, helping others take sabbaticals and explore various flavors of work-optionality.

Reading your analysis and story reminds me how fascinating I find the transitions to and from atheism and Catholicism!

My maternal grandmother was raised an only child of atheists... and became a hardcore Catholic in the '50s and raised 9 kids.

My parents raised me hardcore Catholic... and I became an atheist while studying philosophy at Franciscan (after economics at Ave Maria).

I have way too much esoteric Catholic knowledge in my head I no longer have use for, besides the occasional "fun fact" moment.

Here I thought having to read Duns Scotus's commentary on Aristotle's "Metaphysics" in grad school would be the last I heard of him.

I'll take him over Aquinas.

Seeing this thread makes me want to bust out some Prolog.

I was just thinking about a similar idea. Best of luck!

Minivans with seats removed ftw!

I like to describe my Toyota Sienna as a "metal tent on wheels". It's got a full mattress, but it's no house.

I'm launching a financial planning business right now but I was recently using it to write xpath queries to use with "xmllint --format".

I then used it to generate a more robust Python script processing these large XML files instead.

I like using it to generate scaffolding and for debugging but I haven't had to touch a legacy C++ code base for a few years.

I'm in the midst of creating a financial planning firm serving tech professionals looking to take sabbaticals and mini-retirements (i.e., my former self).

Probably too early to give you an informed opinion but I've enjoyed the ride this far. I have professional excuses to continue learning new things and I get to feel like I'm helping people while occasionally building useful tech tools for my practice.

My colleagues are generally kind nerds, which fills my soul, and I've really enjoyed connecting with them over the past year and a half. Admittedly, I've been exceedingly fortunate in having a large buffer and low personal expenses.

Awesome first content post, man! I like yours better than mine: https://andythemoron.com/blog/2017-03-12/Scraping-For-Fun-An...

One note you may want to add (or step you may want to tweak) is that the initial sqlite3 command won’t work if chrome is currently open. I just copied the History folder to somewhere else and did the same thing, as per the superuser thread you helpfully linked to.

I happened to mention interest in Elixir on my LinkedIn page, and now I get hit up by recruiters for it every so often, so it seems so. I haven't heard too much outside of this personal anecdote, however.