Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?

• cli

  40 4,651 9.7 Go

  The Docker CLI (by docker)

  

I am a self-employed furniture maker. I'm that guy who somewhat infamously no longer builds software[0]. About a year ago I moved my operations from a makerspace to my own shop. That's come with its ups and downs.

On the one hand, I know which idiot last used a tool: me.

On the other, I would no longer see other humans besides my wife most weeks. To keep sane I also work one day a week at a bike shop fixing bikes. It's something I'd done on a volunteer basis many years back.

The unexpected nice thing about this is that it gives me projects that are an hour or two in size in addition to the many-week sized projects that I do as part of my business. It's sort of like getting to fix a small bug in the midst of adding a big feature; it lets me pop out of the big project for a bit and see something else through from start to finish and see some tangible progress before diving back into a long-running project that moves forward in fits and starts.

Beyond getting to tackle some bite-sized projects, I'd say the thing that sustains me is getting to work with clients. It's tons of fun when people come to me with a vision that we can iterate on and bring into reality. And then the flip side is also rewarding: getting to scratch an itch and turn a design I've been turning over in my mind into reality.

https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149...

• soundfingerprinting

  6 913 8.1 C#

  Open source audio fingerprinting in .NET. An efficient algorithm for acoustic fingerprinting written purely in C#.

Started 10 years ago as an open-source project, building an algorithm for audio fingerprinting. Added a commercial offering, selling storage built specifically for audio fingerprints, targeting enterprise customers. Since the offering was too technical (it's hard to sell solutions to problems that are too narrow and domain-specific), pivoted to more "business-oriented problems". This last year's pivot is a chance to finally grow. Running a business in single-player mode is, at times, too stressful. Aside from the technical part, which I very much enjoy, I need to wear marketing, sales, and customer support hats.

[1] - https://emysound.com

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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