I try to always reply honestly when talking about having kids. And I'm lucky to only have friends who do the same.
Usually I say something like "It's really hard, but it's so awesome at the same time that you forget how hard it is all the time. In the end, you feel like it's worth it."
I confess I wasn't that positive when I was totally sleep deprived. I also have the impression that no two situations are the same... Some parents have it very tough while some others have quite an easy time with their kids. You gotta have some luck...
Learning: I learned a big deal of web development (HTML, CSS and JS) from view-source.
Tweaking: I sometimes fix broken closed-source/proprietary applications or websites by checking the source and writing a user script.
Those two can probably fall into the "Nerd" category, though...
When I was a kid and started doing that, I thought that the compiled scripts were written like this, and I was fascinated (and terrified) by how complex they were.
I recall being both impressed by the complexity and either annoyed or impressed by how well formatted the raw HTML output was.
"How can they possibly stand to work on this when it's all jumbled together on one line??"
I would manually pretty-print so I could actually read what was going on, and now I still like to output tidier HTML when I can, even if no one is ever going to see it.
I agree that discoverability and selection of well-maintained packages is problematic in node (I couldn't compare with .NET core though).
But I disagree with you on picking Express as an example of this. I see Express as stable and very well maintained. If by "rotting" you mean "no new feature added", then sure, but I'd consider it a good thing: it is mature and stable, and is used by a lot of people around the world to power pretty demanding apps.
Atlassian, which just IPOd this year, was famously bootstrapped. There are two founders, each with 37.7% [1], so the table is misleading and the should really be 75.4%. Atlassian eventually took funding from Accel, 8 years after its founding.
It is also curious the table rounded Accel's ownership up (12.7 -> 13), but truncated the founders' (37.7 -> 37).
Atlassian's funding wasn't typical VC growth money either. The first round was taken off the table by the founders and was primarily a mechanism to get board members in preparation for a US based IPO. They also took a second round, 100% of which which went to early employees in the form of a secondary market sale for stock options.
There are many more notable bootstrapped exits, e.g. Mojang/Minecraft.
Lots of bootstrapped companies that could IPO, e.g. Mailchimp
And many other examples of companies that took very little money making their founders richer than comparable funded founders. E.g. Each of the founders of Wayfair made more than EVERYONE involved in the sale of Zappos.
But a good proxy for VCs, where most non-IPO exists are basically considered a failure. 1.5-3x returns from a "successful" sale to a larger company is a failed investment for most VC firms.
Exactly my thought when I tried Vue.js: on the surface, it's knockout with some react-inspired additions that make it faster. I loved being able to pick up Vue.js and make something that just worked in 30 minutes.
