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> Sure, I have customers to assist, servers to manage (not that they need much management), and business accounting to do; but professors equally have classes to teach, students to supervise, and committees to attend. When it comes to research, I can follow my interests without regard to the whims of granting agencies and tenure and promotion committees.

As a fellow developer/owner, this is the mantra I'm always repeating.

Is running a small software biz a great job? Meh. The job has higher highs and lower lows than when I was a dev for other companies.

At the end of the day, there's no better way to make sustained progress on groundbreaking, long-term dev projects than to run a company that dedicated to building such projects. If one is fortunate enough to find a stable cash source (like Tarsnap), it serves as a perpetual license to work on the most interesting dev projects one can fathom succeeding at.




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