Over the last few years, I’ve built 5+ failed products. Each time, I ran into the same problems—either the idea wasn’t needed, competition was too strong, or I missed critical insights before building.

To avoid making the same mistakes, I analyzed 180K+ Product Hunt startups (from its inception to now). I filtered 35K products with 100+ upvotes, identified 7K+ that failed, and used AI to analyze why they died and how they could have been improved.

I also spent 2 months tracking Reddit in real-time, collecting 100K+ posts, and filtering 5K+ where users explicitly asked for software solutions—essentially uncovering real pain points.

This project is my attempt to help others (and myself) build better products by learning from past failures and understanding real demand.

Sample file is in the link near the title. Let me know if you any one need a full dataset.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/

Interestingly, can’t seem to find the price anywhere on that page…

Why would Apple need to pay to promote something? Simple as better understanding demand to determine supply? Wouldn’t price be important to include? Why not take pre-orders? So many questions!

### Understanding the Demand
I realized that this issue not only hampers efficiency but also limits creative potential. After discussing with fellow creators and researching the market, it became clear that there's a strong demand for a tool that can automate the process of maintaining visual consistency, allowing creators to focus more on the content rather than the technical details.

### The Development Journey
Driven by this need, I embarked on developing an intelligent video tool. Over the course of 6 months, through numerous technical challenges and iterations, I finally brought Vidu AI Video to life.

### Key Features
- *Intelligent Consistency Algorithm*: Automatically analyzes and adjusts video clips to maintain a consistent visual style.
- *Seamless Secondary Creation Tools*: Whether you're merging clips, editing, or adding effects, Vidu AI Video ensures a uniform output.
- *User-Friendly Interface*: A clean, intuitive interface that makes it easy for users to get started and enhances creative efficiency.

### Try It Out
I invite you all to try out Vidu AI Video and share your feedback. Your insights will be invaluable in helping us refine the product and make it even more beneficial for creators everywhere.

On the other hand, the engineering approach emphasizes empirical experimentation and software engineering practices: fine-tuning, hyperparameters, APIs, MLOps pipelines, etc. From this approach, the models feel like black boxes with some configurable settings.

How do you balance these two aspects when learning about Machine Learning? How do you decide which to focus on, especially given how fast the entire field is changing month by month?

Understanding this demand, I embarked on a journey to develop a solution that could address this specific challenge. Over several months, through countless iterations and a few unexpected setbacks, I finally developed WebLead AI—a tool designed to effortlessly generate website leads and B2B LinkedIn prospects.

WebLead AI stands out for its ability to quickly source leads from both websites and LinkedIn, allowing you to send batch emails to improve sales efficiency. It’s tailored for small and medium-sized businesses looking to enhance their outreach without the hassle.

I’d love for you to try it out and share your feedback—your input is invaluable as I continue to refine and improve the product.

We are testing for the level of demand for a product that aims to solve some of the issues and problems developers and engineers face when building, deploying, migrating and maintaining their microservice oriented applications. Please take a quick look at the site and tell us if this is the type of thing you'd actually want!

http://getmaestro.io

Software Engineers build using the digital tools at their disposal, and so do AI Practitioners.

If you're interested in making the transition, please join this wait-list https://forms.gle/NW3rgKYSH7hymWGD7

Quick history: I graduated with a degree in economics during the great recession but taught myself ruby and Javascript based web dev because I perceived it to be a more lucrative career and have been working as a developer for 10 years ever since . So I feel pretty in tune with a large range of tech after programming for 10 years but on the other hand, I've always stayed well versed in macro economics, especially international trade and monetary policy.

Off to the side of that I have a decent understanding of how financial markets work to the point where I can hold reasonably deep conversations with friends in finance and have some personal experience trading.

Off to the side of that, I started flipping houses in my spare time and learned not only about plumbing, electrical and carpentry but also about sales, accounting project management, architecture and interior design.

So to sum it up I've picked up a mix of

-programming and technical product development

- understanding of financial markets and many macro econ topics

- light but non trivial knowledge of several different trades

- the hard and soft skill picked up on the real estate transactions

- all sorts of other little skill all over the place

Im not trying to be cocky here, my skills in each of these areas are each drastically worse than the people who focus on them full time (hopefully with the exception of the tech stuff) but I was wondering if anyone has found ways to use super broad skill sets like these. The only thing that comes to mind is maybe niche areas of finance but I wouldn't even be sure where to look and I wouldnt be sure how to pitch my experience.

Any thoughts or similar experiences would be appreciated.

I am thinking of freelancing because a) my day job is very boring (I can't leave for a few more months) and b) I could use some extra cash.

I'm primarily a PHP programmer (the usual - php, mysql, oracle) but I have worked with Java in the past.

Given my skillset, is it possible to get freelance work? If no, what tech skills should I pick up? I feel small when people put down PHP all the time. I am confident I can learn Rails and Android (have spent some time with both in the past) if PHP is not enough to get interesting, paying freelance work.

I'm good in communicating, understanding requirements, managing time etc. It is just that I am not so confident my tech skills are enough for freelancing.

Please advise.

To remedy this, I've put together a very basic and simple survey with the objective of identifying which features I should focus on in my MVP, understanding the frustrations of my potential users and trying to understand various workflows as it relates to how they might use my product.

So I humbly approach your collective expertise and ask if you wouldn't mind critiquing my survey (and maybe filling it out, too?) or helping me identify oversights in my approach. As a small token of appreciation, I will gladly share the results if anyone is interested.

Thanks so much! I'm learning a lot from this community and happy to have this resource available.

Survey link: http://www.survs.com/survey/CT3A9Q3XGX

Heat pumps work by using refrigerant and a compressor to move energy against a temperature gradient. If you put 1 kWh of energy into a heat pump, you get 3-5 kWh of heating in your home. But this isn’t breaking the laws of physics because heat pumps don’t make heat, they move it around. The extra 2-4kWh gets absorbed from the outdoors, even when it is cold outside. The low pressure refrigerant in the outdoor heat exchanger is colder than the outdoor air, so it has to absorb energy. After the compressor the refrigerant in the indoor heat exchanger is hotter than the indoor air, and energy flows into your home. This happens in a continuous cycle. A great feature in this system is a reversing valve that allows the flow of refrigerant to be flipped and your heat pump becomes an air conditioner.

There’s a big push to end fossil fuel use in US homes by electrifying all end-uses, and heat pumps are a critical part of this. Space heating is 50% of the average homeowners energy consumption, and makes up 10% of overall US energy use. Recognizing the importance of heat pump adoption, the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act contains $4.3B in heat pump rebates for low and middle income families, and a $2000 tax credit that applies to everyone. Heat pumps can also save homeowners on their monthly utility bills vs. heating with natural gas, propane, fuel oil, and electric resistance. And thanks to the popularity of vapor injection systems, heat pumps now work well even in the cold climates of the Northeast.

Quick technical aside on vapor injection systems - this is an improvement to the basic vapor compression cycle. Gas from the condenser outlet is injected halfway into the compression process. This increases the compressor efficiency, increases the mass flow rate of refrigerant through the compressor, and also lowers the discharge temperature. The result is higher system efficiency, higher heating capacity, and the ability to operate across large temperature gradients (say -15F outside temp to 72F in your home) without exceeding the discharge temperature limit and damaging the compressor.

I’ve spent my career building and designing thermal systems—first in aerospace, then at Tesla working on Model 3 and Semi Truck, and most recently in vertical farming. I got really excited about residential heat pumps when I realized that we’re about to go through a huge transition where the 80M single family homes in the US replace their furnaces with heat pumps.

But the products on the market today have a number of shortcomings. The homeowner experience sucks because the integration of thermostat, heat pump equipment and air quality systems is terrible. Nothing works together well, and the best thermostats are not fully compatible with inverter driven heat pumps. In addition the process of getting a heat pump is painful, including finding a trustworthy contractor, sorting out financing, and wading through rebates. And finally contractors struggle with installs because of the difficulty of properly sizing the system, and understanding if your duct work is compatible with a heat pump

I wanted to approach home heating and cooling from a product design approach, improve the end-to-end experience for homeowners and make a product that was compelling beyond its climate motivations. Electric Air is building a thermostat as well as heat pump equipment (air handler and condenser) and a contractor web-app.

Better air quality is achieved through a thermostat with PM2.5 and CO2 sensors, as well as an air quality module on the air handler that controls HEPA filtration, fresh air intake and modification of the home’s humidity. The thermostat algorithm combines demand-response with weather and time-of-use rate plans to reduce monthly utility bills through pre-cooling and pre-heating. Unlike a Nest or Ecobee, the thermostat will be able to run the heat pump in variable speed mode. A more powerful air handler blower and contractor software enables more ducted installs - no wall units required. The most common heating system in the US is a natural gas furnace connected to ductwork, with the hot air ultimately coming out of vents in each room. This heat pump is a great replacement for the furnace and air conditioner in these ducted systems. The same software used for ducts also helps contractors perform simple load disaggregation (turn a utility bill into a thermal load calculation) to properly size a heat pump system. In addition there’s actually some industrial design going into the outdoor condenser, meaning you don’t have to hide it in an alley. And finally homeowners can purchase this system online. We help with financing and rebates, and connect them with a contractor to do the actual install.

How come no one’s doing this? Heat pump manufacturers are bad at making consumer products like thermostats and the thermostat manufacturers are IOT companies that don’t have the know-how to wade into heat pump equipment manufacture. For heat pump manufacturers, their end customer is largely HVAC contractors, and not homeowners. Also selling direct means disrupting their current distribution strategy which normally involves selling to regional distributors, and sometimes straight to contractors. Getting this right is a big systems integration problem that the current players are ill equipped to handle.

While we don't have any physical prototypes at the moment, we have the industrial design and also largely understand how this will be built. The core technology risk is quite low, it's really about executing the scope well and also finding the right product that homeowners find compelling. I'm working on building traction via preorders (https://electricair.io), and will start building hardware once fundraising is complete, likely in the next few weeks.

What issues have you had with your existing heat and cooling, and do you have any interesting stories around a heat pump install or use? I would love to hear your ideas, experiences, and feedback on any and all of the above!

Some demos: https://twitter.com/AlistairPullen/status/162848600700289433... and https://twitter.com/AlistairPullen/status/162848600806408601...

We’ve been devs on projects ranging from mobile apps, arbitrage trading systems, VR platforms to on-demand startups. Without fail, whenever a codebase gets over a certain size or we inherit legacy code, we get slowed down from not knowing where a certain snippet lives, or how it works. I’m sure we’ve also bothered our colleagues when we first get onboarded for longer than they would like.

Current code search products aren’t too different from CMD + F. We’ve often wanted results that aren’t captured by string matches or require some nuanced understanding of our codebase—questions such as “How does authentication work on the backend?”, "Find where we initialize Stripe in React”, or “Where do we handle hardware failures?”

To build a tool to help developers quickly search and understand large codebases requires contextual understanding of every line of code, and then how to surface that understanding in a useful format.

First we need to parse your codebase; this isn’t a walk in the park as we can’t simply embed your code files because in that instance if you were to surface a result for a specific search you’d only be brought to the file that the result was in, and no deeper. To be able to find specific snippets of code you’re looking for, we need to be much more granular in how we split up your codebase. We’ve used a universal parser (TreeSitter), so we can traverse the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of your code files to pick out individual functions, classes, and snippets to be embedded; not the entire file. This allows us to work on your codebase on a more semantic level than the raw source code.

Once we have extracted all of the relevant code from the AST, we have to embed them. (We use a number of other search heuristics too, such as edit distance and exact matches, but embeddings are the highest weighted and core heuristic.) We’ve learned a great deal about the best implementations of embeddings for this use case, particularly in this case when using embeddings to search between modalities (natural language and code) we found that hypothetical search queries were the optimal way to surface relevant code, as well as creating a custom bias matrix for our embeddings to better optimize them at finding code from short user queries. Simply embedding the user’s search query and searching the answer space with it was a poor solution.

One embeddings heuristic we use is a HyDE comparison, which involves using an LLM to take the user’s search query, and then generate code that it thinks will be similar to the actual code the user’s trying to find. This process is well documented and has given us a huge increase in performance (https://www.buildt.ai/blog/3llmtricks). Another heuristic allows us to achieve “search for what your code does, not what it is” functionality—this involves the embeddings gaining some form of understanding of what the code actually does. For this we used embedding customisation to create a bias matrix to mutate the vector space in such a way that the embeddings cluster code by its functionality rather than simply its literal strings (https://www.buildt.ai/blog/viral-ripout).

By having a product that lives in your IDE instead of your Git repository, we give you the power of contextual understanding in real time as you’re working on your codebase. There’s no need to context switch or change apps—everything is self-contained; you can easily search for code, have your code refactored and fresh code written from a single extension.

Buildt is free for now as we’re still in beta, but in the future we’ll charge something like $10 per seat per month. We’re currently building the last part of what we consider our core features, cross-file codegen. Soon you’ll be just ask Buildt to instantly perform request such as ‘add firebase analytics to every user interaction’.

We started Buildt as a product to tackle our own frustrations and we’d love for you to try it out and let us know what you think. We can’t wait to hear your feedback, questions, and comments!

We’re Victor and Tony, founders of DevFlight (https://devflight.com). We help open-source maintainers make money. Think of us as agents for open-source maintainers.

We met last year through the Indie Hackers community. It’s one of the luckiest things that’s ever happened to us. We clicked immediately. It became clear we share an obsession with building things to make developers’ lives easier. We began working on small developer-centric projects together.

We started DevFlight after recognizing maintainers are the most underserved developers. They provide immense value and get little in return. We’ve spoken with many maintainers who’ve told us the current open-source development model is unsustainable for them. Their projects often end up being a second full-time job without pay. Some have to stop supporting their projects altogether due to a lack of resources.

It’s time to start paying maintainers well for their work. Making open-source development sustainable will benefit everyone in the long-term. Our vision is to make it possible for maintainers to receive a stable income that accurately reflects the value they bring to companies. We’re accomplishing this by connecting maintainers with companies who will pay them.

If you’re a maintainer, apply now on our website to join the waitlist. We’re currently working with a small group of maintainers from popular projects. We’ll gradually expand this group. Shoot us an email to learn more. We’d love to chat with you.

We aim to make the process of hiring maintainers dead simple for companies. We communicate when maintainers are available and what types of work they can provide. If your company is interested in learning more, please reach out to us.

Companies are paying for things like priority email and on-demand support from maintainers, feature request prioritization, continued development of the project, faster bug fixes, and guaranteed project stability. This is not an exhaustive list.

We take 10% from every contract we negotiate. We’re aware the contract model doesn’t work for everyone. We’re exploring other revenue models based on what’s best for our maintainer network. We’d be particularly interested in hearing any ideas about this from the HN community.

This is a difficult problem to solve, because it’s fundamentally more of a human problem than a software one. Companies often aren’t aware of all the open-source software they’re dependent on. Many also have complex purchasing requirements and no clear understanding of how their company can directly benefit from paying maintainers. Solving this problem requires better communication, more transparency, and new systems.

We know the HN community has a wealth of experience and knowledge on this topic. We’re excited to listen to any thoughts and experiences you’re willing to share with us. We want to continue to learn and evaluate how we’re approaching this problem, so fire away!

Victor and Tony

I am currently a solid frontend developer (which is pretty laughable to say, because my experience is just about 3 years), I know (to some degree, of course) you can say almost everything "new and shiny" (for regular apps, without graphics and etc) – popular bundlers, up to stage 1 features, React/Vue/Angular/Cycle, all this state management systems, like Redux/Mobx/Rx and other, CSS with css-next, and so on. I also played with ClojureScript and Elm – and while it seems kind of cool, I don't really see it as a solid option to bet on.

The thing is that I feel stuck. The new frameworks come up every month, a lot of people in JS community have pretty low CS understanding, and therefore the level of discussion seems pretty miserable. Moreover, I don't really want to keep up with frontend, and want to learn something more solid. Not as solid as system programming, but I feel that back-end might be a good choice. But the availability of platforms is astonishing – and while I played some time with Elixir and Clojure, I feel that I should bet on Python and Go. I want to get a versatile language(s) (I know, it is not a good idea to stick with just one language, but I need to pick it up during the year; also I like to move between countries, so it should be in demand in general in Europe.

So, what can you recommend as a fast-picking language and what is the best to become familiar with the whole cycle – development, testing, deploy to the cloud, monitoring, etc (I only scratched the surface in all these topics, so I definitely need to solidify it). I am leaning towards Python/Go (I wrote a small API for my side project in Go).

Since this is YC's official forum, I figured that folks here could give me solid advice on what technologies I should learn to start a startup. I have a vague idea that knowledge about web dev (React, Javascript etc.) and cloud (AWS) is in high demand in industry, but are they the first things I should pick up? What about mobile apps? And blockchain? Where should I start? What area is the easiest to pick up and has the most resources online?

Thanks!

What is the best way of connecting them? Would companies pay for support from project maintainers to improve quality and speed of their development? Would they prefer support contracts or on-demand support based on developer’s hourly rate?

I’d like to get a deeper understanding of requirements that businesses have. Any insight is very appreciated!

We all take for granted the various views we have about skills versus demand, and hiring ads always show the “bucket list” but never say “We want more applicants with a focus on skill XYZ this time around”. So, for those of you that have hired or are hiring in the past year, what is the one skill you wish more applicants had experience with, over all other skills that they could learn?

- Please choose one skill; no ties, no top three, no shopping lists. Picking one is hard, but it’s worth it.

- I’d especially enjoy hearing from YC startups that posted hiring ads on HN this past year.

- Sample answers: C# operations, git rebase, resolving differences through compromise, understanding EDR/XDR

Some of your companies sound interesting at face-value, but the fact that you've succumbed (I'm assuming) to the sales pitch of Captain Recruiter, JobVite, or whatever parasite service tells me you don't have a very good understanding of friction, and therefore by your use of these sites I assume your company is not viable at the least, and at most the interview process would be similarly cookie-cutter. Good luck.

"We are writing this email to inform you that as of March 1st 2019 the Free tier will become a free trial and limited to 7 Days use.

Why are we removing free?
We at Codeanywhere have always tried to give our customers the best value for their money making sure that we just cover our operating expenses. Lately the increasing demand from our user base to boost the performance of our container service forced us to increase the operating cost of running our service, and with that, a forever for free plan is no longer feasible.

As mentioned earlier and as you all know yourselves, compute power is not cheap, and as a preemptive measure for this we have to scale back on free usage.

What about education use?
We do offer very large discounts for education use, furthermore if you do decide to upgrade to an Educational licence, only the teacher/admin has to use a Credit Card, students do not have to, so you have no worries there.

What and why now?
We understand that this will be hard on some, and we are very, very sorry for this, we tried to prevent closing free accounts completely, but the economics just did not work out.

We will do our best to help all we can to transition in this period, so please feel to reach out if we can help in any matter or form.

Furthermore this is one of the reasons we have reactivated the lifetime 40% discount, if you upgrade and use the following code (Promo code: 40forlife1533 valid until 15th March. 2019) you will have a 40% discount on any and all plans for the rest of your life.

We truly hope this is the last of our policy changes for a long, long time, and hope you will support us by upgrading, so we as Codeanywhere can continue on this journey of helping you code, from anywhere.

Thank you for understanding.
Your Codeanywhere Team."

It lays out a biological truth about sleep cycles that I've experienced for 2-3 decades now: about 30% of humanity are night owls, and we have a hard time adjusting to work hours deemed normal by society.

I'm now in my early 30s and have been noticing the negative effects of constant sleep deprivation over the years. My job starts at 9am and I get up at 8am. Naturally, I'd sleep until 10am. That means I'm jet lagged by 2 hours every single day. I go to bed around midnight, but can rarely fall asleep until 1-2am. I use a medical grade light box in the morning.

The consequences of all the sleep deprivation are pretty dire. I keep getting fatter and feel terrible. It seems to be messing with my digestion. Of course, I'm constantly tired at work and have to make up the sleep debt on the weekend, which leaves me little time to actually enjoy my days off.

I know that it's the sleep because I took a sabbatical and lost a ton of weight - and then gained it all back after going back to work. No changes in diet or workout.

I've asked about starting work later, but the response was complete non-understanding - my manager seemed offended that I'd even ask for that, when everyone else was coming in at the same time as me. I didn't want to start a huge debate so I wouldn't be "that sick guy who wants special treatment". But I guess I do want "special" treatment so that my schedule won't make me sick.

How have other night owls dealt with this? If 30% of us are late risers, there must be huge demand for jobs that start later. I've never even heard of a job that would let me start late enough to wake up at 10am, except maybe a 100% remote job. That would probably severely limit the opportunities and number of jobs available, but I really feel like I can't do this to my body much longer - 20s were fine, 30s don't seem so fine. Maybe I should prioritize health now?

I am a semi avid reader, a programmer, and a college student in the midwest USA (Ohio).

I am in a bind.

I consider myself a frontend programmer, Html, Css, Javascript (mainly) and I primarily work on web apps. I use node.js for the backend, but I also know php (started with php web dev years ago). I am not a bad programmer, but I could be better (can't we all?).

For the past 2 months I have been living off of savings and petty cash primarily. I cannot find a job. With my location, I am pretty much confined to doing remote freelance work, which limits the positions substantially. However it is my understanding that front end developers are in fairly high demand. I must be doing something wrong. I know that I am a fairly good programmer, so I do not think my skill set is the limiting factor.

I don't have a github, I always just work on my own projects that I host, never spent the time (or really wanted to) put the code on github. I know a lot of employers look for that however.

I have a online portfolio/resume (past work, skills, about me, etc) all on one page.

I mainly don't know where to find jobs. I'm mainly limited to the Who is hiring threads on HN and craigslist job posts, neither of which have been very fruitful.

I'm going to need to get a non web dev job soon, which I'd rather not do. Is there something I'm doing wrong? Should I learn RoR or Python? Any thoughts?

Thanks

I'm in the process of exploring the development of a SaaS product and am keen on understanding the landscape better from those who have walked this path before I jump into coding. Specifically, I'm looking into creating a B2B multi-tenant identity management platform for SaaS businesses.

These are the main questions that puzzle me most:

- Main Technical Challenges: What are the primary technical hurdles you've encountered in building and scaling SaaS products? Especially interested in aspects related to multi-tenancy, security, tenant management, and onboarding.

- Market Need: In your experience, is there a significant demand for a streamlined, multi-tenant identity management solution? How critical is identity management in your time-to-market considerations?

- Product-Market Fit: For those who have implemented or considered such solutions, what features or capabilities do you find most lacking or desired in the current offerings?

- Choice of Providers: Which identity management providers have you used for your SaaS products? What influenced your choice? Any pain points?

- User Experiences: What have been your experiences with these providers? Pros, cons, and any specific challenges you faced, especially in terms of multi-tenancy and security?

- Building Custom Solutions: Have any of you opted to build your own identity management solutions instead of using existing providers? What led to this decision, and how has it impacted your product development and time-to-market?

- Desired Features and Capabilities: In your view, what are the most critical features or capabilities that are lacking or could be improved in current identity management solutions?

My goal is to validate the need for a solution that simplifies identity management across different tenants.

Any insights, experiences, or advice you can share would be incredibly valuable and much appreciated. Thank you for your time and looking forward to the discussion!

Hustlers: You sell shit. If you're good, you close some deals.

Can Hackers be successful Hustlers? Yes, sometimes. That accounts for the supply and demand preference for Hackers on HN. Unless you are an exceptional hustler, you can be made redundant by a decent extrovert hacker who has a head start on understanding the technical benefits of your business.

Can Hustlers become Hackers? Not often. The exception where a Hustler believed so much in his/her project that the Hustler learned to code at least enough to get good specs is a theme I've seen before.

Building and selling--forgive the simplification--is enough to make a product and earn revenue. We see this transactional business model with many webapps. But is this enough to grow a startup to reach all of its commercial goals? Perhaps there is something missing.

Prophet: A third founder category.

A prophet has deep subject matter expertise. A prophet foresees the need for a solution in the industry and knows enough about the tools available to create a solution proposal. A prophet/hustler is more than a hustler because a prophet’s focus is visionary and long term over short term and transactional. A prophet/hacker is more than a hacker because the prophet dives deeper into market need and development future of the project.

A prophet can be a standalone member than neither hacks nor hustles. One of my favorite contract management startups has a PhD in Linguistics that provides the technical expertise, but she doesn’t live in either of hacker/hustler roles.

The prophet is often the initial founder, because the prophet is master of the conceptual. But not always, as a prophet can take the form of an early advisor or investor who shapes the technical skills of the founders and finds a market for their work product.

Who's the prophet on your team?

Despite feeling confident about my experience, I feel like it would be easier to interview right now if I had just stuck to java for the past 6 years and practiced algos/data structures slowly over that time period. Now that I'm more mature and I've seen the landscape, I want to do two things:
1) Gain a deep understanding of a single language/ecosystem.
2) Get deep expertise in a particular domain. Things that innately interest me include graph problems (vehicle routing), distributed computing (things like kafka), and machine learning. I really want to dig deep and get good at one of these longer term.

Beyond personal interest in these domains, I want to be in a better career position in 4-5 years, so perceived future demand for the skills would weigh in to my decision as well. Any advice on any of this would be greatly appreciated!

It depends on the country, technology, and current situation.

But let's assume an average job position

Middle Frontend Developer. Remote job. You can share your experience whether you use React, Vue, or other frameworks.

I'm asking for a purpose. My GF is looking for a job as a VueJS developer. And she can't find a decent job. But the period of time she's been looking for a job is less than a month.

In my understanding, it's totally fine and you can spend a few months before you find your "dream job".

Also, RUMOUR HAS IT that there is a huuuge decrease in demand in the IT sector. Which I personally don't believe (or even if it is, it's not that significant).

What is your experience here?

I've been doing some market research, and found that devs always have an interesting side project or try to attend hackathons to solve problems during the weekend.

Why not get paid handsomely for it? Like $7k-$10k in a weekend. Just to give a rough format of the weekend:

Qualified devs give availability for weekends they want to hack and more importantly, screen out undesirables, (PHB, egotistical devs, etc.) you're here to have fun and get paid.

Popup dev shop finds clients that want to test an idea or rapidly prototype something along with a significant deposit to show that they're serious + fee to cover weekend running costs. Projects get selected based on interest from the pool of hackers + availability.

Friday - Sunday: hack with all amenities provided, food, beds, shower, etc.

Monday: Present to the client the product. If they like it, we get paid, if not, something to put in your portfolio and meet fellow qualified hackers.

Mutual understanding from the client and hackers that there is no obligation to continue working on the hack after the weekend is over, but at least they have a working prototype which they can buy.

Rinse and repeat. The popup dev shop.

Thoughts?