Small business software. There's an endless supply of problems suitable for bootstrapped software businesses.

React had a wonderful core concept of blow-away and re-render the world. I'm less enamored by the rest of the flow and I'm positively revolted by Flux/Redux, but the base idea is solid.

We always try to be within 4 hours of Chicago. It's too hard if someone doesn't overlap at all. We covered this and more in detail in our book REMOTE.

You bet! We used to do all that stuff. It wasn't until, I think, 2009 that we hired an office manager. Jason and I have done all of it. From setting up insurance or typing in expenses for accounting. It might seem daunting, but be reassured that there are millions and millions of small business owners that figure it out every year. So why wouldn't you be able to? Also, you can use freelance accountants and insurance brokers to help you.

I worked as a sole developer creating Basecamp and Ruby on Rails. So you can certainly get started that way. But it's good to be connected with other developers either at work or through open source communities. There's no merit badge for being a hermit.

I think we usually get between 100 and 300 applications. Then we usually cut that down to 10-20 candidates that we'll talk with on the phone. Then we usually have 3-5 finalists where we may give them a one week paid trial project or we may just decide based on the work product provided. Candidates can surely be dropped at every step. Either the work product isn't strong enough or they're not good writers or they're just not someone the people interviewing would like to work with.

I understand why many people are fatigued by it. There's a lot of churn with questionable forward movement. But still, there are glimmers. I'm happy to have us provide better support in Rails 5.1 with Yarn and Webpack.

At such a high level, the answer is bound to be pretty vague: Keep striving. Don't think you're learning by repeating the same lesson 10 times. You need new lessons. You need to stretch.

You have to build an audience who cares about what you have to say and you have to solve problems that people actually have. I don't think there are any shortcuts in that regard. It took years and years before Rails took off as well.

I worked as contract developer, mostly doing PHP.