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One year of solo dev, wrapping up the grant-funded work

A year ago I walked out of the office for the last time. I handed in my corpo laptop, said some good-byes, and since then I have been my own boss. This first year has been funded by an NLnet grant, which I’m in the midst of wrapping up. As of now, the work is all done, the final request for payment has been sent. There’s a similar last-day-of-school levity to both these events.

I know from experience that you get a lot smarter if you don’t work every waking hour of the day, and any project is realistically better off run by a refreshed smart guy than an overworked idiot that hasn’t seen daylight for a week. The search engine was open source in name but nobody could build it and it had no documentation and the code base had a lot historical clutter making it very hard to navigate. Even though it’s unlikely that internet search engine software will ever see mass adoption or a huge number of contributors, it is never the less a key part of the resilience strategy for the project to have some way it can continue to exist if my instance can no longer be maintained.

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