[danso]

> All the software jobs that I had were opportunities given to me out of compassion and charity. But I wasn't qualified for them. I've always had attention span difficulties. Each of my open source projects were done out of excitement. I had an idea of how to automate something, and I just went for it, and could focus on it for weeks at a time.

What do you mean that you weren't "qualified"? For all of your legal issues, you sound like a brilliant and productive programmer. Have you seen opportunities (e.g. requests from people) to be an online teacher/tutor for programming, perhaps being funded through Patreon?

[_sdegutis]

I'm able to pass interviews very well, but when it comes down to doing senior level programming stuff, I really suck at it. I tried rewriting old.editfight.com the other week in React + Express + TypeScript and it took me 3 days just to get the basic boilerplate working. But I can tell an interviewer what big-O notation means and can write a working fizzbuzz using functional programming techniques in ESNext.

Even if I were qualified, I don't think anyone would like to take online tutoring from a sex offender, and I doubt even more that people would like to fund a felon and sex offender via Patreon. But I really do appreciate the idea.

[moltar]

Hahahaha it takes everyone this much time to set it up. That’s just the state of JS these days.

[anothergoogler]

It takes everybody several days to get the boilerplate working. The people who do it in an hour are using some cookie-cutter like yeoman and have a bunch of tooling/config in their project they don't understand.

[danso]

Yes, I have to concur with this. I think of myself has relatively experienced, but it takes me generally a day to get new boilerplate working. This includes time to read documentation and get things set up and to get a start in understanding how things differ from what I usually use.

The amount of software you've produced and published using a variety of stacks -- Objective C, Cocoa, Swift, JS, Node, Clojure -- and APIs is really impressive. Most people haven't even tinkered with that many things, nevermind publish stuff out for the public to use. That last part is an extremely high hurdle, especially since it requires UI/UX skills and user empathy.

Hell, even your portfolio website is far-above par for any software engineer. Not just in content, but the well-considered layout and visual design.

I don't want to downplay your situation, you indeed have an uphill climb. But you do have skills and actual experience that put you in higher probability at success with software publishing, compared to most software engineers who were to find themselves forced to find employment without the ability to network or get recommendations. Hopefully you can find success again in iOS publishing. I think many if not most iOS developers would be envious of the variety in just your iOS portfolio.

[pluto9]

And yet you have a number of useful and interesting projects on Github.

That stack takes quite a lot of twiddling configuration files and piecing together disparate libraries and unrelated tools, at least on the frontend, and especially so if JavaScript UI frameworks aren't your area of expertise. 3 days is not that surprising.

How about starting a SAAS lifestyle business? There are a number of threads on this site of the "tell us your one-man SAAS success story" variety. Might want to look to them for inspiration.

[_sdegutis]

Thanks will look into it.

[moltar]

Check Indie Hackers for inspiration.