You just inherited $150,000

Ah that’s awesome! Where in Wales did you go?

November’s probably not the best time of year to visit though - it rains a lot :lol:

We were north of Cardiff, by Pontypool/Abergavenny. Going when it was rainy and wet was the whole point! That’s the same reason we went to Norway in February—that’s what the place is like at its “worst”.

I’m from Chicago though. We typically have some pretty intense weather :slight_smile:

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Ah nice! Cardiff is a great city and I love Abergavenny! If you venture a little further north you could check out the Brecon Beacons (the highest point in the south of the UK).

Move here! I’ll have an Elixir friend nearby then :lol:

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Could you make a new thread about nice places to visit in Wales? I like Scotland (especially in Winter as I don’t get to enjoy snow in my region) a lot and I think Wales could charm me as well.

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Well, I don’t know if this fits the technical bill, but if I had those resources I would make a more professional approach to developing the game I’m currently developing.

Assembling a team, this would be divided in:

  • a part working on elixir/erlang (backend),
  • another working on the front-end part of the game (right now the idea is to be totally browser compatible but perhaps moving to something as unity, or even financing some work to be done in Scenic could be interesting, as @Eiji mentions)
  • another part working on a cryptocurrency based market, that allowed for an in-game economy, tradable tokens and conversion between this currency and real bling bling (this is more complex than it sounds as many issues related to the value ceiling, economy health and so on would need to be addressed)
  • extend the group of people doing the illustrations and pay them a bit more

I would look of course into making everything but the game engine (not that it’s like rocket science) itself public source, including the crypto parts, auxiliary libraries for chat/queuing/etc and other elements or contributing to open source solutions of these.

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With three little boys at home, there’s no quitting jobs. I became a silent partner in my own startup to get a job, so no going down that road again (for a whole, at least, but eventually, I will). $150k isn’t going to cut it.

That said, I would invest the money to build an interactive language learning game for children. I’ve been developing the idea in my head and on paper for almost a year. I just haven’t set aside the time to go for it yet. :smile:

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I’d probably use it as a deposit to buy a house - no luck with the real estate prices here.

Also I would keep doing what I’m doing, extra money wouldn’t affect it much, which is nice when I think about it :slight_smile:

Wales sounds like a fun place to settle down though!

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Probably work full-time building out a Field Operations / Services system. Existing products in the space are pretty lacking or have major lock-in and platform coupling to something like Salesforce or Dynamics CRM. Between the stateful capabilities of the BEAM and a cross-platform mobile app that doesn’t suck - there’s a lot of value to add just implementing live/reactive features. High margin on-site services like HVAC, Electrical, and Plumbing all have workflows that can benefit from a good logistics and mobile data collection base. $150,000 is probably enough to build something compelling or better than existing products and it could pay for itself pretty quickly.

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Definitely San Francisco, or maybe one of the coastal towns outside it. I would invest in Erlang. :smile:

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I would pay off as much debt as possible so that I could be allowed to make decisions about what I do without having to owe people money. That would provide me with more freedom to do what I want.

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I started Straw Hat Crew Org with a goal to minimize the cost of creating a business using tech. Since 95% of the startups fail I want to put as much as responsibility as possible to the business side.

I want to make the tech side cheaper, and fast so business could fail as soon as possible and figure out what will be the future.

I would invest the money to keep raising the level of abstraction and the ecosystem around it, so the cost of creating a business is reduced

software like Erlang/Elixir prove the value of having such of amazing abstraction/platform, I want to take it from where the responsibility of such tools ends and keep working on the next layer.

Most of the business out there is nothing new in term of technology, but for some reason, we keep investing thousands of dollar in development to make a business.

Just in the health care industry alone I had seemed the same god damn appointment system all the time, or in every single business the same piece of software for do authentication, authentication, file upload, notifications, payment gateway, CRM … and the list is endless, making the same mistakes and even worst tie the software to the business so much that if you fail you gain nothing from the source code, start over, start from 0.

So, yeah, this is my mission on Elixir land, hopefully, I can help business people and other developers to create a business that could pay people like Jose to focus on tools like Elixir, that is pretty much the end goal.

I already went with quitting the job and was a bad move, I would invest it on coaching and leading other people.

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I’d buy a house in VT or western MA, and found startup developing all the side projects I’ve never had time to finish over the years.

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Assuming that I was going to invest it in the Erlang/Elixir/Beam Ecosystem I would probably use it to hire a student or two from Ben Gurion University which is here in Be’er Sheva where I live to push forward some open source projects that I would like to see advanced those might include

  • Erlog (Prolog on the beam)
  • A Type based Decoder

I would also probably want to invest some of it with one of the groups I know that are trying to get more of the Israeli Beduin community into tech (probably combined with the idea above)

Now if I were to use it as the start of a business it would be something else instead

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Fun question haha! Guessing it was meant to apply to elixir in scope.

I would create a bunch of bounties to fix things.

0.5k Add a flag to allow loading nifs that are missing symbol definitions.
4.5k To fix the elixir compiler, make it stop unloading near every module during recompile, make recompile pause processes.
5k To redo the subscriptions to mnesia events and make them support match specs
10k To bribe a maintainer at ericson to revert the genserver handle_* silent ignore if function does not exist.
10k To rewrite the SSL module into a stateless one, remove the :ssl/:gen_tcp socket distinction, treat all tcp socket tuples as tcp socket tuples.
20k To add functionality to avoid purging modules on reload if a process is executing inside an anonymous function.
50k To develop a way to compile a erlang release down to a single binary (that does not unpack itself), that works on Win, MacOS, Unix.
50k To develop LLVM AST target, so erlang AST can be compiled to things like WASM

If everything gets done on that list it would probably make my life 2-4x easier, so great investment?

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I’d buy a couple of apartments in the building I’m currently renting in, live in one and rent the other. This will give me enough money to work on my own projects instead of having a day job.

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Not too nearby I’m afraid, but I recently moved to Devon to buy a place (I didn’t inherit 150,000 sadly…) Professionally and personally it was the best move I’ve ever made, after ~8 years of living and working in London.

I’m finding it immensely valuable to have time and space to think, in beautiful surroundings. And to be more intentional about how I spend my time.

For anyone considering a move to South Wales (or Devon!): Do it :slight_smile:

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I think you’ll find it not worth the investment with 2 appartments. Renting real estate generally scales well, but for appartments you may need like 5 of 6 to make it work for itself. 2 appartments is relatively a lot of work for small profit, at least where I live.

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Where I’m located(which is pretty cheap) 150 000$ can buy three medium sized apartments, two if in a good location. If I live in one and rent the other two for a average rent rate I will be making only slightly less that the average salary. Which since I don’t have to pay rent would be more than enough to make a living, no luxury but I already live like a monk.

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Ah yeah, so precisely you need 3 more to live comfortably :slight_smile:

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That’s awesome! :023:

You’re the second programmer I know who has moved down to Devon now :smiley:

The fresh air itself is invaluable - when I go into any big city now I feel like my lungs are struggling with all the pollution and stale air conditioning :icon_rolleyes: :lol:

Where did you live before London? I lived there for a couple of years then came back to Wales, I missed the greenery, and partly because it’s much cheaper here! :lol: