TypeScript or just JS? What do you use for data layer?

Usually Typescript. I like sqlite for simplicity. Postgres if something a bit more powerful is needed.

> Are people doing anything complex or performant with Node?

Node excels at getting to market quickly with reasonable performance. I'm not really sure how to answer the performance question, because other than LuaJIT it's one of the fastest scripting languages.

> like a proxy or something?

For me, a proxy is better suited to Go. I've been building REST servers and websocket servers in Node.js though.

Are you a remote consultant by chance? US?

I was a (remote) consultant for several years, but in Malaysia. We're kind of like the middle ground, somewhat higher quality than India/China, cheaper than developed countries.

Go or Nim.

I think it's going to be hard to build an audience with a paid newsletter from the start. It seems like you should write for free + Patreon. As you build your email list and audience you can then start including non-intrusive ads or your own offers, for example an ebook. Eventually once your audience is large enough, you can add a premium list and convert your existing, already highly targeted audience.

Nathan Barry has a book called Authority which basically talks about this.

I'm not so sure. Just looking at all the dongles they ship, it seems they are more interested on what is better for Apple rather than what is better for the end user.

To be fair every company does whats best for itself, if that also happens to be good for the user so much the better.

Any time there's competition, companies need to make things that users want more than their competition, and most choices towards that goal are beneficial to the consumer. Users want a faster cpu at a good price, and AMD and intel competing has lowered prices and increased performance.

You're not thinking very hard.

NVidia?

And in the non-tech world there are many: Ikea, Target, Trader Joe's,

You have never been happy with any thing someone made?