Getting started is always the hardest part. Once you’ve done some good work you can start relying more on word of mouth and charge more.

I would recommend doing some small jobs on Fiverr or Upwork. Contracting isn’t for everyone, nor is running a small business. Fiverr and Upwork will be pretty disconnected from your local contacts so if you mess up or decide it’s not for you then it’s easier to leave.

Ultimately it’s networking, instead of rolling your eyes when an acquaintance has an app idea you can offer to help.

Once I learned about http files I never went back. It’s so easy to share and use, I primarily use JetBrains but there are extensions for VSCode that do the same thing that I have used as well.

That really depends on the culture of the company and your mindset. If you think it is going to be hell it is going to feel like hell.

You work more with people and less with computers, but ultimately you are still working on solving problems. Instead of inside code on a computer it is inside a team within a larger organization.

Join us at !engineering_managers@programming.dev

The community is still small but you can ask questions and there are some good resources there already.

There’s no harm in messaging the sales team directly. Whatever deals CivitAI got might not work for you, they might not even be legally allowed to mention specifics. But you can shop around and see what different providers will offer you.

Lots of VC funding?

Probably. They might have gotten additional discounts off of the advertized price by talking with sales and committing to the service for a year or other ways.

Looks like there has at least been a small team working on ffmpeg for some time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFmpeg#History

Oh wow! That is really cool. I used Google Bard for a bit and liked it because it included some web links, but I found the answers not as good as ChatGPT(especially GPT4), this looks like the best of both worlds.