Supporting USB enumeration and reads/writes to arbitrary endpoints on windows took an act of god, maybe 200-300 hours of work to get it working similar to node-

Supporting USB enumeration and reads/writes to arbitrary endpoints on windows took an act of god, maybe 200-300 hours of work to get it working similar to node-usb (libusb) on macOS (which maybe only took 100 hours). I’m probably underestimating hours by a factor of 2 or 3. Early pandemic time/math is fuzzy. Managing 10+ levels of JS promise chains can be a chore if not architected and named properly. Or worse, when you write a feature that’s close to the user and realize it requires asynch all the way back up through 10+ sync calls so now it’s refactoring across 30 files and you forget one edge case that doesn’t resolve/throw and it takes days to track it down. Normal solo project problems. Integrating fabricJS with a custom wasm module to dither images. That was a 10x speed improvement but took a few hundred hours. Early on I chose react/flow/redux/immutable/semantic-UI as my front-end “stack” and it’s been mostly good to me. Of course, I wish my codebase was all perfect typescript but eventually I’ll get there. The node ABI changes over the years has really stressed me out. It seems like it breaks all the native code every 3 months. Ugh! Customer support has been delightful. Out of a few thousand emails only 2 or 3 have been awful. Sometimes I’ll get an email at 2pm on a Sunday saying “I have to print 5,000 labels by Monday morning or else I’m fired!” and we are always successful. That feels good. The toll free number on the website rings my cell and sometimes I wake up to missed calls from Nigeria or UAE and I think that’s pretty special. Call volume has not been overwhelming. Thank god. Marketing is a huge chore and I mostly disdain it.