I know what I don't want. It's probably biased, and I won't mention anything to avoid a flame war.

All the theme sites I've seen so far only let you specify what you want. But I have a longer list of things that I don't like. And filtering any output by it would shrink any results significantly.

I've been working in web for about a decade. I have no formal education, but I've been in various agencies and in-house teams. I have done some cool stuff but it's limited. I mainly work in wordpress, building custom plugins and themes from scratch for mid size businesses.

I am not technically challenged. The most complex of my work is basically just figuring out client requirements, designing and pitching something that makes their requirements make logical sense, and then building it. The stuff I build is usually no more complex than typical CRUD work.

I don't really know what to do. I'm stuck. I want out of this basic, boring, unfulfilling work. Has anybody managed to make this jump, or similar, and how did it go?

If you plan to offer a service tied to a website you make for your client, what are the advantages of self hosting compared to relying on third party services?

Static sites, CMS, newsletter, emails, form handling and more..

An easy example is forms: you can either use formspree or install one of the countless foss form handlers you can find online..

In my mind it's definitely cooler to offer all the services your client needs + you can also charge for them without having to pay for 5 different plans on other platforms, just your VPS or dedicated machine, more income and less expenses. But I see it can be hard to manage outages sometimes or issues that can come with self hosting.

It's offering a service vs being just a reseller.

My experience with self hosting stuff on my own (for my own use) so far has been quite good. I don't use containerization and I carefully config everything needed the first time, then I reverse proxy through cloudflare, after that I rarely have issues and if I have I simply rely on logs.

In my mind it doesn't seem too hard to install a couple of services and make accounts for my clients + fixing something not working every now and then.

My only concern with that is if one day I will want to stop being a developer, how will I handle the quantity of people relying on my server and everything I will hold.

Interested in your thoughts and experience about self hosting vs relying on third parts!

TLDR; for my project i wanted the signal protocol that would work in a browser. following a previous post i made about looking for the signal protocol in javascript, i couldnt find something suitable... so empowered by AI, i tried to create something myself. i dont want to inspire undue confidence.

IMPORTANT: this project is not professionally audited or production ready.

for my p2p messaging project (a webapp) i wanted to explore an usage of the Signal protocol.... the investigation is still in progress and far from finished. its clear that the Signal protocol is not intended for a p2p architecture with it needing things like pre-keys stored on servers. so it seems nessesary to adapt it.

i looked around for a suitable implementation i could use. compiling the implementation in lib-signal-go to a wasm seemed like an option that worked... but given AI is everywhere, i decided to see if it could put something better together. i started off creating something using browser-based cryptograpy primitives. i would have like to keep it that way, but an ealier AI audit disagreed to using those primitives and so here is an attempt in rust that compiles to wasm.

https://github.com/positive-intentions/cryptography/tree/staging/src/rust

i added several unit tests and and got AI to try create better securty audits, and i think its working well. (or at least well enough). AI's security audit points me to many things i can improve throughout (so i will when i can).

this is fairly complicated stuff and i know better than to ask people to spend their own time to review my experimental project... im not sharing for you to review my code; im sharing this here if this is interesting for anyone to take a look.

(note: the repo is getting a bit too "full" and i will be splitting it into a separate repo for just the signal implementation.)