Startup Potential???

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Seeking employment as a programmer again seems like a futile endeavor. Leaving software development isn't very appealing. Time to consider some alternatives. No business idea comes to mind when it comes to starting my own. At this stage, having one is irrelevant. Better to code first and let that inform.

There is a lot of information about local businesses available online. Scraping turned out to be not too hard. Python with libraries like Beautiful Soup and Requests made the job pretty easy. The end result as of today is just a json file with business names sorted out by categories and subcategories. Having it in a nice format like this makes it easy to query and look for patterns.

There is an ultimate goal in mind. A BRS worker wants to set me up with minimum wage work at a library for 12 hours a week. That's not a very appealing scenario. A $30/month SaaS business sounds better. Having a between a dozen to two dozen subscribers would match what a job through BRS would pay me. Studying data about the businesses in my area sounds like a good starting point. It was oddly enough kind of fun so far. We'll see where this goes.

I'm in the exact same place. I think it's really important to find intriguing work and companies that actually care about their employees... Tricky but worthwhile. My personal life always sorts itself out eventually when I manage to focus hard enough on learning technologies.

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"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos

Finding something that intrigues you and banging away at it is absolutely worthwhile. I didn't know any company "cared" for their employees. Companies seem more like biological organisms. This isn't to discount the humanity of the people running them. It's just an emergent property of the companies as a collective whole.

Python Collections tools are handy for getting to know these creatures in their local habitat. The most frequently occurring ones in my area are the usual suspects. Banks, government agencies, Retail stores, Health care, ect. Things like catering and printing services show up quit a bit too.

Retail in particular can be fun to play with. My last job had one project that required heavily digging into transaction test data in order to find a weird reporting bug. Thinking up new ways to query those transactions for better sets to test with was a kick.

There's probably plenty of other inquiries I could make with the information available now. I should stop coding and posting on wp and eat something. I think better that way.

Update:

Slightly new direction. I thought it might be interesting to see if tech recruiter job postings could be easily matched up to the client companies they recruit for. Recruiters nearly always withhold the names of their clients to encourage prospects to go through them rather than apply for the job directly. How easy would it be to cut out these middle men?

Not easy at all so far. It turns out this is hard to do via the Anytown Chamber of Commerce. Business directory listings are pretty badly organized in a lot of cases. If a recruiter were to let you in on the industry they're client is in, it would be a lot easier to narrow down. Otherwise, not so much.

To be sure, replacing tech recruiters isn't so much a business model as it is an attempt to solve a personally annoying problem. It's hard to say where to go from here. Any advice or ideas?

I think I have an advantage because as a renaissance's man due to the fact I'm an artist, modeler, builder, engineer, comedian, writer, actor, and maybe I might discover more talents later on.

I I just need to work smart to do the job once.