Look into "Hexagonal Architecture", similar/synonymous to clean/ports&adapters/onion. As someone else said, combine it with "Repository" pattern.
I use hex arch in front end and back end. It adds a couple of layers, but it makes apps much easier to test and maintain.
Yes, but it's a very rare event. Maintaining state (form fields) makes it less of an issue. As I said, most deploys are at 4am at extremely low usage (usu zero), and even then a refresh is only needed if the backend has had breaking changes. A severe bug requires a mid-day deploy, but in my experience most severe bug fixes are only a few lines and therefore aren't a breaking change so don't require a refresh.
Our way wouldn't work well if you had 24 hours of heavy load, but most apps I've written have been US-only with low nightly usage (HR, K-12 admin, power grid, medical).
Zero downtime deployments can get very complex for heavy usage apps, such as blue-green deployment.
We decided to avoid the complexity with some practical workarounds.
TIL about "@" and git blame -M/-C. Thanks!
Here's my simple formulas based on how much I would normally make: Short term hourly = Yearly Salary / 1000. Long-term (2+ months) hourly = Yearly salary / 1500.
So, if your salary before being a contractor was $200K, then you would charge $200/hr for short term work. For a 6 month job, you would charge $133/hr
This sounds like vertical slicing (incl bounded contexts), which is my preferred architecture for a monolith. It gives you the flexibility to pivot architecture more easily.
I suggest you look into Evolutionary Architecture, with can help keep vertical slicing
We've gone all-in with SSR+FaaS (aka JAMStack) with multiple projects. You get similar benefits to microservices, but without the complexity. However, hosting can be more expensive under high loads.
I found TDD make programming more fun because it results in less debugging. Debugging can be frustrating and depressing when you get stuck.
I've found ChatGPT makes coding more fun, as I don't get stuck as often on hard problems and it can generate boilerplate quick than I can.
Watch videos by Primeagen on Twitch and YT. He's very high energy. Although successful, He has also struggled with depression, drugs, and ADHD in his past, which might be helpful to you. It's inspiring.
Buy a work laptop and only use it for work.
Don't do any work on your existing personal desktop system, and don't do any fun non-work activities on your work laptop. Further, you shouldn't work at the same desk as your desktop. Keep work and play 100% separate.
You should be able to write off the laptop on your taxes.
The best path depends you how much you like to tinker, your preferences, and your target platform. The learning curve is massive for either, and even after that it will take a lot of plugins and configuration to get close to feature parity of an IDE.
You might consider an IDE plugin at first. For example, there's a VSCode plugin that integrates actual Neovim as the editor. There's a Jetbrains (intellij, android studio, webstorm) plugin, IDEAVim, that very closely emulates Vim.
All that said, I use Neovim and prefer it over Emacs. The excellent Lua support in Neovim has eliminated the biggest complaint I had with Vim (vimscript vs LISP). Neovim has LSP support and can communicate with the same language backends that VSCode uses.
No matter what you do, learning Vim keybindings can be very useful as a lot of websites and local apps support it (e.g. gmail, github, less, lazygit).