frankly i think grants are much worse; subject to politico manipulation, a lot of handwaving and results often not delivered  a lot of the budget wasted; really if you have seen how govt grants are this is how many end up. 

JUST F'CKING DO IT. There are NOT many people doing dev work in this space anyway so the chance anything is not going to get reviewed or recognized is pretty low. 

fwiw, if you are a new dev and you don't have work experience, this is a great way to get your work reviewed and improve. I don't think you can improve when you are in a silo, at all. of course you can chose never to improve and just rest on your laurels, that's fine too. 

 yes, i agree, but one has to pay the rent in the meantime

i have learned from my first big grant task that i need to do more of my own basic work, like now with this radical rewrite of the library focused on minimising memory allocation - still my main time spent coding is going to be on paid work but i'm dedicating other the rest of my time, more than before, on this kind of work because the decisions you make under the gun are often bad ones... the last month of my last grant job was all taken up chasing bugs that the worst still are not gone 

 also, i am just doing it, and i have had some pretty awesome results on my own driven work, fastest nostr JSON encoder that exists, for #golang at least

but i have to dedicate the majority of my time to projects i'm paid for... next coming up starting on tuesday once my dings are healed up is an aggregator for nostr and bluesky and then after that probably fixing the bad bugs in replicatr that take over 24 hours to manifest and make it unfit for production 

 I dunno , maybe my free work is below par. What do you think ? This is my 10 hrs /wk mostly unpaid github.com/bitkarrot