so you _did_ end up buying a boat load of ethereum i presume?
When I started coding this project ETH price was around US$ 500, and gas prices around ~40 Gwei, making it feasible to launch the project on mainnet without much hassle using my own funds.
Since then ETH has gone up to the roof. Now ETH is ~US$ 1900 and gas price ~150 Gewi, making it 14x more expensive to launch.
I'm still evaluating if I should launch on ethereum mainnet or in a different solidity compatible blockchain (ex: Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche) once the project reaches a beta version due to the cost of deployment.
In the project main page I ask for donations for covering deployment costs [1], but so far I was unable to secure any funds.
I use draw.io [1] for technical diagrams (ex: flowchart, UML, etc) and Google Drawings [2] for more generic diagrams (ex: system designs).
[1] http://draw.io/
Never really invested in any currency as it always felt too risky / speculative for my taste.
It wasn't until last year with the upcoming of DeFi (Decentralized Finance) that I decided to get involved somehow, instead of just watching innovation happen. I also think this really has a lot of potential.
So I started investing my free time for building an experimental decentralized options exchange [1] in order to develop myself / become qualified in this field.
Worst case scenario I end up with a cool project on GitHub that never took of but provided me an awful lot of knowledge and some new friends.
[1] https://github.com/TCGV/DeFiOptions