Haven't got paid for almost 1 year. Laptop, passport, months of code got stolen

This stinks a little bit.

A web developer for 14 years? And you havent backed up your code in months?

I am not saying the story is false. I'm just saying that if your income depends on your code, back it up frequently.

Also, how do you know the startup is going to be profitable in the long run? Because the CEO who's getting you to work for him for free says so? What have you been doing for cash the past year?

savings purely saving. see my comments above about backup.

This really, really sucks.

If you have little to no cash, you've been robbed, and you've not been paid for a year, you have to start thinking about self preservation. If you've lost your work too this project is going to be inevitably and dramatically delayed -- any payday from this start-up is far out into the future now. You don't need me to tell you you're on the verge of a bad situation. (How are you paying rent if you have no money, btw?)

I have no idea how donation-based classes will work out, but you should act pragmatically and cut back your time spent with this start-up so you have time to focus on other things, lest you starve. This is the reasonable course you should take right now.

(On a side note: it bothers me that you've been working unpaid for a year for someone else's literally bankrupt business.)

Freelance, get a McJob, claim some sort of welfare if you're eligible -- do whatever you have to do to keep yourself afloat. Businesses, especially start-ups are risky things, and while this may work out fantastically in the long term there will be no long term if you don't take care of the short term.

Take care of the other issues, like getting a police report now. You'll probably need that to report your passport stolen, so really, do this immediately! I'm going to guess you don't have contents insurance, but if you do, claim also.

Edit: if you're living off savings as you've mentioned elsewhere, why was your money in cash rather than in a bank account?

Let's keep in mind that entrepreneurs are dreamers, delusional even. We take incredible risks and are willing to suffer to create something we can be proud of.

To wit: I once worked so obsessively on a project I forgot about making money for rent. That's right, my mind was in a constant deep flow state for weeks on end, and rent (among other things like exercise and socializing) slipped my mind.

I ended up losing my apartment and being forced to sleep in a friend's basement for a month.

I completely can understand that. We entrepreneurs have such an irrational and excessive belief in our own future prospects that we tend to discount the present, often to our own detriment. I know I've gone down this path before myself which is why I'm giving the advice I'm giving.

OP must take care of today, as unsexy as it is, for the long-term to be a possibility. It's a case of one career paying for the other until the second is all that's required.

Hey thanks, I also just want to say that in some way it really sucks and I was in the middle of looking for other paid work.

However, the reason I went into the company is because the company owner agree to try out way to get the company to stage 4 culture as seen on Dave Loganäs tribal leadership

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_logan_on_tribal_leadership.ht...

Yesterday, I emailed her that I will only be able to do paid work for her and told her that I have failed in nudging the company to stage 4, and I am still comitted, at this point I need more resources, and I have not figure out how I can do that.

It was quite a poninat moment.

Sorry for all the spelling on my roommateäs sweedish keyboard. No english spell check.

Are you one of these developers who have been developing for 14 years and is turning 17 next week?

I would recommend you cut your loses and run for the hills. Get a nice developer job for a company which can pay bills, offers a free laptop and can pay for source control.

(The question i have to ask is why not back the code up at lease in dropbox or bitbucket which offers free accounts?)

yeah, I got lazy for a moment and didn't bother to do it. My time machine may have a more recent backup but not sure til I restore it.

I wasn't aware of the free accounts. And there contain some sensitive data which I didn't want to put in dropbox.

So, this start-up has been developing code for a year without releasing anything. Has no money. Is relying at least partially on a developer who has been on the edge of disaster with no payment from this project for a year.

Sounds like a recipe for a disaster to me. If you can't get to your code then I assume that sets the start-up even further back.

How do you know the start-up could be successful? There is no way to tell until you start trying to pick up paying users and get something out into the wild. Until then, it's just one person blindly trusting another.

The bottom line here seems to be that you aren't really bothered and the Macbook would give you extra cash. You have already been making cash from other sources. So, what are you asking for? New students for your classes? Someone to lend you a Macbook Pro? This probably isn't the best place to ask.

Hey guys, this really happened. I am trying to keep it private because I donät want to tell the name of the company, because I donät think the owner would like others to know.

Donation is appricated, but I would have to setup a bitcoin account. I also have a strip account.

But the most imporant thing is if you are in Aarhus or Denmark have a mac book pro 15 inch, and donät mind me restore my time machine backup on it to get some of my files back that will be great!!

I can come to you with my hard drive and you can watch me as I do my work.

Indeed. It is also very interesting to see how I get offend by how people think this is a scam, where for me it is just what just happened.

I am going to fine with or without anyone's help. It is also interesting to see what kind of community it is here.

Hey guys,

I wonät be able to tell you the name of the company till I reach some kind of agreement with the CEO.

If you want to donat I just created a bitcoin accountÖ

1GUDbTJv7PuwDJDR4y2pHiY8ggyGnXbEx2

I really appricated it!

I also have a Danish bank account and an American Account, but not sure if I want to post that here.

I can try to open a paypal account, but not sure if I can.

I am happy to give you guys the police report number if you PM me (can you do that on hacker news?)

I am also perfectly ok with pay you back the money once I get paid from the company. And I really DONÄT know when that will be.

I am good at what I do...The laptop also has a lot of code that I didn't back up.

I wish you the best of luck but these two sentences aren't really compatible.

Other than advertising your yoga class what are you trying to get by posting here? These types of hard luck posts come up on reddit hundreds of times per day and are often exposed as scams to get donations.

you are right, I should have backed it up, but the owner forgot to pay the bill on the backup server. So the only backup is on my time machine. Which means I need a laptop with similar configuration to restore. And right now no one is willing let me erase their mac book pro to restore backup.

I did not intended to be a advertisement, but I thought if you are in Aarhus then why not. It would nice to meet some local programeer. I donät read reddit, facebook or twitter.

> forgot to pay the bill on the backup server

I'm not sure I believe the "owner" is telling the truth. If he forget to pay the bill (why isn't it a credit card recurring subscription?), or the credit card failed due to insufficient funds, then he would have received multiple emails warning of service termination.

Why aren't you backing up your code to private repositories, ones that can be had for free from bitbucket.org? Even Dropbox would have been a good alternative, although you might want to encrypt anything sensitive!

If you're telling the truth, I'm certain you need to walk away from this sketchy owner and this bankrupt startup.

yeah, I think that is a honest mistake, we both emailed the service provider, they are still invistigaging why she didnät get an email alert

Be suspicious of this owner. She sounds like a shambles at the very least, and possibly even dishonest.

you are right, I should have backed it up, but the owner forgot to pay the bill on the backup server.

I work full time for one company but do side consulting work. For my side consulting work I use SkyDrive (free) on my notebook to store my code which automatically gets synched to 3 other computers. I use a TFS instance for source control on a separate server in my house. I then make manual backups every day and copy them to an offsite FTP server. That's 7 copies of my code including 2 offsite backups (SkyDrive and FTP server). You could do this yourself with free / open source versions of what I use. Just get a Dropbox account and set up a script to copy to it every day.

It might just be me but I loathe re-writing code.

thanks 300 bps, I am pretty sure I will do something similar to that in the future, but right now this is really not useful for me at all.

I lived up there for a year and half, how are things going in the city? Still no people on the street after 8pm?

If you are a EU citizen, it is easy, just get one of those manual jobs with the temp agency. It's paid 10 EUR/hr, it is enough to live a comfortable life there and you only need to work 2 or 3 days per week.

4 weeks * 2-3 days * 8 h * 10€/h = 640-960€ is enough to live comfortably in Denmark? With rent and everything?

As a dane, no 1000 € is nowhere close to being alive "comfortably" ...

It is slightly higher than "kontanthjælpen", a last-ditch governmental grant to keep you alive (where you are also entitled to a lot of rebates (childcare, and stuff)) and special purpose grants to make ends meet

An unskilled worker earns about 2300€/month and that is not even close to comfortably.. Median income (still not comfortable) is 3500€/month

A confortable one is probably bigger than 5000€/month..

Denmark is one of the most expensive countries in the world to live in... (especially in the four major Citites (Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense, Aalborg)

I know!! My friends are wonderful here. I have also learn how to dumpster dive. So no food problem at the moment.

Good point, I should have run the numbers. I was thinking on cheap student rents. The temp work idea is still doable, but 2 days was too optimistic, 3 days seems more like it.

Before you go on about how expensive DK is. If you cook your food and you avoid alcohol, then it's not that much more expensive than other countries. You can eat with 10 euro/day or less (10 if you eat a lot of meat/fish). Most clubs in Aarhus don't charge entrance, so you can also go out for free.

So, yeah, I had a good life for that amount. But we need to add ~200 to correct for student dorm prices.

no I am american. I was here on a few other adventures as well as to work with a danish designer on web design. That is NOT my strong suite. I am also working on another project with the art acadmey.

but that project is not paid. It is just for art!

Uhm, maybe you can still work, I'd try asking one of those agencies. Also, up there they love Americans, so you should have some kind of advantage in that.

maybe, but the police really can't do much in this case.

Aarhus is great btw, the BEST CITY i have lived in out of all the places in China, USA and Germany.

Hey!

Try to restore your work using your friend's computer. Here I dig up some info about this: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/44803/restore-from-.... Good luck!

hey, I'll try that, but I got the feeling since my HD is encrypted. I can only do it by restoring. I may try to get a 2.5 1TB HD here in denmark. Anyone know a cheap place where I can get that? I know everything is expensive here.

I don't want to sound abrasive, but if you are a developer of 14 years' standing then why not list your skills and experience and ask if anyone has any actual paid work they could send your way before soliciting for donations?

Sorry, my roommate need his computer back. I'll type what I can do once I get to a computer. on my phone now.

Hey alexhawdon or anyone else who is wondering,

here is the quick run down of my work history and my skill sets:

I have being a Mac user since System 6.

I started my development career in 4D (was a Mac only database ) and File Maker Pro around 1997.

I wrote the report card system for a whole school district of a city in Texas. The system should still be operational right now. I majored in Psychology and minored in computer science at college. My CS grades were excellent, but I already know a lot about program when I started school. I find the data structure class to be the most valuable class through school, everything else I learned in the real world.

For web stuff, I started on Perl CGI.pm , did some java applet programming and pretty soon started working on PHP Sybase. That was my prefer choice for web development till 2006, which I dived deeply into Gmail, Aajax and wrote something that rendered web template based on json like Backbone. That is in 2006.

Then I discovered Helma (SSJS) http://helma.org and found javascript to be very nice. I even wrote Douglas Crockford telling him about helma. He was very excited about it too.

Helma has being my prefer choice of web development framework. I like that in JS function is a first class citizen, has closure, and if you want to do client side fancy stuff you have to use it.

I have also done a couple of project for a financial education company in Django one with Python and some stuff had to later be converted to Jython, because I need to use a java lib.

One project in Ruby on Rails to scrap Groupon like sites.

I have jazz music player that plays different node of a song on different browser client in NodeJS, but I prefer RingoJS (that is Helma 2.0) see comparison here: http://hns.github.io/2010/09/21/benchmark.html

I prefer PostgreSQL over MYSQL, and prefer H2 over PostgreSQL, but can use whatever you want.

Data query is probably the strong suite, because I started on 4D programming.

My startup experiences: I have built a SaaS for the legal industry around 2007 and lived off it's recurring income for a couple of years till the they changed the law.

I was also managed a team of developer in another startup for job reviews, but the funding got pull during the financial crisis.

I can basically do anything web and database related. I am best at solving business problems with technology.

So I am available for any paid work at market rate. Reference available upon request. Feel free to contact me

lostlaptopdenmark@aim.com

Sorry I can't post my real email or else it will gave away my identity.

I also have a good friend who is the founder of a ycombinator team. I can ask him to vouch for me here. I actually meet the whole team of ycombinator around april when I was visiting the west coast. If you guys are here on the board, I was Asian guy from Denmark, the one that got sick at the deep dish pizza place and had to leave early.

If you have any more questions feel free to ask me here or contact me in private. I can do a Skype call with you if you like. I can also give you my temporary Danish number if you like over email. Thanks guys. I will check computer again later.

However this thread plays out, will be interesting to see how the HN community responds. Suspect most see this thread as spam/fraud, but interesting to see people taking the OP seriously and giving advice to try and help.

You might check couchsurfing.org for generally helpful folks in your place. And definitely Denmark is a welfare state, do check out the many helps. Good luck!

hey thanks lauremerlin, I have a place to stay right now thanks for my good danish friends. They even got me a 600 DKK laptop running linux, but it burn out yesterday.

Such a spam story

1) Always source revision your code, free private repos are available at bitbucket.

2) Never work without compensation

3) Preferably make a contract

4) Agree to incremental delivery or milestones

5) Prepare regular invoices

6) Follow up on outstanding invoices

7) be strict about getting paid, on time, or fire the client

You may be good at what you do, but that doesn't help if you screw up the business part of freelancing.

Hey thanks a lot Pyalot. We do have a contract, and the owner really knows about it. The cash just have to pay for some urgent expenses at the moment.

Yeah, it was my fault for not git push origin after the backup server was restored.

But the shutdown introduced a few problem in the work flow, and I just got lazy and didnät do the system admin stuff and just kept on programming. A lesson well learned.

Do you have a PayPal account people can send money to, like an email address or a link to donate?

This story is setting off some alarm bells for me so I'd be wary of forking over anything more than advice right now.

Why on earth would you discourage others from helping because you are suspicious. Like I said earlier, I believe this person because similar experiences have happened to me.

Never, never try and stop people from trying to do good. I would rather be scammed than be complacent.

Whoa! There are a ton of pity scams online and there are other people in this thread that are suspicious too. It's your prerogative what you do with your money but certain things about the post just make me feel off. I might be right, or I might be wrong.

I'd never knowingly try to stop someone from doing good, but by the same token, warning that this might be a scam is prudent.

yeah it is really rare to have that happen in denmark. Trust me. I had to go to the police station 2 times to file a report, because they donät get this kind of break in much here much

sorry on my roommateäs sweedish keyboard, canät figure out the keyes

I'll vouch for Tree. We've been friends since 2001 and we worked together for a couple years. Your skepticism is understandable; Tree may be a bit of a free spirit who doesn't use github as much as he should, but he is also honest.

Incidentally, when gmail was first released back in 2004(?), Tree dug in and reverse engineered a basic version of it in a couple of weeks. That was before libraries like Prototype were available. His Javascript skills are formidable.

I dont have paypal, because they closed my account. I am one of those people that is part of class action law suit against them. A long story. Maybe a bit coin account. I was more thinking along the line if anyone in aarhus can lend me a lap top to restore my time machine backup.