chrisgoman

It all depends on YOUR attitude and less about the employers that will hire you. If you interview with middle management, it may be hard for you to show your worth but if you interview with anybody who is an "owner" (stakeholder in the company), you will most likely be hired right away.

Owners know it is very hard to find people that can "think like an owner" and make decisions based on the company's interest vs their own. Obviously, you have to "fit in" for a while (being the new guy and earn the respect of your peers) but I would say that if you can "think like an owner", you would be put into a lot of responsibility fairly quickly. Thinking like an owner means NO POLITICS (you are not trying to move up the ladder), NO EXCUSES (get stuff done and ship it) and WORKING ON THE RIGHT THINGS (able to prioritize properly the pile of work). Unfortunately, you have to play those games for a couple of months (and eat a lot of pride in terms of job title and pay just to get in the door) but it will all work out shortly.

Develop any software for your domain (lab technician or microbiology) that solves a simple problem you see or encounter daily. Identify a problem in your current day job that can be solved with software like recording data in the lab, tracking supplies, etc. (nothing too complex) and come up with a solution (website to check-in/check-out, mobile app (?), etc.) and learn how to build it. It will not be perfect but you will have done something. Having domain experience will GREATLY make it easier to transition -- learning a new field and software at the same time is going to be rough.

https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/51-mechanics-of-building-...

You were on the right track, DigitalOcean is the easiest and at $5/mo for Debian/Ubuntu, it should be sufficient for an MVP.

If you are concerned about security, just follow the "simple" steps below

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/best-practi...

.. it's mostly just typing stuff in a terminal

You can probably skip 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17 (in the short run)

If you want to automate this, you can learn Ansible (or Fabric fabfile.org) but that is probably premature

Just make sure you have a backup of everything on your server (nobody is going to take that more seriously than you, specially for customer data)

For scaling, they have some simple Load Balancers now (pick the correct region where it is available) ... used to have to do some DNS-based load balancing before (AWS R53). Again, probably premature but it can be done without too much pain once you get there

Yes, backup your data somewhere else.

(1) Gitlab/Github for source code (almost free)

(2) automysqlbackup (or similar) to an S3 bucket for your database (very cheap) using S3FS

(3) Make sure you have a way to reproduce your entire server environment using fabric, ansible, chef, puppet (or Docker images) that is also in source control

If you have PROD code, this is normally called DR (Disaster Recovery)

Normally, your salary is 1/3 your billable rate (for most industries). So approx $55/hr

1/3 goes to salary, 1/3 goes to overhead and 1/3 goes to profit. Overhead includes the hours you are not getting billed out (paperwork, internal work, etc.) and also fixed costs for the company (office, vacation, sick, PTO). Profit normally goes to the owner and retained earnings (savings for a rainy day for the company)

No real difference IMHO, JWT just introduces some "standards" for some interoperability. Session cookies could be anything

There are pros and cons of JWT but if you are OK with it, it is not complex if you use a library. JWT purists want everything on the token (no database) but if you are OK with using a database, just store the token and delete it to revoke. When authenticating, add a database query (it's not that bad) in addition to the verification of the token

Just continue your normal life of "average" (as you say).

If all $8m went into your checking account, the first "simple" step you can do is to start breaking up the $8m into different account types at different banks with you and your wife as depositors for FDIC insurance purposes, in case you are not paying attention or ready to do anything immediate with the funds. https://www.fdic.gov/deposit/deposits/

Then after this, your full time job can become just learning how to manage your money which includes self-education first, before hiring anybody. It is not that hard and I'm sure you can do that on an average, not very hardworking 8 hour day, 5 days a week :)

Since you are a tech manager and seem to know "pieces" of your job (coding and business) but not enough to consider yourself a specialist (like a coder or the business guy), use this same mindset to be a manager of a team you can build around how to manage this $8m. In truth, $8m is not a lot of money per se so you may not need a team ... most people will want 1% of that per year to manage it. Your hope is that they are making at least 1% + inflation rate but you would probably do better yourself.

Good luck and congratulations!

Buy the older ones (2014-ish) from ebay

Xero

How much are you willing to pay? Are you expecting this to be a free service? There is a company called Altos Research

+1 ORM for simple CRUD and maybe the first version of getting lists (SELECTs). You will then quickly need raw SQL. I usually like to create "fake" ORM-like objects from raw SQL so that other code doesn't have to care too much where the data is coming from

Namesilo for the following reasons: (1) pricing does not change (goes lower once you hit 50+); (2) free privacy and (3) free 100 email forwarding per domain. Have not tested their DNS yet.

For hosting, you guys really need to get on DigitalOcean instead of doing the shared hosting. For $5/mo, you can put 10,000 domains/websites there with Letsencrypt (free SSL) instead of paying $5/mo/domain

Seems like you are doing mostly reads. Implement a very basic ETL (just a dumb copy) to a DB you control. Once the corporate DB is better, hopefully you are just changing the connection string. If you have some control, a replicated slave. For writes, you may have to try to connect and write, then catch any exceptions and queue up the write for later. Once things get stable, your queue should be empty.

Microsoft Azure gives $5,000/yr credits to non-profits. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/azure Also a non-combinable $5/mo for Office 365 E5

+1. For some reason, only GoDaddy can expire all your domains on a specific date (for example 12/31) so that you don't have to renew your domain names at random times. Seems fairly trivial to implement and is a MASSIVE annoyance-saver for customers. For example, pay $12/yr domain expires on 12/31 of this year (instead of 3/4) so maybe on 12/29, you can look at your list of domains and figure out which ones you want to renew.

But Google domains win for the free privacy guard (GoDaddy charges $25/yr for domain & privacy, Google domains is $12/yr)

If he is smart enough to code, spend an hour with him walking through each folder of the source code and then draw a diagram of your stack and also walk him through it. He can use the drawing to walk your clients through so it is prettier than the code. So, you have to go to "sales side" and put yourself in his position and then help him there (maybe even pretend to be a client by role-playing) so you can see what he is trying to do. I'm assuming showing code is not the end goal but something else.

Vagrant is awesome! Why would it be dead?

+1. Most folks here don't understand that 5% equity is easily diluted to 0.005% equity in 6 months. So now you are going to spend $50k suing the company for the $10k they owe you. OP needs to listen to people who have experience (like you) instead of random strangers who think equity = cash

If you are skeptical of the company's future, just take the $100k and move on with life.

Self-hosted Trac (without the "k"). It was usually trac.domain.com

If you are just throwing something together, static S3 pages with Cloudflare in front?

For pre-employment screening, we had court runners literally sitting through the courthouses going through paper records for each candidate on an "ad-hoc" basis. Some companies do this in a more organized fashion by having a person just data enter ALL the records (like in North Carolina if I recall) and since they had this data, we just bought the company.

If you are already at $170k, you are doing good (even considering you are in the Bay Area).

Like it was mentioned here, focus more on the value you bring to the company, always make decisions like you own the company. If I were the owner, this is what I would do ...

It is a whole different perspective than thinking about "how much can I personally make". Once you get comfortable thinking in that mode (may take a couple of months & years), things will get clearer and you will be able to elevate your thinking and see the forest. It will then get easier for you to talk about "business" and negotiate your pay relative to what you bring. You may realize you are in the wrong company as getting paid $200k is not possible where you are.

If you keep looking around your peers and "at your level" (aka, why is he making more than me), it is definitely easier but you will not elevate your game and get to CTO/VPE.

... start your own business is either negative dollars or $300k or somewhere in the middle with a LOT of grinding (certainly a lot more than 70 hours/week). So if the goal is to make $300k guaranteed, starting your own business is not what you want to do

We use Trinet (a PEO) and you can have different "classes" of plans that have different trigger points. For example, when you qualify (how many days later), how much % is contribution by the company vs the person and their dependents, etc.

You are correct, there are very strict rules so you do need to make an attempt at making money (the definition of a "business"). If you are actually making a profit (thereby paying taxes for your business entity "the LLC"), then it makes it much easier. Now that I think about it, I think I end up paying my accountant/tax firm about $30k/year mostly for tax returns (I do most of the accounting myself in Xero)

You mentioned "projects" (plural) and the way I have it setup is pretty similar to those recommending an LLC (or S-Corp) in CA.

While the annual cost of $800 minimum tax plus maybe another $500 in administrative fees (accountants, legal, etc.) is real money spent, you can make it back in tax deductions and potential liability. If you have a structure in place (another entity that is not you personally), it is much easier to deduct expenses (less red flags) IF you make an attempt to actually generate income -- the government cannot stop you from being a bad business person :)

If you are in a 50% tax bracket, this could easily be offset by $3000 in expenses such as hosting fees, domain names, costco membership, cell phone, even your car lease. If you are renting, you can possibly deduct some portion (~20%) of your rent (do not do this if you own a house). Get a separate bank account + debit card, a separate credit card (maybe a business one with rewards) and pay everything using that entity. You will end up making "owner contribution" from your personal bank account to your business account every month.

The extra wrinkle if you have multiple projects is that you can further separate your different projects into "DBA"s (Doing Business As) which costs an extra $100/yr (County Clerk Recorder, Publish in Magazine, separate bank account, credit card, domain name) 100% owned by your LLC (or S-Corp). If you shut down a DBA, it will cost maybe another $50. You will need a DBA to open a bank account under that name.

While this may look like overkill, this keeps everything clean and if your side project does take off, you will have some history with the business.

On a day-to-day basis, what I usually end up doing is setting aside a day to deal with all these entities. Most bills are on each "company" credit card and I call all the credit card companies to align the closing date. For example, all my credit cards close around the 22nd or 23rd of every month. On the 12th of every month, I pull up each account and pay them all using one screen of online billpay if you have all your business accounts tied together using your SSN.

Note: I have other companies that are their own entity as they are generating income & have other partners. The setup here is specifically just for my side projects.

Ok, there is the other side to this coin WITHOUT replacing PHP http://engineering.dailymotion.com/php-7-deployment-at-daily...