clorohk

Thanks for posting this, that explains the outage I had earlier

Recently seen a great phrase:

Be grateful for the things you don’t have to do.

As programmers we have one of the nicest jobs in society, there’s a lot of shit that we don’t have to deal with (figurative and literally), I’m very grateful for that.

Two Steps From Hell https://youtu.be/9O4_awEHh1g and similar things

All of the below is no professional advice, I’m just a programmer who looked into this a bit.

The easiest thing in my opinion would be to incorporate in Croatia and then use Paddle https://www.paddle.com/, Gumroad https://gumroad.com/ or FastSpring https://fastspring.com/ for payments. They take care of all your VAT/Sales taxes.

If you want to go with a simple company outside of Croatia, maybe go with a UK Ltd, easy and cheap to set up and run. I used Sleek https://sleek.com/uk/ for that.

But if you live in Croatia, I would go with a local equivalent of a Ltd + Paddle/Gumroad/FastSpring.

They’re used quite a bit in hospitals to transport blood transfusions, medications, etc. as far as I know

I’m kind of in a similar boat in terms of tech stack. A few things you could do:

Try to get into https://www.codeable.io/. Haven’t tried personally yet, but might in the future.

Have a look at low-code/nocode tools and become an expert in one of them (Shopify, Wix, Webflow, Zapier, etc.)

Concentrate on landing pages and reach out to marketing agencies to ask if you can contract with them. Might be the easiest way to get a fulltime job as well.

Ignore the requirements and simply apply for some of the job ads. Especially for older big companies, many of them are likely to run on your stack and simply put things like cloud in because the hiring manager has heard that’s what they need to do.

Just some ideas, hope this helps.

Same here, love Codeigniter. It’s the perfect combination between not using a framework and having most of the features you need. I remember learning everything by reading the manual in one evening and I was ready to go the next day.

I worked on projects with Laravel as well but it never clicked for me. It feels to me that Codeigniter is one level of abstraction lower which I appreciate

FastSpring https://fastspring.com/ and Gumroad https://gumroad.com/ are two more alternatives to Paddle you can look into. Both handle VAT for you which makes global sales so much easier (worth it in my opinion for the higher rate you pay, but that depends on your project)

This is fantastic, was thinking about doing something similar as a side project but given that this exists, I’ll probably simply go with this. Thanks for implementing and posting on HN

Wunderlist or Todoist -> Zapier -> Twilio might be a quick solution. Might be worth a try

It’s actually fairly simple I think, but will probably lead you away from most modern client-side JS frameworks.

- render the website on the server (with PHP, Ruby, JS, Java, whatever you’re comfortable with)

- deliver HTML and CSS only as far as possible

- reduce JS to a minimum and stick to raw JS where possible (or use simple libraries like jQuery)

- use native fonts wherever possible

- rely on as few third party elements as possible (chats, popups, etc). You can’t control what they are doing/loading.

Very unsexy way of doing web development but worked for me anytime I had to do a project for a client.

Here’s a website of mine where I pushed my approach to the limit: https://www.pinhok.com/ (and yes, you could still produce nice designed websites with this approach, wasn’t the main target for me for this website for now)

I had a look into this for Austria some time ago, for small companies there seem to be looser rules and it seems to be possible to start out with 5k deposit (or 10k, not sure). Then you would slowly add to the Stammkapital over time I think. More can be found here: https://www.wko.at/service/wirtschaftsrecht-gewerberecht/Ges...

Concerning LLC be careful that there are double taxation treaties and that you first find an accountant who specialises in running a LLC from Ger/Aut. Otherwise you’ll pay twice in tax + high fees for the extra paperwork the accountant needs to do locally.

I personally had a look at having a UK Ltd run from Austria, there are plenty of companies specialising in that (just google UK Ltd Österreich/Deutschland). Not sure to what extent that’s still possible post Brexit.

All in all, especially if the big company is willing to pay upfront, I would personally go for a GmbH, might be more expensive to set up but saves you troubles in the long term I think.

Having said that, I’m only a programmer myself, please don’t rely on my advice here, definitely talk to a local accountant about that, they usually have a free consultation to get started.

Shameless plug, but might be useful for some people here.

I’ve created vocabulary books with the 2000 most frequently used vocabularies for 40 languages (so far). You can find that here: https://www.pinhok.com/

Those are real translations, not Google Translate, and all cross checked and proofread.

Came up with this for myself when learning Cantonese. Before that I found HSK (Chinese standard test) very useful which kind of follows a similar approach.

It’s not for everyone, but people who like 80/20, etc. might find this quite useful