jnardiello

Software dev who just switched to devops recently. Good luck to whoever will manage an AWS infrastructure on his spare time between developing one feature and another. Seriously, the cloud is not shifting roles. Actually, the more everything gets moved to AWS, GCloud, etc.. and the more the level of abstraction will grow - the more you will need specialised devops IMHO.

Overall, disappointing article.

PHP Dev here with similar experience as yours. I used to work/live in London and stayed there for a bit less than ~2yrs. My salary was 50k in a well respected big US-based corp. Mine was the highest salary in the team, other members were between 35 and 45k.

Honestly, be well-aware that the value of your salary is going to remarkably decrease if you relocate to London. Mainly because of rent. I used to pay 1.5k to live in Bethnal green (which is ~20/25 min by feet from the silicon roundabout - very likely where you'll end up working). You can save some money commuting but you'll end up paying for transports, so, expect end of the month to spend about the same. If you are alone and will be happy with a single room, it will be 600-800 in a decent shared flat.

I'm 100% confident saying that those 5/10k of salary increase are not enough to justify you to move. 40k in manchester are a lot more than 50k in London.

In terms of salary increase, as a lead PHP dev you can expect to go around 65-70k but that will require time.

Completely different story if you decide to start contracting as in London you can easily ask for 400/500GBP a day.

I hope it helps :)

Great naming, reads like "Half-ass" in italian. Other than that, great stuff

apologies, you are absolutely right. Has been a very long day :)

To be entirely honest, I'm quite concerned about your choice on choosing Alpine as the base distro. Their choice of using musl over glibc might be cool but if you have to put old libs inside a container, it's hell (if not entirely incompatible).

Here is the catch: you just need to realise that docker-machine is really just a virtual box linux machine. Once you get that, having shared volumes working as expected is quite easy without requiring 3rd party tools. I'm actually quite concerned on how this is going to change with this new tools, if they introduced "more magic" it could mean to lose control on your local environments.

> Now, if a programmer decides whether or not study and understand the pasted code has nothing to do with the quality of the final product.

I deeply disagree with this and for such obvious reasons.

If it's a joke "Ahah", if not it's just depressing. SO is a valuable resource to confront and understand concepts. Let's not encourage this copy/paste culture

Italy, too. Pretty much down globally.

Agree but you could still easily gather events and metrics, which once aggregated would provide BI insights. Managers do love this kind of things

1. If users are NOT aware of being tracked, it is HELL creepy 2. Scalability is now not an issue :) I think your concern should be to find the first customer. 3. not sure 4. I think they would, but you need to make sure users are not creeped out by it. 5. Unsure. You might want to try both ways. Start marketing a specific use-case and see what happens (if it works, etc..).

No, I didn't. That was the total tuition fee including taxes. Obviously that didn't include any sort of college accommodation or meal plan - as I lived at reasonable distance from the campus. It was just standard "classes & exams".

That said, because tuition and taxes are proportional to family income, I was in the highest and most expensive tuition fee. Most of the students in the campus would roughly pay half of it - unless they would start to repeat classes and not pass exams (for which you automatically jump to the most expensive yearly fee).

My tuition fee in a top-notch european technical college (automation engineering) was roughly 3000$/year. But yeah, let's keep cargo-culting the US model.

I don't think people realize that Mafia is not anymore what it used to be 50 years ago. They are well-established in different regions across europe (you wish it was just an italian thing, right?) which are generating a tremendous income with drugs and prostitution, but the real deal is when this capital gets re-invested in legitimate business - again across europe. Do you really think that once you get into the range of the tens of millions any financial institution is going to turn down easily any investment? They won't.

So, I think it's so simplistic to picture mafia as gangsters robbing and extorting businesses and dealing drugs. I rather picture them as shirt-and-tie business men traveling to Milan, Munich, London, Luxemburg and Geneve looking for investing opportunities.

And how distributing this as a composer package would stop you from cloning the repo manually and still use the class as if it had no composer json?

On the other hand, what if you have a slightly more complex system with some logic to handle crons?

You just don't get it :)

Whoever wish to include manually this package and use it like if it was 1993 will still be able to do by cloning this repo and including the file by hand. On the other side, 99% of the sane PHP that has been written in the last few years including fairly large projects, WILL use composer to manage external dependencies as it's probably the single project who made PHP a modern language.

So, what are the cons of releasing this as a package?

I'm not even starting the conversation where I'm trying to convince you that using a dependencies manager is always a good thing to keep the codebase sane and clean - even for small scripts. That "<10 mins thing" is an empty claim as you have to do a boilerplate once and can use it all the time (unless you are the kind of programmer who is not 'good-lazy' but rather 'bad-lazy' and love to re-do its job by hand over and over)

If the target audience are those developers manually including everything, then it's not a package for me. Using composer is completely unrelated to having (or rather not) dependencies. It's actually pretty much the opposite: a way of distributing your package to projects who wish to use it. So again: please use composer.

Completely agree with the namespace. You HAVE to namespace it :) Hope it helps

Mate, seriously, use composer and packagist.

No doubts: Elixir :)

Hope it helps

> Since you're looking for a quick win, you should put your focus on improving the product pages. Your selling point is the product's quality. You need to emphasize the product features on every page. You currently only have a few sentences on each one. Also, you have a great opportunity to tell a story with sourcing the product from artisans in Italy.

This is absolutely true. I honestly think that we should both try to find an "empathic" connection with our customers AND tell them the story behind each product describing the months of work we spent traveling the country to actually truly get the best, both in terms of raw materials and local hand-made production

Apparently we are receiving quite a few visits (and some positive feedback) from the US. We do really appreciate all the help we got on HN.

If any of you guys will decide to place an order, please use this coupon code during the checkout: FREEUS

It will give free worldwide delivery :)

Having a list of youtubers or bloggers is probably the next thing we will do. We will try to get in touch with them and see what we will need to do in order to get some coverage. The hard thing with our core business is that our stock is limited. Because everything was made by either artisans or local family-run laboratories we had to place our orders with months of advance (in order to make sure they had the time to prepare everything) and products are still limited.

Before sending out samples, we need to make sure they are well-worth it!

You made a good point saying that we should show straight-away products that relate with the current season. We will probably remove the "Bestsellers" (which actually are not bestsellers at the moment btw) with something more relevant.

These are all good suggestions/insights. Some of the things you mentioned we do, others we don't. I'll be spending the next few days trying to optimize our campaigns and define a clear demographic for the people we target.

I haven't yet implemented retargeting as it requires quite some time and I need to understand how it works. We do use cookies to rebuild the checkout when a user returns on the website (at least something!)

We tried building a newsletter, but we wasted a lot of time as people simply would not subscribe. We might want to try again but we will need to understand exactly what we can offer people and what would motivate them to give us their email address.

In order to let people know we are reducing prices, we run campaigns with specific collections and landing pages (so that we can track at least what people is doing as soon as they arrive on the offers page), an example here: http://polghi.co.uk/collections/winter-is-here

Tomorrow I will do a long list with some of the stuff you mentioned and will try to further optimize what we have, thanks a lot for your suggestions!

Added to the to-do list, tomorrow I'm going to add multi-currency support to the store!

If your wife will decide to be our first customer, tell her to get in touch via mail. We will be super-happy to offer free shipping to the US :)

Thanks a lot for the kind words regarding the products, they are (quite literally) our craft!

I'm blown away! Thank you so much for this!

I do realize that speaking english as a second language is an issue considering our target. We definitely need to find someone to proof-read our texts and landing pages.

> The language on your page might use a tweak too. It's clean and clear, but not entirely suggestive. I would get help changing that, if it were me.

Thanks a lot for this. Both me and my wife are non-english, it's really hard to choose the right words. We might need some help from a professional copywriter.

Bricks and mortar store is something we are considering. To be fair, we don't have enough money to actually setup a "proper" store BUT in London it is possible to open pop up stores, which you can rent for a few days or a few weeks. We are probably going to do that as I'm 100% convinced that our products are actually the best marketing we have.

Beside that, the "discount" topic is a hot one. We are still in the process of testing our assumptions. So far, all we know is that if we sell full-price imitating the "big brands" in our segment, we get 0 attention. As you mentioned, people are after brands and we are still unknown.

Now we are trying to see if there is a segment of people who care about quality and is ready to pay a bit of money to get higher quality but still would never pay 250$ for a scarf from the big brands as they realise that it's all about the empty brand with little quality behind.

Thanks a lot for the feedback, it's really important to have the chance to speak with someone about this stuff (other than my wife, of course).

Thanks for the suggestion. Pinterest is a recurring subject, you are not first one suggesting it but none of us ever used it. I do definitely need to spend some time with it.

Disclaimer: I never went through a similar situation.

To me it sounds like that you have built the core platform for someone else, as an employee, and you have been rewarded for your work. Problem is: you are an employee and you are tired of that.

My feeling is that what you are really saying is that you would like to do your own thing, but the current situation is too economically stable and good to just give it up. How about keeping consistent with your current role and start working on a pet project? Might sound like an obvious advice but it does really make sense to me given your situation :)

Agree. This is just plain abuse on people who have no other available options.