Interesting… I use egg whites to remove the sediments from the wine.
354 karma · joined June 1, 2014
https://otar.me
I’ve been using it since my early career and didn’t switch to other stack… it’s been evolving like a crazy lately.
The only thing I miss in the language right now is generics.
PHP is not your ugly language any more, quite some time to be honest…
I am originally from the PHP/Laravel world, recently had to quickly develop a very simple (5 endpoints) REST API and decided to give CF workers & KV storage a try. In an hour the API was running in production…
CF is really, really good at many things.
I was leading the large project, it was a core system for a financial organization.
Because of a fast pace and because of the fast growth and because of the unexperienced management, it was impossible to quickly train and delegate things to the appropriate people.
I was often getting a call from the devs, asking for help, and I was like “it works so and so, check the X file and find the Y method, that’s where you should apply changes. When you do that don’t forget to do Z.”
I was also getting calls from the top or middle level management. They were asking me things about the product specifications, marketing metrics, etc…
Literally everything “that guy” that knew everything.
The pace didn’t slow down, the opposite, company wanted to grow like crazy. I couldn’t keep up with everything. I remember I had a honeymoon in Thailand and I was literally hanging on a phone to dictate people how things worked and what they should have to do.
Things ended up miserably. The new CEO came and we agreed that I needed help with the delegation: I needed suitable people on-board and time to teach them. The process started. But it was going slow. We still had a fast pace of growth and I was trying to hire and delegate along the way.
After some time, I was accused to be a “ corporate parasite”, keeping all the knowledge to myself to be indispensable and irreplaceable. I left the company soon. Did my best to transfer the knowledge before that.
In the end, it’s been one of the best experiences I had. I grew professionally and mentally, nowadays I easily spot the problems while they become big, know who is who in a glance and so on… I learned a lot along the way.
Several advices someone might find useful:
1) If you cant align with the decision makers you either have to get used to it or move on. Mostly you have no control on the other peoples’ thoughts. If it’s broken, it’s broken. Period. Don’t prolong your decision.
2) Always under-commit and sometimes try to over-deliver. Depended on the quality of your management or organization you might want to over over-deliver and be respected. If you’re in a situation like this then good for you.
3) If you want to grow your organization and the team, you must learn how to delegate tasks and get deliverables, without micro-managing people.
4) In the end, its more about people and less about technologies. Your job is to understand, manage and delight people and solve all the problems along the way.
Though, some more examples with real-world use cases would be good.
Through the history there are loads of examples: Warren Buffer paying lower tax rate than his secretary (ever got interested how?), Eduardo Saverin denouncing US citizenship in favor of Singapore citizenship and saving hundreds of millions in taxes.
Right now I hire contractor developers in Ukraine and they pay 5% on their income + minor accounting fees.
There are loads of government incentives around the globe, especially for the IT people.
US is the worst of citizenship in terms of taxes. You pay taxes citizenship-based on your worldwide income, while most of other countries tax residents, not citizens.
In a short, move away from a high-taxation country in a low-taxation country and enjoy the benefits. Or become a perpetual traveler and be a tax resident of NO country. There are loads of countries that offer good balance between taxes and life quality.
I currently pay about 2,5% on my gross income ($100k+) as a software developer, which is more than most of EU/US developers are left after tax…
In a short, if you’re willing to make some trade-offs and optimize your taxes, you’ll be legally retaining your hard earned $$$. Among the trade-offs, tax residency is the most important. Things are a bit complicated for US citizens as the government taxes their income regardless of their tax residency, citizenship-based.
P.S. That 2,5% includes all the fees like accounting, legal consultations and banking fees (account maintenance, transfers…)
Two thoughts:
1) CloudFlare offers incredible service. What would need the team of netadmins/sysadmins can be handled via their UI easily. I use Argo in one project and yes, it is a very efficient tool. CloudFlare is becoming like AWS, knowing its tools is a skill. Maybe one day well see an official CloudFlare Solution Architect certification?.. :))
2) For such traffic heavy websites I don’t think there’s a better combination than Static Websites hosted over CDN, which is cached aggressively and for the dynamic part serverless as a backend. If you configure it properly (cache optimization, rate limiting to not get a huge paycheck if DDoSed, etc…) this setup is like set-up-and-forget-it, without the need to invest loads of resources into it.
My typical workflow on HN when I see the paid content block/popup on a destination website: 1) Go back 2) Open HN comments 3) Find archive.org or outline.com link 4) Read the content
Account transfers bring more flexibility and convenience and costs almost nothing.
Systems grow from toddlers to old men, so do the businesses. They just evolve and adapt, otherwise they die.
I leave outside US and in my country Google has no official dealer. I bought an unlocked Pixel 3 via my friend in US, who shipped it to me.
At first, everything seemed good unless it started to lag in few months. First, battery percentage was stuck at 26% (but the phone was charging), then, received phone calls were having a very bad quality (calls via messengers were good).
So, in conclusion, I couldn’t: 1) understand if the phone was charged or not; 2) always had a bluetooth earpods with me in case I needed to call or receive a phone call.
It appeared that both of the issues were a hardware failures and needed my phone to be shipped back to US to the Google Service Center, which I didn’t do.
When you pay a decent money for a flagship phone, such issues are unacceptable.
Pixel 6 might be an excellent phone, but I’m not risking my $$$ anymore with it.
Related: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jan/24/wilderness-solo...
Linux had all the opportunities to be really good, but the development process was slow, hardware compatibility was a crap and occasionally I would loose a day or two after a postponed update (which got fixes already) to make it work again. I don't really understand why Canonical/Ubuntu dropped Gnome and worked 7 years for Unity, then switched back to Gnome again. 7 years developments and contributions to the Gnome could really make a difference.
There are many things that you could be annoyed with in Georgia and for these reason many young people flee the country in search of a better life. I somehow declined dozen of relocation offers on the software engineering roles and stayed alongside my big family, which I don’t regret.
If you ignore some parts of the uncomfortable environment, adapt to some of them and construct the comfort around you and your loved ones, I believe life can be comfortable in many places of the world, unless your physical existence is under danger.
From the other side, living in Georgia has many benefits: dollar-value, cheapness, amazing food, really good and cheap wine (for 10 USD you buy a bottle which costs 25-35 abroad), beautiful and diverse nature, safe environment… and steady flights to the EU countries (which I got to used before pandemic) makes travel very easy… I was literally flying in EU every second weekend.
1) I use XMind, which has floating topics. I quickly draft mentioned requirements as a floating topics and then break them down into sub-topics
2) After the requirement is clarified then it's a time for prioritisation and I use priority matrix for that.
3) Then you just unify everything under a central mind map topic and "connect the dots".
I'm running around 40 domains on Cloudflare Free plan. About 20 of these domains have some traffic.
Mark Overmars, thank you!