scottlilly

The same with me.

Before, my problems were generally when USPS was making a Sunday delivery. They'd often leave the package outside the entrance to my apartment building - otherwise known as "the public sidewalk".

The last few weeks, most of my packages were handled (well, mishandled, to be more accurate) by Amazon's delivery service. I finally cancelled the two remaining orders that were somewhere in transit, and cancelled the auto-renew for my Prime account.

Now, I order directly from shops, and might get a Costco membership for bulk items.

I'm using mine right now, and love it.

When I started experiencing forearm pain a few months ago, I bought several vertical mice from different manufacturers. The Anker was the clear winner for me. It fits the best in my hand and is shaped so I can easily lift it up and re-position it.

"The Goal" - Started my interest in Lean principles, along with how to apply them to programming - imagining my programs as little data "factories", that need to be made efficient and efficiently.

"How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World" - Taught me I don't need to follow the standard path that "everyone else does", and to focus on how I can actively change my world - instead of waiting for someone else to to change it for me.

"Code Complete" - Get it. Read it. Live it.

Checking the bathroom is a trick I learned a long time ago. If they're messy, that's almost certainly a sign that your potential co-workers and managers are disorganized, undisciplined, and/or don't care about their work.

I recently wrote a Greasemonkey script to do this - it changes the link text background to yellow and disables the click.

If anyone is interested, the code is posted here: http://scottlilly.com/greasemonkey-block-links-to-annoying-w....

Outside of Houston, Texas, this former private bunker (http://www.houstonbunker.com/about/) was turned into a secure data warehouse. I believe Continental Airlines used to use it for their data.

I was going to add, "The Goal". I just received two more copies of it from Amazon today. I've given away more copies of that book that I can count (and will give away another one to a co-worker on Monday).

Like many others here, I plan to finish some things I've started before. In particular:

1. Complete an open-source 2-D RPG engine in C#

2. Write a full-length science fiction novel

3. Increase the number of tutorials/training videos I create for my site and YouTube

I also have an idea forming around an in-person workshop to introduce teens to programming. I'd like to do this in Paraguay, for less-privileged kids, and be able to provide them with a laptop/netbook. But, that may end up being a 2017 project.

If you want to dig deeper into this, I suggest reading "The Clustering of America", by Michael J. Weiss.

I think some of the key indicators it used were number of bowling alleys, liquor stores, and payphones (keep in mind, it was published in 1989).

There is also the scenario where someone may not be able to open a bank account due to an extremely bad credit history, or not being able to meet minimum balance requirements (or have to incur relatively heavy 'service fees' to maintain an account with a low balance). The current mainstream alternative is money transfer services that charge a hefty percentage for transfers.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/12/pf/fdic-bank-accounts/

I think that one problem has been with some people promoting TDD by saying to write "the simplest thing possible to get the unit test to pass".

I've seen "Uncle Bob" do his bowling game demo, without using the expected classes for Game, Frame, etc. It's an interesting exercise, but would be a horrible way to write any large-scale business application. However, some people walk away from that with the idea that they should write quick "hacky" code, instead of doing any thinking about design.

When I write a program, I use my [constantly-evolving] set of "best practices", based on what I've experienced when writing other applications. Writing a factory method for object instantiation is not "the simplest thing possible", but I've seen it come in very handy at times, so that's what I'm doing in my projects now.

After all, aren't retrospectives, and modifying your process based on what you've learned during your project, one of the huge points of Agile - even though I've rarely seen them done, let alone done well.

I wrote an ebook about a non-technical topic I had experience with.

I spent 18 months doing all the things I was "supposed to do" to build traffic and sell copies of it - frequent blog posts, SEO (including some recommended grey-hat stuff), weekly "newsletter" e-mails, etc.

Before the Google ranking algo change (Penguin? Panda?), I had my best month ever - US$ 150 in gross income. After the change, I lost 90% of my traffic and didn't have the heart to continue.

Even without the traffic loss, the site was going nowhere, due to a bunch of other mistakes I made. The biggest problem was that the maximum lifetime value of a customer was less than US$ 25.

I moved from the US to Uruguay for almost a year. Three years ago I moved to Paraguay, where I currently live.

What has your experience been? - Mixed. There are good things and bad things. But, overall, I'm happier here and plan to stay.

What is your particular career? - .Net back-end programmer, back in the US. However, I'm trying to do other IT-related things here that don't involve me sitting in someone's cubicle for eight hours a day.

What were your moving expenses? - Just the price of the plane ticket. I sold everything, packed a few bags, and left.

How much is your rent or did you buy? - I'm renting a tiny apartment in one of the nicer neighborhoods in Asuncion for about $300/month. I highly recommend that you don't buy until after you've lived in a place for at least a year. It will take you that long to see if you really want to stay there, and also figure out the local real estate market.

Where did you move to/from? - US. Chicago and Texas.

How are the schools? - I don't have any kids, but I've heard that you'd probably want to send your kids to private schools here.

Have you become fluent in the native language and was the language barrier difficult to overcome? - I've become a little bit better than "functional", but nowhere near fluent. Unfortunately, it's easy to get lazy at this point. You'd generally need to be close to fluent in Spanish, to get anything done here. However, since I mostly hang out with Paraguayans who are educated IT people, many who have learned English. Since they're usually better at English than I am at Spanish, we often end up speaking in English.

How long have you lived in this country? Are you a permanent resident or do you plan on moving back to the US? - Just over three years here. I've had permanent residency for two and a half years. I plan to apply for Paraguayan citizenship at the end of this year (when I'll first be eligible). I don't plan to return to the US.

What was the process like to become a permanent resident? - Fairly easy. Get some documents from the US (birth certificate, police background check, etc.), have them legalized by the Paraguayan Embassy/Consulate in the US, deposit $5000 in a local bank (to prove financial solvency), and hire a local "gestor" for about $800 to deal with getting the paperwork stamped and submitted, dragging me around to the required appointments, etc. Six months later, I have my permanent residency and applied for my "cedula" (national ID), which took about a month to receive.

Did you have to already have a job when you moved to that country? - Nope. But I had a decent amount of savings (emphasis on "had").

What's the cost of living compared to where you moved from? Has your quality of life improved or not? How and why? - I live on around $1000 a month. I could live cheaper if I cooked at home more often. I could live more expensively, if I rented a bigger/nicer home. Overall, I'd say my life is better - even when you include the stress of still trying to get some business idea to work. I lost about 25 pounds of excess weight, from eating better and walking more. I feel less stressed, since I'm not being constantly bombarded by wars/bad economy/etc. I'm in a place that I believe will grow and improve over the next few years/decades (something I can't really say for the US).

Actually, you can renounce with only permanent residency.

I personally know someone here in Paraguay who has done it. He's now stateless. The Embassy highly suggests that you have another citizenship. However, they will accept a renunciation if you don't have one.

The day you renounce your US citizenship, you are no longer a US person (unless the State Department has a valid reason to deny your renunciation).

It may take several months, or more than a year, for the State Department to issue you your Certificate of Loss of Nationality (CLN). However, the effective date of your loss of citizenship is the day you signed the papers and swore your oath of renunciation at the Embassy or Consulate.

You are only required to file taxes with the IRS for the year you renounced, and only for whatever you earned up to the date of your renunciation. Before the HEART Act of 2008, you may have been required to continue filing, and paying US taxes. However, that has now been replaced with a one-time exit tax on unrealized gains, for "covered expatriates" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriation_tax).

I'll probably have a Part 2 (and maybe more). First, I want to see what direction people are interested in taking it; web-based version, add graphics, more game features, deeper coding skills, etc.

Plus, it took a lot of time to write. So I can use a little break. :)

Thank you. When looking through forums, I always saw, "I want to write a game, but I don't know how to program" posts. So I figured this might be more an interesting way to introduce someone to the basics.

From a similar personal experience, definitely contact a tax lawyer or "Enrolled Agent". They know the system. An Enrolled Agent helped me get my situation resolved relatively quickly, which let me move on with my life.

Niche ebooks seems the most common way I've seen to generates a little extra beer money (or more) from a development blog.

I lived in Uruguay for almost a year, before moving on to Paraguay.

When I left Uruguay 2.5 years ago, applying for residency was changing a bit. Apparently, nowadays, you need to show you have "enough income to support yourself". The people I know say that's usually around $1500/month. Also, expect it to take at least 18 months to finally complete your residency. It took over 2 years for some people I knew. However, you can still live there while your application is in process (no visa runs needed).

If you've been reading anything that says it's "cheap" to live in Uruguay, it's probably several years out of date. Inflation seemed to be around 15% a year. Personally, I was spending about $2000-2500/month to live there by myself, and I wasn't living extravagantly (other than living in a decent neighborhood).

Uruguay doesn't manufacture much of anything, and imported goods have a 60% duty, along with the standard 21% IVA (Value Added Tax). So, electronics are about twice the price of what you'd pay in the US.

It's also not a very entrepreneurial place. There is some software development there, which can have some tax advantages. But prepare yourself for a very bureaucratic place, where things don't move quickly, and taxes/fees are high.

Uruguay may be a place you'd end up loving, but if you base your views about it on what you've read from International Living's website, you're going to be in for a big shock.

You're right, user B could make incorrect (to me) ratings about other users.

Similar to what you say about derived and produced information, I would have "personal" and "external" ratings. My personal rating for user C (that I make after reading some of their posts) would override all my other external contacts ratings of user C.

Over time, if I have a high percentage of different personal ratings from user B's ratings, then the system would apply less weight to his ratings for other users.

I was thinking about doing something similar. One of the things I wanted to incorporate was an reputation ability (beyond just blocking). It would be similar to a referral engine in Netflix or Amazon.

So, I'm user A. I mark user B as a high-value poster. User B marks user C as a high-value poster. When I run across a post by user C, I see they have a good reputation. If many people I ranked as high-value, also ranked user C as high-value, then I see user C as having a very high reputation. The same, in reverse, for low-value posters.

Congratulations!

I just released my first app on the Windows 8 App Store the other day, but went about it a little differently. I decided to build the absolute simplest app I could think of – the kind of app that really could be completed in 48 hours.

The goal of this app was to get something into the store. Even if I don’t get any downloads, this app served its purpose for me. Now, I have the whole infrastructure in place for my future apps. I have a checklist of what I need to do. My accounts are all set up. I’ve seen some of the potential bumps in the submission process. Having successfully been through the process once, I don’t have that in my mind as some huge hurdle, which could demotivate me from even starting another app.

Now it’s time to focus on building something that solves a problem that people are willing to pay for.

I'll be able to apply for Paraguayan citizenship in about a year, and I plan to renounce my US citizenship immediately afterwards.

I'm so much happier here in Paraguay (even with all the cultural differences), instead of the US. I also can't say I feel happy about how things have progressed in the US over the last few years - regarding politics and economics. I really expect that Paraguay is the country where I will build my family and my future.

Unfortunately, PayPal has limited capabilities in some countries.

In fact, Costa Rica (where the company is moving) appears to be a country where you cannot withdraw money from your PayPal account into a local bank account. It also looks like you can't have them transfer money to a Costa Rican credit or debit card. PayPal doesn't even have my current country (Paraguay) listed as a place where I can do anything. https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-approved-...

I also encountered problems with other money transfer services when I first moved overseas. They had limits on how much money I could transfer per day, month, and lifetime of my account. As I started crossing certain thresholds, they wanted me to send them my tax return for the previous year, if I wanted to continue using them. Someone else I know frequently had transfers blocked by the service he uses to pay his foreign contractors. There's some new regulation, a policy changes, or just general screw-ups.

One potential problem arises if a US company tries to pay someone with a bank account outside the US.

Due to FATCA regulations, there may be a 30% withholding on bank wires sent to foreign financial institutions that aren't Qualified Intermediaries (foreign banks that agree to submit information on any US account holders who have accounts with them).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...

I've actually been thinking about offering a code review service, since it would fit well with the way I like to work. Personally, I wouldn't want to do one-hour reviews, but would be very happy selling four hour blocks of my time.

A third-party code review could easily point out certain problems that aren't only qualitative (e.g., the code is vulnerable to SQL injection attacks). It could also be useful to evaluate programmers. The project owner hires a few different developers to write a single user story, the reviewer tells them which code is the highest quality, and the project owner hires the best coder to do the complete project. For slightly more corporate clients, it could also be used to identify to a non-technical manager where their programmers need additional training.

As far as the reviewer being asked, "How do I fix it?", that could lead to the reviewer offering training material, libraries, or development tools.

For most countries that I'm aware of, when you apply for permanent residency you need to submit a criminal background check from your home country. They don't want to let in fugitives or violent criminals.

For US citizens, that means the FBI (although you generally have your fingerprints taken by your local police, and send the fingerprint card to the FBI). Since I was already in South America, I had my fingerprints taken at the Paraguayan Interpol office. I sent them to the FBI in the US and waited about 75 days to get my results back.

I also had to get fingerprinted for a criminal background check by the Paraguayan police, even though I had never been in Paraguay before.

Other than that, the process was fairly simple - a copy of my birth certificate (certified by the Paraguayan consulate in the US), a couple of visa-sized photos, and US$5000 to deposit in a local bank for the duration of my application (to prove I'm financially solvent). If you're married or divorced, you'll also need to have those papers legalized.

You're 100% correct about the incredible amount of bureaucracy for getting residency in Uruguay. After almost a year of waiting, and being told it would probably be at least another six months to a year to have my residency completed, I gave up and moved to Paraguay.

Getting permanent residency in Paraguay was fairly simple. I completed it in about seven months (partially because I needed to wait for my FBI background check). Other people I know had theirs completed in four to six months.

I also find Paraguay to have less government intrusion than Uruguay. Not that Uruguay felt oppressive, but the Uruguayan government is certainly involved in more aspects of business, welfare, regulations, etc., than the Paraguayan government.

Most Paraguayans only speak Spanish, or Guarani (the native language). However, if you're working in the tech sector, it isn't unusual to find people who speak a decent amount of English.

Sadly (I'm a Windows developer), it's almost all Android here in Paraguay.

I spoke with a couple local companies that do mobile development and the biggest problem is still the cost of hardware. That's even though Paraguay doesn't have anywhere near as large a problem with importing as other nearby countries do (for example, Uruguay's 60% import duty and 22% IVA, Argentina's restrictions on imports and spending money outside the country). I occasionally pop into cell phones stores and I haven't yet found a Nokia Lumia to replace my old X6. I'm sure they're available, but they certainly aren't common.