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Last year I went to visit a friend who has spent the last 2 years living on a Pacific island. I had the feeling that there was not a lot of programming opportunities on this said island but there was a market for IT generalists. There was a case of a person from Switzerland who moved to the island and purchased a shipping container and turned that into his office and workshop. Like most places there will always be need for IT support(business and home), so that was his core income. I believe he also did work on websites for businesses, resorts and small programming tasks on existing in-house applications. While remote work is certainly a possibility, you must be weary of the internet links that these islands have, some are very very slow and not very cheap.

I would also suggest that a set time frame of 3 days will not fit every project and could be a cause for pain when you can not deliver said project on time. You might want to have some sort of range of times/prices depending on how hard/big the scope of the project will be.

I had a flatmate once who used dodgy online streaming websites. They were riddled with pop ups and advertising but no ads in the actual video. The quality of the movie also varied in source from "Cams" to "dvdrips".

This looks exactly what I have been looking for. I have just signed up, can't wait to try it. Thanks

It really depends on if you have family/kids. That sort of move will require a lot more thought and planning if you are to move your whole family. Compared to if you are single, you only have yourself to look after and provide for. I have just immigrated to England from New Zealand with my wife without the certainty of work. Luckily we have a family friend who is housing us while we look. I would say that the chance to move over to SF with the certainty of work is something that might not come up very often. If you did decided to go I would definitely try to arrange to keep your company in France going.

Just a quick question on attire, am I correct in presuming this is a casual event and therefore we should not dress up like we would for an interview?

Ask yourself what your priorities are with going to college. Let’s say you do get a job for a start-up, will you set yourself a time limit of say a year before you go to college. You will find it harder and harder to give up a job and go to college the longer you continue to work. As others have mentioned you can always apply for internships while you are at college. You might find better opportunities and more doors open if you do go to college. You can always leave collage if along the line you find a start-up that suits you.

It will only be a mistake if you do not learn anything from it. So I wouldn't even look at your decision as one choice could lead to a huge mistake.

Easier said than done.

I also agree with "if it is not on paper, it does not count!". My first job they verbally agreed to a pay rise at the end of the first 6 months. It was a lot of hard work getting them to actually act upon this. This was a very very tight company and was hard work even getting the basic tools needed to do my job.

I think that statement is upon reflection. Everyone looks back at previous code and thinks they could have written it better. That is just the progression of a developer.

If Ebay decide to adopt this approach, wouldn't that be a sign that this startup has merit?

Event details can be found here: http://auckland.startupweekend.org/

This is good to know. I am currently in the process of leaving my current job and looking for work in a different country(UK). I have been hacking away at a side project that will help fill a particular need but mainly because:

a) I wanted to expand my skill set and work on a language and environment that I don't get to explore in my current job.

b) I want to have something to show potential employers to let them know that I am passionate about development and more than just a 9-5 programmer.

The issue I currently have is that the code is ugly and there are lots of things that I feel I could refactor and clean up. I might always feel this way as I am sure I will never have anything "perfect". I am wanting to get it live within the next few weeks and I think that I will have to accept that I just need to get it live and then focus on improving it after I have had feed back from users etc.

I am in my mid 20s and I was just thinking about this the other day. All these comments have been a good read for me.

I would general agree with this but I think it comes down more towards the type of person you are and the way jobs and study are viewed.

University is seen as a fixed term situation and is at an individual level. Here are the things you need to do, now go and do them by this time. Work is kind of the same but you have set hours that you are willing to do the work in. Generally this is 9ish-5ish. Your boss accepts that you have a life outside of your work(I hope) and will accept that you can only do so much during your set working hours. There will be times that you have to put in extra hours in the evenings or weekends but this should never be the norm. The time frame for the completion of a project is usually based on there only being a certain amount of time each week that any one person can give to the job. You can increase and decrease the amount of workers to change the completion time. While at University it is at an individual level and you cannot increase or decrease your clones. Being at University it is up to you to decide how many hours you are to spend on learning or completing something.

I know when I was a student I certainly spent over the "normal" 40 hours a week on my studies. During the end of my degree I was in the 80+ hours a week. This really does depend on the person though. Some people will do the bare minimum to scrape through with Cs and might not spend over 40 hours a week. I invested pretty much all of my time on my studies, so for me my workload took up a far higher amount of time during my degree than it does at my current job. This is all based on working for a company, not a startup(yours or someone else’s) or contracting. They pose different parameters around working hours, workloads and motivations.

I believe the difference between a standing desk and an exercise ball are very different. The ball still positions you in a sitting upright position. The idea of a standing desk is to get in a completely different position and not have the weight resting on your lower back. I have long wanted a standing / adjustable desk, so that I have the option to stand for part of the day. It is not possible in my current work place so I have settled for a kneeling chair. I generally use it in the mornings and switch to a normal chair in the afternoons. It just adds an extra bit of variety in my working day. I have found that the variety has helped ease some back muscle woes.

This is a very very important thing. The package that I currently support needed to learn that years ago.

I would suggest picking up a sport(insert some form of physical activity). By working more hours you are not necessarily providing the startup with more productive hours. The longer the hours the more burnt out you will get. This will result in more mistakes (bugs), more time spent trying to solve problems etc.. Do not feel guilty for taking some time out for your own life. Not only will this help you, it will help the startup. It will give your brain time to reset and you should even see an improvement in time it takes you to do tasks. Even just taking time out of the office for a decent lunch break will help make your afternoons so much more productive. The number of times I have walked away from a problem to go for a walk (anything else but sitting at the desk staring at the problem), to come back to the problem and know exactly what is wrong.

Location?