jlangenauer

One thing to be aware of is that registering a company in the US (or anywhere else) does NOT mean that it's not taxable where the founders or management are resident.

For example, in Australia, a foreign company is taxable if i) Australian tax residents control the company’s voting power; or ii) Its “central management and control” is in Australia.

Other jurisdictions have similar laws.

And what about what’s best for the person being fired? Or are they just a cog in the machine, unworthy of empathy or decent treatment?

For those who haven't yet come across it, bundler-audit is a very useful tool to pick up any old and/or insecure gems in your application. It should be part of your CI pipeline, or at a minimum, run locally every so often.

https://github.com/rubysec/bundler-audit

Good for you! Stand up for yourself if they ask, use words like “inappropriate” and “disrespectful” to describe scheduling a conference call on a Saturday.

> If you want to fly from Germany to the Canarian Islands for 50 EUR round trip then you're going to end up with unstable airframes.

How does B follow from A? That's quite the non-sequitur.

I will also refuse to fly on one anytime soon.

If, in the Soviet Union, people had to live in tents while working, most sensible people would blame the economic system in place.

Yet in capitalist America...?

It’s not tax, we pay to a “Krankenkasse” (roughly a not-for-Profit health insurer), so we see exactly what it costs.

The premium is based on your monthly salary.

Yes, this is a constant irritation here, presumably to protect the awful Apothekes, who have a protectionist guild, and also - shamefully - sell complete nonsense like homeopathy.

I normally stock up on OTC medication like Ibuprofen when I’m in the UK.

That’s what he/she was making in the United States.

What rubbish. Germans are fiercely protective of their work/life balance.

Are the SSDs on these located in the servers that the DBs run on, or do they live on a separate SAN?

I ask, as at a previous job, we used to run our Postgres DBs on raw Droplets, and we'd get awesome performance on disk bandwidth (which we really needed), so much so that if we'd have moved to AWS we'd have had to pay very significant $$$ for provisioned IOPS to get the same bandwidth.

It'd be awesome if that same performance/price ratio was available with these new managed DBs.

Well, I better get myself to Toulouse this year, so I can take a tour of the Airbus factory while they're still building them.

It’s worth noting that government placement of massive economic projects over the desires or even well-being of local people is a feature of Soviet and modern day Chinese economic systems.

And so it seems, American capitalism as well.

I paid for courses at the start, which really helped.

Beyond that, reading books in German, and dealing with German society in German (surprisingly hard to do here in Berlin, as all the locals love to speak English, Jens Spahn excepted). Watch German TV.

I’m also lucky to have a few German friends who tolerate speaking to me in German, despite the fact their English is near fluent.

Yes, but I find that you fill in the blanks as you use and are exposed to German.

Having lived in Germany for 3 years now, and managed to speak German to a half-decent level (B1/B2), I offer the following observations.

1. The genders don't matter nearly as much as non-speakers think they do. If you talk to your bank, it doesn't matter if you ask about "der Konto", "die Konto" or "das Konto" (the last is actually correct), you will be able to communicate quite fine. Unlike French, there are very few words where changing the gender has a different meaning - das Bund/der Bund (the bundle/the association) is the only one I can think of off-hand. Same with adjective declinations - "das verbundenes Konto", "zum verbundene Konto", "ein verbundenen Konto" are all wrong and will grate on the German ear, but will all be understood.

2. I agree absolutely with not trying to map German propositions to English ones. One of the things that improved my German a lot is learning the verb + proposition combinations - "ich denke an...", "ich freue mich auf...", "ich helfe dir bei ..."

3. There is an amazing amount of structure in German words which you start to see after you have basic vocabulary, which makes it easier to guess at the meaning of words you've never come across before. For example: das Mitleid - "mit" means with, and "leid" would be related to the verb "leiden", to suffer. So you'd have "with-suffering", which makes it possible to guess the actual meaning - "compassion" or "pity". This of course gets extended far further with German's compound words.

I quit the job that was causing my burnout, flew to Argentina, and spent some time hiking in Patagonia.

Worked remarkably well.

Not all of this is the EU - which is not exactly some super-state that controls every aspect of life on the continent.

Almost all of these things are in the jurisdiction of the member states themselves, and the EU has little power to control them.

If the EU didn't exist, Germany would still be staffing its nursing homes with cheap(er) foreign labour, just done under a visa rather than EU freedom of movement.

If the EU didn't exist, companies would still produce high-quality products for rich markets, and low-quality products for poor markets. (If you want a fascinating example of this, read this Twitter thread about the manufacture of sanitary pads in Africa - https://twitter.com/aprzhu/status/1083278476310913024)

If the EU, ceased to exist, would eastern European supermarkets no longer be filled with "shit", or would local producers continue to export their good produce where they can get the most money for it?

There is a tendency to avoid criticism of the EU and congratulate it for things it does not do, but it is also a mistake to assign all the ills of Europe to it, when blame for them is much more accurately laid on national governments.

One reason is because I think there isn't such an obsession with becoming a billionaire here. If you're a founder, and someone offers you a deal which will personally see you net €10-20m after tax, why wouldn't you take it?

> You also have to provide the immigrants with whatever social spending to which locals are entitled.

Absolutely not true. The UK, for instance, explicitly states on its work visas "No recourse to public funds", although they are happy for immigrants to pay the same taxes as locals...

Examples like this make me appreciate the European Union's strict rules around state aid - which do a lot to eliminate beggar-thy-neighbour competition between countries, preserve tax bases to actually provide services and infrastructure to citizens, and hinder companies from playing off country against and city against city.

(That said, they're not perfect - witness Irish tax law as a prominent example)

The thing with hyperloop that I've not seen solved yet: points/switches. How do you divert the vehicles between two different paths?

Google has also become quite disgraceful for this - they've added prompts to their mobile apps to get you to install their other mobile apps. For example, when you click a link in their Gmail iOS app: "Do you want to open this link in Chrome [Install] or Safari [Continue]?"

I hope whichever product manager and UX designer contributed this are cursed to a life of either scalding or freezing showers caused by incomprehensible taps in every hotel they visit.

It's not just about separating business logic from "cloud plumbing". It's building you infrastructure around services that cannot simply be replaced elsewhere, or cannot be replaced easily - if you want to move from AWS Kinesis to (say) Kafka for message broking, or from DynamoDB to Postgres.

There is a reason Amazon gives away a lot of free credits to startups, and it's the same reason drug dealers give away free samples. If the economics are right, and growth is strong then you might be okay - but you also don't want to find yourself with a $100k/month AWS bill in a startup with only $2m of annual revenue.

(P.S Greetings from the other side of the Spree. I love La Lucha on your street!)

One of the things with Lambda etc is that while they are cost-effective (and flexible) when a business starts, they also can also lead to lock-in (not just with the serverless functions themselves, but queueing services etc). A few years down the track, a business may find themselves spending quite a lot of money with Amazon, and being unable to move away without a major re-engineering effort.

I do wonder if, in a few years time, if we're not going to be seeing a new genre of technical blog posts: "How we migrated off serverless to reduce our costs"

Sydney is a beautiful city, but still part of a rather insular and inwards looking country. House prices are obscene (but are finally dropping!), the public transport is a disgrace compared to any European city, and if you work in tech, the really good jobs have only started to appear in the last 2 or 3 years.

I left it for Berlin, and mostly don't miss it (apart from days like today where I could perhaps tolerate weather slightly warmer thatn 0º.)

Non-fiction:

"Age of Anger" by Pankaj Mishra - Eye opening work about how resentment develops in societies, and becomes weaponised by politicians - wide ranging examples from Voltaire-era France, pre-independence India and modern day ISIS.

"Poverty Safari" by Darren McGarvey - A stunning polemic and sort of memoir about modern-day poverty (particularly in the UK). Will change your mind, whether your politics leans to the left or the right

"Anmerkungen zu Hitler" by Sebastian Haffner - Only about halfway through this, but it offers clear observations and insights as to how Hitler gained power in Germany. Published in English as "The Meaning of Hitler", but the translation is a bit sketchy and doesn't have Haffner's clear prose.

Fiction:

"Guapa" by Saleem Hadid - an amazing portait of LGBT life, and life in general in the Arab world after the Arab Spring.

When I interview developers, I generally ask some basic questions about security - "Explain to me what an XSS attack is?", or "How would you defend a web app against SQL injection?"

Basic stuff, which - to my mind - literally every person who develops anything which is on the web should know.

And a surprising number of people - even "senior" developers can't answer this stuff. It's really worrying.