marklit

It's surprising the Russians issued him a visa after he entered their country illegally. Fingers crossed for him arriving there today.

I second this. I'm not seeing Apache used much in any of the places I'm working in these days.

USB ports being disabled on corp PCs for one.

The author of this probably grew up in an environment simular to mine in the 1990s. Among my peers and teachers, everything revolved around Microsoft. C$650 for Visual Basic Pro, Windows NT was the special platform that business used, 'real' databases cost a lot of money.

I really wish I could go back to those times and give the open source world more thought and attention. Free compilers, free databases and looking back at it, PERL would have been a lot more useful than Visual Basic.

I spent years developing OpenGL applications on WindowsNT. I wasn't very good at what I did and the market for my skills wasn't very broad.

Had I built a basic web app using HTML, Postgres and PERL I could have avoided a lot of time spent in jobs I did not enjoy very much.

In the summer of 2002 I was trying to focus on building my skills in C++ and OpenGL to a commercial-ready level. As a fun side project I built a mock airline ticket booking system in PHP. The side project got my a job in Germany and the rest is history.

Some languages and tools are more marketable than others.

I'm glad to see both dropping. The world is a better place.

Out of curiosity were you recruiting developers directly or going via a headhunter or agency? £350 that I see a lot is what's offered from headhunter emails filling my inbox everyday. They take a large margin for themselves as a finders fee.

I'm not sure why I'd have to give up on HN. Not every posting here relates to entrepreneurship. I've found countless posts which have turned my attentions to new technologies. Those technologies ended up helping me find new contracts.

I have met some talented developers who are keen to build a business of their dreams. I'm glad they're doing it as (1) they are trying to reach their goals in life and (2) they aren't competing with me for work :)

You can use an umbrella company to do all your accounting. Ten minutes at the end of each week doing time sheets, 30 minutes each month submitted receipts for write offs. Equipment costs can be deducted from taxes so they can end up being extremely cheap or free.

IR35 is a good point. If you have multiple contracts and don't work in any one place for more than two years you should avoid any questions around if it's really a contract or not. Most employed coders I know hardly stick around in a place for more than two years here in London.

But 200 days means you're working 40 weeks of the year leaving 12 weeks for everything else. I know some contractors aren't always working but I work next to ten other python developers who are only on six month contracts. Notice periods are anywhere from a day in some places to a month in others. Same as employment really.

Also, which startups here in the UK give you 12 weeks off a year?

Lots of contracts in London are paying £350 a day. £350 / day * 48 working weeks of the year * 5 days a week = £84,000 / year. £55,498.64 in your pocket after tax. Compare this to ~5 - 10 years of working for peanuts in a startup hoping for an exit. Keep your eye on the clients who agree to short payment terms, forget the dreamers.

SEEKING WORK: London, UK - Remote a possibility.

I'm a full stack developer with 10+ years of professional web development experience in the UK, Germany, Estonia and India.

I specialise in Python, Django, Postgres, Celery, RabbitMQ, ffmpeg, Amazon EC2, Cloudfront, S3, Linode setups, HTML5, backbone.js, D3.js, RESTful API design, API consumption including facebook and twitter and ElasticSearch. I've extensive experience in devops using chef and fabric. I'm a big believer in Test-driven development.

I've done both back- and frontend work for BAA, Blackberry, Bloomberg, Danone, Financial Times, Ford, ITV, Krispy Kreme, Nectar, Nokia, PWC, Pizza Hut, RBS, Royal Mail, T-Mobile, UKTV, Vertu, Williams F1 and Xerox.

My CV: http://marksblogg.com/cv (mobile number and email address be found in there). I hold both a Canadian and a British passport. My principle method of working is as a contractor as apposed to a full-time member of staff.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the lack of conformity to PEP8? His code works and it's valid python but I feel that it's difficult to read.

Throw your CV up on CWJobs. I've been coding Django for two years and every time I put it on there I get 100 phone calls coming in.

You can make fabric execute commands in parallel. The reliability will be as good as it'll get with chef. I've spent ages dealing with edge cases with both fabric and chef setup systems.

http://morgangoose.com/blog/2010/10/08/parallel-execution-wi...

Mine have been a mixed bag. At my current ROI I'm paying something like $7 for each person who creates an account. I've done marketing for big companies in the past and they paid like $2 per new customer via various means of online advertising.

The main reason I choice it was because I only have to hold an integer id of your account id on twitter or facebook. If my database was ever compromised, there is only that piece of info about you that would disappear. It's basically leaving all the security problems (not to mention lost passwords, etc...) as a problem for Twitter and Facebook to deal with.

Good point :) To be honest, people search for all sorts of things on the iTunes store but very few people search for tools to help them market on the iTunes store. Also, Apple have got a lot of good keywords trademarked and it's hard to use them via Adwords.

Neither, I've built a Django-based website that helps mobile developers pick better keywords for the iTunes store.

http://searchrank.is/ monitors search keyword rankings of iOS apps on the iTunes store and tries to predict keywords of compeditor apps.

Cool, that's what I suspected. Maybe CTO should stand for Chief Traction Officer.

I'm on here and living in Tallinn. Most foreign techies I know here in Estonia are on HN.

I learnt Python this year. I went from being a fulltime LAMP employee to contracting in Python.

In May I started spending a few hours every night after the gym working on Django apps, mostly re-building my blog and just fell in love with everything Pythonic.

In August I started applying for Python contracts around London and one came through in about three weeks. I've since managed to only be out of work eight days since the beginning of September. I've done well enough to take six months off and travel around Asia next year.

I'm really glad I did this as I was unhappy being an employee and LAMP coding felt like I was untangling other people's piles of cables all the time.