mediascreen

There are a few things I think you could do about it:

1. Find somewhere to work were they use a tech stack you feel is more appropriate.

2. Work at a smaller company where you have more say in the tech stack and tooling.

3. Find a company or team where someone else works on developer tooling and automation, so you only need to worry about site building.

4. Freelance and specialise in what you enjoy working with.

I work at a small (15 people) web agency where I have a large say in what we use. It's surprisingly little React/Vue, a bit of WordPress (not everyones favourite maybe) and a lot of backend work on APIs and admins in Laravel and plain PHP/HTML with some vanilla JS. Only about 10 percent of the clients ever care what stack we use.

All of our 60+ projects are setup the same way:

1. Pull down the repo and run "docker compose up" to start you local environment. Any composer or npm commands should be run through docker compose, so no local installs (except docker) are needed.

2. Push to staging branch to deploy to staging and merge to production branch to deploy to production.

At least in eu-north-1 the three AZs are located in different towns, about 50 km apart (Västerås, Eskilstuna and Katrineholm).

As a Swede with pretty much the opposite views, your monolithic EU "we" sounds pretty offensive.

The 2008 financial crisis might have started in the US, but outcomes in European countries varied greatly depending on local policies and debt levels. It's hardly Americas fault that some European countries had taken on very high levels of government debt.

AirBnB and Uber seems pretty easy to regulate on a local level and in many places in Europe they are.

At least here in northern Europe the opinion still seems to be solid in support for Ukraine. The invasion is not always the top headline anymore though.

How does it work in countries with slightly lower incentives? Are there other ways to get people to pay for my retirement? Maybe by attracting well educated immigrants?

As someone who pays taxes in Sweden and don't plan on having children, I would probably not choose to pay for 480 days parental leave per child, subsidised day care and child allowance payment to the extent they exists today if I had a choice.

I run 50+ smallish applications on AWS using Bitbucket Pipelines, Fargate, Aurora MySQL, S3, Cloudfront and a few other services. Most of the setup is scripted using very simple Cloudformation scripts. I estimate that I spend maybe 10% of my time on this and the rest of my time on ordinary dev/architecture tasks.

Before Docker and AWS this would have taken me so much more time.

The only drawback is that we have a hard time finding other developers in the company that want and have the time to learn the setup. It's not very complicated, but require some familiarity with the AWS ecosystem. It can seem daunting to someone who has to learn it from scratch.

Of course. Companies will not spend money without expecting something back. But the sponsorships are not very obvious and you have to ready pretty far down on the about pages to find out. I would be surprised if 10% of the visitors to the arenas knew about the sponsorship.

In these cases I think it's mostly about employer branding and I think it's communicated much more within the sponsoring companies.

In Stockholm, Sweden, two of the largest arenas are named by companies who paid to have the arena named something not associated with their company.

Friends Arena is named after the Swedish anti bullying foundation Friends as part of the Swedbank sponsorship of the foundation.

Avicii Arena is named after the artist by the companies Trygg-Hansa and Bauhaus.

Sure. On the other hand you can usually chose which companies to interact with. When it comes to governments the relationship is not optional. Your government usually have more ways to affekt your life than most private companies has (like no fly lists).

A few years ago the true extent of the Swedish program for tracking left wing sympathisers became known. It ran from the sixties up until 1998. For example, if your car was seen outside of a left wing publication you could end up on a list somewhere. That caused you to be automatically excluded from 5-10% of all jobs without you never finding out about it until 20-30 years afterwards. Imagine wanting to become a police officer, a pilot or and engineer and never understanding that the reason you didn't get an interview was because you had parked in the wrong spot one day years before. Or that your sister briefly dated a left wing journalist at some point.

I often find that developers with an interest in product development and the business side can make huge contribution by suggesting alternative solutions to writing more code.

With some gentle pushback on requirements they can help clarify what the real issue is. Of course, this has to be done carefully or it will quickly get very annoying.

Another useful skill is to have a feeling for when problems get too hard and it's time to backtrack. At least in my work, most of it is basic CRUD of different varieties. If I find myself inventing new things or not finding any answers Googling my problem, it's likely that I'm on the wrong track and there is a simpler path I missed.

The server locations does not seem to matter as long as American government agencies are able to make the company provide the information.

But, companies like AWS claim that they voluntarily bind them selves to to provide much stricter privacy safeguards than the US law requires[0].

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-and-eu-data-transf...

I agree. Hopefully this is temporary and they can figure out a reasonable compromise. As a Swede I do feel that parts of the EU (with Germany and France) are heading in the wrong direction. Those are not countries famous for their entrepreneurship and it seems like their first instincts in relation to the US are usually protectionist.

Why limit it to the EU? Shouldn't every country have their own AWS, Azure and Google Cloud?

I think we underestimate just how difficult it is just to replicate existing services, let alone keep up with the innovation.

It's like the Argentinian effort to stimulate its own computer manufacturing by banning Apple products.

I already get a lot of "We are sorry, but for legal reasons we are prevented from providing this service where you live" when I'm accessing American websites.

Recent European judgements seems to make it illegal to embed content from YouTube or Vimeo for example.

I don't see how dividing services up by region will help me anyway. I'd rather be able to choose from a few (I imagine there are more than a few at the moment) international Mailchimps than one in EU.

I think we (in the EU) will soon realise the bizarre consequences of these regulations. European startups will not be able to use standard SaaS or PaaS tools (like AWS, Azure, Mailchimp, PayPal etc) if they are based in the US (like most of them are). No cloud services, no Office 365 or Google Workspace.

It will take forever to build up a similar ecosystem in Europe and I think most successful European entrepreneurs will just end up starting companies in the US instead.

There must be some reasonable middle ground before we fragment and destroy the entire Internet. Why not start by making a general exception for temporary storage of less sensitive data like IP-addresses for efficiently and cost effectively delivering a web service.

If there is one thing they could start looking in to it would be handling of personal information by governmental organisations. I work a little bit with a few municipalities, and the number of documents with deeply personal information that are just emailed around over unencrypted email is shocking.

Well, you might be building inventory systems for lumber yards or scheduling software for transit companies. It might be more abstract and not as direct, but I would still take pride in those tasks.

I derive most of my job satisfaction from solving interesting technical challenges. I also have an ability to become interested in whatever industry I work in and I take pride in being a small cog in the system that provides goods and services that people desire a little bit cheaper, faster, easier or with better quality. That's enough for me.

Most of the time when I see those "lets save the world"-organisations it seems to me that they are either moonshot ideas with 1/100 chance of success or they are doing trivial work, duplicating the efforts of already existing organisations or doing things that have no measurable impact at all. I honestly think I would feel less satisfaction working for them. Sometimes I even see them bidding on each others names on Google Ads to capture donations from each other.

When it comes to agency work, with a lot of small to medium sites or API:s (in the $10k-$200k range) PHP is very convenient and there are a lot of choices when it comes to hosting and deployment. Dedicated WordPress hosts, Laravel Forge and Vapor, small hosting and VPS providers as well as AWS Lambda, AWS ElasticBeanstalk and AWS ECS to mention a few.

I'm no Java developer, but JetBrains Java and PHP editors look very similar in functionality. And VS works fine with PHP.

To say it's not controversial seems misleading. It may be widely acclaimed, but also hugely criticised. Wikipedia has a short collection of the criticism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

Well, I'm spending the fall in Barcelona right now, but I don't think I'll move somewhere else permanently. As I get older I seem to get more attached to Sweden and have hard time imagining building a permanent life somewhere else.

I live in Stockholm and have a beautiful 20 minute walk to the office. It takes about the same by bus or metro.

On the other hand I have an 45m2 apartment, since I would rather have a small place in the center of Stockholm than having a bigger one in the suburbs.

I'm pretty sure AWS Textract does that already.

https://aws.amazon.com/textract/

Well, first of all it's 10x compared to Norway and 3X compared to Denmark.

There are huge differences in demographics between the Scandinavian countries. Over 20% of the Swedish population have been born outside of the country, mostly in the Middle East or Africa. This group has been hit disproportionately by Covid. The risk of needing intensive care for Middle Eastern immigrants in Sweden is 6 times higher than for people with Swedish ancestry, and the risk of dying is 2.8 higher [0].

There are also pretty big differences in how elderly care is organized and run.

I'm not saying we did a good job in Sweden, but I definitely think that there are more factors than lockdown in play.

[0] https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/2dddee08a4...

Got the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate certification two years ago.

I started working more with AWS and felt like there was a bunch of services and concepts that I didn't know. My employer paid for a three day course and the examination fee was included in the price.

It was useful mostly in giving me more confidence in my role, but I also got a better understanding of the huge AWS ecosystem. Helps us with clients sometimes that I'm "certified"...

The course was extremely boring (a lot of reading aloud from the textbook), but forced me to focus on the subject for three whole days. I also spent a few hours studying the textbook on my own and spent a few hours on parts of a Udemy course.

I think it is very hard to say if it is because if or in spite of its policies that Sweden has been somewhat successful.

And I would say that going from the world's highest tax rates (% of GDP) to the world's fourth highest rate does not make Sweden neo-liberal. We have also had a Social Democrat prime minister since 2014 and a government that relies on support from the former Communist party, so we are not quite a neo-liberal utopia yet.

Maybe not exactly the same thing, but there are tax auditors, tax audits, access logging (for some administrative systems), "know your customer" bank regulations and public insider registries for example.

Can a restaurant really afford to waste huge amounts of expensive meat every day? I thought their entire margin was based on minimizing expensive waste.

In a weird way it feels like we are more prepared for this in countries like Sweden where your social security number, tax returns, income, credit history, address, spouse, children, company board positions, pet ownership, car ownership and criminal records are public information and easily available.

At least we have no illusions of privacy. Someone could start with your licence plate and two minutes later know pretty much everything.

Since 1905 you have been able to buy a book every year that listed up to date income and net worth for everyone in your area [0]. Now, of course, everything has moved to web services and APIs. Take a look at the example response from this API for an idea of the information available [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxeringskalendern

[1] https://api.ratsit.se/swagger/ui/index.html#/Person/get_api_...