stevenwilkin

Don't make mistakes.

Great to see you're still going Nigel! Is this library the latest iteration of your original VectorGL project?

Probably related that Foodpanda announced they were shutting down in Thailand.

It currently costs <1 USD to perform a Bitcoin transaction:

https://bitcoinfees.net/

Reminds me of irccat:

https://github.com/irccloud/irccat

I've had the same experience with a constant stream of freshly minted recruiters want to add me on LinkedIn each and every week.

I've done contract Rails dev in London for the past 2 years now, before that I had clients in the South of England, Dublin and Belfast. Apart from holidays I've not spent any considerable time out of work.

Here's a relatively recent post from the LRUG mailing list with a bunch of jobs in it:

https://gist.github.com/stevenwilkin/76cdb6a1680c18192c2d

Another from the same guy from a while back outlining the market in general:

https://gist.github.com/stevenwilkin/ad97636243757b03c25b

Average rate has been around £400/day the last year or so though if you can tell your ass from your elbow it's not difficult to charge more.

The demand for contract Rails devs here in London is showing no signs of lessening

The last few years I've been building up a portfolio of dividend paying shares. In the previous 12 months dividend payouts have totalled GBP 2488.31. There has also been some capital growth.

The portfolio is inside a SIPP (self-invested pension) and the funds funnelled into it have been the profits from my contracting business which would have been liable to higher-rate income tax here in the UK.

Keeping money from the taxman which then makes me more money is great, shame I can't access any of it until 2040 ;)

I just stopped putting my phone number on my CV about a year ago which cut down the calls a great deal.

My current rate is nearly double the rate of my first contract which was equivalent to double my last permanent salary. This is after a few years of contracting, starting off in a low-cost city (Belfast, N. Ireland) branching out to Dublin and now London.

Ditto, I don't need to put a huge amount of time into the admin side of things. The volume of recruiter emails & calls can be oppressing at times haha

The contract market here is pretty vibrant. I'm on close to a 100% premium to the permanent employees sitting in the same office, doing the same work.

I was copying out the example BASIC programs from the back of manual of the C64 I got for Christmas 1991 when I was 11. I have vague recollections of LOGO on the BBC Micro before that. 20+ years then.

Still so much to learn ;)

Supplied usernames and passwords should be all lowercase, ie:

user: star pass: star

user: night pass: night

Having 12+ months of savings at hand has certainly bought some peace of mind in my own situation

Looks interesting Des.

How are the users' social media details accessed? Do they opt-in and supply Twitter/LinkedIn/FB credentials themselves or are they acquired by other means?

I can vouch for the skills gap here in Ireland.

I have siblings working in fields which were quite dependent on the housing bubble and as such they have been out of work for some time.

On the other hand, every IT recruiter I know here is complaining about the lack of candidates and I've had as much work as I've wanted in the past few years.

The place I'm currently contracting in (mentioned in article) has their summer intern programme in full swing.

Not only are the guys getting decent pay but they are building a useful in-house app while getting trained up in technologies like OS X, Linux, Git, Ruby, Rails, MongoDB etc.

Win-win!