Yeah, I'm making an effort to avoid being preachy, but since God does play a genuine role in the story, people might as well hear about it (otherwise I'd be hiding crucial information to understand my decisions!)
I don't know about levels.fyi (they want me to register / upgrade to see what salaries are like in Amsterdam), but I gave some more details in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359237
In short: I'm working 4 days / week (3 billable days, 1 overhead) and earning about double of what I'd otherwise get. Though obviously I'm taking additional risk. You are right that the healthcare side of things is covered.
I don't mind answering that question, but I'm not sure it has a place in the article (maybe I'll modify it later if I change my mind). My expectation is that in The Netherlands you could at most aim at 80k / year as a FTE (depending on lots of factors). Right now my workload is equivalent to 4 days / week and I'm earning about double what I'd get as an employee. Sounds like a good deal to me.
I wrote this article based on my last 3 years as a contractor with increasingly interesting clients (I'm currently doing open source Rust work for ISRG, the makers of Let's Encrypt). I've found lots of inspiration here on HN throughout my journey, so I'm hoping my article continues the chain and inspires some more people! I'll be hanging around here for the coming hours in case anyone has questions ;) (btw free to write to me directly if you prefer; contact details are in my profile)
Interesting to see this here... I unexpectedly transitioned from full-stack development to paid open source systems programming a bit more than a year ago. It would have been quite more difficult without my contributions to the Rust compiler and ecosystem back when I was at the university, and it still feels like I got very lucky.
Interesting timing... A few weeks ago I evaluated using tarsnap for my business and ended up going for borg + rsync.net, for some of the reasons pointed out in the post. It seemed like the more "professional" option (the website was clearer and the service didn't require me to top-up at irregular intervals). I guess I'm not the intended audience of tarsnap.
My experience has also been somewhat disappointing. I had a toy project that I decided to host elsewhere (Hetzner VM + Dokku), after the node for the PG database stopped working without any notification and didn't come back online (until I manually resurrected it).
> Work 6 days per week. Use that saturday to work on things that are harder to do during the week because of interruptions.
In my own case I haven't found it necessary to overwork. In fact, if overworking was the only way to make it I'd probably become an employee. My current schedule is 4 days / week, consisting of 8 hour work days. Three of those days are for billable work, one for other stuff (bookkeeping, sales, blogging, keeping up with HN :P). I plan to write a proper article with more details by the end of this year, when I feel I have enough things to tell.
Author here. As others have commented, some package managers allow multiple versions of the same dependency. Conda doesn't, and I wanted to stick to the Conda rules in the article ;)
Author here. I glossed over this in the article, but the solver is actually privileging higher versions as you suggest. In the "set" step, when we arbitrarily set a variable to true, we have a heuristic that picks the highest possible version of the package.
I write about once a month, mainly about technical stuff I come across at work (e.g. my last post is about writing a SAT solver for dependency resolution)
Yeah, for me it was confusing to see that many programmers seem to thrive without static typing, and in fact the 6-month Elixir project was an experiment to see if I could do the same :P (to me, Elixir is still the most appealing of dynamically typed languages)
For me it didn't go that far, fortunately, because I managed to jump ship on time... But it was getting _tiring_.
> Have you learned any tricks (...)?
My current apprach is: don't. These days I usually work in Rust, C# and sometimes Typescript. I'm only open to working with dynamically typed languages for short periods of time, as a side quest of the main task (e.g. for my last contract I had to read quite some C code, which somewhat resembled dynamically typed code, but I spent even more time writing Rust, so it was OK).
After spending 6 months working on an Elixir codebase, and spoiled by languages with proper IDE support, I'd say Dialyzer is nice... But doesn't get even close to what I'm used to. Sometimes the benefits of the BEAM and the OTP outweight these drawbacks, of course, but to me it sucked the joy out of programming (I'm very type oriented when writing and, more importantly, reading code).
Not the OP, but I came across this and it sounded like something people here might like :)
It's pretty impressive work, explained in a very accessible way in 15 minutes. If you don't know much about how processors work, you might even learn a thing or two!
Wow, this resonates with me! I stopped doing full-stack development a while ago, and have since January been contributing to open source projects as a contractor (my next gig will be for ISRG, the makers of Let's Encrypt, :D). By working on open source libraries I get to tackle interesting problems without being bogged down too much by accidental complexity. It feels like the ideal solution to me (though it is difficult to replicate, as it takes quite some luck).
Hi HN! Some context, for those who (like me) check the comments before going to the articles: I wrote this after attending the RustNL conference back in May, as a way to capture my fascination for the language. Hope you enjoy ;)
I contribute to Rust open source projects on behalf of companies. Recently I spent two months improving Quinn (the main Rust implementation of the QUIC protocol), and now I'm helping develop Rattler (a collection of Rust crates to work with the Conda ecosystem).
Hi there! I wrote this as a way to share my enthusiasm for QUIC after spending 2 months enhancing the main Rust implementation of the protocol. Let me know what you think!
Thanks for working on LiveView! Next to Rust, one of my favorite ecosystems is .NET and Blazor has been a game-changer when writing desktop apps. I'm looking forward to having something similar in Rust!
As far as I know the plan is indeed to publish a version to crates.io, and the only reason it hasn't been done yet is that it is still early days. You might want to jump in their discord server to ask, though, if you want to be sure (or maybe you can even create an issue on GitHub)
OP here, happy to see this reached the frontpage! For those like me who always look at the comments to decide if the article is worth their time: this is about an open source package manager written in Rust, which I had the pleasure to work on during my last contract. There were a bunch of interesting technical challenges (mostly around performance), which required some creativity to solve. If you like that kind of stuff, you might enjoy reading the article ;)