The PragProg folks have a new book that includes exercises and looks very promising as an introductory material. It's available in beta state and apparently about to be finished: https://pragprog.com/titles/nmquantum/
It took me years to notice a flaw in this approach: it's based in the premise that everyone has time for side projects.
From that point I think about it as a bias. Nowadays I try to assess if the candidates with no public activity on GH and no side projects have the passion and interest I look for, but can't take it further outside of work due to their specific circumstances.
"On Tuesday June 9th 2020 Heroku changed the certificate used for terminating TLS for built-in <appname>.herokuapp.com hostnames from a certificate issued by DigiCert to one issued by Starfield/AWS. This change was rolled back on June 10th because a small subset of Heroku customers had pinned apps to the DigiCert certificate or had apps that could not establish a chain of trust with the new certificate for other reasons.
A new DigiCert-signed certificate will replace the current one before June 22nd (when it expires)."
If you're taking care of most/all the technical details, the only blocker that would prevent me from this kind of service is the unknown legal/compliance work I'd need to do in order to start taking this kind of money and have access to those users' data - is that something you can provide guidance on?
I can't recommend enough watching the The Salt of the Earth[0] documentary. It's not only an impactful review of Salgado's career but also a great (and visual) way to expand our knowledge about the world and its recent history.
I live in Spain, outside of those two hubs but always keep an eye on them. Both have healthy dev communities that organize monthly meetups and conferences where it's easy to connect with local startups. Lots of open opportunities, often open to foreign folks, and at least a few companies with very strong technical teams. Salaries aren't near the SF range but should allow you to afford a healthy work/life balance and enjoy your time here.
It’s definitely getting better. If you can, take your time to find conpanies that follow and encourage best practices (proper staging environments and project management, testing, continuous integration and deployment, training resources, career path). Some well-known big consultancies are disguised sweatshops, avoid them like the plague. Attending local meetups should get you in touch with the kind of companies and team mates that you’d like to work with.
> in many comments given in forums, it's been stated that the people in BCN are less warm than the people living in Madrid. I do not know the reason of that. Would that have an adverse impact on my life as a foreign person willing to go to Spain?
In my experience, both cities are plenty of people that didn't grow up there, and plenty of foreigners. Most of the folks you'll interact with will be genuinely welcoming and willing to help you feel like home.
You'd totally make more money in UK, but I think that the quality of life you can get with nice CS-related job in Madrid/Barcelona is definitely worth trying.
I struggle to estimate any dev work beyond a few weeks, so I wonder if some of these estimates may be wishful thinking too - maybe the Manas.Tech folks have a good sense of the theory behind the work that’s left though, in which case it’s only (“only”) a matter of implementing it. In any case, I wish them the best and hope that they can release 1.0 next year!
My rule of thumb for websites/apps is: use whatever the team knows best. Certain stacks provide specific advantages (time to MVP, performance...) but I don't think any of them trumps an experienced team with production projects under their belt.