After reading this (very entertaining) article, I think I can guess why the fuse on his machine was missing. This is exactly what I would do, if I was met with this monstrosity!
Synology has a good suite of products here that run on their NAS devices. Moments is a Google Photos clone - not quite as good, but definitely good enough.
Try having kids. The amount of crap you will end up with, like it or not, will make you rethink your position in the world, and your house’s storage capabilities.
My box of wires in the attic is often the butt of my wife’s jokes, but every once in a while I find that satellite coax connector I’ve been saving, or the scart cable that is the only thing standing between old vhs tapes and nostalgia.
I’m looking forward to picking up a second hand M1 Max mbp now that these new models are out. M1 is more than fast enough for me, and I’m specifically looking for a native 3 external monitor setup, without any DisplayLink shenanigans!
Not tried, but also researched thoroughly. The main difference as a ‘Merchant of Record’ is that they are effectively resellers of your product, and pay you a (majority) cut on all sales. As you mention, one of the big attractions for me is the fact they take care of local taxation laws - as a UK based seller I would be on the hook for calculating and charging VAT in all countries that I sell to, which is a massive headache / pain in the arse to get right. Much like the App Store, Paddle removes all of that, as a MoR they are your only ‘customer’ from an accountancy point of view.
Of course, one of the big drawbacks here is conceding control of a critical part of your infrastructure to another organisation. Better hope they don’t hell ban you, or you’ll be totally screwed. But that seems to be an issue with whoever you choose.
On the specific point about getting a US bank account in the EU. I’m in the UK and have used Wise [1] (née Transferwise) to set up a ‘virtual’ US bank account. You get a US account number to send to your client / plug into Stripe, and the funds are paid into the Wise account, which you can then transfer into your home currency account at your leisure. It’s worked really well for me and the fees are very reasonable.
I’ve been a freelancer / consultant in the UK since 2013. Here’s the approach I took.
Initially, I stuck with the ‘permanent’ day job and start freelancing part time, in the evenings. This allowed me to focus on building a network of connections without the stress of needing to find a contract that would pay for my cost of living.
My first contract was through upwork (when it was called elance). I found a UK-based client who needed a small job doing for $25/hour. This merged into a new opportunity with the same client. 9 years on, and I’m about to go back to working for the same client once more, on a different project, at a much higher rate.
In parallel with this, as the pressure was not on to earn a living from freelancing (yet), I didn’t feel the need to fill every spare hour with billable work. Instead, I signed up to a bunch of different meetups, and volunteered to help run a couple of them. Through this I built a network of connections and opportunities, which led to _every_ other client I have worked for. I can’t stress enough how important this was for my freelancing career - visibility is everything. Tell everyone who will listen that you are a freelancer and you are open to new opportunities.
The contract market is rich and lucrative in the UK but you can’t expect to be handed opportunities via platforms. As others have mentioned, the best gigs come to those who put themselves out there. Speak to other developers at meetups and conferences, tell people you are a freelancer and eventually something will crop up.
I much prefer the SE form factor to the notched design, but the latter boasts a significantly better camera system. If they put the dual lens setup from the 12/13 in a new SE then I’d buy it in a heartbeat. Kids are only little once - capturing those moments with a better camera trumps most other things in my book.
This is probably an unpopular opinion but as a contractor, I’m not expecting to be fully integrated into a company, nor lauded for my efforts. As a contractor, I understand that I am plugging a gap at short notice, on a temporary basis. I anticipate coming in, being useful and getting paid well to do so. I then expect to leave and find something else. The flexibility, autonomy and well-remunerated nature of contracting is what appeals to me - integrating with co-workers and compliments on my work are a distant second.
As an aside, if you are being compensated less than permanent employees as a contractor, then your rate is not high enough. The ‘fully loaded’ cost of a permanent employee is higher than their stated salary, due to tax, insurance, pension contributions etc - all of these need to be deducted from the contractor’s billable rate to provide an accurate comparison between the two.
As per the article there are 32 fuses, meaning they can support 32 ‘irreversible’ firmware updates. There have already been 13. What happens when update #33 is needed? Or are they banking on the switch being superseded by that point?
Awesome job. I guess the API spec file is key to this! I see from the repo that you use swagger.
Best of luck with the project - as others have noted, this is a space ripe for improvement given the success of the closed source incumbent that is Firebase. I still mourn the loss of Parse!
Not the OP but just wanted to weigh in on the PHP point. Just because it isn’t the coolest/hottest language around, doesn’t make PHP any less suitable for a project like this. Laravel in particular has been a game changer for modern PHP-based backends and sites, and the language itself has been steadily evolving and improving. It may not get the column inches of the likes of Phoenix or Remix, but it is stable, battle hardened and fully suitable for the majority of use cases in 2022.