An article of clothing or accessory of some kind from a conference she attended that helped you look up attendees and identify her, or some other identifying club/service that contains profile pictures?
To your point - yes, adding on an extra 18% doesn't make much sense when they could have simply incorporated that into their menu prices. You will never be certain how the money is divvied up, regardless of whether you are paying additional tips or not...
That being said, patrons are accustomed to paying an additional fee when dining out; so rather than simply raise prices (which I'm sure would elicit grumbling and/or loss of patronage), they maintained the expectation of paying an additional amount for the service they've received.
I didn't have a ton of time to search, but did they mention what kind of software they used? I'm curious what database(s) and schema(ish) techniques were used to hold all of that time series data?
What do you want to do? What are you passionate about. I understand you've got bills to pay (possibly a family to support), but look at this situation as an opportunity to work on something you'll love doing.
It sounds like (from your description), that you would classify yourself as rather specialized at a set of Java technologies that were related to performing your previous job. You know java, that means you can pick up C# really really quickly. Honestly, you should be able to pick up a lot of other programming languages rather quickly just by the virtue of knowing one. Even if you don't want to invest the time into learning something new to a certain level of comfort, at least get some familiarity with a few others so you can at least talk to them.
I've had the benefit of working at a research lab for the last 8 years, which lets me work on new projects and new technologies constantly. I've also been involved in the hiring process a number of times, so here's what I look for: passion, attitude and willingness to learn.
Regarding your question about personal projects and Github, I think that's absolutely a perfect opportunity to either showcase your abilities, or at least demonstrate some creativity, collaborative development ability, productivity (I got X done in Y days/weeks/months) as well as coding ability. I think anything you can point to and say "I did that" and allow them to critically review it would be a big benefit.
Check out www.indeed.com (if you haven't already) to keep tabs on relevant job openings.
Actually, we started out using mongo to focus on the analysis instead of the schema, but we quickly ran into performance issues as the datasets grew. We were simply using mongoengine for Python, so we didn't spend a significant amount of time trying to optimize our schema or implement things like sharding.
Our performance issues with mongo largely stemmed from our poor use of indexes - we defined a lot of indexes because how we needed to query was a very organic and undefined process as we got new analysis requirements. Because we would have to frequently go back and compute new feature vectors across the whole (or large parts of) the dataset, we weren't able to implement a lot of the aggregation capabilities you'll see implemented in many other time series schemas.
OpenTSDB and StatsD seemed great for getting TS data in and producing nice dashboards, but they didn't seem to fit our needs for performing custom analytics on the data.
Working in an environment where hosted solutions simply aren't an option, I am grateful GH:E is around.
The actual cost per year ends up being fairly negligible when we factor in the nearly 100% removal of administration overhead that our previous VC options required.
Thanks for the feedback! We've tried calling the sales phone number, filling out the web form and emailing [email protected], all with no response, so we were starting to give up hope ;)