Some of us from the platform team that built Capital One DevExchange are personally keeping an eye on this post in case anyone has questions or feedback - we'd love to hear it!
St. John is on the list, but I'd recommend Caneel Bay Resort vs. their recc to this audience if you want to unplug while on vacation - no TVs nor phones in the rooms, and it's amazingly tranquil.
In Newark, past the TSA checkpoints, the Tel Aviv gate has its own secondary screening with barricades, wands & pat-downs for everyone. I suspect that is because of actual threats and a desire for real security.
The key to reading the Economist is to go into it not planning to read the whole thing.
My approach: Read all the short blurbs in the first couple of pages, then most of the 1/2 page articles that follow, note any that seem interesting, then seek out the longer versions deeper in the issue. As you work through the issue, skip or lightly skim the rest that don't spark interest.
I'm the admin for one of the rare instance of Stack behind a corporate firewall, which doesn't have votering detection - I've noticed this happening among a few co-located sprint teams. I created a d3.js Sankey Diagram to show the volume of people voting for other people and posted it on the site to let the community discuss it and it died down.
Popping back in the thread to say "thank you" to everyone who contributed so far - this has given me a lot to research and think about.
From a product management perspective, Laravel is tempting - I certainly get that it could seem bloated, but some of that seems quite useful for getting to MVP quickly - the user auth and billing especially.
I'm considering Postgres / Laravel / Bootstrap (already have a clickable HTML prototype underway) to be replaced by Angular post-MVP, but I'll probably noodle on that last bit some more when the time comes to make that call.