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.
Echo this, works really well. Saves many many thousands a month sending Stripe -> Wise US "virtual" account -> UK bank account vs Stripe -> UK bank account.
Stripe's forex fees are horrendous. Wise charges <0.5%, Stripe >3%. The spread here is similar to the credit card charge in the first place!
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?
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.
Plus the comment about it being not built on Postgres is absurd.
Postgres is great, but if something is not built on Postgres, it's bad? Use the right tool for the job. This looks like a combination of Redis and Maria, two great products with two different use cases which tells me the developers did think carefully about their architecture.
Can you elaborate what you mean by "comment about not built on Postgres is absurd? I said "It's not built on Postgres.", but I didn't say that was necessarily bad - though it is likely depending on the circumstances. Again, same for PHP, likely bad, but you'd need to know the circumstances, which is why I made the post.
My statement was a response to their employee's comment about the downsides of Postgres, which I quoted. I didn't say what avoiding Postgres is bad, 1. I quoted their unbacked comment, and then 2. I explained it is not bad to use Postgres and actually it's worse to roll your own database. Not sure where you got the fact they use Redis and Maria, that is not very clear on their website, but I found an article on Github: https://github.com/appwrite/appwrite/blob/master/CONTRIBUTIN...
It's much easier to understand Supabase (they use Postgres) vs. AppWrite (I could not find out what they use). They did mention their "new database: completely rewrote the Appwrite data management layer". https://medium.com/appwrite-io/everything-you-need-to-know-a...
> I said "It's not built on Postgres.", but I didn't say that was necessarily bad
The three other bullet points are criticisms of Appwrite, and now you're going to claim the fourth point about being not being built on Postgres was not a criticism? You set the tone with your three other arguments. Don't try to claim the fourth wasn't in line.
The Maria and Redis are the first bullet two points in the link you gave. I also actually read the docker-compose file instead of inferring.
It is your assumption to believe any of them are criticisms. In fact, none are.
"AppWrite is written in PHP", "AppWrite doesn't yet have their Cloud version" and "Not much progress is happening on the GraphQL side" are not criticisms, "It's not built on Postgres" is similar. These are just facts I've come across which others may like. Following each fact, I follow with my thoughts.
Christy Jacob, from AppWrite said an unqualified statement: "I'm trying to be as objective as I can, but building the entire ecosystem around a single product like Postgres ( even though tried and tested ) comes with its own downsides...", and that was my response.
This is a pointless meta discussion though, isn't it? It is childish to assume I meant everything has to be built on Postgres for me to use it, or to make it "proper". If you already think its obviously absurd, you should think why one would say it? Perhaps you misread or there is more to it.
I was about to ask how you manage to support so many different language bindings, then I noticed that you’ve built an ‘SDK generator’ [1]. Very cool! I’ve not come across this concept before - how does it work?
We use twig templating syntax as an agnostic language that allow contributors from different coding backgrounds to help us build the SDK templates. Then we use our API spec file to auto-generate the source code and push the relevant code to the SDK repos and package manager, it works really well and help us maintain a big amount of SDKs with little overhead after the core templates are done. We actually plan to have a talk about, it's really cool!
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!
