Personally, Malta is a great country but the political part is complicated and makes it hard to expect good but controversial change, ex: attempts to lower the number of cars on the road. If someone tries that, they might do some good but it's very likely to make a lot people unhappy and everyone knows everyone, voting for political parties goes for generations (15-16 year olds chanting for Labour party because their parents and grandparents did that -- even though they can't even vote yet). Hard and drastic changes are needed but you won't get reelected if you do that...
Apart from that, the occasional xenophobia and selfishness is visible.
From a dev perspective, iGaming (online gambling) is booming and raising the prices of rent making it more difficult for locals. Poor get poorer, eh..?
Source: Living in Malta for almost 2 years now.
P.S. The trick is not to read too many news, not having interest in politics, enjoying the weather and ignoring crappy people.
> The trick is not to read too many news, not having interest in politics, enjoying the weather and ignoring crappy people.
That only works for so long until the crappy things and people you've been ignoring have festered long enough that they start inserting themselves into your life and it's too late to stop them.
I'd say most places becomes a lot better if you stop engaging the mainstream news and politics, even Sweden seems quite sane after doing so. I've found it gives you time and energy to focus on your actual life surroundings.
I have no doubt that it would greatly improve your quality of life in the short term. The thing is, somebody's got to pay attention and stand vigil. If everyone ignores what's going on, it won't be long before some thugs are knocking on your door asking for papers or some other nonsense they already know you don't have.
There is plenty of bullshit to safely ignore. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to completely bury your head in the sand.
It is quite nice. Not the best country but can't complain :)
The internet services are not so great, compared to mainland EU. Mostly because it's an island, I guess. I pay ~30 euros for 100down/5up. There are not a lot of options, look up Melita or Go for more in-depth info on that.
I work for a Maltese company as a developer. Can't complain. If you work in a Maltese company, it is fairly more relaxed than working in an iGaming company :)
> voting for political parties goes for generations (15-16 year olds chanting for Labour party because their parents and grandparents did that
That's true also in the US, and generally true for anything that is complex requiring dedicated time to 'understand'. The default route is to mimic parents. Some people never grow out of that behavior.
Can't really compare the two. while the US struggles on voter turn out. In Malta during elections there is a rabid and more than 90%+ of eligible voters vote. But its all tribal and pointless..
I use it daily, both at work and home. I would consider it the best tool for PHP development - powerful IDE, extendable with a plethora of plugins (composer, gulp, npm things; laravel thing resolving).
I don't really use the Database tool, I'm not even sure if it exists anymore in the IDE since they released DataGrip.
Debugger tool is great but for non-objective reasons I liked Visual Studio's more (not for PHP).
In overall, it does everything that it should AND more. You can usually drop other software and just use PHPStorm for most of your development needs. Similar things can be said about other IntelliJ products.
For my projects I almost always use NewRelic (free works fine, unless something gets really wrong and more info is needed). Additionally, I use my own open-source application and write custom setups to collect data of whatever I want ( https://github.com/andriussev/server-seer ); from there on the data can be processed internally or, I tend to use my wrapper for it on https://sysplatter.com.
I applied to Moonlight but never heard anything back, sadly (except for marketing emails).
I suppose that either they have much more developers than contractors, they only work with US people or my skills aren't needed :( (mostly PHP/Laravel backend work with various frontend skills and some experience in other languages)
You're correct - we have more contractors than developers right now. Sorry if you haven't been matched yet - if you send me an email (philip at moonlightwork.com) we can feature you on next week's Orbit [1] email to clients.
The process has largely been manual with spreadsheets until now, but soon you will be able to log in and browse all open projects.
Over half of our projects have been completed by a contractor outside the USA.
I made https://sysplatter.com. I don't know how much other people's use cases it accomplishes but for me, I like a lot of customization of my statistics so it helps with my other stuff.
Not really used that much by other people; didn't click at all with anyone on HN, sadly.
Oddly, just yesterday I published an article about multicore CPU performance of some providers (including DigitalOcean) and they now have made my tests almost obsolete. Luckily, my tests were with $20 VPSes so the still have some credibility.
But I'm curious how oversold would the new droplets be. DO had the most deviation in the providers that I checked. Would think that at least for a while, there should not be much overselling on CPU.
Does not seem so (checked with a new droplet), which makes sense. The high CPU droplets have only 20GB of storage which would make any standard droplet, except the $5, inconvenient to resize automatically (if not impossible or very dangerous).
As far as I remembered, this started when EU started forcing companies to pay VAT taxes depending on the customer's country. Maybe it was not worth the hassle?
This seems to persist with other Google products. Ex, API, Firebase.
This is exactly the reason we don't allow individuals in Europe to sign up at Tesults. Companies with a VAT number are accepted.
I'm honestly surprised if this is the reason Google does it too, we made the decision because it was not worth the hassle but we are hardly Google sized! I thought they'd be able to handle this just fine.
This[0] might be of interest for you then, they basically handle the European localized-VAT compliance for you and it should be as simple to integrate as, say, stripe payments.
It looks promising, I plan to use it, but have no experience with it yet.
As for the idea that VAT MOSS is what keeps google cloud from entering the private market, I agree that it's improbable given Google's size, they have figured it out already for other products after all.
I could believe that for business focused products like Google Cloud its not worth the admin overhead for the revenue they'll get from individuals hacking on side projects.
It seems strange that Google would have trouble with EU VAT rules for developer products. They seem to handle it fine for consumer-facing products like the Play Store.
It's not the cheapest one but certainly not luxury. Has a nice padded slot for a laptop (I use a 15 inch laptop) and plenty of space for other stuff.
I use it both for carrying my laptop and I can also fit enough clothes for a week-long vacation.