Except instead of corporations sneaking in your house to paint your room green during the middle of the night, it’s the corporations deliveratelu choosing to paint their lobby green + you just happen to frequent their lobby
It's faster and cross-platform (Windows/Linux/MacOS). Switching version managers is trivial. If you don't like it, just switch back in the time it takes to uninstall a binary.
Totally agree with this. "Kafka is terrible if you use it with poor practices" should be the title of this. It's totally clickbait targeting the "Database Inside Out" articles / concept, which if you read the most common 3-page high level it explicitly states you should be materializing up into other data sources / structures / systems / etc
To date, I've never written code that reads from a Kafka topic that wasn't taking data and transforming + materializing it into domain intelligence
Partner and I built a service to do sales attribution and commissions, ingesting data from Shopify / WooCommerce / etc. Works great for any sort of sales organization w hierarchy, but we’ve had success with network marketing / direct sales.
Spending nights and weekends, we scaled enough that we banked about $67k on the side in the first 8 months and then took used that as seed to go full time. 3 years later we’re still at it with a decent team and a ton of fun and cool tech
Interesting read. Not sure I agree, though not my area expertise.
The idea that we’re hitting full saturation, or that startups will have to push into market vs pulling sales from market gaps assumes that we’re reaching full saturation across the board. That the reach of everyone being online also means they’re all online in the same markets / products / verticals.
I’ve worked most my career consulting as a software engineer, primarily split in 4-5 business verticals. The giants in those spaces (hiring, healthcare, cosmetics, etc) have 8-15% market share. And there’s constantly turn over where people for whatever reason exit and return to the customer pool.
So while from an economic and academic standpoint this seems pretty solid, I have a hard time accepting it practically.
Again, anything I know about this kind of thing is peripheral knowledge, so very likely wrong. would love some insight :)
Make it part of your policy and very clearly disclose it up front while explaining the why. If they push back, concede by letting them pay for the non-refundable tickets up front then
Do you actually forward receipts to the client and have them pay to the cent?
I always find it easier to just have a fixed line item for "travel to client events", and usually I end up coming out ahead by a substantial margin by not booking fancy hotels.
Isn't that fraud? You are supposed to charge exactly how much the travel expenses did cost. If you think you should charge for the travel time proportionally to your work rate, then you should do that but have these separate.
It's possible a client will ask you for the travel expenses receipts and it would not be nice to show him that there is difference between what you charged and what it did actually cost.
You should expense (to the IRS) what the actual expenses are, but you can charge your client whatever you agree on.
e.g., a month ago someone wanted me to travel to their site.
Although I didn't end up going, my fee to do that would have been much more than just the travel (6 hour drive to another state) and hotel costs: I also have to factor in that while I'm travelling, those are hours I can't bill to any other project, so the client would have been billed for the full two work days of travel even though my out of pocket costs would have been much less.
Exactly. Every time I travel for a client they pay for everything, plus the "sandwich & juice" in the airport, taxis/trains to/from home/airport/hotel/meetings AND the hours/days from the moment I exit my home to the moment I reach the hotel. For the return, any minute after 5pm, until I get back home.
I am not willing (in order to be 9am on the client site (in another country) to spend half a Sunday away from home and loved ones for free. I usually charge 1h commute +2h in the airport pre flight + duration of flight + commute to hotel post flight.
No, it's a travel fee. When I hire service workers to make house calls, I'm under no impression that the line items for traveling simply covers their expenses. I expect them to make a profit for the privilege of having a professional show up in person.
Could you explain why you think it's fraud (and where you're from might help too).
In the UK there's, for example, a standard "mileage charge" which people tend to claim for driving to a place for work. It's not "the cost of travel" it's an approximate.
When a company charges for sending an operative to a site, they pay the operative £10 ph, and charge the company receiving them £100 -- presumably you think that's fraud too?
How about when Guchi (made up company) charge you $500 for a plain white tshirt made by people who aren't paid a living wage, wouldn't that also be fraud under the same sort of consideration?
I'm not sure it's fraud but it's probably not a good practice.
Standard "mileage charges" in the US are actually set by the IRS. I assume it's similar in other places so that's a well-established practice for car-related expenses. I'm not sure how else you would do it as there's no way to directly capture expenses other than fuel.
I assume that in most cases billing some standard travel day rate/per diem (perhaps based on location) would be fine as well with, possibly, air charged separately for the actual amount.
The key is that you're being explicit that you're not charging the actual amount but rather some standard rate that, in principle, approximates average/typical expenses.
The mileage charges set by the IRS are for 'computing the deductible costs of operating an automobile for business, charitable, medical, or moving expense purposes', i.e. they're used to work out your tax bill.
There are similar mileage rates in the UK, published by HMRC. They have the same purpose.
The mileage rate you agree with your client needn't be related to those rates at all.
Fair enough. It's pretty common to use them for billing purposes as well but if, for example, you mostly drive to client sites and want to use mileage as a proxy for billable travel time it would be perfectly reasonable to add an uplift to mileage rates over the IRS rate.
I was just asking. You are putting "travel expenses" @ $xxx which doesn't seem to include your rate; so it should be how much you spent to "get there". If you want to charge extra (and I think you should since it's time you spent for the client) then maybe put "travel expenses" + "x hours spent traveling".
It depends on the client. With a government client, expenses for lodging and meals are usually capped to the GSA scale. It depends on the contract though.
Depends what the contract says. I've had a client tell me to use expensify and call it a day. I've had to manage travel as part of a fixed price bid. I've just had to bill for travel as a line item on a T&M.
The bottom line is on your end, you should be capturing receipts, you should be logging costs per project, and you should be providing all this data to an accountant for a nice quarterly rollup.
Yeah, it really depends. I've done it all different ways.
- Bill the client for actual expenses
- Paid out of pocket for travel that was baked into the day rate
- Had major travel (air/hotel) paid for directly by a client's travel agent. (Which I actually preferred to avoid when reasonably possible because now you're dealing with your client's travel policies.)
I'm not an accountant but I tend to agree you shouldn't be billing a broken-out travel line item that's not actual expenses or expenses plus explicit overhead [or a standard per diem].
No hard numbers for you, but FWIW I ran tests about 4 months ago and the performance was /very/ low compared to what is achievable compared to S3 and even normal NAS.
I've been on the list to get into their preview program for a while so I can benchmark it, actually! Part 3 of the blog post is going to include some NFS stuff either way.
When you do, it would be really useful to include the classic fio/bonnie/etc. stuff to break down performance by the type of operation (e.g. file creation / deletion, streaming read/write, random read/write) and block size.
EFS supports NFSv4 so it should avoid being as routinely limited by server round-trip latency as NFSv3 tends to be but it'd be nice to see how well that works in practice.
