Very similar situation. I have been cancelled, and I can't face going back to employment, but finding a way to earn a crust as a solo engineer is proving somewhat hopeless. At least I'm not paying tax any more. Checkmate Rachel Reeves.

You still pay taxes through VAT, property, and other schemes.

Not necessarily. Basic food is zero-rated for VAT, and if you qualify you can get council tax reduction. For example, I get a 25% council tax discount. If you're unemployed with no income, you may genuinely pay very little direct tax, it depends on circumstances.

How did you get cancelled? I think the same happened to a friend

It's true that (these days) typically, a senior dev will be handy with AWS. It's certainly not true that a senior dev is defined by being good with AWS. I bet Linus Torvalds isn't a big AWS guy.

I share your scepticism of the cloud, particularly AWS. They create this hugely complex system, charge the earth, and then rather than bend over backwards to help people learn, they have the audacity to charge more money for the training and certifications.

Rather than set up your own physical infra, I think it's reasonable to pay for a VPS. To me that's not 'the cloud'. Get a barebones linux environment, and you can do whatever you like.

My whole mantra is making fast and lightweight apps. Being able to create apps and services without needing the cloud, I think, is an equally valid characteristic that you might expect a senior dev to have.

I see, I go the VPS route as well atm. I was just wondering about apps that might outscale a VPS but probably I can just connect application nodes via multiple VPS, afaik Elixir makes that pretty manageable.

This is cool. I'm actually working on a trivial web-app that will be similar. I'm just doing it as an exercise before I undertake something a bit more ambitious, but I'll be drawing inspiration from yours.

Okay..

I've never seen the point in spending time and effort learning and memorising a bunch of vim commands. If I need to do more than simple edits to a file, I'll have a graphical desktop installed and use vscode. I tend to use nano if using a CLI as it's more intuitive.

I've never seen the point in spending time and effort learning and memorising a bunch of contextual menus that I need to point and click through. If I need to do more than simple edits to a file, I'll do the same thing as I would when making simple edits to a file or composing an email, I'll crack open vim and get to work.

> If I need to do more than simple edits to a file, I'll do the same thing as I would when making simple edits to a file

Cracked me up good.

You don't need to spend any time or effort memorising a bunch of menus.

Nothing is going to convince me that a more conventional GUI text editor provides better ergonomics than something like vim or emacs.

If you don’t like that kind of editor, that’s fine. You do you.

I've never heard anyone say that.

I'm a night owl, always have been, always will be, but we live in an early bird world, and fitting in with that is worth a lot.

So at the moment I'm passionate about fixing my daily routine to finally get enough sleep, and get to work early, leave early, and hopefully have energy to do things in the evening.

I've changed all my clocks back one hour so that psychologically it's easier to stomach. I have a light set on a timer to turn on in the morning, and strict bed time.

I can work flexible hours, but somehow showing up at 9:30 I always felt like I was "late" and felt rushed, and then having to keep working until 17:30 felt hard too. Doing the exact same hours but arriving 6:30 to 7:00 means I now feel like I'm ahead of the game each day, and I get to leave early, and there's still daylight when I leave work which is a huge motivator.

Oh man, I can relate to that a lot... have you experimented with melatonin? A really low dose (0.3mg) of it at around 11-12pm helps me tremendously with keeping my rhythm somewhat in check. I still make liberal use of option to work whenever I want, but at least I'm not in "get up at 2pm" mode anymore.

But it seems you've found a pretty good way of managing your sleep already, arriving to work at 6:30 sounds like an alien world to me. How have you managed that? Just the strict bed time? Doesn't that mean you lie awake for an eternity?

I've not tried anything like melatonin. I originally believed that if I normally go to bed at 1am, trying to sleep at 10pm would have me just lying awake, and the only way to change my sleep cycle was to force myself to get up early, so that I'd be tired earlier. That turned out not to be the case.

It was more a psychology thing. Before, I'd wake up absolutely exhausted, be tired at work all day, come home, fall asleep on the couch, make dinner. Then, I wouldn't want to go to bed because the idea of that being all my day was, was just too depressing. I wanted a few hours of actual life where I could just relax and watch TV.

They say the first step to beating alcoholism is admitting you're an alcoholic. Well, the first step to beating my problem was accepting I'm a wage slave. Yes, I sell a significant proportion of my waking life to a company in exchange for money. Until I can win the lottery that's the constraints of my life, so I could carry on as I was, or work within those constraints and make the best of things.

There is no better feeling than waking up needing the loo, and you still have four more hours before your alarm goes off instead of four more minutes. Getting to bed early is 90% of it.

I highly recommend listening to this specific episode of the Peter Attia podcast: https://pca.st/episode/eafed9b7-a673-4b84-8dc3-46684eeba9ad

Thanks, I'll give it a listen.

I'm similar, I remember when I was a teen the way I'd obsess over things, now I just don't care about anything. I can't get excited. I think part of it is ageing, part of it could just be loneliness or depression, but I also think the way we can always distract ourselves with random crap on the internet is really bad for us.

Over November I'll be going on a hiatus of anything that I do just to fill time and distract myself to prevent boredom.

The straightforward reading of the gp is that keeping its own currency was “special” in the context of the EU, which requires new members to join the Eurozone eventually. It would be a “privilege” insofar as it is an exception to the EU’s general policy.

Of course, the UK is not required to rejoin the EU, even if the EU would consider allowing that. Of course, the EU can set any terms of admission. If the UK doesn’t like the terms, it will stay out of the EU. No one is forcing it.

Indignation doesn’t seem like a reasonable reaction here.

All countries in the eu are obliged to eventually adopt the euro. But there is no set timeframe. Also all eu countries have central banks, euro or not. So the uk can promise it will join and never do and that will be fine. There is no “ordaining” here, its what the club wants. Like it join it no enjoy tue misery.

Sweden does it by deliberately missing the convergence criteria. Denmark has an opt-out.

Start using it yourself, raise some PRs, get them to review it, bring up diffs on the screen, just ease them into it a bit. If you're confident using it, that might help them learn to trust it again.

Thanks!