andriussev

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 :)

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.

.. fun? Hehe.

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.

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)

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.

Comparing, in Lithuania, nothing much has changed in regards to local prices but for EU, they actually still provide separate additional packages. The best one for internet seems to be 3eur/1GB.

If it included info on what to do with the WEAK ones, it would be much better. Sort of like the Google Pagespeed style.

I am a developer, currently (for more than half a year) improving on the sysadmin side. If you would like someone who's not necessarily as experienced; I am sure I could help you. Email me, my username at gmail.