defo10

People don't get how important it is to have control over the basically the whole programming ecosystem of a particular language. Google services dominate Flutter. Look at all the services Google provides. You'll find first class support in Flutter. Compare that to AWS, Azure, etc and these usually have wip features or simple adapters. So if you like and use flutter/dart, for whatever reason really, chances are you'll use any of Google's services because their integration into the framework is much better, and the libraries are better maintained.

I am convinced they did some proper analysis in-house and continuously find that investing the flutter/dart yields returns across all other services. The language/platform is the gateway.

You can bill, but the company owners are completely liable until the process is completed. Then the liability goes over to the company. Quite the risk if you ask me.

"We demand an EU-Inc without a legal requirement for notaries to be part of individual steps." I wish this would become reality.

Props to the detective work! Might need to be more careful about reusing usernames haha

Here’s a highly relevant, recently published paper:

Lasgaard M, Qualter P, Løvschall C, et al. Are loneliness interventions effective for reducing loneliness? A meta-analytic review of 280 studies. Am Psychol. Published online October 23, 2025. doi:10.1037/amp0001578

If you know German, you might be interested in the two books on loneliness published by Noëmi Seewer and Tobias Krieger.

I‘m a cofounder of a German loneliness startup. My core insight is that loneliness often stems from a badly adjusted internal social threat function ( f(social event)=perceived threat ).

This function runs subconsciously all day long. From talking to strangers to reaching out to a friend, the lonely mind is much more aware of negative outcomes, so your mind protects you by telling you things like „I don’t talk to strangers because I would annoy them“ or „I don’t reach out to that friend because he’s probably busy“. And that makes it much much harder for lonely people to maintain a healthy social life.

As for the fix, you can try to set the social event up in a way that has less room for perceived threat. Think of third places, regularly scheduled meetings, etc. Or you can work on the function itself (=your thinking patterns). If you look at research on loneliness interventions, working on this function is the most effective way to help individuals overcome persistent loneliness.

Now the sad thing is that people don’t like to hear that the most effective way to combat loneliness is to work on their own perceptions, which makes the sales pitch rather challenging.

compliance requirements mostly (same for health tech)

I'm especially excited about the error reporting in jank. Fingers crossed they will live up to the blog post showcasing them. Most people I convince to give Clojure a shot tell me that they are utterly confused about its error messages.

For public services, entry level sw engineering with a master's degree would put you at ~52k€ (TVöD E13 I); with 1 yr of experience you would get ~+5k€; with around 3 yrs of experience you would get ~+9k€, surpassing the median salary if you have a master's degree. With a bachelor's degree you'd start at ~46k (TVöD E11 I, though E10 would be possible, too) and would need to wait a bit longer until you surpass the median. Note that German public services generally base your base pay on your qualification (your degree), only then can your experience "shift" the base pay upwards. Also note that starting next year, they will get a 10 % salary increase...

Tl;dr public service employees earn pretty average

I'm a grad student at a university from Berlin. We had a job fair a few weeks ago with ~15 companies where I asked every company representative what their salary for freshly-graduated sw engineers would be. About 80-90 % fell between 50k ± 5k € before tax (=brutto). Notable exceptions were finance sector jobs and jobs at American tech companies which offered closer to 70k ± 5k €.