zeroego

I'm a middle-class person from the US. I've even had several short stints of living in Europe. I'd love to live in one of the countries there, but being a little bit older now I really don't want to start over again. Making new friends is hard, and it gets harder the older you get. Not to mention family here in the states. I've spent a few holiday seasons alone and it sucks.

To add to your QoL statement I feel as though European countries have a different kind of QoL. Here in the states the material quality of life is high. Things here are cheap compared to the rest of the world. Whereas in say, Germany, the social QoL is higher. People are more taken care of there and overall have less stress. Cities are walk-able, trains can actually take you where you want to go in a reasonable amount of time, a sense of community still exists. I think of lot of people from the US value the type of QoL we have here over what they have in various European countries.

I was going to read it, but that pop-up asking me to sign in or sign up for your newsletter kept blocking my view. For a blog, with what I'd imagine would be limited readership, why would you insist that people login or sign up for your newsletter? I think you'll drive away more readers than retain using this method.

I've played around with Lazyvim a fair bit and it seems pretty solid. It's a bit more hands on than kickstart. Currently working as a laravel dev and really enjoyed Jess Archer's course on how to setup nvim specifically for laravel. Would recommend it if you work with php and js.

Another vote for Carhartt shirts. I'm large and it's difficult to find shirts that fit well. Their shirts are cheap and last me years. Also if branding is an issue for you, it's very easy to remove the patch on their pocket t-shirts.

I don't have a novel solution to your problem, but here's my experience. I had a mac laptop for a previous job and I went down the route of using separate a iCloud account. I used spotify so it was no issue in terms of music. The company was also heavily into the Microsoft office suite of products, but I opted to not use OneNote but instead used a password protected sync-able third party note app. I did this so I could have my notes if and when I left. I personally value a clear separation of my work and personal accounts so I found this worked pretty well for me.

Perhaps you could remote into your personal mac for iMessage/Music? It would be clunky but would protect your privacy.

I don't actually fall asleep, but every day after work I lay down on my bed for about 10 minutes. Sometimes I close my eyes and sometimes I just stare at the ceiling, but I just breathe and relax. Really helps me get into "home mode" and out of "work mode".

This is a solid argument, thanks for taking the time to write this out!

That's an interesting take! I'm still early in my career and I ask with genuine curiosity, but why do you think "clean code" has a bogus meaning?

I'm currently using Laravel at work. It's very opinionated, and some folks say it uses anti-patterns with regards to its use of facades. That being said my last job was C#/.Net and I am so much more productive with Laravel. It really allows you to develop quickly and I haven't yet bitten by any of the "anti-patterns". If you give it a shot I'd recommend just using Laravel Sail as, if you already have docker installed, you can have a full dev environment setup in less than 10 minutes.

This hasn't been true in my experience. People were very critical of Picard season 2 and the whole of Discovery. I posted criticisms myself and never got banned.

I currently pay for a few things:

Proton Mail - Solid email service. I'm not hardcore about privacy but I do like their ethics.

Spotify - Love having instant access to any music, though I wish their app was a bit more intuitive.

Two Twitch subscriptions - Both of the streamers are friends, but I do enjoy their content a lot and like supporting them.

Laracasts - I'm a new to Laravel/PHP and this website has been awesome for high quality tutorials.

Cheapest tier of iCloud for photos - I have other ways to backup photos but the convenience of iCloud is very nice.

I just took a job as a Laravel dev. I was previously a C#/.Net dev before that. Not making any claims about one being better than the other, but you're right about the ecosystem and the community. It's been great and I've been surprised how quickly I've become productive working in this new ecosystem.

I mean that they used versions of frameworks that were no longer supported, and they did not use best practices which resulted in lots of security concerns (and messy code).

Wow that sounds eerily similar to my experience, I'm sorry you had to go through that!