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alanbyrne

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Founder at Cogmotive Reports - Office 365 Reporting & Office 365 Analytics https://www.cogmotive.com/

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I agree with this 100%. As a SaaS business they are going to be spending a lot of time working out what state their buyers are in and what tax to add to the sale. For this reason we incorporated in the UK (We are London based) and charged no tax for our US customers. All we had to do was call the IRS and get an EIN to provide to our larger customers, which was a fairly painless and free process.

IBM when it takes over operations often hires the IT staff of the firm it is taking over operations from and runs systems on multiple-year contracts.

I've seen this happen many times and it's always been successful. They can replicate the business processes they've honed over time whilst keeping that important business knowledge. It's also often better for the staff as they can hand off that knowledge and move internally within IBM to new and more challenging roles without switching employers.

I use a British Airways branded Amex here in the UK and put almost all my spending through it. Thanks to their Companion Voucher my wife and I get a couple of business class trips on the house each year (Spend £10k in a year on it and get a Buy one get one free flight with points)

I agree with paraschopra. Many places I have worked have included a clause in the employment contract that says something along the lines of "Anything you create whilst working for us, including in your own time, will become property of our company"

Interesting. I've only ever had good experiences with black cabs. Especially if there are road works or traffic, they seem to know exactly which street to turn down without any sort of aid.

The Uber drivers I've used in London have always used GPS and gone down routes which I would consider slower and more expensive.

In a 300,000 user mail system I've seen mail queues grow by many thousands of messages a minute causing hundreds of gigabytes of email to be queued on the disks.

Once the issue is resolved and the queue starts flowing again it can take a very long time for these messages to be sent successfully, especially when you need to scan each one for viruses and account for disk latency that doesn't usually occur on these servers.

Just go home 13 years ago

In my experience it's very rare to get any sort of real job security these days.

Whilst working in the financial industry throughout 2008-2010 I saw many of my colleagues let go for no reason other than that they were told to reduce head count. Many of them had worked there for 10 years.

Unless you're working for a government organisation or similar there is every chance that you will be let go at any time with your minimum notice period.

I write a technical blog so people only really come to my articles when they are looking for a solution to a problem. Until recently I did zero "audience building" and had about 80% new visitors with 500 visitors a day.

I just wrote articles to improve my writing skills and now people find them in Google.

I've been blogging about my chosen field for about a year now and I've seen similar rewards from it.

Most recently: - I was asked to provide an article to go into a sidebar of someone's book. - Someone I met for the first time at a meetup mentioned that they knew who I was as my articles kept appearing at the top of their Google searches for particular topics. - Microsoft suggested a resolution to a problem ticket I had raised with them by copying and pasting my own blog into a Word document and sending it to me - complete with Screenshots.

I've also learnt a lot by researching "that extra little bit" for the blog content and from other people leaving really great comments.

As a recent Puppet/Chef advocate I think this is a great idea. I've recently gone to a lot of DevOps conferences/meetups in the London area and they are becoming quite popular.

I am sure a similar thing is happening where you are based and it might be worth you going along to give talks and sharing your experience. It will help your site get exposure to the right audience if you respectfully mention it at the beginning or end of your talk.

Some constructive points: The copy on your site could use a tweak. There are a lot of unnecessary commas and strange grammar usage.

The mouse-over nav on your blog makes my eyes bleed, especially the colour of the tag line.

Consider putting your blog under your main subdomain (http://www.makerops.com/blog) rather than a separate sub-domain (http://blog.makerops.com). We did this recently and it dramatically improved our SEO as Google started using the content on our blog to rank our whole site.

Edit: Fixing my own grammar!

Pricing Principles 13 years ago

Stop coding, pick up the phone and call some of your free users. Ask them if they'd pay for your product and why/why not.

If none of your free customers are willing to pay, then it might be time for a pivot. Such as licensing your app to financial providers as a value add.

I agree. I've recently noticed a huge amount of .Net resources for the Microsoft Cloud based on Azure, Office 365, SharePoint Online etc. I expect there'll be lots of money made piggy backing LOB .Net applications off these services.

Simple, pretty, to the point and does what it says on the tin.

Unfortunately I can't seem to copy the link at the top of the design. Instead of making it a readonly input, make it a link or tell them to copy the URL from their browser. Using Chrome 26.0.1410.64 m on Win8

Great work though