We do a book exchange. We tell all would be givers that we will not accept gifts but only used/new books. You come to our house and give one of your books to our child and we will give you one back in return. Works for birthday parties too.
These are likely seasonal job losses like retail or related. You have to do Year over Year comparisons for jobs. Month over month comparisons are misleading because of seasonality
Same experience here. A few of my developers migrated our servers to DO 2 years ago to "save" a few hundred dollars. Turns out DO has planned downtime every other month and its cost us 100x more in staff and headache dealing with them. You can't run a SaaS or anything that requires uptime reliability (ie, any sizable business) . I've transferred our main site back to AWS. Also AWS dedicated pricing is now almost the same as DO, and much more reliable.
But congrats to the DO team. They will only get better.
If you listen to everyone here, they'll ask you to finish school. That is the safe bet and "prudent" choice.
If you want to be a founder, you'll never be comfortable taking the "safe" route. Go for it. Do it when you're young and you're able to take risk. No regrets, whichever path you take. Good luck.
Is software free trial similar to this? Don't we, as developers, give our software for free in either a freemium or free trial business models? One freemium tool I'm involved in only monetizes 2-3% of our users... But it's a model that works as far as marketing goes.. Not saying you shouldn't pay artists but isn't this another form of marketing to users? In the end, it's win-win. Apple gets more users, artists gets more listens...
Do you know if these kinds of interactive content perform better (ie clicks/shares/views) vs other forms, ie longform or just plain data visualization pieces? I personally enjoyed it a lot.
Singapore had some success in the consumer electronics field with Creative (remember the Sound Blaster?). There is Razor, whose CEO is Singaporean, but the company isn't based there.
Regionally, Singapore is already a tech hub and will continue to dominant that region. But I doubt it will ever threaten the Valley or even places like NY or LA.
Most of the comments here are focusing on the OS. It's not about the OS. It's about the ecosystem - the apps marketplace. They can come up with a great OS, like Windows did, but without the ecosystem, consumers will not use it. A smartphone without apps is a dumb phone.
However, applying for a Work Permit is still rather cumbersome (which is typically the first step after the job offer and before Express Entry) I just went through this process with an employee. While there is no arbitrary quota, the process does take between 3-6 months.
But overall the path to citizenship is much shorter than in the US.
And Canada has public healthcare. So, no need to worry about healthcare while you're self employed.
There are many education pathways to a good career. The traditional 4 year college after high school is only one of them. It's great to see real examples of these different pathways.
I quit my job and travelled for almost year in South America. I later spent 2 years in grad school (studying social science) as part of an extended "break" to figure out what I wanted to do. I had no grand plans, goals nor did I become enlightened from it. I did learned Spanish and met my wife during my trip, so personally, it had a big impact in my life.
Definitely, had some regrets about grad school as it was a fairly academic program. I went straight back to coding/software after graduation.
My advice is, if you know what you want to do, just do it. There is no need to travel the world or go on any journey. But if you don't, or if you haven't travelled yet, then yes, it does wonders to expand your experiences.