For something production-tested already, I've found RabbitMQ to be very easy to operate as a single server. You obviously don't get HA with a single server, but it's been a breeze to manage.
American Citizens Abroad (https://www.americansabroad.org/) is another non-profit organization working on behalf of US persons abroad. They are doing some great (but probably ultimately quixotic) lobbying work in favor of changing to Residence Based Taxation, and they have also spearheaded a way to have a US bank account even when you aren't able to be physically present.
Their newsletters also have general good advice etc. and are generally a great resource.
While reading this, I couldn't help but think of Black Mirror S03E01 Nosedive. I understand the dynamics of all of the players involved in this, but I can't help but feel a little sad about the co-opted "authenticity" in the influencer industry. Is there a middle ground between authentic content and actually being able to monetize it as an influencer?
Well, it is currently a fully moderated list, and we will do our best to maintain the guidelines so hopefully you won't get any spam at all!
Right now we are checking sign ups before approving, so if someone signs up with an obfuscated email and we can't find their linked in page etc (so that we can check that they are really a CTO/engineering director and not a spammer) they won't even be added to the list unless we follow up directly and get a bit more information.
It's not that PHP (or virtually any other non-purposefully-arcane/obscene language) is inherently "terrible", it's just that the syntax, organization, standard library, and most of all mainstream community do not encourage well written, well architected, well "conventioned" systems.
Because PHP really is so trivial to cut and paste, and will often "just work" (as in, be interpreted w/o syntax errors and produce some output), the vast majority of PHP code actually out there in the wild is absolutely terrible and leads to an insane number of vulnerabilities on the Internet, not to mention complacent developers who do not really understand how/why their code is working.
Obviously it's POSSIBLE to write excellent, performant, secure PHP code - see Facebook and, presumably, Mailchimp - it's just that virtually everything in the PHP ecosystem is fighting against you.
While I suppose Laravel and co are trying to reverse this trend, they just aren't what the "average PHP developer" is actually using - the median PHP developer is almost certainly copy pasting snippets from Stack Overflow into their hobbled-together Wordpress theme.
The primary thing that determines overall group performance (assuming no interpersonal biases like peer pressure or coercion, etc) would be the probability that any individual chooses the "right" answer. If this is greater than 0.5, then according to the Condorcet Jury Theorem, the limit of the group as a whole choosing the right answer is 1 as the group size increases.
Perhaps having a smaller size allows the "noise" in the group to still produce the "right" answer more often than it would in a larger group?
One of the most unintuitive concepts in thinking about Cold War strategy is the assertion that explicitly targeting the opponent's civilian instead of military targets was morally superior: targeting military first (counterforce targets https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterforce) would potentially prevent retaliation and thus allow an aggressive first strike. Targeting civilian (countervalue targets https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countervalue) would ensure destruction and thus be inherently defensive.
It makes my head (and heart) hurt to think about it and I'm glad that I didn't have to make those kinds of decisions. I can see how it can (and did) lead to madness and the kind of irrational thinking satirized in Dr Strangelove and other stories.