1. Startups
2. Scaling/Growth
3. Existing company expanding from USA->Europe or Europe->USA
It's not as good as Silicon Valley for any of these, but no-where is. It's also not that good if you're trying to IPO, again no-where is compared to the USA.
For start-ups/high-growth you get a pretty good business environment (legal/corporate and day-to-day running a company is reasonably straightforward), employees with skills and the employment law is pretty flexible, there's plenty of finance around.
For Growth and USA companies that are expanding into Europe then London/UK is somewhat easier to understand than other European geo's. There's an aligned language and there's more cultural touchpoints - it's kind of a mid-point culturally/institutionally between Europe/USA.
For funding/driving to late-stage and IPO there just isn't anywhere like the USA. But everyone has to expand to North America eventually, so it can be fixed at that point. Also, PE funding has changed a lot in the last 10 years, so if you're not on the 1-in-1000 rocketships there's a more steady 'good' path which is totally viable.
As a Brit when I started doing deals in North America one of the things I picked up was that I had to be explicit about disagreement OR where a decision was not being made yet. In the UK during a negotiation a 'silence' is not equal to agreement or disagreement, it's a NO-OP. If I didn't do this then prospective customers/suppliers in the USA would believe that I'd agreed to their request when from my perspective I had merely noted that they'd asked for something. Has anyone else run into this?
The other one that's confusing is that "tabling" something means the complete opposite.
I would separate 'politeness' and 'indirectness' a bit. I generally agree about 'politeness', there are plenty social forms that Brits still follow. For example I found the language/manner of New York attorneys pretty 'aggressive' the first few times.
Indirectness, is definitely a thing - Brits speak to each other or signal disagreement in ways that's clear to another Brit, but maybe not others. The use of silence, but also some words that depending on tone can mean different things which I think is difficult for North American's to interpret.
Do you have an experience working in Europe or the UK?
> I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree
Maybe this is how it looks from the outside, but it's not how it works in reality.
My evidence is I've been working in 'tech' for 25 years and having hired people across the UK, Europe and North America. Tech is one of the most accessible career paths, particularly for areas that are novel and expanding rapidly - consequently direct experience of an area is the important currency.
Often roles will advertise a 'degree' or equivalent industry experience. The only roles I can think of where this could be an issue is trying to join a large corporate organisation in their 'graduate' programme (e.g. a major bank), but that's the same situation in the USA as well.
Guix is gathering feedback from users and contributors on their experiences; what they love and what they've found challenging. Whether you're new or a veteran we'd love to have your opinion and comments!
As the projects never done this before it should be super interesting. So submitted this for anyone that's a current user, or tried it in the past.
For those that don't know Guix is like Nix, but uses a single language (Guile Scheme) to define and configure the system. It's has four elements:
- a package manager that can runs on top of any Linux distribution (e.g. like homebrew)
- a dotfiles and home environment manager
- a complete GNU/Linux distribution
- a way to create isolated development environments
"Modern" seems to be used a loose adjective these days for "I rewrote $thing [in Rust]". Minecraft was created in 2011, and is Wikipedia says the last version of the 'classic' edition was released in 2017. So anything after 2017 is now defunct.
I don't mind people rewriting things in <insert-name-of-tech-I-like> but "modern" as a value seems pretty loose, and it's often at least arguable whether it's objectively better!
I use it for additional packages on top of another Linux distribution (Ubuntu). This gets me rolling release packages and guix shell which is great for development as each project I'm working on can be completely separated.
For 'servers' the nice part is being able to prepare a declarative operating system configuration and play with it locally (VM), then it can be deployed to the remote node and you know it's going to be the same. If something goes wrong it's easily to declaratively roll-back. Here's a nice starter post (https://stumbles.id.au/getting-started-with-guix-deploy.html). The deploy capability definitely needs more hoops to jump through and it's not without rough edges - but I think it's really cool. There's active ARM and RISC-V work - I don't know how rough that would be compared to the well-known ARM ports - ask on #guix if you're interested.
Yes, I wasn't throwing shade on Nix, I was drawing a specific comparison about Linux distributions.
My opinion is that Guix/Nix move the state of the art for Linux distributions forward. So Guix<->Nix are both similar Linux distributions, and different from previous approaches (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat etc).
Transactional package management and declarative system configuration solve a whole host of problems. Guix (and Nix?) directly integrates configuration management into the OS, rather than as some adjunct piece of tooling (Ansible, Terraform etc). We define the packages, the system, the configuration using the same DSL. Transactions and a declarative approach improve maintainability, reproduciblity and might limit the amount of time I spend messing with different tooling ;-)
We're a small group 5-10 people, so it's very informal and friendly. I'm sure Fabio (https://fabionatali.com/) who organised it would have good advice! I'll say that from my perspective the fact that it's also virtual is really great as otherwise I couldn't attend!
Guix is more similar to Debian, with only 'Free Software' applications in the main archive.
For proprietary codecs, firmware and so forth there is the Nonguix channel. Again, this is fairly similar to how distributions like Ubuntu have handled this line in the past.
I need Chrome and also have some games loaded using 'channels' - heh heh - another post:
New packages and updates to packages come into the archive continuously. For example, in roughly the last 24 hours 40 packages were added or updated - https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/log/ . Advantage of this is that you can use new packages immediately and there's no big 'upgrade'. Challenges are that if you were an enterprise and wanted to stick on an 'old' version this wouldn't the right distribution.
Guix does receive security updates, and those are added to the archive immediately. I haven't had any problems myself. It's definitely a 'community' project, so you have to enjoy doing a bit of hacking!
Guix can create reproducible development environments that are "sealed off" from the rest of the distribution. It's called Guix shell and it's very flexible:
I did two specific posts about using it for 'development' environments. You can also 'fix' the environment (think a git hash) and use the declarative configuration to share it with others:
One thing to bear in mind is that at Weaveworks we made massive contributions and did our best to be part of the community in the right way:
* Flux
* Flagger
* Cortex
* Ignite
* Weave Net
* and a whole host more
Oh and there's a load of people without jobs tonight - wondering about their futures - hopefully people will see the talent and the contributions and find roles for them.
Thank-you - really appreciate this comment - acknowledging the work that great people did and the efforts they put in. I wish the outcome was different - but we really tried to do good things, and play well in the open source community.
> I am so freaking sick of companies lying and exploiting open source. This is Embrace, Extend, Extinguish at it's finest.
I don't see how this is 'Embrace, Extend, Extinguish'? This license guarantees that the code becomes Free Software at a maximum of 4 years - and in this case they've specified a shorter time period.
I'll give you that there are lots of games played in open source, so I understand that feeling of cynicism. But, this actually seems like an attempt to add some nuance to the commercial<-->free divide.
The reality is that many 'commercial' OSS companies have to take the open core route because understandably investors expect a return on their money. There are exceptions to this, but they are pretty rare. In fact, there are probably a whole set of SaaS companies that could be open source, but don't do so out of the fear of someone taking their code and 'free riding' them.
Finding a way to prefer the entity that sponsors/incubates the code base, while also genuinely allowing a community of contribution around it (not free riding) would be very beneficial in lots of situations. Maybe a better critique would be that this has some similarities to the Trolltech QT approach - but that's a different argument.
It's not as good as Silicon Valley for any of these, but no-where is. It's also not that good if you're trying to IPO, again no-where is compared to the USA.
For start-ups/high-growth you get a pretty good business environment (legal/corporate and day-to-day running a company is reasonably straightforward), employees with skills and the employment law is pretty flexible, there's plenty of finance around.
For Growth and USA companies that are expanding into Europe then London/UK is somewhat easier to understand than other European geo's. There's an aligned language and there's more cultural touchpoints - it's kind of a mid-point culturally/institutionally between Europe/USA.
For funding/driving to late-stage and IPO there just isn't anywhere like the USA. But everyone has to expand to North America eventually, so it can be fixed at that point. Also, PE funding has changed a lot in the last 10 years, so if you're not on the 1-in-1000 rocketships there's a more steady 'good' path which is totally viable.