In my previous post I briefly listed pros and cons of being an entrepreneur. The next logical question is—what does it actually mean, to be an entrepreneur?
To properly answer this seemingly simple question one needs to take a deep dive into the swamp of Dutch laws, regulations, stipulations, and definitions.
As a follow-up to the post about my professional anniversary and to fulfill my promise I’d like to elaborate on my reasons and the path of becoming an entrepreneur. The story is going to be quite long so I’ll split it up.
In fact the very idea of freelancing wasn’t new at all. Many of my expat friends living in Holland have been doing that for years. That mainly concerns IT specialists as they arguably represent the majority of those who came here from the ex-USSR.
It’s been about a year since I’ve switched to developing this website (built with Yii 2/PHP/MySQL) using Docker. After just one try I realised that Docker is the best thing happened to development. Well, after Vim, of course.
So I’ve decided to write a brief tutorial on setting up a dockerised development environment, in the hope it could be helpful for those who never tried Docker or experience difficulties getting started.
With all that fuss I have missed the important date of 20 years of my professional experience, which happened on March 22, 2016.
The following scan of the first page of my Employment Book (Трудовая книжка, an official register of one’s work experience, which every employee in Russia is obliged to have) can prove that:
Recently I’ve been busy learning the esoteric editor called Vim and figured out my laptop’s touchpad is causing nuisance when you’re working with the keyboard only—which is the whole point of using Vim. At the same time, some programs are nearly unusable without the mouse. In other words, I wanted to be able to switch the touchpad on and off—with the keyboard, of course.
Some laptops have a special key combination for it, but my Dell XPS 13" doesn’t. Ubuntu also provides a switch in the Control Center, but it’s hardly reachable without the mouse:
The New Year’s Eve has seen a light frost of -2 °C in the total absence of snow. The green grass got beautifully powdered with rime.
The whitened trees alongside the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal (Amsterdam-Rijnkanaal), which passes next to Houten, became simply magnificent:
The turbulent two thousand sixteen has come to an end. The year that has brought so much grief to our world. The year in which Sun Caged and Stream of Passion ceased to exist. I’m inclined to think it’s good that it’s over.
Happy 2017 to all the readers of this blog! I wish you lots of optimism, persistence and luck!
Following the tradition I’d like to look back on the last year—which has been quite positive on my part. So, in 2016 I managed to:
Yesterday, December 17th, Houten hosted a charity event called Rotary Santa Run. For just €10 every participant got a red Santa Claus outfit, a couple of drink vouchers, and a possibility to take part in a funny and useful event. The collected funds will go to the organisations Jeugdsportfonds Houten and De Nierstichting.
A total of about five hundred Santas of all ages and walks of life have gathered at the central square of our Houten.
The present trend of dubbing everything “smart” based on mere presence of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or Internet connection is a bit annoying. So we have seen smart washing machines, smart watches, smart smoke detectors, smart toothbrushes and so on. Now traffic-lights are next in line, according to our local press. A news article announces the very first smart traffic-light (slim verkeerslicht) in the country has been installed in Houten.
Five days ago the mighty Arjen Lucassen has announced on his Facebook page two live shows of his Ayreon mega-project, which got the name Ayreon Universe. The shows were scheduled for 15 and 16 September 2017, with the official ticket sale starting on 24 November at 10:00 CET.
Last Saturday was marked by a show by the prog metal band Myrath from Tunisia (Northern Africa). The venue was the club Patronaat in Haarlem, Netherlands. Myrath is unique not only because of its origin, but also thanks to a magnificent combination of heavy sound and Arabic motives and instruments in their music. Furthermore, they have a belly dancer!
But first things first.
