• At OpenRegulatory, we’re a small team of 4 people, and everyone receives the same salary. There are a lot of tangents I could go down from here – like: Etc., etc. But those are for another day. Today, I’ll be talking about paying everyone the same salary, regardless of location, and regardless of role at…

  • Thought I’d share this cool snipped as it’s really easy to migrate from “vanilla” Postgres to pgvector in dokku: And that’s all there is. The only step causing downtime here is stopping the container to link it to the new db. The actual copying of data is done before that, so this is a very-low-downtime…

  • At my company, we’ve had the questionable privilege to attend multiple audits of medical software manufacturers by the Berlin authorities. I’d like to share a few anecdotes. I’ll stick to the facts, and you can form your own opinion: Those are the facts. Now it’s up to you to decide: I have my opinion –…

  • Important disclaimer as always: For entertainment purposes only, and if you consider doing this, only do so if you’re a medical professional. I recently was investigating bloodletting – you know, the historic “therapy” in ancient medicine which was supposedly the standard therapy for pretty much any ailment due to the lack of other options. I…

  • If you’re using dokku for your deployments (it’s awesome) and were wondering how to set up automatic backups of your dokku postgres instances to Hetzner S3, here’s how you do it. TLDR Example In this example, we’re assuming that we’ve created out Hetzner S3 bucket for dokku backups in the Falkenstein region, fsn-1. Test the…

  • So you want to build a business. You have two options: (This, by the way, assumes we’re already way too deep in the “startup bubble”, where the only two viable business models appear to be based on consulting or a product. We blissfully ignore the wider economic reality that there are lots of other viable…

  • Flat-hunting in Bangkok is interesting. In contrast to Berlin, Bangkok has what real estate dudes call a “renter’s market”: There’s an oversupply of condos, so people looking to rent one are in a very favorable position. Two stories first! First Story: Berlin Housing Market I own a flat in Berlin which has a notoriously broken…

  • You don’t need a co-founder. Just be a solo founder. It’s easy, and it’s great. But, as always, it depends. On what?It depends on you. My point is that the whole discussion of solo founding vs. co-founding is not a very rational one – sure, people online are shouting at each other that one thing…

  • This article is a bit of the missing piece on on the differences between a holding-GmbH in Germany versus a “normal” GmbH. I briefly mentioned the holding setup in how to found a GmbH company in Germany here, and I summarized all my “hacks” for founding and running German companies here. So now it’s time…

  • I’ve been wanting to write an article on ETF investing for quite a while. That’s because multiple friends have been asking me for investment advice. This, by itself, is highly questionable of course, because these friends were under the assumption that I was supposedly a smart, structured person and therefore that my personal investment decisions…