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The Kafkaesque German Bureaucracy
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7 min read
Let’s assume we meet for coffee, and that you’ve just founded a new company – very simple structure, 100% owned by you. If you now went on to tell me that, as part of your company registration, the so-called “transparency registry” has opened an investigation into your newly-founded, one-person company which is obviously 100% owned…
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Expat Bank Accounts For Digital Nomads
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12 min read
So I went down this very deep rabbit hole of expat / “international” bank accounts recently, and it’s quite interesting. Now, because a few friends asked me about it, I’ve written up my findings here. My situation is that I’m moving from Germany to Thailand but, that being said, most of the findings here are…
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I already wrote about the 14 steps required for founding a company in Germany, and I also wrote up all my notes and hacks for running a German company efficiently. Those two posts turned out to be some of the most popular posts on my blog, and I seem to have this weird thing of…
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I am currently in the process of incorporating a new company in Germany. Yes.. I’m sure you wonder which sequence of questionable decisions lead up to this very questionable decision, but I won’t bore you with the details. Instead, today, I’ll go ahead and rant about something truly insane: The German Transparency Registry (Transparenzregister). The…
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The Rise of Exit Taxes
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5 min read
Revolut’s co-founder Nik Storonsky recently moved from the UK to the UAE. The move will likely save him up to GBP 3bn (yes, those are billions) in capital gains tax which he would no longer have to pay in the UK if he were to sell his entire stake in Revolut. This sparked a huge…
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Opening a Thai Bank Account on Thailand’s DTV Visa
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8 min read
Having a Thai bank account is very convenient. While some people tell you that it doesn’t really matter and you can either always pay with cash or credit card, you’ll realize sooner or later that this is only partially true. Here’s a quick rundown of the benefits: By the way, there are other aspects which…
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Writing this up because I just tripped over it and spent an hour debugging what ended up being an obvious problem. So here’s the situation: You’re running Rails 8 with SQLite as its main database, and you want to replicate / backup that database to Hetzner S3. Bonus points if you’re running Rails on your…
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DHH announced Rails 8 adding a lot of support for SQLite at Rails World 2024, which motivated me to give it a shot. I enthusiastically procrastinated this quest. One year later, after visiting Rails World 2025 and realizing this whole SQLite thing was here to stay, I got down to writing some code. I migrated…
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Using SQLite On Dokku (With Rails 8)
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4 min read
SQLite is the new (cool) kid on the Rails block, and rightly so! I just migrated one of our Rails apps from Postgres to SQLite, and here are some quick notes on how to make it work on dokku. The TLDR is that you have to mount a host directory into your dokku app, as…
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What does Amsterdam’s prostitution have to do with B2B SaaS Sales? Good question. Let me tell you. First, some context. Our dev team just came back from Rails World in Amsterdam. It was fun! A great conference, and Amsterdam is a great city. It’s always a nice change of scenery to visit a city which…