• So you’ve successfully founded your German GmbH company. You managed to follow these very intuitive 14 steps and, after waiting a very short period of only 2-3 months, you now have it – your own company. Congrats! (Irony aside, founding a company in Germany is indeed entrepreneurship on hard mode) Now, as part of the…

  • Okay, huge disclaimer upfront as I seem to be the first person on the internet to report this: All of this is based on only a few data points, I may be wrong and I’ve reached out to the e-Residency team for clarification and will post their response. Update: The e-Residency team has responded to…

  • Here’s an interesting take on Germany’s exit tax, which I have written about before: Leave Germany before your business gets big. What do I mean by that? I mean that once you’re a business owner in Germany and your business has reached a certain size, you are essentially barred from ever moving out of the…

  • 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…