Oliver Eidel
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Running a Profitable SaaS Company Is Brutal, Brutal Pain
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16 min read
You might think that running a SaaS business is great. And you’d not be alone! Every software developer, Indiehacker and would-be startup founder is thinking like “oh man, working at <boring day job> sucks, but if I just had a SaaS, I could just lean back and enjoy that sweet, recurring revenue”. The reality, however,…
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So you want to migrate your S3 object storage provider in your Rails application. While that might sound scary at first, the good news is that you can use the built-in ActiveStorage mirroring feature of Rails to do it easily! Random context: If you’re building companies in Europe like me, it seems to be a…
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How To Find An Alternative Career As a Doctor
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15 min read
Medical students and doctors often ask me how the hell I managed to leave the hospital and work as a software engineer (and later, founder) instead. We usually would schedule a call and somewhat aimlessly do a Q&A in the optimistic hope of the other person asking me good questions, and the even more optimistic…
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Using Hetzner S3 Object Storage in Rails
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2 min read
Hetzner recently launched their S3-compatible object storage. Like many other Hetzner services, their object storage offering looks really interesting because it’s significantly less expensive than the competition, especially AWS – the initial pricing suggests it’s ~4x cheaper for storage, and ~50x (!) cheaper for traffic. Let’s look how you can use it in Ruby on…
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Acarbose: Life-Changing Farts You Will Remember
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9 min read
As with some of my self-experiments, Acarbose is one of those where I can’t remember my reason for starting it. I think it was some sort of simplified cave man reasoning ™ along the lines of “Acarbose.. modifies gut bacteria.. good.. must try.. walking to pharmacy now.. showing doctor’s ID.. thank you”. And so it…
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I’ve been running OpenRegulatory for ~5 years now. It’s profitable, there are five people working here, and I bootstrapped all of it, so I still own 100% of the company, with zero investors. Cool, great, well done dude, blablabla.. Anyway, in the meantime, a few people approached me on how to found a company in…
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Vitamin B12 (cobalamin) is an interesting one, because many people (including doctors, and including me until recently!) don’t know much about it. Let’s take a look, and let me explain why you might want to be injecting hydroxocobalamin. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves! Before we get started: What the hell is Vitamin B12?…
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The EU AI Act Is Here. We’re Screwed
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6 min read
I’m sure you’ve been eagerly awaiting another rant, especially about this sort of stuff. But before I start ranting, let’s actually start with some facts! Here’s what Thierry Breton of the European Commission thinks about the AI Act: Okay. So he thinks regulating AI creates “a launchpad for EU startups”. I’ll just leave that there…
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Is GDPR Saving 2,920 Lives Per Year?
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5 min read
Tweets like this one set me off: Okay, hold on, dude. You just passed more regulation which startups have to comply with, making it harder and more costly to build and launch AI products in the EU, and now you call that a “launchpad for EU startups”? Historic! Let’s do a thought experiment and go…
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Tokyo: Japanese Toilets And Express Trains
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9 min read
I was really looking forward to visiting Japan for the first time. First, let’s talk about Japanese toilets. Japanese Toilets In Thailand, you get a teaser of Japanese sophistication when you visit one of those sophisticated Thai shopping malls and sit down on one of those sophisticated Japanese toilets. In case you didn’t know, they…