dredalious

Actually, the Belgian fire dept has done that multiple times already. At least once in the Antwerp harbor with a Volkswagen. They where being followed by a tv crew at the time, so it’s well known to the public and we got some explanation as to the reasoning of why they’re doing it like this. (“Helden van hier” S04E08)

So, you know how there's a shortage of IT'ers... After a month, if the internship is going well, ask them if they see this as an opportunity to acquire you right out of school. If they do, ask them how they think this will go now they refused to let you work from home after first agreeing on it.

Hmmm, should seriously up my github / stackoverflow game then. My clients tend to be in the more closed branches, not much opportunity to work or give back to the community.

After this client I'll apply to job offers more aggressively, see if that helps. Honestly, I just want to work from home most days instead of wasting my time in traffic.

I agree on business/management not comprehending the complexity of IT, it's one thing we need to try to do a better job of, at least to some degree. But I have turned down / terminated jobs because clients are unwilling to even try to understand what we do and simply want to stay stuck in their pre-computer/pre-internet way of thinking and working. IT is here to help your business move forward, but if you are unwilling (which includes paying the right people correct wages) there is nothing I can do for you.

How and where did you find a US remote job whilst being/remaining in the EU? I'm a bit in the same street as you (freelancer, Belgium, previous experience with remote work).

More on topic, I hear the same in Belgium, they want someone to work 24/7 basically for free and then they are surprised that the guy they hired isn't some kind of magical being that knows every language (for some reason this goes for both natural and programming languages) and framework and whatnot.

Two part answer 1/ how do I built it 2/ how do I run it.

The run part became easy the last few years: Dockerize all the things, run them on AWS ECS with Fargate (and add whatever else you might need, e.g. ELB, S3, SQS, ...), no servers to setup or maintain.

The built part, that actually became harder... You need to figure out the best tools for whatever problem you're trying to solve, and the list of tools keeps growing. I default to very conservative standards, because I'm familiar and productive with them: Java (Spring Boot), Vue.js and PostGRES, with sometimes a bit of Node or Python and some ElasticSearch or DynamoDB thrown in the mix.