My Eastern European wife and I recently faced the decision of how to go about getting her a green card. At the time we lived outside the US.

One option was to enter the US on her B1 visa pretending to have no “immigration intent” and then “change our mind” a respectable number of days later and apply for AOS. The process for this was 1.5 to 2 years. I didn’t want to do it for that reason and because I wasn’t comfortable with what amounts to visa fraud, but our attorney presented it as a pretty standard option.

The other option was consular processing. This wasn’t automatic. Our attorney contacted a few consulates in the region where we lived to see if any would accept our case (due to war the consulate in her home country wasn’t handling routine cases). We got approved for consular processing in Budapest.

I had to go once as the US citizen spouse to submit our application packet and do a pro forma interview. Then a few months later it was my wife’s turn to go to the interview.

The process, like any immigration process, was paperwork heavy and nerve wracking. The final interview was very simple and felt like a formality.

In that case once approved she received a visa that would be stamped upon entry to the US and this would count as a temporary green card pending receipt of the physical card.

All of this happened during the second Trump administration so I was expecting a hostile or at least adversarial process. But it was quite the opposite. Total elapsed time was about six months from initial attorney consult to entry into the US as an LPR. It would have been faster if our attorney was more on the ball getting our final interview appointment.

If I were to find myself in need of a green card for a foreign spouse again I would opt for consular processing if given the choice. Now that it’s required I imagine there will be a longer backlog.

Obviously if you need to do this at one of the consulates that no longer offers consular processing that’s a different story. I was fortunate that the Budapest consulate agreed to take our case.

I got into it recently mainly to play with digital modes on HF for emergency comms and also because it’s an interesting and unexplored field for me.

I fled to Georgia when the invasion started and lived there 10 months. I’m grateful to the Georgian people for their hospitality towards me and my Ukrainian colleagues who took shelter there in a very dark time. But having said that we all subsequently returned to Ukraine.

Georgia isn’t a bad country. It’s very under rated in my opinion. The Georgian people are very friendly, their (private) healthcare is high quality, and as long as you don’t run afoul of the ruling party it’s pretty safe as well. But Ukraine even in a time of war is more advanced and has better economic infrastructure. If I were a Georgian dissident I could easily see myself fleeing to Ukraine.

I’ve in Europe for 7 years now, not to escape any particular political ideology back home but suffice it to say that I was motivated. If you’re motivated and willing to endure some discomfort there are multiple options for European immigration available to you.

Making any statement about “Europe” is painting with a broad brush, that said I am not particularly bullish on Europe now, for various reasons. But I can’t think of any European country that has the same problems as the US; they all have their own problems, as well as just different ways of doing things.

I’ve never lived in an agrarian commune but I can say with certainty that it would be my absolute last choice.

Whether or not they end up losing business long term, it seems like a nice grift for as long as they can pull it off.

Unlike the author of the article I do get a ton of value from coding agents, but as with all tools they are less than useless when wielded incompetently. This becomes more damaging in an org that already has perverse incentives which reward performative slop over diligent and thoughtful engineering.

When I lived in Georgia it was also that easy.

Ukraine has a long history of resisting Russian subjugation, long before supposed CIA plots and conversations with Victoria Nuland. I wish there were some sinister plot to vanquish Russia via a proxy war in Ukraine; maybe then the Western powers would finally jock up and put an end to Russian imperialism once and for all. Sadly I’m afraid this narrative of Ukraine as pawn to destroy Russia is only a Russian propagandist’s fever dream.

I was at a birthday party in Kyiv about a month ago, the only non-Ukrainian guest. Most of the day most the guests were speaking Russian, even when cursing the Russian invaders and toasting to their deaths. These were “elites” economically speaking.

The idea that there are Russian speaking Ukrainians being oppressed like Jews in Nazi Germany is idiotic and not at all based in reality.

Source: I speak Russian but not Ukrainian, my wife is a Ukrainian whose native language is Russian. Every time we wake up in the night to Russian bombardment we curse the Russian invaders—in Russian!

So if anyone else is having trouble closing your Mercury account I suggest you contact support and ask to change your principal location to somewhere in Ukraine. Your account will be closed in no time.

There is no app to install. WiFi is always available so you don’t even technically need to have a mobile data plan.

If you don’t want to use this then you call the waiter over and someone brings the mobile credit card terminal instead.

The “how does the waiter know to come and take payment” problem is unique to how restaurants in some countries handle paying the bill.

However Workers supports WASM so you don’t necessarily have to switch to JavaScript to use it.

I wrote some Rust code that I run in Cloudflare Functions, which is a layer on top of Cloudflare Workers which also supports WASM. I wrote up the gory details if you’re interested:

https://127.io/2024/11/16/generating-opengraph-image-cards-f...

JavaScript is most definitely the path of least resistance but it’s not the only way.

School for me was a gladiator academy. Useful for producing gladiators I suppose but at the expense of any genuine intellectual curiosity or love of learning. Thankfully I had an informal opportunity to stay after school when the budding gladiators all went home to torment small animals or whatever it was they did, when I could sit in peace and play on the school’s Apple II. That opened my eyes to an entirely different world, which I now have the privilege of inhabiting.

Some of my siblings liked school, and my parents were wise enough to make the homeschool/government school decision on a child by child basis. I’m very grateful that they had the courage to make that decision in my case against fierce opposition by all of polite society.

What turns me off about the version of an L7 SWE as described in the OP's link is the extent to which it doesn't sound like that at all. Maybe it's my bias against BigTech career ladders, but reading between the lines it sounds to me like it's more about navigating organization, political, and bureaucratic obstacles and attending a lot of meetings and generally being seen to be doing these things.

The point of my comment is that perhaps it is rational for an org like Dropbox to value the ability to do that more highly, but I've been in those roles and I found them personally to be soul-crushing.

When I see that "code fluency" expectation tops out at L3, "design" at L5, and "architecture" at L6, I'm taken aback. So in Dropbox, L7s and L3s have equivalent code fluency?? Heresy! Nonsense! Dysfunction!

But I try to see this from the perspective of the (I assume) execs who maintain this document. Is the value of an L7 that they write better Python or React or Rust code than the other Ls? Or is it that they are expected to navigate the bureaucratic maze that Dropbox has become, making things happen and getting things shipped instead of throwing up their hands and blaming corporate dysfunction? I imagine myself as a Director in this same environment, bucking for a promotion which could easily have a seven-figure impact on my comp; who do I want implementing the projects that I am going to put into my promotion packet? Probably I want whoever will make things happen, I doubt I care very much about how finely crafted the code is or how many CPU cycles that hot new feature is going to consume in prod. In fact the document is explicit that all roles are measured on impact, which is only vaguely related to technical excellence.

This kind of thing used to upset me, as I've spent decades refining my craft as a SWE, I consider myself to be very good at it, and here's a Dropbox document telling me that they value my skills at about an L3-L5 level which would typically be 20-somethings on a traditional SWE career path. If I want to work at Dropbox with a title that matches my own self-assessed level (L7, naturally!), I will apparently be expected to do very little of the craft that I love and have honed over decades, and instead should attend a lot of meetings, craft long-term visions, influence strategies, and probably cross-functionally synergize paradigms or something.

But thinking more deeply about this, setting aside emotion, it makes a certain kind of sense. After all, at this point in the lifecycle of Dropbox or any other BigTech, what would have a bigger impact: another hot-shot software engineer shipping code day and night, or a smart technically-minded operator navigating the corporate hierarchy and political minefield to get the right things done in spite of the dysfunctional structures that seemingly every big org evolves into order time? The answer is obvious from my framing, the only confusing thing about this is that they use the title "SWE" for both of those things.

I would be interested in a Dropbox L7 SWE level of compensation, and I've already self-assessed myself as L7, yet my impression from reading this document is that I would be miserable as an L7 in Dropbox. Perhaps not coincidentally, I've spent almost the entirety of my career in startups without rigid career ladders, or vesting-in-place at the big companies that acquired those startups, or most recently founding my own software startup. That this career framework has convinced me that Dropbox isn't the right place for me is probably a good thing, as it saves me and Dropbox interviewers quite a bit of wasted time and effort.

As for why I stayed, it’s hard to believe but even today, modulo the air raids, my life in Kyiv is just better than the life I led before in Miami, and vastly better than my life now in Budapest. I fell in love with that city when I started traveling there on business in the 2010s, and decided to move there to build my next company in 2018. The people, infrastructure, services, startup culture, healthcare, etc are all much better than a country with Ukraines history and geographical fate would suggest. That’s down to the Ukrainian people who have by force of will achieved some remarkable things with very little.

The war is already destroying some of what they have achieved, and depending on how it ends may destroy it all. But as I said, even now in a brutal and relentless war, life goes on.

I should also point out that as recently as last month I heard a lot of American accented English from obvious tourists on the streets in Kyiv. I was at a trendy restaurant with a Ukrainian colleague and nearly every other table had at least one foreigner. Some are there to cash in on the wartime opportunities with drones and other offensive and defensive technologies, some are deniable operators doing god knows what, but my sense is that a fair number are just tourists. Go figure.

It’s not so much that there is no danger or the war is far away. I woke up many times to explosions in the distance and air raid alarms in the capital are a daily occurrence. Attacks are absolutely not limited to critical infrastructure. Even if Russia didn’t deliberately target civilian populations (and they definitely do), air defenses don’t vaporize enemy ordnance so it’s going to fall down somewhere, and when attacks are happening in cities then it’s likely that it will land on something populated.

It’s more that the odds of being killed or wounded as a civilian in the capital are higher than in a peaceful country but low enough that the mind just gets used to it and you go on with life.

I finally left Ukraine a few weeks ago, for fear of how bad the winter will be with the infrastructure bombing. My wife and I moved to Budapest. Believe it or not, we miss Kyiv and want to move back in the spring, war notwithstanding.

Having said all that, I was in Baghdad in 2006 and I do not understand why any Iraqi family would move back there during that time, unless they were Kurdish and moved to the northern Kurdish territory.

I returned to a Kyiv in August 2023 and in the intervening time I’ve noticed this trend as well. It really takes a psychological toll when you are woken up in the night over and over by explosions or air defense systems firing.

If more westerners had to live this way for a month or two I think it would go along way to a better understanding of the plight (and incredible grit) of everyday Ukrainians.

It must be so cool to work at a company that is cool with open-sourcing projects like this ;)

I then ordered a second one later in 2022, thinking it will be years away. It was ready to ship in a month or so and spacex offered to ship it with no additional charge (just the $99 deposit I paid). I accepted this generous offer and am grateful to SpaceX for their help.

So technically it’s correct that SpaceX did not provide either of these dishes for free. I also paid the monthly service which is discounted compared to US rates but not free. However it’s also correct to say that SpaceX was generous in making Starlink available and gave at least one dish away for nominal cost in the early days. I’m sure I’m not the only one who benefited from this.

Starlinks are used a lot on the front. Of course they get captured by Russian forces sometimes.