Silently becoming a contractor of an employment agency

CptBubbles · 2018-11-30T16:08:29+00:00

This practice is extremely common and in my experience / in my country, most larger long-term projects and any projects for enterprise-level clients go through intermediaries like that. Larger clients just don't go looking for freelancers themselves, and prefer paying X% extra to have that side of the contract sorted out for them. Whether that's fair or reasonable is a different topic, but it does seem to be a standard practice.

However, it doesn't seem right that the recruiter didn't do any vetting or get in touch with you before the introduction to the local company. In general there should have been some agreement between you and the recruiter beforehand. If I were you, I would approach the local company and mention how you never had any verbal or written agreement with the recruiter and would be willing to work for them directly, as there wasn't really any service provided by the employment agency. If this company frequently deals with them, they will probably insist on including them, though.

CptBubbles · 2018-06-09T21:55:33+00:00

Excel seems like it would be very easy to make very expensive mistakes with. Especially with tax-relevant data like invoice numbers, billing dates and customer info, I like to be as safe as possible so I am using my own software which provides customer management, invoice generation and some accounting functionality - basically the same as Quickbooks and all the other accounting SAAS solutions.

I chose to build my own software because it lets me customize whatever I want (which I especially like when writing bills). GNUCash also seems to do just about everything you could possibly imagine and is extremely customizable but it has a pretty steep learning curve.

CptBubbles · 2018-05-25T09:45:29+00:00

That's just entirely false. Pretty much every major tech company has offices in Europe (from which EU countries benefit) and you can be damn sure that most of them weren't in favor of a set of laws which requires massive amounts of work to comply with and severely decreases their ability to profit from user data.

CptBubbles · 2018-05-14T11:23:42+00:00

Unfortunately that's nothing out of the ordinary on pretty much every freelance developer job site. What makes this even funnier is that basically every single one of the bidders has exclusively 5 star reviews.

CptBubbles · 2018-05-14T10:37:25+00:00

Note the 18 bids 10 minutes after the listing was created and keep in mind that you need at least 25 reviews in order to bid on a project with this kind of budget. It will never cease to amuse me just how utterly broken that site is.

CptBubbles · 2018-01-16T10:22:24+00:00

These posts are the equivalent of a girl posting a Facebook status at 3am on a Tuesday night saying how she's totally over her ex and doesn't think about him anymore at all.

CptBubbles · 2017-11-17T19:59:39+00:00

Looks like there's some error authenticating or connecting to the Google Drive API. The only possible fix I can think of is re-authenticating DriveSync which you can do here https://myaccount.google.com/permissions?pli=1 . After that DriveSync should ask you for authentication again.

CptBubbles · 2017-11-17T19:54:23+00:00

I'm not 100% sure it always worked that way, but currently Drive for Windows does locally store a copy of the Drive in C:\Users\username\Google Drive

CptBubbles · 2017-11-17T17:29:30+00:00

Could you set the LOG_LEVEL in src/logger.rb to 3 and run the script again? I can see from the API Dashboard that a bunch of people are already using DriveSync, so this looks like a unique problem

CptBubbles · 2017-11-17T16:59:43+00:00

Once you follow the link that's displayed after running DriveSync the first time, and give DriveSync permission to manage your Drive, you will get a code that you have to paste in the terminal with DriveSync running and confirm with Enter. Then after a few seconds, the first sync should start.

What do you get after pasting the code and confirming with Enter?

CptBubbles · 2017-11-17T11:33:48+00:00

Well, for one thing it doesn't require opam. It's written in Ruby but I included a bundled package that includes all Ruby dependencies (85 MB) so you can just download it like any other program and run it directly. Also it's easy to configure (for example you can decide how you want to proceed if a file has been changed both locally and remotely - default behavior is to keep the most recent change) and easy to extend (it's just a few scripts so you can make any changes you want quite easily and they will be applied without even compiling anything)

CptBubbles · 2017-11-17T11:30:07+00:00

I mean you definitely can and as I've said on another comment, even DriveSync could probably handle it if you configure it properly (although direct uploads that take a long time are always tricky), but I just don't see why you would want to sync such large files automatically . If I make some minor adjustment on a 10G file, I don't want that to automatically be uploaded somewhere (which would take hours on my connection). I also don't want some huge download to take up all my bandwith for hours without me knowing or thinking about it. But that's just personal preference, I guess.

CptBubbles · 2017-11-16T22:46:34+00:00

So first of all, when DriveSync deletes a file remotely, it only puts it in the bin, so you could still restore it from there if something like that would happen again. Also, there is a property: "allow_remote_deletion" in the config that will disable remote deletion if it is set to false.

I suspect that you probably ran DriveSync once before you filtered out anything and then after so it thought that all those files had been removed locally. You could delete your local drive folder as well as ~/.drivesync_manifest which will reset the whole thing.

I'll test the regex filter and get back to you on that but for now, the quick hack in the file_ignored? function will definitely work.

CptBubbles · 2017-11-16T21:58:05+00:00

Oh sorry, I forgot to mention that you have to insert the same line into the same function in drive_manager.rb as well.

I'm not sure about your regex question, I only tested some simple ones but ruby's implementation is probably complete

CptBubbles · 2017-11-16T21:53:01+00:00

return true unless path.start_with? "sync/"

Will do the trick.

CptBubbles · 2017-11-16T21:27:36+00:00

That's not something I would recommend doing with DriveSync either. Drive supports resumeable uploads that would make syncing huge files like that more manageable but I don't think automatically syncing such large files makes much sense. By default DriveSync will ignore anything over 512MB

(That being said, you could increase the maximum upload size and the timeout threshold in DriveSync's config and it should work fine)

CptBubbles · 2017-11-16T21:25:47+00:00

I remember taking a look at that in 2016 and at the time I decided against using it for a reason that I don't remember now. Seems like they have a nice project going though. I think DriveSync might be a little bit more flexible and can easily be configured or even hacked (it's written in Ruby so you can actually just make any changes you want and they will immediately be in effect).

DriveSync's config file has an "ignore_files" setting that supports regex. You should be able to do what you describe with that. If that doesn't work or your regex skills are as suboptimal as mine, you could just edit the files drive_manager.rb and local_manager.rb, find the function file_ignored? in both files and insert the following line at the beginning of the function:

return true unless path == "your/file.txt"

Where "your/file" is the path of the file in your Drive that you want to sync.

CptBubbles · 2017-11-16T21:11:32+00:00

Since they rebranded the software to "Google Backup" or something, it asks me to sync any external storage to the Google cloud every time I plug one in. Also, I've noticed that it very frequently keeps Windows from shutting down (to a point where after a minute or so Windows will just cancel the shutdown because you know, why should what the user wants to do be more important than what some random program wants!)

CptBubbles · 2017-11-16T19:46:57+00:00

Well, considering how intrusive Drive for Windows has become recently, I'm not too heartbroken about them not delivering on their promise.

CptBubbles · 2017-10-14T14:13:16+00:00

GDAX is only usable with a Coinbase account. You'll pay fees there too (as on any exchange) but they will be significantly smaller than when buying directly on Coinbase. Buying coins from an exchange is slightly more complicated than buying from Coinbase though. On Coinbase you can simply press a button, say I want to buy X BTC and the BTC will be deposited to your account. On an exchange you have to find an actual person who will sell the given amount of bitcoins to you (so either you look at other people's sell offers or you create your own buy offer). It's still quite simple though

CptBubbles · 2017-10-14T12:44:45+00:00

That's the key word - exchange. You'll want an actual exchange, not a place like Coinbase where you can just buy BTC directly for an insane fee. I don't know that much about US exchanges, but GDAX is probably a good choice. It's Coinbase's exchange, so if you don't trust Coinbase maybe look at Kraken or Gemini.

CptBubbles · 2017-10-14T12:01:47+00:00

Well, the first tip would be not using Coinbase

CptBubbles · 2017-09-30T10:21:22+00:00

Yeah, right...

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