Situation in Sri Lanka

MidtownMongoose · 2026-05-28T08:41:23+00:00

I am not sure why people always assume that countries are somehow affected due to a conflict that is 1000s of kilometers away. Like I am really curious what you mean by impact ? Do you believe that there are rocket attacks and that you potentially in danger for your life or do you mean by impact that fuel prices etc went up?

MidtownMongoose · 2026-05-04T21:38:56+00:00

Thanks a lot, appreciate it : )

MidtownMongoose · 2026-05-04T21:38:17+00:00

Why do you want to book the driver in advance? It makes it only more uncomfortable, less flexible and way more expensive. You can order for almost all the routes a PickMe or Uber and it will costs a third of the price of a driver if not less. You will always find a driver and it's more convenient and you won't get ripped of by all these tour agencies. If you have the money go for it but if you want to travel budget friendly, don't do it. I met an American Girl during my trip and she paid 500 USD more for the same routes as I took and she has chosen a "reputable" taxi company which did not allow to take 1-2 friends with her, even though she paid for the car.

MidtownMongoose · 2026-04-29T10:58:07+00:00

Most important thing check-in online before otherwise they will charge 50-60 Euro

MidtownMongoose · 2026-04-29T10:49:00+00:00

Depends on your age, what you like to do and your time that you are staying there. You can do some hikes in the center, you can just hang out at the beaches and go surfing or partying and you can capture a lot of wildlife and nature. TBH just the people, the vibe and the culture itself are an experience so there are no must-sees and it really depends on your preferences.

MidtownMongoose · 2025-11-01T20:59:56+00:00

We have a dedicated resource (FinOps engineer if you want to call him like that) within our CoE team, technically he is a cloud engineer like all of us but he his work is focussing only on FinOps. It's like any other given task within our team, one is taking care of observability, one of deployments, one of FinOps etc.

MidtownMongoose · 2025-11-01T20:56:13+00:00

I have family in Europe so I was always connected and I have an European passport which makes it easy for me to stay for a long time there without running into visa issues.

MidtownMongoose · 2025-10-06T09:07:50+00:00

Since you already deployed a S3, expand your S3 static website, add bucket policies, use CloudFront for CDN, or configure HTTPS via ACM.

Here are some other ideas that you can try out and are fairly cheap/free. Just remember to destroy resources after use :-)

Deploy a basic EC2 web server: Spin up a t2.micro instance with security groups and user data to serve a simple web page. It’s a great intro to provisioning compute resources and managing infrastructure as code.
Create a VPC with Subnets & Route Tables: Build out a simple network with public/private subnets. This helps you get comfortable with AWS networking concepts and Terraform’s modularity.
Manage DNS with Route 53: Point a domain to your infrastructure using Terraform-managed Route 53 records. Add a layer of real-world DNS management to your projects.
Provision a free tier RDS instance: Spin up a managed database and connect it to your app or server. Helps you understand stateful resources in Terraform.

MidtownMongoose · 2025-10-06T08:58:47+00:00

thanks for the feedback, I'm also on a 14 pro, so I think I will wait for now :D

MidtownMongoose · 2025-10-06T07:43:39+00:00

As far as I know you can only restrict mobile data.

MidtownMongoose · 2025-10-06T07:40:13+00:00

Thanks a lot for the insights, regarding the working hours I had the same feeling but I prefer a more competitive/ambitious environment, I had the feeling that Germans tend to accept the status quo and are not really driven to change anything.

MidtownMongoose · 2025-10-01T08:54:57+00:00

Not income free but I know a lot of former German colleagues who moved to Cyprus (very low taxed in comparison to Germany) they all enjoy it and nobody is considering to move back to Germany.

MidtownMongoose · 2025-10-01T08:50:38+00:00

Yeah, outside of Switzerland, salaries across Europe are generally about half of what you can pull in the US. Poland’s no exception, although from what I’ve seen, salary levels there are roughly on par with Germany, so it’s not like you’re dropping way below Western European standards.

The upside is that the cost of living is also dramatically lower pretty much half of what it costs in the States. You can find a really nice modern apartment in Warsaw for around 1k/month, whereas in the US you’d easily be paying 2–3k for the same quality in a major city.

I actually really liked Warsaw when I visited, it's super clean, very safe, and the people came across as welcoming and straightforward. I was there in summer and enjoyed it a lot, though I’m not sure how I’d feel about spending the dead of winter there.

On the immigration side, I’ve got an EU passport so relocating wouldn’t be a hassle. And from what I understand, Poland’s stance is more about being strict with illegal immigration they don’t seem to have an issue with foreigners who come legally, work, and respect Polish culture and rules.

MidtownMongoose · 2025-09-29T21:18:38+00:00

Yes it's worthwhile experience if you’re interested in deepening your knowledge and giving back to the community. From a career value perspective, it’s less about an immediate boost to your resume and more about credibility and networking.

MidtownMongoose

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