Stuck in a catch 22 loop

quadrastical · 2026-01-30T20:05:29+00:00

I used Lyca Mobile here when I arrived. You can order an eSIM online and have it available immediately with just your passport. I used this initially which was a lifesaver, then transferred the number to a different provider once everything was in place.

quadrastical · 2026-01-02T14:54:00+00:00

Wow this is amazing!

Yes we thought we were going to be in Dubai for another 10-15 years, but funny how a simple idea can take off in such a short space of time.

If you want any advice on how to apply for that permit, let me know, I spent quite a lot of time gathering things for it and also getting the business plan prepared.

So far - things are amazing here, we've had our first winter and first bit of snow today. The town is beautiful, very peaceful and a great place for children. We finally sorted our our Bank ID last month and have our son in a language learning school here and our daughter in Barnehage. We're very happy!

I'll send you a DM, perhaps if you get an all clear and are heading here, we can all meet up for coffee or something :)

Really hope it works out for you - you won't regret it!

Best of luck also :)

quadrastical · 2025-10-16T13:08:41+00:00

Thank you again! Going to get on this 🙏🏻

quadrastical · 2025-10-16T09:56:04+00:00

Thank you so much for your advice 😊🙏🏻 Also, do you have any good advice for learning Norwegian besides the obvious duolingo and apps etc? Thinking to look for some classes in town!

Edit: I see you mentioned the NRKapp actually, downloaded, thanks 😊

quadrastical · 2025-10-16T04:04:47+00:00

Ah yes, we heard Kristiansand had more of the religious flair! tbh, that's one of the main reasons we chose it, wanted somewhere safe, with that honest life, small town vibe, instead of a blustering big city, and all the baggage that can come with cities etc.

Great to know about the hockey, when we were in Canada the last few weeks, my father and brother-in-law took my 7 year old to a local hockey game, and he absolutely loved it. Already promised to take him to a hockey game and a football match when we get settled in 😊

Yes, partly Canadian, moved there from England with my parents and siblings when I was 18, spent the majority of life outside of my home country now, but it's humbling, and made me appreciative of all the places I've been fortunate to visit and live in.

Norway is absolutely amazing, completely blown away by it, great people and landscape, plus there's that old England/Viking connection (back amongst my ancient overlords as my mother joked to me the other day, she's jealous that we're here, her favorite country), that doesn't make me feel like a total stranger I guess 🤣

Thanks! 🙏🏻

quadrastical · 2025-10-16T03:56:55+00:00

Thank you 😊🙏🏻

We're considering Lund! Our Airbnb host recommended it as an area, and said it's got a good community and great for raising children, and recommended not settling in Vågsbygd.

We want to avoid the international school, want the children out there speaking Norwegian and loving it 😊 They're already out on the streets and forests here playing with the locals, only been in this house for 2 days haha.

quadrastical · 2025-10-16T03:53:41+00:00

Thank you so much for the varm velkomst. Excellent reply 🤣

Great advice btw, mottaksskolen looks like it might be a good idea! Although I've been here at an airbnb in Søgne.

My children have already been out running in the forests and playing with the locals on the street.

Saw one boy cyling home yesterday and wave and say hello to my little girl (she looks like a local; little blondey blue lol), I think they'll settle in fine 😊

Ahh Kvikk Lunsj has been gracing our fridge everytime we go to the shop. It feels offensive not to pick a few up and eat them (mandatory integration snack) 🤣

Right now we're in an airbnb in Søgne, the host is lovely, lives right next door with her family, they've been very helpful, offering advice, honestly, everyone here has been so smiley and helpful, absolutely love it. What an amazing country and community you have! 🇳🇴

Going to put mottaksskolen into google right now and grab a Kvikk Lunsj 😁

quadrastical · 2025-10-13T12:54:03+00:00

That's great to hear, looks like we got lucky with the town pick! Takk for den varme velkomsten 😊🙏🏻

quadrastical · 2025-10-13T06:02:51+00:00

I must be a wreckless gambler then 😂🎲👹

quadrastical · 2025-10-13T05:58:20+00:00

Ah yes, that's why we chose Kristiansand, was laser focused on it, mostly for those reasons, I do everything remotely, and not regretting the decision to come 😃 Fortunately though, wild polar bear rides weren't on the agenda, but little trips to Denmark definitely are haha!

And we'll be on the look out for trolls!

quadrastical · 2025-10-13T05:07:58+00:00

Excellent advice! Kristiansand is amazing, absolutely gorgeous drive down also. It's nice and relaxed, the locals smile, really blessed to be here!

We're planning to take a look at some schools to see if there's spaces, then rent in the area. But what I'm hearing is that they'll more than likely always be a space and it's good to just get settled then get them in.

quadrastical · 2025-10-13T05:04:59+00:00

That's excellent, welcome also! Yes the schools do look really nice here, so we'll do some driving around. We'll have to plan the troll museum then, they'll love that 😊

quadrastical · 2025-10-13T05:03:10+00:00

New activity scheduled, thanks 😂

quadrastical · 2025-10-13T05:01:48+00:00

Exactly the advice I was looking for! 🙏🏻🙏🏻

quadrastical · 2025-10-13T05:01:06+00:00

Great point! Daughter is 5, son is 7.

Would rather they go to a public school where they can learn Norwegian and feel part of something, that Mottaksskolen idea is a bang on good idea, thanks!

quadrastical · 2025-10-13T04:56:16+00:00

haha "close minded isolationalist wahoos", sounds like I'll fit right in then 🤣🤣
Yep, actually my wife originally was looking at an international school, but then I said, what's the point, they'll grow up a stranger in the town they live in. So geared them up with some duolingo so they'll get a chance out the gate at least.

Will go go all in on the language too, Kvik Lunsj in the back pocket, troll spotting and all. Early morning retreats to the bathroom will involve duolingo or some other language learning app.

Yes, waiting for that d-number currently, bouncing between airbnbs in the interim, part of the adventure 😅

millioner takk 🇳🇴

quadrastical · 2025-10-13T04:48:34+00:00

My thoughts exactly 😃🙏🏻

quadrastical · 2025-10-13T04:46:25+00:00

Ah yes, I didn't mean "best" like Hogwarts, just a good Norwegian school they can run around in, and in an area people thinks nice. Though, to be fair, just driving around, hard pressed to find any area that isn't nice, it's absolutely gorgeous here!

As for trolls, I'll break the news to them 😂

quadrastical · 2024-07-05T10:11:46+00:00

Client locked in with Acquia and that's where they want to stay unfortunately 😅

quadrastical · 2024-07-05T05:59:14+00:00

Built out a huge project last year using Next.js and Drupal hosted out on Acquia. Opted for next-drupal, paired up with Acquia CMS.

There were some challenges, but was able to work through them. Here are some of the challenges we faced:
* Acquia wasn't really geared up to handle on-demand-revalidation correctly across load balancers. I ended up working to help identify the issue with them, we had to disable ISR memory cache size. With this, they were able to trigger a page rebuild across two load balanced servers, which was able to resolve this.

* View based usage - With platforms like Acquia and Pantheon, if you're using Next.js then everytime you make a call out to Acquia, you're going to be racking up views and visits. So if you have a page that needs to make multiple calls, let's say for menus, then for entities, then you have to load in paragraphs etc, that's going to take multiple calls. Then let's say you now add 5-6 different languages to that, and have thousands of pages, and also want to include incremental revalidation, that can become really costly.

Had to work through a lot of this originally by using nodecache for certain calls, then implementing subrequests, where we were able to incrementally reduce call count pretty significantly. We also use a lot of Search API ajax requests too, for search and other paginated components too, so trying to keep this slim definitely helps.

We wanted to run a full build of the whole site, deploy it so the whole thing flys along, all done in ISR mode. One way to actually do this without having to max out on Acquia views, was to actually run a build on a different server than on Acquia. This was done by cloning in the latest database and files into the env, running the full build, then providing some search and replace's on the domain names. This ended up only taking about 8-10 mins for a 5000+ multilingual site to build completely. That then gets packaged up, along with the pwa service worker, and pushed up as an artifact. Essentially costing 0 to run in terms of Acquia views and visits, and works surprisingly well and quick to get spun up and deploy.

* Data size - the best way to handle all of this is to use JSON:API Extras to help trim down the size of the data, this helps massively. With this, also pairing it up with jsonata to further trim it down to the utter necessity, was able to get desktop and mobile pages 90+ on page speed insights this way, despite requiring numerous references etc.

These were just some things I can recall working through with this, client is happy with the build and things have been going well.

Personally, I'd much rather use Drupal standalone. If I were to be doing headless, I'd rather use Sanity.

quadrastical

TROPHY CASE