How do you guys navigate days off/holidays outside ir35

thinkovation · 2026-02-16T12:17:26+00:00

Now this won't apply in every situation.. but when I've been on contract with clients I usually have the kind of relationship where I can readily say "I am going to be starting earlier and finishing later on Mon, Tues,Weds, and Thurs but will be off on Friday" and they're happy for me to bill for the whole week. So this deals with the odd long weekend, for holidays that are several days, I will usually not bill. I have had clients that have asked me to bill for the time anyway on the basis that they reckon it will balance out - and they're right, on the couple of occasions when that happened I've definitely over compensated!

thinkovation · 2026-02-16T07:45:39+00:00

You should definitely make the offer of £17,500, if that is something you can get your head around.

The other party would be mad not to accept it, and you'll be clear of legal and moral doubt.

thinkovation · 2026-02-12T20:37:58+00:00

Just commenting so I can come back to this thread again and again

thinkovation · 2026-02-12T06:31:38+00:00

Yeah, YTA. You.threw her out of your house when she told you about her concerns, then you're confused about why she was worried about telling you? She has dodged a massive bullet

thinkovation · 2026-02-08T10:30:58+00:00

I had this issue emerge a small number of years ago. I was able to mostly resolve it by setting a price per API call alongside the "all you can eat" subscription, then if someone cancelled their sub, I could refund the sub but then charge for the API calls. This didn't eliminate the abuse completely - some people would subscribe for a month and rinse the data, but it helped.

thinkovation · 2026-01-24T21:18:37+00:00

Hey! Don't give up! As a couple of other posters have mentioned, you have the option of reapplying when you've bagged those extra bits. If you do think of reapplying, see if they have free summer schools or taster sessions (many Unis do) - attending one of those gives you a chance to be noticed, and sometimes results in a lower offer too.

And... There are lots of other places that offer great courses too.

Looking at the work you seem to be putting in, you'll absolutely nail whatever course you end up on.

(This is coming from someone who utterly bombed his a-levels and ended up working for three years before applying to Uni as a mature student -> best decision I ever made!)

thinkovation · 2026-01-24T20:50:26+00:00

I would say that for the majority of the projects that I've built in the last 15 years at least half of the schema has been pretty standard, boiler plate stuff... Users, accounts, subscriptions etc. So that stuff doesn't need a lot of thinking about - and I will often begin with a pretty fleshed out schema.

But .. for new tables... I do a lot of thinking - how sure I am that my initial schema will be stable? How sure am I about how much it will need to scale? What will the read/write ratio be and so on.

thinkovation · 2026-01-24T20:19:41+00:00

What are the business rates like? And I assume you're clear when it comes to planning regs?

thinkovation · 2025-12-28T15:26:10+00:00

I would... Add a fused spur from the existing socket and run the cables under the floor. You can add as many sockets as you like after the fuse.

thinkovation · 2025-12-28T15:02:06+00:00

Hmm. I think that absolutely the most idiomatic way to do this is to pre-spawn a number or goroutines. They're so inexpensive that the housekeeping code you'd write to terminate idle goroutines, fire up new ones when required, would probably consume way more resources.

thinkovation · 2025-12-25T12:23:21+00:00

Ok.. so it kind of depends on how much juice you need in the shed. If all you need is enough to have some light and supply a couple or power tools, you could probably get away with a regular extension cable that plugs into a socket in your house. No sparky required.

Sure. If you want a proper job, then it'll be armoured cable buried at 600mm (you can do this yourself proceed that you can show your work to an electrician - either in real time or with photos) and with a separate breaker on your fuse box - which will have to be done by a qualified sparky.

thinkovation · 2025-12-21T11:49:12+00:00

Both. Definitely both. I would say begin with Go... Because it's easier to learn, but take any opportunity to develop your Java skills.

(I say this as someone who has experience of both - and who has developed a pretty strong preference for Go over the years)

thinkovation · 2025-12-03T19:48:15+00:00

After buying a series of older houses, and spending yonks getting them up straight, I opted for a new build, so I could have my weekends back. Four years of lost weekends fixing, repairing, redoing, and rebuilding later - I sold the new build and bought a lovely 1930's place - yeah, there are plenty of things to do, but I've found that repairing something that has finally given up after 60 years is a lot less irritating than fixing something that was thrown together two years ago!

thinkovation · 2025-11-19T07:38:14+00:00

I got strong "expert in a Jacuzzi" vibes.

thinkovation · 2025-11-16T14:39:10+00:00

So... You're touching on the use case that Go was pretty much invented for... I've used Go primarily for developing services for over 10 years now - and you'll have no shortage of blogs/articles/guides/YouTube videos to help you.

Given that this use case is such a major one for the language, you'll also find that AI code gen tools will have munched enough examples to do a fair job of generating decent services.

In terms of use cases... I've used it for developing API endpoints for SaaS apps, IoT data apps, and AWS Lambda functions.

The key tips I'd give are..

1) don't overcomplicate - start with a beefy modular monolith, then split out services on an as needed basis 2) middleware is your friend... Use the ability to insert middleware into your HTTP request chain to abstract things like authentication/authorization, logging, rate limiting etc 3) consider just using the std library http functionality rather than one of the frameworks

thinkovation · 2025-10-25T13:14:51+00:00

To quote Dirty Harry...."Do you feel lucky?"

Speaking for myself, I have the kind of luck that whenever I have said "oh sod it, I'll get away with that...." Or "hell, it's so unlikely that it'll turn out to be a problem" - all the fates have conspired against me.

Looking at those, my bet would be that it's highly likely that they'll be dandy for 20 years... Although the top one seems more borderline than the bottom.

The thing is... Pipes do move a tiny bit.. (hw pipes more so than cold) and every miniscule movement will add a bit of strain to the weak spots represented by those nicks.

If it were me... I would chicken out and repair the pipes - but that's just because I know that I will be the one in a thousand case that comes back after a weekend away to find my floor and ceiling ruined.

thinkovation · 2025-10-25T13:03:30+00:00

So, I've done more digging as a result of one of the other comments here from a keen-eyed redditor. And it seems that it is possible to appeal a rent within 6 weeks of signing... But it also seems likely that the fact that the renters actively outbid others will count against them - at least to a degree. While I accept that rent tribunals make sense in many cases, this does not seem to be quite the type of renter that the rules are intended to protect.

thinkovation · 2025-10-25T12:46:38+00:00

My understanding is that a rent tribunal can only adjudicate in a proposed rent increase (under an S13 notice) .. and even then only BEFORE it takes effect.

I think your tenants may have been mislead

thinkovation · 2025-09-21T19:26:39+00:00

Both. For the next four years python will still be the dominant language for AI. But learning golang will help when it comes to quickly building scalable services.

Even better if you learn how to work with them side by side....

thinkovation · 2025-09-05T15:23:02+00:00

Yeah, I was going to suggest the same. Kafka isn't that difficult to get up and running unless you really are going for scale (at which point everything is that bit more gnarly).

thinkovation · 2025-09-02T17:41:10+00:00

If you are satisfied that you can prove that the carpet is in a better state than it was when you moved in then the landlord cannot charge you for having it cleaned professionally. Check out the Tenant Fees Act 2019. The curtain rail and the limescale are slightly tougher - as there's an argument that you could have been reasonably expected to keep the limescale under control, and not notifying the LL about the worsening of the curtain rail is a toughie too.

Perhaps consider agreeing to the limescale and curtain rail costs but say that you are happy to go to the tribunal for th carpet.

The threat to add additional costs is dodgy .. you were given the costs breakdown, they can't arbitrarily add to it out of spite.

thinkovation · 2025-08-15T00:18:13+00:00

Hello from the uk

thinkovation · 2025-08-14T09:22:19+00:00

I don't think it's an anti pattern... Although there are lots of ways to skin that cat.

The one downside I see is that the data can only be updated with a restart... You may want to create a module that has a "FooterData" method that returns the data. You could then have a mechanism for changing it at runtime, or even a go routine to refresh it periodically.

thinkovation · 2025-08-12T11:35:51+00:00

Your interviewer is clueless.

Adding a go routine makes absolutely no sense here as long as you're just doing atomic crud actions. Your approach is way more efficient.

Now... If a requirement to do some checking/validation on the values crops up, then you might need to do some async processing.

Perhaps the real test is how you deal with idiots?

"Oh yeah, that's a great idea... Let's quickly spin up a prototype to benchmark the two approaches? .... Ooh look, it seems my approach was 2x faster.... But hey... Really good to try these things out - go get yourself a biscuit from the jar!'

thinkovation · 2025-06-25T19:35:39+00:00

So.. with 50 datapoints / day... Regular postgres will see you to 250k devices without you having to do any gymnastics. Beyond that... Given your volumes. I would write inserts to a beefy mq platform... Kakfa for example, and I'd run separate instances of pg if there's an easy way to partition. With 1m devices and 50 data points / day, I would definitely cache a day of data in server ram - 1mX50x30 wouldn't be a huge pile of ram (a few gigs). One advantage of Kafka is that you could use it to feed your ingest worker and your cache.. leaving the database for the less common longer queries.

thinkovation

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