I hope Bulgaria and the EU have learned from past mistakes (I don't think they have).
While EU and the Euro had good intentions and prospect, it turned out to be a disaster for some of us.
Greece is in a recession for more than 16 years now, with no visible exit,
because (one of many reasons of course) it couldn't devalue its currency back in 2009.
Now we might speculate that Greece couldn't have avoided this, even if it weren't for the Euro,
but having lived this from the inside, I think that it wouldn't be that painful.
Countries like Japan, Italy and even USA nowdays, have comparable debt to GDP indexes,
but none of them (as far as I undestand) have had this kind of dorp in living standards,
price inflation or increase in poverty rates since 2008.
Best of luck to our Bulgarian neighbours. They are going to need it!
Maybe the word recession was not accurate. Also Germany is a highly developed country, so it's expected to have minimal growth.
Greece should be compared to other developing economies in Europe (mostly pre-communist states), and that comparison is eye-popping...
The real economy, the one that affects people's lives, is still something like 25% below what was pre-2009.
In essence people are still 25% poorer than they were before 2009.
That's the worst recession EVER recorded in recent history. Worse than the 1930s.
That's why Greece is only slightly above Bulgaria (yet) in real purchasing power compared to other EU countries.
Don't get me wrong. There were a lot of benefits for most of the EU countries,
but the lack of common economic strategy, and regulation prooved catastrophic for some.
> Greece is in a recession for more than 16 years now, with no visible exit, because (one of many reasons of course) it couldn't devalue its currency back in 2009.
Greece is not in a recession, it hasn't been in one for a while. It's in austerity mode which I do agree it's a too blunt of a tool to use for recovery but alas those were the terms for Greece to get a bailout after its debt mismanagement (including lying in their official government reports for many years).
> Now we might speculate that Greece couldn't have avoided this, even if it weren't for the Euro, but having lived this from the inside, I think that it wouldn't be that painful.
And why do you think that? It's a small country, with a small economy, accruing so much debt that wasn't used for development which in turn didn't generate taxes in return. Notwithstanding the cultural practice of tax evasion, it was going to implode either way.
It would be probably as painful, or more painful, to be shackled to the IMF's terms (which always have included austerity) while holding your own currency which would be quasi-worthless because no one wants to buy your bonds unless you paid massive interests. Debt repayment premiums would be a massive headache either way in the Greek budget (with or without the euro), devaluing your own currency would create a lot of pain for the people since Greece imports a lot of more advanced stuff from other EU members, and also would erode all savings from a relatively old population.
I don't agree with the austerity bullshit, just to be clear, but I don't think there was any solution that wouldn't be painful, maybe different pains but it was never going to be much better.
I say that as someone who lived through multiple Brazilian crisis, including four currency changes to tackle hyperinflation, lived under IMF-imposed terms.
I understand the pain but in both cases (Brazil, and Greece) the absolute mismanagement of the state's finances for decades required bowing down to the powers that be (IMF, ECB, etc.) to save the country from bankruptcy.
Maybe so, but we are both speculating on this.
However the truth of what happened with the Euro is devastating.
Also the IMF was also part of the Greek debt restructuring deal, so it wasn't that different from what Brazil or other countries have experienced.
I am not against the Euro, far from it. But the EU could have handled this crisis much better for the benefit of both Greece and itself.
The Greek economy wouldn't have collapsed, and the anti-Euro sentiment which led to the rise of ultra-right-wing parties in EU wouldn't grow that much.
I've switched jobs (software) recently (after 6.5 years).
While searching for jobs, I went once through the "now-standard" hiring procedure for an employer,
that included an automated test with programming and IQ-test like questions. It was the 1st time I went through it.
I think that a college freshman might have done better in some of the questions, regardless that I have ~15 years of experience.
Also the software they used (their own product I was supposed to work on) had a bug in the report, that falsely indicated I hadn't completed one of the tests.
The whole experience was
a. Stressful
b. Somewhat irrelevant to my skillset
c. Totally dehumanizing
Long story short, I started looking for opportunities using my connections etc, and settled for a job with less $$ but hopefully less bullsh*t too.
Since other web frameworks struggle with performance optimizations for a decade (see Angular, React), Blazor seems like something you wouldn't pick unless you didn't care much about performance (mostly network traffic I suppose)
But for teams that already have invested in .NET and need to migrate desktop apps to the cloud, this seems pretty reasonable.
There are millions of boring corporate apps that need something like that, and most of us work on those boring companies, rather than "on the edge" of tech...
Also it's much harder to reverese engineer WASM than de-obfuscate JS so maybe there's another use case for Blazor (and WASM in general)..?
I am currently investigating the use of microfrontends in our company.
We have multiple web apps (Angular, but also some legacy JSP ones) that are currently hosted on different domains.
Some of them are part of a product suite (see JSP), and some of them are separate products themselves.
However all of them target the same users :
1. Our Customers
2. Our employees (dev, service, support teams)
Those products have a complex way of authenticating and storing user data, since we haven't got a centralized auth server.
So we keep multiple copies of user data, and authentication mechanisms, which leads to duplication, trouble in syncinc changes etc.
Also, our customers, need to log in to different systems each time they need to work on 2 separate products,
let alone that the UI/UX might be quite different. This leads to frustration, confusion and bad UX in general.
At the moment, we are implementing a centralized authentication service, which means that we can finally integrate users across systems.
However we are trying to re-architect our frontend applications also, that's why I've been exploring microfrontends.
My first attempt, will be to integrate the Angular apps under a single login page which leads to a host app that will only handle :
1. Users (login/logout/manage)
2. Navigation (Send me to the required web app)
I have already used module federation (webpack) to integrate a new web app (module), into an existing product and it has been working fine for some time.
So I am exploring integrating all of the Angular apps under a single host (new webapp), and using module federation (or whatever else works) to fetch and run
the other modules, with routing (lazy loaded, remote modules)
It's worth noticing that our 2 main products I am trying to integrate, are Angular SPAs that use the same UI framework, and similar UI/UX.
There are 2 (currently) small-sized teams that work in these projects, and they have their own release cycles.
Each project has its own backend service.
The issues I have identified so far are :
1. Angular/package upgrades must be done simulatneously (if we care about performance, and don't want multiple copies of the framework downloaded and running in the same page)
2. JWT token sharing/refreshing (Since everyone will live under the same domain, we can share auth tokens in cookies/headers,
but we require a mechanism for all apps/modules to request a token refresh, and a way to communicate user status changes : user logs out, permissions have changed etc)
(p.s. Backend services - hosted in separate domains - will of course have to integrate the new Auth service, and inspect/validate the shared JWTs)
3. ALthough module federation might work for Angular SPAs, we will have to implement a separate mechanism for importing JSP apps (iframes probably?) and the way we share JWTs with them.
Since I've read a lot of constructive critisism on the issue here, I would love any feedback regarding my approach. Is there anything else I should explore?
I've thought about NX monorepos, with separete CI/CD pipelines for each project, but that looks more complicated from where I stand.
Agreed!
Been on a one-man team for many years, and have felt exactly the same.
As others stated you are definitely not a loser. I know it because I'm not. :P
- Almost every one of us is working on boring CRUD web apps, and that's fine
- Work is not the only part of life that is supposed to make you happy (on the contrary)
- Try to spend all of your free time off screen. Exercise, meditate, read some books (not coding ones ..)
- XP >> LeetCode. A college graduate will definitely beat me at LeetCode, but I have been integrating online payment/banking systems in production web apps which have handled millions of $$ payments. Learn to promote those skills when job hunting, and don't worry about DS and Algos so much.
Now we might speculate that Greece couldn't have avoided this, even if it weren't for the Euro, but having lived this from the inside, I think that it wouldn't be that painful.
Countries like Japan, Italy and even USA nowdays, have comparable debt to GDP indexes, but none of them (as far as I undestand) have had this kind of dorp in living standards, price inflation or increase in poverty rates since 2008.
Best of luck to our Bulgarian neighbours. They are going to need it!