I think twice a week would be optimal. Every day is too much work, and every other day is still too often. Twice a week (I suppose Mon or Tues and Friday) would give us time to dig through major news cycles, catch up on analysis, and compare sources. The result would be a sort of annotated list of links to stories we view as important, with some commentary strewn in.
I can send over some similarly-themed writing my colleague and I did if you're interested in learning more.
This is where professional indemnity insurance is invaluable.
It will provide you with cover for mistakes as well as alleged negligence. Sometimes even when you're right, the legal costs to defend yourself are just as high as being guilty.
In Australia, it'll cost around the $1k/year mark for a smaller agency but absolutely worth it.
As someone currently writing an app which uses a retrained Inception model, I watched the show pointing and laughing (and then crying) at the same issues and frustrations. The accuracy of the show and especially this episode has been just brilliant.
Thanks for sharing all the tech details too, it's been great to read. I'm even more amazed to see it as a real app, that I didn't expect!
I'd like to second most of the advice here. The three critical bits that stand out for me:
1. Lots of projects don't really mean much. More can be worse, as it (potentially) shows an inability to focus on a task. Instead, reduce it to a few core projects. List what technologies they use, what problems they solve and how you solved them. Ideally, upload them to github so that people can see the source code.
2. Move. You're going to have to take the plunge and believe in yourself. Especially if visas are involved, it's far easier to hire someone locally if you have the choice. To be considered for a visa for a common job like programming, you would need to be absolutely amazing.
3. Aptitude. As someone who's hired over a dozen people in various tech and supporting roles, aptitude and team fit are just as if not more critical than actual technical skill. There's no point hiring the greatest programmer in the world if they aren't going to be a good fit or if they can't adapt to different processes. Good programmers are adaptable because they're able to change languages and environments yet carry over their skills in the process.
Good luck finding your path, don't forget to have fun along the way!
As someone who's currently 1/3 of the way into doing exactly what you've been asked... I'd advise you to really strongly consider the time it takes. I was wrong by a factor of 4. Thinking I could spend an extra few hours a week takes hours a night.
Expect no support, their staff are only there are a conduit to move things around. The other thing that shocked me is how crude it all is. The publisher I'm engaged with only has email and word docs. No form of document management nor version control outside of manual naming of the documents.
Even if my book sells well, it won't cover the cost of the time if I'd simply consulted that many hours. If you are considering it for the money, don't accept. If you want to study a subject in detail and get partially paid for it, then it might work out.
What I thought would be a quick few hours a week thing turned into taking up all of my free time over the weekends. And writing the first draft isn't even the most difficult part. In the review stage, you'll be revisiting stuff you wrote more than 5 months ago and we amazed at what a poor job you did then. Of course, time constraints make it impossible to re-write the whole thing, which is something we programmers like doing so much! So you do the best you can and move on.
And the tooling is non-existent. Word documents and emails are what I had to deal with. There were multiple instances in which I was editing the wrong version of the chapter, or the editor was looking at an older version, etc. I hope better tools exist for this process.
Virtuozzo / OpenVZ brought container technology to hosting providers and according to Odin has now had over 1 million containers deployed. We use them for our company and wouldn't be able to achieve the reliability nor the performance without them.
We're also excited about Docker, because it brings a whole new set of tools to help complete the whole picture. The container system is just one small part of Docker, it's the whole toolset and platform which is why it's so popular. The best thing is, Docker will run in nested containers with Virtuozzo / OpenVZ, so you can take direct advantage of both technologies.
> We're also excited about Docker, because it brings a whole new set of tools to help complete the whole picture.
>___> there's never going to be a complete picture.
There will always be a new shiny toy out there to play with and to go with that complete picture.
Google probably have other shiny toys that complement those containers that they haven't talked about yet. They had borg for a long time and even now we're barely getting some of those, Mesos & Kubernates.
Do you deploy individual services to isolated AWS instances or are they on the one instance? Do you ever hit dependency issues upgrading some of the services? Do you ever hit the "worked in development" type production pushes? If so, Docker may be of interest to you.
Of course, if it's not broken then you don't need to fix it. Docker can't solve issues if they don't exist in your environment and it's not a 100% fit for every scenario. It's still worth having a play so that you know how it all works, once you start using it it'll make a bit more sense.
I'd also set expectations, are you going to post once a day? once a week? only when there's something of value?