Given the current data handling practices I believe it might be appealing to many companies/individuals to keep as much in-house as possible.

True.

We keep mostly everything in-house, but team communication was the hardest part, as we wanted something that defaulted to end-to-end encryption. Surprisingly hard to beat Wire.com.

Ended up going with an XMPP server with OMEMO for encryption, and Jitsi Meet for video.

This is precisely where the value is. More companies are allowing to "move" your online chat session to Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and SMS.

I've been exploring this for close to 10 years now and the biggest barrier is not lack of companies that can provide platforms to "unite" other verticals but rather an outright resistance to make what seems like big changes to those moms and pops businesses. It's quite difficult to find the right balance between the bare minimum each of these businesses needs to change/update to make it viable to create the platform and what seems like too tall of an order for them - instead they will just print more flyers, work double shifts, come up with nearly "at cost promos", etc.

I was wondering about that repetition.

I believe the first step would be associating your method of payment with the country whose content you are eligible to see.

So, a Brazilian citizen living in the US would pay the Netflix account using his Brazilian Credit card. And that would block him into Netflix Brazil content? The origin of the CC is the issue? What about 'generic' CC you can buy at stores?

Have you seen Popcorn Time before? A friend of mine has been using it when travelling to places with restrictions on Netflix access.

AFAIK Popcorn Time uses torrents, it'll not be a problem for OP but in other countries (such as Germany, I think) it can and will cause you legal problems and fines for pirating content.

At least with proxies/VPNs + Netflix you'd not trigger those kind of penalties.

You can just use a VPN with popcorn as well (or "normal" torrents for that matter).

Didn't Popcorn Time go down?

The salary increase part or just the constant pursuit to be better than your coworkers? I always found development to be less competitive field than others - what are your experiences of the past 5 years?

At least for me, competition has always been fierce especially early on and I paid for it with my health. In later years, I have found that I have acquired the tools (technical and business-oriented) and discipline to hold my own amongst my colleagues and also recognize political patterns in organizations without burning out. That has helped me survive this long without folding my hand early in the game. I love coding, but not as much as my health and well-being.

Less competitive? Have you ever done a whiteboard interview with a guy on a power trip?

At first it was the salary, now I find it being on the dev side of things and general company strategy. I'm always wanting to be included on every discussion within the company(30+ employees, I was employee number 6 or 7) if it relates to something I know about. It feels like an obsession. Sorry for the late response.

What does the origin of the company have to do with this?

SMACSS - Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS.

Thank you for not registering a stand-alone domain to host this.

Why? (genuine question)

Because we don't need yet another domain to host a .js file or a nifty way of displaying something. HN is polluted with "Look guys, I made a jQuery plugin over the weekend, so instead of linking my Github you can check it here yetanotheruselessdomain.io". I might be bitter though, since whenever I want to register a domain for a genuine product/service it is usually taken with a "Buy this domain" link on it and nothing else. Too many domains are being used for silly purposes while taking them off the market from those that could give them much bigger potential.