> With a full time job as full stack developer at a good company he would have done a lot more. The guy is good, at a FANG he would earn 200+ guaranteed and a pension plan.
I don't want to attack this comment in particular, specially because they're saying this to simply support the argument that the guy is an excellent programmer, but it irks me when people say stuff this assuming that an excellent programmer always has easy access to a FAANG.
Some people simply live in underdeveloped countries where their talents can't shine and they have no way to get an interview at FAANG, some people are either too young or too old to be a good candidate, and a myriad other things that could get in the way of an excellent programmer. In such scenarios, an Internet business like this is the only way out for some programmers. I'd bet there are hundreds or thousands of genius programmers living in Russia, Brazil, the Balkans, Guatemala and many other countries that simply couldn't land a job at FAANG even if they wanted to.
I made almost $1 million in the last 12 months, 90% from ads. The rest is from Premium (users paying to hide ads) and licensing a self-hosted version of Photopea.
When you start your own project, you never know, if it will ever make $250k a year. But if you get hired, you can be quite sure, that you will never make more than $250k a year.
I'm not a designer, but for my personal dev projects I always end up needing to do some light image editing. Not nearly enough to justify a Photoshop licence, and I've tried other apps like Pixen and GIMP but have always been met with frustration.
Photopea is one of my favourite tools on the web. Thank you for making such awesome software.
As for the comment about working at a FAANG I'm baffled. In what world would working at a FAANG, dealing with company politics, reporting to managers, having employment reviews, etc. be more desirable than the freedom and satisfaction of launching your own project and being able to very comfortably sustain yourself?
In the world where for every PhotoPea there’s a hundred other failed ideas that never materialised; to consider the idea of “just create your own product” being simpler than dealing with office politics sounds laughable either because you are not aware of how difficult the former proposition is to a regular engineer. If it comes so naturally to you, it still sounds immature to not realise how rare such an ability is.
You seem to be basing that question on the assumption that both options offer the same pay (or at least that both off "enough" pay). Working on your own project is a tremendous risk; and for every success story like this, my assumption is that there's at least dozens who fail or don't even make enough to pay their bills.
Working on a successful independent software project is, for a lot of people, much more desirable than working at someone else's company; in much the same way owning a startup company would be. But the key there is "successful", which is certainly not guaranteed.
You seem to be basing it on the assumption that Ivan would be able to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard and get into said FAANG. I'm only half-kidding.
Plus you now don't have to work full time on it, presumably. Financial freedom Vs corporate job. I know which one I'd prefer. Also congratulations on your outstanding success
Congrats! It's an amazing story that shows that a sole developer can create a product on par with paid products from big companies. I think many people assume you always need a big team to create something great, whereas often a sole developer with dedication and talent is enough to challenge even large products.
Hey, I've used Photopea a bunch of times to help create thumbnail images, nice app!
If you ever wanted to jump on a podcast to talk about how you built and deploy it let me know. I'd love to have you on the https://runninginproduction.com/ podcast. You can click the "become a guest" button to get started if you were interested.
(Note: if anyone else wants to be a guest you can submit a request too, I just finished a huge stretch of 8 months worth of backlog episodes so I have openings again)
It would take me some effort to make and maintain a separate version. Users would report bugs which have been fixed months ago, because they did not update it, etc.
I think the importance of "offline apps" is overrated today. Personally, I spend less than 10 hours a year on a device without internet, and I think this number is decreasing each year, for everyone.
People use Google Maps and Wikipedia without having them on their hard drives. On the other hand, it is nice, that you can simply close a website and there is no track of that service in your computer.
Maybe a Progressive Web App could work? If I remember correctly, it requires basically just adding a cache manifest.
Initial setup can be finnicky (test it on a separate subdomain!) but it shouldn't require much more than a correctly configured cache manifest and a few lines of code to handle updates.
there are even some frameworks that make it extra easy, like angular for example (just `ng add @angular/pwa` and you're basically done).
while it is pretty easy and doable in maybe 1-2 days, depending on how fluent you are with these kinds of things... it's not entirely in the authors best interest. if people start using it `offline`, he wont be able to get advertisement revenue after all ;)
Hi Ivan, Photopea is awesome. I'm glad to know that it's really well profitable. I was wondering, do you have other apps you want to build and you stay focused on Photopea?
It‘s more than just a bit unprofessional to disclose the earnings of a client on a public forum.
(I take that back if he has given You explicit permission)
For example a very common thing you might want to do is add text (or any other layer) on top of an image and then center that text / layer either vertically or horizontally relative to the image.
In Photopea you create a text layer and then drag it near the middle and it'll show you guidelines when you're close and then snap into the perfect center (either vertically, horizontally or both). It takes like 2 seconds and feels intuitive.
In GIMP you have to make sure you switch to the alignment tool which is hidden by default so you need to remember to hit Q to activate it or hover over the move tool and select it but if you hit Q you better make sure you're not in any text input because it'll insert "Q" instead of switching your tool, but since you're adding text chances are you will be so you need to remember to click away. Then you need make sure you click an active area of your text layer and click the align horizontal icon, then you need to click the align vertical icon. Then if you decide you want to change your text you have to repeat this whole process again.
Another example is adding a simple stroke (line) around some text or other layer effects that Photoshop has had for over 10+ years.
In Photopea, you open up layer styles, pick the stroke option and can tweak the colors and thickness very quickly. After applying the style you can change and move around your text and the styles are applied to it automatically, it feels intuitive to use.
In GIMP I spent an hour researching plugins to add this behavior and after picking one it technically works but the user experience is pretty hostile. It creates the stroke as a separate layer so you can't move your text and the stroke together unless you remember to link them, and if you decide to change your text content or size you have to delete the old stroke layer and make a new one.
GIMP is really good in terms of what it can do but using it feels like death by a thousand paper cuts because you need to do so many steps to accomplish what feels like basic things that other editors have had for years when it comes to user friendly features.
I understand creating a highly polished image editor isn't easy and honestly if I knew their code base I would open a PR for the snap to center guidelines but at this point I have to imagine if they wanted to add that feature it would have been added. From the outside it feels like it hasn't been added because they don't want that feature, but as an end user that makes me wonder why. It's such a useful thing.
What's the point of asking if you're just going to dismiss the answers?
I used to use The GIMP exclusively, but I jumped to Photoshop when I could afford it, due to GIMP's poor UX and adjustment layers (which have been "coming soon" with GEGL since 2008).
> The sum of your complaints are because you know how to do it in PS.
Or PS is just more intuitive than GIMP.
> I am a professional graphics designer
Once you are using a tool professionally, I guess that intuitiveness is no longer a selling point. It is though for someone that only use it from time to time...
> That's not how to align text on gimp. The text tool has an alignment feature. It aligns the text within the text box
I'm talking about horizontally or vertically aligning a layer relative to the image, not the text within the rectangle bounding box of the text input box when you have the text tool activated.
It's such a common use case to want to take a layer (whether or not it's text isn't important) and center it horizontally or vertically relative to the entire image or another object.
So, you draw the text box in the size and position you need? All of these "features" sound like training wheels for graphic designers. It's not hard whatsoever to accomplish, and assuredly not worth paying monthly for. If you know in general how to edit graphics the tool you use is irrelevant
> So, you draw the text box in the size and position you need?
I'm not sure what you mean.
If you have a 1000 x 1000 image I'd like to put the text "Hello" exactly in the middle of the image, both vertically and horizontally and let the tool determine the exact bounding box of the text input based on how much text I have.
> All of these "features" sound like training wheels for graphic designers.
In GIMP I described the workflow how to do that using the alignment tool. I also described for comparison how to do it in Photopea because it only involves dragging the layer near where it should be and it auto-snaps to perfect center with guidelines that appear when you're close.
This isn't a training wheels feature because both casual and professional graphic designers aren't eyeballing a pixel perfection alignment every time without thinking, but Photopea gives you this outcome with the least amount of effort you can ask for and its accuracy is 100%.
> It's not hard whatsoever to accomplish, and assuredly not worth paying monthly for.
There's a difference between hard and convenient. Executing a checklist of steps isn't hard but it sure is inconvenient if I need to do that every time I want to align something. It's the difference between something having a good / intuitive UI vs not.
My standard example for "GIMP is unusable" is "try to draw a straight line" which I had to find a tutorial for (you need to hold some magic keys). That said, I struggled with that in Photopea too (not realizing my intended red line was there, just hidden by the blue vector indicator).
I get that but hold shift for constraints is standard in almost every editor out there. (Not sure about Photoshop, it has weird behaviors for modifier keys.) Also, I find GIMP more intuitive for some things. For example, making solid-color backgrounds transparent is very easy in GIMP but as far as I can tell impossible in Photoshop.
I'm not talking about constraining a line to a 90 degree angle. I'm talking about "draw a single straight line from one point to another". Most editors have a dedicated tool for that. In Gimp, you take the brush, then shift-click start and end.
How do you do the solid color background in Gimp? In Photoshop, I'd select the background with the magic wand (contiguous or non-contiguous, depending on preference), potentially use one of those edge-improving tools, then either press delete or create a mask. It apparently also has a special tool for it that I haven't used before but seems to do basically that.
Oh, OK. Regarding the background: That works, and you do the same thing in GIMP but that doesn't handle transparency. In GIMP there's the Color to Alpha tool which is pretty much magic.
Say you have https://this.is-a-professional-domain.com/4Hhtqcf.jpg and you want that glow on a transparent background. In GIMP, I'd select the chip, Select>Invert, Color>Color to Alpha and it would just work. I tried to do it in Photoshop and couldn't figure it out.
Meanwhile, this kind of attitude in users is exactly why everyone is stuck with dumbed-down, more complex/more buggy, less powerful solutions. The more information is available at people's fingertips, the less people are willing to take a few seconds to discover it.
Gimp has made some usability improvements, but I agree it is still painful to use.
When Blender finally bit-the-bullet and overhauled their UI - in a way that more aligned itself with how other keys/clicks worked in similar tools - it totally relaunched itself and is now so much easier to use.
It would be great it Gimp (and inkscape) did a similar overhaul IMHO.
It works on any machine, including Chromebooks, without installation.
I also find it more user friendly (unlike GIMP where I constantly feel like I'm fighting the bad UX instead of actually doing what I came to do), especially if you're used to Photoshop.
better than a software that doesnt do what users want it to do? a lot of things. Why dont you go and try Photopea. It has achieved so much what Gimp couldnt. Yes, its made for business and its closed source. But considering the number of devs and the number of years spent, Photopea is an excellent replacement for photoshop. I have personally used it for most of the small image editing I needed.
Since I come from Photoshop, GIMP always has a way of pissing me off by doing something unexpected or making something trivial needlessly complicated.
While I congratulate its developers for not using ads and making it free, it remains a pain to use sometimes. I mainly use it for cropping, resizing, and image blurring, but for anything else I use Photopea.
That being said, if I took the time to properly learn to utilize GIMP through tutorials, as I did with Photoshop back in the day, I wouldn't be surprised if my opinion does a 180.
The Filter menu looks a bit funky to me (edit: in Firefox 87): https://i.imgur.com/S70o2eU.png ... probably one of my addons messing with it but I don't have that problem in GIMP.
His comment, that you're replying to, literally says 90% of the $1 million usd revenue comes from ads. The rest, so 10% of $1 million, comes from subscriptions and so on.
I mean even in germany it's not easy. The average salary of a SE here is about 65k before taxes. Most senior engineers I met make about 80-85k before taxes (~50k after taxes) (I am located in hamburg). Even for well booked freelancers about 1 in 10 people make more than 200k a year (140k being the average which results in about 72k profit after taxes).
I just had a quick look at google, netflix, twitter and facebook and they don't even offer any SE positions here. Amazon has some in Berlin but they pay around the same salary as stated above.
Otherwise, in Berlin there are other bigger tech companies and with remote opening up more and more the salaries tend to increase. Currently the biggest companies in Berlin when it comes to compensation: Microsoft, GitHub, Airbnb, SAP, Wayfair, Amazon, Datadog (Remote), Snowflake, Shopify (Remote), Hubspot (Remote), Spotify (Remote), DigitalOcean (Remote), MongoDB, Stripe (Remote). I wrote an article about it here: https://www.kevinpeters.net/top-tech-companies-berlin-2021
Most of these companies offer more close to 90-100k or even more (depends on the stock). So it is not FAANG but it gets better and better throughout the years.
To be fair, living costs are also much lower. I'd estimate living costs in the US to be on average at least 30-40% higher, plus high property costs in the Bay Area. Germany has some expensive areas but most parts are still relatively cheap compared to many US cities or places like London or Paris.
To be fair, property prices in Germany (buying) are insane, and if you account for that, it makes the salaries seem low. Munich is currently on par with the bay area per square footage/meters, at much lower salaries.
And unless you've been grandfathered into a rent controlled apartment, inner city rents for newcomers are overpriced AF, especially after the new rent controll law kicked in in Berlin, further restricting supply and increased the prices for newcomers.
Eh I used to want to work for Google, but now I see it about as sexy as working for AT&T. Doing something like this gives you respect and freedom instead.
I can tell you it is a bit different. The visa is hard to obtain unfortunately, otherwise I think a lot more engineers would move, me included.
The only real options are:
- L-1 visa: Get into FAANG in Europe and try to transfer to the US. Lots of unknowns if you really get transferred and so on. L-1 to green card seems to be possible, best possibility for Europeans though
- H-1B visa: Applying from abroad: Nearly no chance, sorry. You will have to schedule your applications to the end of the year to get into the lottery in March or so, and then it is pure luck. 30% chance from what I have heard + you have to rock the interviews hard and the company must be super-willing to wait for you
- Study in the US. Do a masters degree there and be on Optional practical training (OPT) for up to a year/two years after graduation and hope your H-1B visa goes through in the meantime
All these paths have kind of unknowns unfortunately and the path to permanent residency is even more strict. Or you just marry someone from the US.
This 100x! Sure the salary might be great, but to give up all the comforts of a...you know...actually developed country? No thanks!
I'd much rather work for a local software shop for a slightly above-averege salary in a country where the prospect of owning an apartment is more than a fantasy, where I won't go bankrupt if I have a serious medical issue, won't get shot by a raging idiot if I don't start moving at a red light fast enough, my hypothetical children can get excellent education without taking out predatory loans that will follow them for the rest of their life, not to mention the political system over there.....
True, I was definitely exaggerating, but the horror stories I hear from my american friends still make very skeptical that moving to the US for what would probably be a junior position at FAANG would be worth it in any way. Just the story of a friend of mine getting some basic dental surgery in the US makes me not even consider moving there.
At a FAANG you'd have healthcare and dental insurance plans co-sponsored by the employer, in addition to pretty humongous compensation that would easily cover your $50 or so dental insurance contribution.
Don't get me wrong there's plenty of folks who struggle in America, but white-collar employees of the top five tech megacorps ain't them.
Even if you’re not at FAANG, you’re going to get pretty good care for very little cost at any funded startup. Almost every place I’ve worked I’ve never had to pay insurance premiums and almost always had obscenely low copays for visits and operations. (Visit a doctor - $10, surgery - $35... etc.. very cheap)
Being a software engineer in the valley definitely means you’ll likely have a pretty good healthcare situation that might be better than the free version you get in other countries...
>prospect of owning an apartment is more than a fantasy
which european country would that be? owning property is out of reach for most europeans because the high tax and social burden make it pretty much impossible to save up for a house
Taxes are hardly the issue, it's the fact that in high-density and high-income areas, there simply isn't enough supply for the demand.
I'm from Slovenia and, ignoring the capital, which has a huge housing shortage (not much room for the city to expand), it's still quite common for people to own apartments. It's definitely decreasing, like everywhere in the world, but not unheard of. I also never said anything about a house - that's a completely different story.
From what I've heard, normal apartments basically don't exist in big tech centres in the US. You either get an expensive moldy hole in the wall or a huge new development that even a C-level will have a hard time getting a loan for.
Again, all of this is just from my perspective with the parameters that I care about. I know it works for many people, but the US really just isn't for me.
You can get the high salary in Zurich, although if you're already in Zurich you'd be better off working in finance. Source: my colleague who moved to Google Zurich and then switched jobs to finance.
The US is seen as a bit of a backwards country; poor medical, technologically poor (banking, internet), little paid time off/vacation, no free/cheap higher education, rampant gun violence/domestic terror - on top of that you risk loosing some pension and health benefits in your "home" country if you stay abroad for years.
Note that the point with a solid/free education system isn't that kids of rich SEs get free college - it's that society as a whole gets better education - and your kid's friends also have a future/access to education.
French here. No way I would leave a society who achieve 35 workweek, minimum wage, 25 days payed vacation and free healthcare. As a programmer I could win more in another country, but I dont want this money if people around me cant live a decent life. Even in France it is quite hard. I wont leave for a lesser country like the US. I want my nurse to be able to do a great work and it means having a good life.
I think the reason it's viewed the way it is, is that it's actually a strange choice. If these problem happen in some random poor country that used to be a conquered colony, that makes more sence
Moving away from home is just not something many people want to do. I don't think many Americans would move to another country with different language and far away from their family, just because they'd get a higher salary.
Going to the USA has been my dream since being a teenager but that's not the case anymore.
The USA has some good things going for it: VC money, great salaries, true freedom of speech (unlike the EU), right to bear arms (unlike most of the EU, where only robbers have guns and if you defend yourself you risk getting sued - tried on my skin), beautiful seaside, legal weed, less problems with immigrants (African immigration is a bomb waiting to explode, if it hasn't exploded already), place with good opportunity and enjoy a nice climate (in Europe the choice is between cold places with good work opportunity, aka UK, Switzerland or warm places with a barely functioning economy and ridiculously high taxes).
Unfortunately health care is too expensive, taxes are as high as Europe (where is your freedom?), the food is subpar, mass shooting in schools, you have to drive way too much, a culture that is transitioning kids because they think they're the opposite gender.
All in all, I think I'll stick with Europe for the time being and consider maybe South America or South East Asia in the future.
Not GP, but besides career opportunities, the US is just not very appealing (anymore) to many. It is not even necessarily about things where you could objectively say something is better or worse, but personal preferences on how to live life.
For me the biggest luxury of being a software engineer is, that pretty much wherever I go, I’m going to be solidly middle class within that region. So I can afford prioritizing other things over maximizing salary.
After quitting in 2000 I work on my own creating products, some under my ownership and some for clients. In average I do just fine, some years are good, some are not that good. However not once have I ever thought of trading my freedom to do as I please to some better paying job at FAANG or the likes.
Not even underdeveloped countries, I live in a G8 country and there is hardly any significant FAANG shop here.
For example if you want to work for Google in Europe it's either UK or Switzerland, which are interestingly the two developed european countries outside of the EU :)
Because in the Bay Area they also pay standard rates. Stock comp has been very supportive over the past years but base salary mostly reflects high living costs. Developers in Europe are still paid well compared to median income. The 80-90k€ that were mentioned in another comment here are an excellent salary in Germany. And if you're in the top 10% of your country, it doesn't matter how big that number is unless you want to take your savings to move somewhere else in the future.
For many people staying close to the place they grew up and their family is important. If you get a well-paid job there it can be more attractive than moving halfway around the world for more money.
> No, with FAAG in Bay Area you can easily have 2x-3x the median national rate for developers.
That's not what I wrote. I said they pay as well as others in the area. Yes, not everyone pays exactly like Google or Amazon, but other tech jobs in the Bay Area are also far above national median for developers. FAANG pays well but they still pay in relation to the area, they don't just give away $300k paychecks to people anywhere in the world.
And the rest also just confirms what I mean, 80k in Germany are a great salary. Many people won't gain much moving to the Bay Area to get $250k (if they can). The standard of living won't be that much higher than with 80k in Berlin.
But they pay Irish salaries there, not Bay Area salaries. Which is fine, FAANG developers in Ireland are still doing well. And not everyone wants to live in the bay area, just like not everyone wants to live in Ireland, Germany or any other place.
> For example if you want to work for Google in Europe it's either UK or Switzerland, which are interestingly the two developed european countries outside of the EU
Yeh and there's are crazy amount of hiring here at the moment. FB, Amazon, TikTok, Stripe, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Salesforces (amongst others) all hiring from Hundreds to a few thousand
Yes. Ireland seems to be pretty much basing its entire economy, at the moment, on attracting huge American megacorps to set up shop in Dublin. Rather than actually investing in producing anything themselves.
It's a recipe for disaster. As will become apparent when some other equally strategically placed jurisdiction starts offering even more enticing tax-breaks and the megacorps up sticks and decamp there instead. Then the whole house of cards [and with it most of the Irish economy] will come tumbling down.
What a pathetic pathetic country!
[and I say that as a terminally embarrassed Irishman]
It's a recipe for disaster. As will become apparent when some other equally strategically placed jurisdiction starts offering even more enticing tax-breaks and the megacorps up sticks and decamp there instead.
At the moment, if I were the Irish government, I think I'd be more concerned with the likelihood of genuine international collaboration on business taxes than any single rival nation setting up a more favourable tax regime. Even the Biden administration now seems to be acknowledging that this may be the way forward with the need for governments to make up unprecedented economic damage from the pandemic, and if the US moves that way, there is political cover and financial incentive for other governments in the developed world to move that way too.
Making enough money to live comfortably in a place you like is key. It doesn't matter how much it is, if you have family and friends in a low-cost area, even $30k can be more than enough. I believe most people are happier if they can choose where to live and can live there well rather than chasing the highest salary you can get in the world.
I don't know how true that is, but I'm not sure it matters anyway. Money is nice, but job satisfaction is about much more than total compensation figures. Are you building something worthwhile, something that will help people to improve their lives in some way? Are you building something that is intellectually stimulating, facing challenges that you enjoy overcoming? Are you working in a comfortable environment, where you have positive interactions with pleasant colleagues? Is there a supportive culture, where you are respected as a contributor and trusted to make decisions according to your level of skill and experience? Is there a healthy work-life balance?
Another point is that he is now free to go out and get another job if he wants to, while still getting the ad money from Photopea every year. That's the whole point of building up a passive income stream - once you uncouple the income from actually working, you are then free to do whatever you want with your time - including selling it for a salary like most people so.
Yep, I also have the impression you need a lot more to land a job at a FAANG than to simply be an excellent programmer. The interview process at companies like Google can be pretty byzantine and hard to master without an internal "champion" I heard.
Indeed, it sort of assumes that working at FAANG with a pension plan and 200k+ is what the author should be striving for (the objectively better option), and I’m not sure if that’s accurate.
While there are obvious benefits to FAANGing, there’s also a lot to be said for working for a smaller team, or even yourself. Money isn’t the soul (or even main) motivator for a lot of people.
Some countries call what Americans call a “401k” a “pension”.
Americans use “pension” as short for “defined benefit pension”, meaning you are owed some amount of money every month after the retirement age, and it’s up to the employer to do whatever needs to be done to provide it.
Americans use “401k” or “IRA” to refer to a defined contribution pension, one where the employer (and employee) contributes a certain amount into an account that is withdrawn from after retirement. However, the amount the employee can withdraw is subject to however much is in the account when they retire and however much the employee wants to periodically withdraw, so there is no definite benefit amount.
I have British family that refer to the latter as a pension, but we would not in the US. I would be surprised if any modern tech company offers a defined benefit pension anymore, even in UK/Europe.
And some people, even if they have the chance to move to the US or some rich city where FAANG has engineering offices, would rather stay with their friends and family at the city they were born and make a lot less.
I'm not sure it would even make much sense for them to work at a FAANG. Running a small entrepreneurial business is so different from succeeding in a large corporation. In one you need to be a master of everything from marketing through to development, in the other you are going to need to be highly specialised to merit a large income.
My guess is he wouldn't want to work in a FAANG and they wouldn't want to hire him.
I've worked for Amazon and all I had to do is getting permissions from teams and then do some config changes (or similar level programming) in their software.
Needless to say year-by-year I forgot everything I've learned before. My CV might got a boost, but my skillset decreased a lot. Only thing what I've learned is politics and how to push and decorate an empty promo doc.
I was a braindead when I finally got my stocks.
So went back to the startup word, where I could thrive.
The average lifespan was like 1 year there, most people did not even wait for the stock so basically worked cheap for amazon.
I don't know what it's like in other countries, but here in Belgium, if you want compensation that is anywhere near FAANG levels, you have to go the freelance route and charge high day rates. Then we'd have to be talking rates of 1000eur/day or more, which is extremely rare. And if you didn't incorporate, you'll be taking home less than 500eur/day. Which is still three times more than what the average SE employee gets to take home. But it's a far cry from US FAANG levels.
Does FAANG let you delegate your time to other people. E.g. if I don’t feel like coding today I can just hire someone to do it for me and collect my FAANG salary? Can I sell my job for a million when I’m fed up of it? No?
Ok then running photopea is not comparable to a FAANG 9-5
Besides the fact that he might not want to, I suspect many FAANG companies aren't optimized for hiring developers capable of making something like Photopea. Very little about the hiring process at somewhere like Google or Facebook is about what you can make on your own.
FAANGs hire for people who can make a small part of a larger whole incredibly well. That's mostly good for what they do, which often requires deep knowledge of specialist algorithms, but they miss out on hiring generalists who aren't necessarily good at the deep stuff but who can make lots of simple processes work well together. Which,in my opinion, is what you need to be a good front end developer.
Kind of goes without saying also that 250k is going to go a lot further in the Czech Republic than it is in SF. 3000 EUR / month in Prague is going to get you a top end 2/3 bed apartment.
> I'd bet there are hundreds or thousands of genius programmers living in Russia, Brazil, the Balkans, Guatemala and many other countries that simply couldn't land a job at FAANG even if they wanted to.
Maybe they know they are just too clever for FAANG companies and can do even better for themselves by starting their own businesses?
We have to stop this constant submission to FAANG companies as 'the dream job' when in fact there are smaller companies out there that are just as good as they are and are also extremely profitable.
I don't they are interested in the glory days of the 2010s which the FAANG companies were the talk of the town. Fast-forward 10 years, they are now under scrutiny by everyone and it's not looking good for them. It's time to find new and emerging companies that will define the 2020s or 2030s.
> We have to stop this constant submission to FAANG companies as 'the dream job' when in fact their are smaller companies out there that are just as good as they are and are also extremely profitable.
I agree! There’s also highly profitable private software businesses that are bigger than Netflix. I work for one. While it doesn’t pay nearly as well as FAANG, it does pay well, and is low-pressure / laid-back (I’m actually thinking about leaving not for better pay but for a faster-paced environment).
> Some people simply live in underdeveloped countries where their talents can't shine and they have no way to get an interview at FAANG
Some other people would consider morally reprehensible to be accomplices of FAANG. I wouldn't work for them even if I could. It would be like working for Fox News.
Not sure what it's like these days but back when I starting university Google had just acquired a local company and setup their first Latin America office in my hometown(Belo Horizonte), salaries were probably a fraction of its SV counterpart but they were still 5-10x higher than just about any other company in the region. It was notoriously difficult to get in, only way to get an interview was to either have a phd or a masters with an impressive resume, even then you probably needed some connection to refer you.
Honestly I hoped their presence would help push local companies to up their game and drive salaries up for developers in a low wage market, unfortunately that is yet to happen 15 years later.
1. I have worked for FAANG adjacent companies(similar market cap) in the silicon valley. It is not exactly a badge of honor, sure - if other people want to honor you and you want to ride it why not. But it is not a badge of honor IMO. Horror? Sure.
2. People talk about 200+ guaranteed for a long time now. I think no one has caught on to it yet. Programmers of this caliber can and do pull ~600K regularly in FAANG and FAANG adjacent. If they are capable of people management at the same time (very few at this programming caliber are), then they will be pushed into the executive situation with millions in stock.
> I'd bet there are hundreds or thousands of genius programmers living in Russia, Brazil, the Balkans, Guatemala and many other countries that simply couldn't land a job at FAANG even if they wanted to.
I could make more money as a waiter in Germany or Austria than in my devops job in the Balkans, but a) money isn't always the main motivation, especially in Europe and b) the same amount of money goes a lot further than in Silicon Valley.
That, plus the fact that building your own shit, being your own boss, and making your own mark on the world is probably a lot cooler and more satisfying to most of us here than helping sell more ads or get people to watch even more TV.
Or simply photopea could have just never been found and became yet another thing to add to a GitHub resume that some hiring manager looks at and says "what's your work experience?"
my issue is with that comment assuming Photopea is full-time job. maybe it is idk, but maybe it isn't and he can still work a day job and this is a side business. regardless of FAANG ofc.
Also why would a talented programmer or a true hacker want to work for FAANG. The pirate mentality of not working for a big box corpo seems to have faded.
Its just shocking to think that wasting your talent into making people click more ads for some faceless corp can even be compared to creating something great like Photopea.
Compared to the best mids of previous generations making things that would blast civilization back to stone age in matter of minutes, I'd say this is progress :-)
Except even the most destructive technologies have lead to incalculably valuable advancements for society. This is clearly a step back when we'd rather funnel our best minds into ads rather than things that could in a very real way help advance our civilization.
I hate ads too, but saying they are worse than nuclear weapons sounds just a bit too extreme...
I mean, the information spreading helped by Google search was/is incalculably valuable for humanity.
Nuclear weapons did lead to nuclear energy, and that is a benefit. They also lead to the end of WW2 and to the peace we are living now ( the reason super powers don't fight each other is that attacking each other with nuclear weapons will mean the end of everything ).
It's difficult to argue with ideology amd frankly the shenanigans of the less ethical parts of the digital ads industry haven't helped, but if you get the chance or inclination to research advertising from the early days of invention of newspapers to the present day, you may find that it is largely advertising money that paid for democratising access to information, culture, communication and entertainment which was till fairly recently in the history of civilization the privilege of the rich. Not a few social revolutions have been enabled by wide access to information and communication by organisations whose bills arr paid by ad dollars.
It should be modified to: lies that ad tech people tell themselves so they feel better about what they do for a living. If you work in a terrible field doing terrible things, you can at least pretend you're really smart so it's not a total loss.
Back in reality, very few of the best minds work in ad tech.
That fraudulent quote should be challenged every time it's posted, until it finally dies.
The trouble with this argument is that you're not starting with a level playing field. Other things being equal, work that produces more value might generate greater expected returns, but clearly in the real world other things are far from equal. There are opportunities available to those who already have money that are not available to everyone else, and consequently everyone else has to pay a premium, usually to the benefit of those who already had money. See also: most of the financial services sector, the standard arguments on the ethics of taxation to fund public services, etc.
TV shows are also monetized by ads, but we don't ask talented show writers why they are wasting their time writing episodes when they could be spending their efforts towards creating better ads for washing up detergent.
If the developer of Photopea went to work on advert technology what would happen? The world would loose this great piece of software, one of the worlds richest advertising companies might get imperceptibly better at targeting ads, and the creator has to stop working on his own pet project which he is doing on his own terms and work on whatever his boss tells him to. Besides, if he achieves his goal of becoming one of the most popular image editors in the world, there is a good chance Photopea will be much more valuable than he will have earned as a salary at FAANG.
Photopea could just as well be monetized by selling licenses or by non-intrusive unpersonalized ads. When you have a great product making money from it isn't hard.
I think that 90% of ad tech is useless shit technology that just exists to take a cut of the money, without actually providing much of a value to anyone.
It's like realtors or financial advisors or other middlemen like that. The main reason for them being there is that it's a very profitable business to get a cut of somebody else's transactions.
People were making things before advertisers tried to pretend nothing else could exist without them, and will continue to do so long after advertisers are gone.
May have sounded nice, but successful creators eventually become advertisers. As long as they have money to spend on marketing, they'll spend it to get in front of the right people
ad technology admittedly provides a possibility for monetization, which can justify something to an accountant, but it is completely perpendicular to use-value and technical feasibility. it does not "enable" anything to exist.
I don't use Photopea enough to justify paying for it. I already own Photoshop and only very occasionally fire up Photopea when I need to make a trivial edit to an image for posting online, or suchlike when I can't be arsed waiting for Photoshop to launch.
And, since I have an almost pathological hatred of adverts, I block them and use Stylebot to remove the space where they'd be.
But I'm glad the dev is making a decent living from what I've previously described as probably the most impressive web app I've ever seen. He deserves rewarded for his work but I'm sorry, I'm NEVER even looking at --never mind 'clicking on'-- a single advert while using the web, if I can possibly help it.
I don't think this a waste of time. Adverts help businesses get their products to consumers. This pays people's wages. It aids wealth generation. Nothing bad about that.
Did consumers need those products? Would they have bought the same thing but from a different company? If not, would they iblnstead put this money into savings for a rainy day? Would they save for a house? Wouod we have less homeless and vulnerable people?
Would the clever people working on ads and manipulating consumers actually pursue careers like chemical enginerting which solves fundamental problems of human civilisation?
If everyone saved money in a world where ads didn’t exist, do you think housing wouldn’t be bid up by virtue of many people having extra money to spend?
I hate what web ads have become, but I’m pretty sure they’re not a significant driver of homelessness.
Sure, i am not claiming without ads we will not have homeless people
I am asking whether we have any proof that the advertising i dustry contributes anything substantial to the real economy, or we would be better off if these people were doing something else
If you keep the consequences and scope of view so narrow like that, sure, that is a single positive that isn't weighing it at all with any of the negatives.
Ads also make sure that I add those businesses to my mental blacklist and never want to interact with them again. This affects peoples wages. It aids wealth destruction. Nothing good about that.
What I find more amazing is what an incredible equalizer IT is: An individual with nothing more than a computer (and $50 worth of rented production infrastructure) plus the right skills can build a project that makes a (well-deserved) million a year, from anywhere in the world.
It also shows the power of smart design and keeping as much as you can client side. Attempting to move any of the actual work to the server side would create an unsustainable amount of a) additional development work, b) infrastructure cost, c) infrastructure operations work. It's also a great example that you truly can do everything inside a browser nowadays.
Regarding the incredulous people who can't imagine how 12 TB/month cost only $50, the hosting provider may be taking a small loss on it, and make it up with other customers. At Hetzner, extra bandwidth (after you've exhausted your included allocation) retails for 1 EUR/TB + VAT. A provider can afford to lose $10-20/month on a single customer, and kicking them out is probably not worth the effort and the risk of even the smallest amount of bad press/word-of-mouth.
It's the "plus the right skills" part that makes it not actually an equalizer. No one is born with the skills to write amazing software. It takes a lot of hard work to learn those skills, and in order to do that hard work you need to have the available time and resources both to study/practice and to meet your material needs (and the material needs of anyone who depends on you) in the meantime. Not to mention that it's not just the skill of programming, there are a hundred other prerequisite skills that can't be taken for granted either, a big one of which is language skills. If English isn't your first language, you're starting way behind.
Yes, you need free time, and either having English skills, learning English skills, or knowing another language that has good documentation is important.
But it's still a far shot from needing a tens of millions of dollars to build a factory, or even tens of thousands to buy some basic equipment for some smaller business that doesn't have the potential to get anywhere nearly as big.
It's still more accessible than anything else.
You need a computer with an internet connection and time. That's it. English is the easiest language to learn as well. Not because of its structure or vocabulary mind you but because it's very easy to get constant exposure to it in all forms - entertainment, education, science publications.
The best thing about programming is that you don't need an invitation to an exclusive club. No degree, no connections, no expensive licenses. You can put stuff out there for the whole world to see and it costs <100$ to have a functioning website with payment integration.
You need talent and dedication to recognize and solve problems people consider important. It's maybe the last mostly meritocratic fields left. We are lucky to have it, it might not be for very long.
I use Photopea a lot and the amount of Photoshop features it has is astounding. Like adjustment layers, smart objects etc. The PSDs it exports work nicely with the Photoshop I have in my Windows PC. This is just mind-blowing.
That brings me to a question I have. GIMP has been in development for longer time. And supposedly it has a bigger team behind it. So how come GIMP is missing a lot of nice features like non-destructive editing, layer styles etc? I saw some of these features in its roadmap, but why is its development so slow? Is it only because working on GIMP doesn't generate any money?
GIMP is OSS and doesn't pay the bills.
I'm sure much more man-hours went into Photopea (even with a single contributor) than in GIMP and the [ad revenue / promise of passive income] is what allowed that.
I suspect a lot more work went into GIMP, but a) the overhead of many small contributors ate a lot of it, b) the overhead of an ancient code base, having to interface with OS level GUI libraries etc. ate a lot more c) GIMP got a lot of development for features but not enough UX work.
Totally agree that the ads paying the bills is what enabled Photopea to become so good in the end.
He says somewhere that 20-25% of users of Photopea are from India. This sounded surprising, and then I remembered that so many photo-editing services are based in India (search for "photo clipping service" for instance).
Many of them probably use Photopea, a much cheaper alternative to buying huge numbers of CC subscriptions...
There is something hilarious in the fact that image editing farms in India, whose clients come from all over the world, use a Web app made by one guy in the Czech Republic.
Another interesting fact is that those farms get most of their business from Google ads, and the maker of Photopea in turn makes most of his money from ads.
The only thing that baffles me is how he was be able to get his adsense account approved. Anytime I try to apply for one for one of my SPA web apps, I get declined due to "lack of content".
It's also that they've become a lot more strict on that rule over the years (which doesn't even make sense, since google doesn't do contextual ads anymore)
Thanks a lot! Photopea can do many things other editors can not do, e.g. opening a PDF in a PSD way (with editable text layers, vector shapes, clipping masks, bitmaps as smart objects etc.).
You can also use it to convert Gimp, Sketch, Figma, SVG and other formats to layered PSDs.
> I was contacted by one of developers of Adobe XD, to coordinate me about the development of the XD format (which is very new and still in development, but I implemented it into Photopea). I am trying to compete with all photo editors, but Adobe Photoshop is the most popular one today (that is why I worked so hard on supporting PSD files).
I have used Photopea for about 2 years now after I got introduced to it from the reddit AMA. Used to use Photoshop for created App Store screenshots for my app, then I upgraded my Mac and my old Photoshop wasn't supported on the new MacOS (64 bit stuff if I remember right) and I didn't want to shell money on a new license. Photopea was a convenient choice considering I don't have to install anything on my Mac plus it loads much faster (if browser caches) than Photoshop itself.
Few examples of the App Store screenshots for my Hacker News app HACK:
That sounds like a lot, but ads on Photopea are pretty disruptive. They take up a significant portion of the screen in an app where having enough space to see everything is a real problem.
I saw lots ads from Adobe pop up. Can anyone help me understand why Adobe is funding a guy in the Czech Republic to give away for free a pixel perfect closed source clone of their flagship product? I also can't find the privacy policy.
Anyone able to explain how Adobe never took legal action against this product? I always thought that the UI was so similar as to be over the line in terms of copycat. But then IANAL so perhaps that’s legal.
They could try to bog down photopea in permanent lawsuits, but that would risk some EFF-style organization taking the other side, and now they're fighting an equal opponent, earning a lot of bad PR, and most importantly, they're providing a lot of cheap advertising for the competing product while also making themselves unpopular.
Had a great time with you 2 years ago when you came to Nantes, France to explain "Developing the best free photo editor". Check-out his explanations here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZmaeC_Ma5A
I have used Photopea somewhat, but I have thought this is temporary as it's not open source. How long this will be available? If Adobe targets this, it wouldn't be a surprising to see this being bought off and killed.
Hi, I am the creator of Photopea :) Photopea exists since 2013.
1. Nobody can buy Photopea, if I refuse to sell it.
2. I am not aware of using a work of someone else, or a unique idea of someone else. I would not be able to live in a world, where I am constantly scared, that someone more powerful can put me in jail, just because they have more money for lawyers. I hope our world is not like that, and if it is, I am ready to fight to change it.
All ad providers today do not allow showing ads in iframes. You can find our privacy policy by going to https://www.Photopea.com , clicking "Account" at the top, and then, clicking "Terms of Service".
I just tested it out with uMatrix and uBlock Origin in Firefox and it works fine. I wonder what ad blockers you were using that made you think it was "incredibly hostile"? I only work on Photoshop files once a year or so, but next time I do, I'll gladly pay to support the ad-free version of the app.
All I want is a worthy alternative to Adobe After Effects. We have decent alternatives for the rest of the Adobe suite already. Davinci Resolve Fusion isn't quite up to the task just yet.
I think the most amazing is that it s made with pure javascript , no need to learn any frameworks and the myriad of things around them. Maybe even i do know javascript after all...
Or from people who won't purchase anyway. If I need something, I'll look it up. "Suggesting" I purchase something just doesn't work for me. Ads are blocked on my machines primarily for aesthetics, then lack of use.
A lot of people talking about the revenue (no issue with that).
I wonder about the implementation. How is this done? Feels performant from my limited testing. I see that it uses WebGL but would love to know more details.
Thank you, Photopea looks amazing (even on mobile!) I'll certainly try it in the future. This success is inspiring and your talk is very interesting. Do you intend to make sqzr.js available to others ?
Feature counts are meaningless. There’s only like a dozen things in Photoshop you actually need. What counts is a smart, efficient UI with a good hierarchy and consistent arrangement. Gimp fails entirely at this, not any feature issues. I’d happily strip 80% of its features for an interface that doesn’t awkwardly overlap buttons at the least convenient moment.
Photopea instead copies Photoshop’s interface, which is its real asset.
Not having to install Gimp nor Krita is great, given all the disk space they occupy.
As an added bonus with Photopea I have to relearn GUI patterns nor shortcuts, I can apply what I've learned in years of PS usage.
This is an opportunity for FOSS, if the objective is to increase adoption from casual users. I wonder if the GIMP version that was made to look like PS is still a thing
When uncompressed and unpacked, GIMP is 112.25 MiB and Krita is 189.45 MiB on Arch. Which doesn't seem like a lot to me these days given their feature set, bundled stuff etc.
Meanwhile I can do without, by using my browser. What doesn't seem a lot to you in terms of resources and space is a blessing to those with more limited means.
For the vast majority globally speaking, wouldn't bandwidth be the limiting factor?
Also if you have a slower computer wouldn't running everything in Javascript be the last thing that you would want to do.
Furthermore if you where to measure RAM usage between the apps I bet GIMP would be far more conservative with the same load.
Also if you are editing images for a living 100 megabyte really isn't that much? Lets say you have RGB images of a resolution of 1920x1080. Sixteen or seventeen of this would be 100 MB already? If you are using layers you quite quickly reach this amount of storage. So the size of GIMP is really negligible.
The only definition of someone with more "limited means", where this would be better is someone who is using a chromebook but still has a 1st world tier internet connection. I'd be happy to be corrected if I am wrong however.
In Photoshop / Photopea you can select a layer and add an effect such as stroke, shadow, etc. In Gimp, you can do the same with filters... The inconvenience to me is that filters are immediately rasterized, so the effect becomes harder to change.
I don't want to attack this comment in particular, specially because they're saying this to simply support the argument that the guy is an excellent programmer, but it irks me when people say stuff this assuming that an excellent programmer always has easy access to a FAANG.
Some people simply live in underdeveloped countries where their talents can't shine and they have no way to get an interview at FAANG, some people are either too young or too old to be a good candidate, and a myriad other things that could get in the way of an excellent programmer. In such scenarios, an Internet business like this is the only way out for some programmers. I'd bet there are hundreds or thousands of genius programmers living in Russia, Brazil, the Balkans, Guatemala and many other countries that simply couldn't land a job at FAANG even if they wanted to.
I made almost $1 million in the last 12 months, 90% from ads. The rest is from Premium (users paying to hide ads) and licensing a self-hosted version of Photopea.
When you start your own project, you never know, if it will ever make $250k a year. But if you get hired, you can be quite sure, that you will never make more than $250k a year.
Follow Photopea to see my progress :) http://facebook.com/photopea , http://twitter.com/photopeacom
Photopea is one of my favourite tools on the web. Thank you for making such awesome software.
As for the comment about working at a FAANG I'm baffled. In what world would working at a FAANG, dealing with company politics, reporting to managers, having employment reviews, etc. be more desirable than the freedom and satisfaction of launching your own project and being able to very comfortably sustain yourself?
Working on a successful independent software project is, for a lot of people, much more desirable than working at someone else's company; in much the same way owning a startup company would be. But the key there is "successful", which is certainly not guaranteed.
If you ever wanted to jump on a podcast to talk about how you built and deploy it let me know. I'd love to have you on the https://runninginproduction.com/ podcast. You can click the "become a guest" button to get started if you were interested.
(Note: if anyone else wants to be a guest you can submit a request too, I just finished a huge stretch of 8 months worth of backlog episodes so I have openings again)
I think the importance of "offline apps" is overrated today. Personally, I spend less than 10 hours a year on a device without internet, and I think this number is decreasing each year, for everyone.
People use Google Maps and Wikipedia without having them on their hard drives. On the other hand, it is nice, that you can simply close a website and there is no track of that service in your computer.
Initial setup can be finnicky (test it on a separate subdomain!) but it shouldn't require much more than a correctly configured cache manifest and a few lines of code to handle updates.
while it is pretty easy and doable in maybe 1-2 days, depending on how fluent you are with these kinds of things... it's not entirely in the authors best interest. if people start using it `offline`, he wont be able to get advertisement revenue after all ;)
But yes, this is why I suggested testing with a separate subdomain.
SimilarWeb says the website has had 8 million visits in the past 6 months. His CPM must be very, very high.
From https://www.levels.fyi/
Google (total comp):
Level 4 - $266k
Level 5 (Senior) - $353k
Level 6 (Staff) - $484k
... and similarly at other FAANG companies.
If you're good/lucky, you can make it to Senior in 3-4 years as a new engineer.
It used to be that Level 5 -> 6 was a difficult jump, but nowadays there are many Level 6s and 7s. At Level 7, even your base salary >$250k a year.
Are you even allowed to release customer/client info like that?
Edit: thank you!
For example a very common thing you might want to do is add text (or any other layer) on top of an image and then center that text / layer either vertically or horizontally relative to the image.
In Photopea you create a text layer and then drag it near the middle and it'll show you guidelines when you're close and then snap into the perfect center (either vertically, horizontally or both). It takes like 2 seconds and feels intuitive.
In GIMP you have to make sure you switch to the alignment tool which is hidden by default so you need to remember to hit Q to activate it or hover over the move tool and select it but if you hit Q you better make sure you're not in any text input because it'll insert "Q" instead of switching your tool, but since you're adding text chances are you will be so you need to remember to click away. Then you need make sure you click an active area of your text layer and click the align horizontal icon, then you need to click the align vertical icon. Then if you decide you want to change your text you have to repeat this whole process again.
Another example is adding a simple stroke (line) around some text or other layer effects that Photoshop has had for over 10+ years.
In Photopea, you open up layer styles, pick the stroke option and can tweak the colors and thickness very quickly. After applying the style you can change and move around your text and the styles are applied to it automatically, it feels intuitive to use.
In GIMP I spent an hour researching plugins to add this behavior and after picking one it technically works but the user experience is pretty hostile. It creates the stroke as a separate layer so you can't move your text and the stroke together unless you remember to link them, and if you decide to change your text content or size you have to delete the old stroke layer and make a new one.
GIMP is really good in terms of what it can do but using it feels like death by a thousand paper cuts because you need to do so many steps to accomplish what feels like basic things that other editors have had for years when it comes to user friendly features.
I understand creating a highly polished image editor isn't easy and honestly if I knew their code base I would open a PR for the snap to center guidelines but at this point I have to imagine if they wanted to add that feature it would have been added. From the outside it feels like it hasn't been added because they don't want that feature, but as an end user that makes me wonder why. It's such a useful thing.
Outlining text is easy too. true, there isn't a magic text outline button, you must use the same method you would use to outline any arbitrary object.
The sum of your complaints are because you know how to do it in PS. I am a professional graphics designer and artist and I use gimp exclusively.
I used to use The GIMP exclusively, but I jumped to Photoshop when I could afford it, due to GIMP's poor UX and adjustment layers (which have been "coming soon" with GEGL since 2008).
Or PS is just more intuitive than GIMP.
> I am a professional graphics designer
Once you are using a tool professionally, I guess that intuitiveness is no longer a selling point. It is though for someone that only use it from time to time...
I'm talking about horizontally or vertically aligning a layer relative to the image, not the text within the rectangle bounding box of the text input box when you have the text tool activated.
It's such a common use case to want to take a layer (whether or not it's text isn't important) and center it horizontally or vertically relative to the entire image or another object.
I'm not sure what you mean.
If you have a 1000 x 1000 image I'd like to put the text "Hello" exactly in the middle of the image, both vertically and horizontally and let the tool determine the exact bounding box of the text input based on how much text I have.
> All of these "features" sound like training wheels for graphic designers.
In GIMP I described the workflow how to do that using the alignment tool. I also described for comparison how to do it in Photopea because it only involves dragging the layer near where it should be and it auto-snaps to perfect center with guidelines that appear when you're close.
This isn't a training wheels feature because both casual and professional graphic designers aren't eyeballing a pixel perfection alignment every time without thinking, but Photopea gives you this outcome with the least amount of effort you can ask for and its accuracy is 100%.
> It's not hard whatsoever to accomplish, and assuredly not worth paying monthly for.
There's a difference between hard and convenient. Executing a checklist of steps isn't hard but it sure is inconvenient if I need to do that every time I want to align something. It's the difference between something having a good / intuitive UI vs not.
How do you do the solid color background in Gimp? In Photoshop, I'd select the background with the magic wand (contiguous or non-contiguous, depending on preference), potentially use one of those edge-improving tools, then either press delete or create a mask. It apparently also has a special tool for it that I haven't used before but seems to do basically that.
When Blender finally bit-the-bullet and overhauled their UI - in a way that more aligned itself with how other keys/clicks worked in similar tools - it totally relaunched itself and is now so much easier to use.
It would be great it Gimp (and inkscape) did a similar overhaul IMHO.
I also find it more user friendly (unlike GIMP where I constantly feel like I'm fighting the bad UX instead of actually doing what I came to do), especially if you're used to Photoshop.
While I congratulate its developers for not using ads and making it free, it remains a pain to use sometimes. I mainly use it for cropping, resizing, and image blurring, but for anything else I use Photopea.
That being said, if I took the time to properly learn to utilize GIMP through tutorials, as I did with Photoshop back in the day, I wouldn't be surprised if my opinion does a 180.
I just had a quick look at google, netflix, twitter and facebook and they don't even offer any SE positions here. Amazon has some in Berlin but they pay around the same salary as stated above.
Otherwise, in Berlin there are other bigger tech companies and with remote opening up more and more the salaries tend to increase. Currently the biggest companies in Berlin when it comes to compensation: Microsoft, GitHub, Airbnb, SAP, Wayfair, Amazon, Datadog (Remote), Snowflake, Shopify (Remote), Hubspot (Remote), Spotify (Remote), DigitalOcean (Remote), MongoDB, Stripe (Remote). I wrote an article about it here: https://www.kevinpeters.net/top-tech-companies-berlin-2021
Most of these companies offer more close to 90-100k or even more (depends on the stock). So it is not FAANG but it gets better and better throughout the years.
Btw, I should probably not post this but we share the exact same name and work in the same field. :D
With everything being remote right now, people have been taking jobs on the California wage scale, but living in Peoria.
And unless you've been grandfathered into a rent controlled apartment, inner city rents for newcomers are overpriced AF, especially after the new rent controll law kicked in in Berlin, further restricting supply and increased the prices for newcomers.
The only real options are:
All these paths have kind of unknowns unfortunately and the path to permanent residency is even more strict. Or you just marry someone from the US.I'd much rather work for a local software shop for a slightly above-averege salary in a country where the prospect of owning an apartment is more than a fantasy, where I won't go bankrupt if I have a serious medical issue, won't get shot by a raging idiot if I don't start moving at a red light fast enough, my hypothetical children can get excellent education without taking out predatory loans that will follow them for the rest of their life, not to mention the political system over there.....
Driving in Bay Area feels positively relaxed to many places in Europe too. Hell, even LA is a lot nicer place to drive than Rome.
Don't get me wrong there's plenty of folks who struggle in America, but white-collar employees of the top five tech megacorps ain't them.
Being a software engineer in the valley definitely means you’ll likely have a pretty good healthcare situation that might be better than the free version you get in other countries...
which european country would that be? owning property is out of reach for most europeans because the high tax and social burden make it pretty much impossible to save up for a house
I'm from Slovenia and, ignoring the capital, which has a huge housing shortage (not much room for the city to expand), it's still quite common for people to own apartments. It's definitely decreasing, like everywhere in the world, but not unheard of. I also never said anything about a house - that's a completely different story.
From what I've heard, normal apartments basically don't exist in big tech centres in the US. You either get an expensive moldy hole in the wall or a huge new development that even a C-level will have a hard time getting a loan for.
Again, all of this is just from my perspective with the parameters that I care about. I know it works for many people, but the US really just isn't for me.
When your marginal tax rate rises to roughly 40% once you earn 50k Euros I'd say it is an issue.
And that's only direct taxation.
On the other hand the public transport is great, which means you don't have to live in the most expensive areas to have decent commute.
Note that the point with a solid/free education system isn't that kids of rich SEs get free college - it's that society as a whole gets better education - and your kid's friends also have a future/access to education.
The USA has some good things going for it: VC money, great salaries, true freedom of speech (unlike the EU), right to bear arms (unlike most of the EU, where only robbers have guns and if you defend yourself you risk getting sued - tried on my skin), beautiful seaside, legal weed, less problems with immigrants (African immigration is a bomb waiting to explode, if it hasn't exploded already), place with good opportunity and enjoy a nice climate (in Europe the choice is between cold places with good work opportunity, aka UK, Switzerland or warm places with a barely functioning economy and ridiculously high taxes).
Unfortunately health care is too expensive, taxes are as high as Europe (where is your freedom?), the food is subpar, mass shooting in schools, you have to drive way too much, a culture that is transitioning kids because they think they're the opposite gender.
All in all, I think I'll stick with Europe for the time being and consider maybe South America or South East Asia in the future.
That would be Canada, not the US. Even though some US states allow it, the feds do not.
For me the biggest luxury of being a software engineer is, that pretty much wherever I go, I’m going to be solidly middle class within that region. So I can afford prioritizing other things over maximizing salary.
For example if you want to work for Google in Europe it's either UK or Switzerland, which are interestingly the two developed european countries outside of the EU :)
For many people staying close to the place they grew up and their family is important. If you get a well-paid job there it can be more attractive than moving halfway around the world for more money.
And there are numerous places in Germany and Northern Europe where an experienced developer can command €80-90k.
Consider that a senior position at Amazon Berlin wich lists €80-100K range would be more towards €300k in Bay Area.
That's not what I wrote. I said they pay as well as others in the area. Yes, not everyone pays exactly like Google or Amazon, but other tech jobs in the Bay Area are also far above national median for developers. FAANG pays well but they still pay in relation to the area, they don't just give away $300k paychecks to people anywhere in the world.
And the rest also just confirms what I mean, 80k in Germany are a great salary. Many people won't gain much moving to the Bay Area to get $250k (if they can). The standard of living won't be that much higher than with 80k in Berlin.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/11/03/ire...
[1]: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/apple-s-cash-mountain-ho...
Or Ireland, or France, or Belgium.
It's a recipe for disaster. As will become apparent when some other equally strategically placed jurisdiction starts offering even more enticing tax-breaks and the megacorps up sticks and decamp there instead. Then the whole house of cards [and with it most of the Irish economy] will come tumbling down.
What a pathetic pathetic country!
[and I say that as a terminally embarrassed Irishman]
At the moment, if I were the Irish government, I think I'd be more concerned with the likelihood of genuine international collaboration on business taxes than any single rival nation setting up a more favourable tax regime. Even the Biden administration now seems to be acknowledging that this may be the way forward with the need for governments to make up unprecedented economic damage from the pandemic, and if the US moves that way, there is political cover and financial incentive for other governments in the developed world to move that way too.
While there are obvious benefits to FAANGing, there’s also a lot to be said for working for a smaller team, or even yourself. Money isn’t the soul (or even main) motivator for a lot of people.
Either way, isn’t this mostly semantics? My point is that one persons priorities doesn’t necessarily match with another’s.
Americans use “pension” as short for “defined benefit pension”, meaning you are owed some amount of money every month after the retirement age, and it’s up to the employer to do whatever needs to be done to provide it.
Americans use “401k” or “IRA” to refer to a defined contribution pension, one where the employer (and employee) contributes a certain amount into an account that is withdrawn from after retirement. However, the amount the employee can withdraw is subject to however much is in the account when they retire and however much the employee wants to periodically withdraw, so there is no definite benefit amount.
I have British family that refer to the latter as a pension, but we would not in the US. I would be surprised if any modern tech company offers a defined benefit pension anymore, even in UK/Europe.
My guess is he wouldn't want to work in a FAANG and they wouldn't want to hire him.
Needless to say year-by-year I forgot everything I've learned before. My CV might got a boost, but my skillset decreased a lot. Only thing what I've learned is politics and how to push and decorate an empty promo doc.
I was a braindead when I finally got my stocks. So went back to the startup word, where I could thrive. The average lifespan was like 1 year there, most people did not even wait for the stock so basically worked cheap for amazon.
And many other similar stories
Ok then running photopea is not comparable to a FAANG 9-5
FAANGs hire for people who can make a small part of a larger whole incredibly well. That's mostly good for what they do, which often requires deep knowledge of specialist algorithms, but they miss out on hiring generalists who aren't necessarily good at the deep stuff but who can make lots of simple processes work well together. Which,in my opinion, is what you need to be a good front end developer.
I just think photopea is far more than "generalists who aren't necessarily good at the deep stuff".
I think Photopea is pretty complicated alogrithm wise too
And there's a high chance they would be rejected for lack of culture fit anyway. Or fail one of the quirky whiteboard tests.
Maybe they know they are just too clever for FAANG companies and can do even better for themselves by starting their own businesses?
We have to stop this constant submission to FAANG companies as 'the dream job' when in fact there are smaller companies out there that are just as good as they are and are also extremely profitable.
I don't they are interested in the glory days of the 2010s which the FAANG companies were the talk of the town. Fast-forward 10 years, they are now under scrutiny by everyone and it's not looking good for them. It's time to find new and emerging companies that will define the 2020s or 2030s.
I agree! There’s also highly profitable private software businesses that are bigger than Netflix. I work for one. While it doesn’t pay nearly as well as FAANG, it does pay well, and is low-pressure / laid-back (I’m actually thinking about leaving not for better pay but for a faster-paced environment).
Some other people would consider morally reprehensible to be accomplices of FAANG. I wouldn't work for them even if I could. It would be like working for Fox News.
Or also simply not being a cultural fit. What if you’re a republican?
In Ivan’s case he has clearly achieved success and financial freedom on his own terms, so kudos to him.
Many of us would love to be able to do that, even if it meant taking a pay cut.
Honestly I hoped their presence would help push local companies to up their game and drive salaries up for developers in a low wage market, unfortunately that is yet to happen 15 years later.
1. I have worked for FAANG adjacent companies(similar market cap) in the silicon valley. It is not exactly a badge of honor, sure - if other people want to honor you and you want to ride it why not. But it is not a badge of honor IMO. Horror? Sure.
2. People talk about 200+ guaranteed for a long time now. I think no one has caught on to it yet. Programmers of this caliber can and do pull ~600K regularly in FAANG and FAANG adjacent. If they are capable of people management at the same time (very few at this programming caliber are), then they will be pushed into the executive situation with millions in stock.
...or assuming that an excellent programmer (or, in fact, just a programmer) wants to deal with FAANG in the first place.
I could make more money as a waiter in Germany or Austria than in my devops job in the Balkans, but a) money isn't always the main motivation, especially in Europe and b) the same amount of money goes a lot further than in Silicon Valley.
It's not that comparable.
- Jeff Hammerbacher
We're going to regret this sooner than later.
I'm not sure what ads can give us...
Oh wait, we still have those nuclear weapons too!
Back in reality, very few of the best minds work in ad tech.
That fraudulent quote should be challenged every time it's posted, until it finally dies.
Using the best mind to improve trade is a good thing. Sorry if its not popular around herr but its true.
If the developer of Photopea went to work on advert technology what would happen? The world would loose this great piece of software, one of the worlds richest advertising companies might get imperceptibly better at targeting ads, and the creator has to stop working on his own pet project which he is doing on his own terms and work on whatever his boss tells him to. Besides, if he achieves his goal of becoming one of the most popular image editors in the world, there is a good chance Photopea will be much more valuable than he will have earned as a salary at FAANG.
I think that 90% of ad tech is useless shit technology that just exists to take a cut of the money, without actually providing much of a value to anyone.
It's like realtors or financial advisors or other middlemen like that. The main reason for them being there is that it's a very profitable business to get a cut of somebody else's transactions.
May have sounded nice, but successful creators eventually become advertisers. As long as they have money to spend on marketing, they'll spend it to get in front of the right people
And, since I have an almost pathological hatred of adverts, I block them and use Stylebot to remove the space where they'd be.
But I'm glad the dev is making a decent living from what I've previously described as probably the most impressive web app I've ever seen. He deserves rewarded for his work but I'm sorry, I'm NEVER even looking at --never mind 'clicking on'-- a single advert while using the web, if I can possibly help it.
Would the clever people working on ads and manipulating consumers actually pursue careers like chemical enginerting which solves fundamental problems of human civilisation?
I hate what web ads have become, but I’m pretty sure they’re not a significant driver of homelessness.
I am asking whether we have any proof that the advertising i dustry contributes anything substantial to the real economy, or we would be better off if these people were doing something else
It also shows the power of smart design and keeping as much as you can client side. Attempting to move any of the actual work to the server side would create an unsustainable amount of a) additional development work, b) infrastructure cost, c) infrastructure operations work. It's also a great example that you truly can do everything inside a browser nowadays.
Regarding the incredulous people who can't imagine how 12 TB/month cost only $50, the hosting provider may be taking a small loss on it, and make it up with other customers. At Hetzner, extra bandwidth (after you've exhausted your included allocation) retails for 1 EUR/TB + VAT. A provider can afford to lose $10-20/month on a single customer, and kicking them out is probably not worth the effort and the risk of even the smallest amount of bad press/word-of-mouth.
But it's still a far shot from needing a tens of millions of dollars to build a factory, or even tens of thousands to buy some basic equipment for some smaller business that doesn't have the potential to get anywhere nearly as big.
The best thing about programming is that you don't need an invitation to an exclusive club. No degree, no connections, no expensive licenses. You can put stuff out there for the whole world to see and it costs <100$ to have a functioning website with payment integration.
You need talent and dedication to recognize and solve problems people consider important. It's maybe the last mostly meritocratic fields left. We are lucky to have it, it might not be for very long.
Edit: rephrase
Totally agree that the ads paying the bills is what enabled Photopea to become so good in the end.
Many of them probably use Photopea, a much cheaper alternative to buying huge numbers of CC subscriptions...
There is something hilarious in the fact that image editing farms in India, whose clients come from all over the world, use a Web app made by one guy in the Czech Republic.
Another interesting fact is that those farms get most of their business from Google ads, and the maker of Photopea in turn makes most of his money from ads.
Photoshop is just way to slow compared to Photopea. So it’s both easier to use and much faster than the original.
Kudos to Ivan for this!
You can also use it to convert Gimp, Sketch, Figma, SVG and other formats to layered PSDs.
https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_...
> I was contacted by one of developers of Adobe XD, to coordinate me about the development of the XD format (which is very new and still in development, but I implemented it into Photopea). I am trying to compete with all photo editors, but Adobe Photoshop is the most popular one today (that is why I worked so hard on supporting PSD files).
I have used Photopea for about 2 years now after I got introduced to it from the reddit AMA. Used to use Photoshop for created App Store screenshots for my app, then I upgraded my Mac and my old Photoshop wasn't supported on the new MacOS (64 bit stuff if I remember right) and I didn't want to shell money on a new license. Photopea was a convenient choice considering I don't have to install anything on my Mac plus it loads much faster (if browser caches) than Photoshop itself.
Few examples of the App Store screenshots for my Hacker News app HACK:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer...
Something tells me I'm by far not the only one who has heard of Photoshop, and GIMP, but not Photopea.
Of course one way to defend that would be to have the company be US based or with founding US partners.
https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_...
Had a great time with you 2 years ago when you came to Nantes, France to explain "Developing the best free photo editor". Check-out his explanations here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZmaeC_Ma5A
Legend.
1. Nobody can buy Photopea, if I refuse to sell it.
2. I am not aware of using a work of someone else, or a unique idea of someone else. I would not be able to live in a world, where I am constantly scared, that someone more powerful can put me in jail, just because they have more money for lawyers. I hope our world is not like that, and if it is, I am ready to fight to change it.
1. Putting ads in an iframe hosted on a separate origin.
2. Posting a privacy policy.
Along with Figma one of the brightest examples of how browser apps can be slick, performant and powerful.
- AWS Cloud9 (IDE)
- Google Docs (Office Suite)
- Gravit Designer (Vector editor)
- Photopea (Photo editor)
- Google Mail
What are your favorite web apps?
It's rather good.
I wonder about the implementation. How is this done? Feels performant from my limited testing. I see that it uses WebGL but would love to know more details.
Photopea instead copies Photoshop’s interface, which is its real asset.
But neither Krita nor Gimp are supposed to be drop-in replacements for Photoshop anyway so that's okay.
As an added bonus with Photopea I have to relearn GUI patterns nor shortcuts, I can apply what I've learned in years of PS usage.
This is an opportunity for FOSS, if the objective is to increase adoption from casual users. I wonder if the GIMP version that was made to look like PS is still a thing
Also if you have a slower computer wouldn't running everything in Javascript be the last thing that you would want to do.
Furthermore if you where to measure RAM usage between the apps I bet GIMP would be far more conservative with the same load.
Also if you are editing images for a living 100 megabyte really isn't that much? Lets say you have RGB images of a resolution of 1920x1080. Sixteen or seventeen of this would be 100 MB already? If you are using layers you quite quickly reach this amount of storage. So the size of GIMP is really negligible.
The only definition of someone with more "limited means", where this would be better is someone who is using a chromebook but still has a 1st world tier internet connection. I'd be happy to be corrected if I am wrong however.