Shift To Europe

My General Standpoint

Since I hadn’t yet written about it here (but made allusions to it on mastodon): I am concerned about and disappointed in the US, especially its tech sector. A snarky reader could point out that disappointment in the tech sector is a universal experience and that snarky reader wouldn’t be wrong. However, it seems correct to assume that big tech - and all big (software) tech is US tech at this point - is bad.¹

• all big tech companies are trying to exploit labor in various forms
• all big tech companies are trying to skirt regulation to keep the market fair and open
• all big tech companies are actively exploiting their relationship to their customers in various forms
• all big tech companies don’t do enough for the environment nor do they give us options to buy products that are environmentally conscious[
• all big tech companies invest heavily in generative AI and market this tool for frivolous use cases
• the CEOs of all big tech companies bent the knee to a criminal after the election

But not only big tech, also many smaller and medium-sized tech companies are based in the US and many of the tools that we use are US-based. And apart from us giving money and data to these US-based companies and therefore their economy, we as non-US customers don’t matter in the same way as US-based customers. Also do our laws clearly not matter as much. And our values also don’t matter in the same way.

Now, everything is a lot more complicated than that. Just because things are made in Europe doesn’t mean they are better, more ethical, safer or will respectfully engage with consumers/users. But a shift to Europe still means something. It’s about control or at least access. If I’m unlucky with a piece of software that is made in Europe, I do have different ways to enforce laws. I can try to find other users that have similar concerns and we could try to enforce or improve a given situation within the EU together.

In practice, this is not an avenue I’d want to ever go down, but it’s still better to have it available, than to sit here on this side of the Atlantic and let people with their own problems and interests just take my money and data and otherwise don’t care about me.

Giving my money to Europeans also feels better. It pays salaries of fellow European workers or entrepreneurs. It also breaks the pattern that money and data for software just has to go to the USA: Even if that’s not literally true in 100% of the cases, it seems to be the default. It doesn’t have to be the default.

There’s also an opportunity here to reevaluate the landscape in terms of what is available as a self hosted solution. Is there maybe even a local first or local only option that suffices? In other words: Is there an open source tool or an app (as opposed to a service with a subscription) that could be used?

So, most things in my setup can be replaced by something less invasive and more under my control. It’ll take some work and it’ll take some getting used to, but changing the things I use to get work done is certainly possible. This might not do a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it certainly makes me feel a little better and makes me live more according to my own beliefs and values.

Exceptions, Exceptions everywhere

So with that said, it’s not that easy or reasonably possible to just get rid of big tech altogether, as we all know. I certainly will also not just switch to worse apps just because “US bad”, although I’ll use my momentum to reevaluate and to shake things up a bit.

That being said, one bit tech company I just can’t let go is Apple. All my personal devices are apple devices and even though I hate their rent seeking practices in the app store and some of their other behaviors (and their recent ads, too), but by comparison it still seems to me the least bad option in consumer electronics. It’s a little bit harder to say how committed they actually are to their stated goals: accessibility, education, caring for the environment, inclusion and diversity, privacy, equity and investments in a fair supply chain (all taken from the footer of the apple website under the heading of Apple Values), but be that as it may: Apple actually does give me the option to buy carbon neutrally produced products for example² and it still seems to me that what they say about privacy is not just empty talk.³

I am also fine with using indie apps and services that are simply indispensable to me. Due comes to mind. And obviously Obsidian. Good Apps.

And finally I’m willing to try new stuff. In a move almost diametrically opposed to the tone of this post, I recently started to use TickTick for example, even though it is US/China-based.⁴

Decisions, so far

I have not made many moves, yet. But two come to mind:

Jetbrains in, VSCode out (mostly)

Jetbrains is a company based in the Czech Republic that was founded by three Russians back in the day. That sounded an alarm at first. And to be honest I had my gripes about some of the UX with PHPStorm over the years (1, 2) so I never bothered to check it out further. However three things happened:

1. I am working on pretty big legacy php projects now, that make PHPStorm mandatory because Intelephense/VSCode can’t handle the code base anymore.
2. For a side project I started to use Laravel way more than ever before and fell in love with it. And falling in love with Laravel made me realize how good Jetbrains' Laravel Idea plugin is.
3. I noticed that even though Jetbrains had connections to Russia, they ceased operations there, relocated all the people in their Russian locations and made clear their stance against the war in Ukraine.

Having to switch IDEs for recreational programming and work - especially since working with Laravel in PHPStorm using the idea plugin is just so great - felt more and more cumbersome and so I kinda sorta just started to customize and use PHPStorm as my main IDE.

Because my setup consists of two machines - a beefy “devbox” running linux and all the projects; and a MacBook Air as the client from which I do “remote work” through ssh on the devbox - 100% of my work is done “remotely”. That means I either use VSCode with their various remote extensions or use Jetbrains Gateway.

Whereas VSCode works with 1Password’s SSH-Agent, Jetbrains Gateway does not and has the added annoyance that even when using a more conventional ssh-key makes you enter its passphrase twice for some reason. I’ll have to look into that a little more, but for the time being I will use VSCode for source control and for more dev-ops-y tasks that require to edit a file here and there, but I’m not working on a specific project adding features.

Why even move away from VSCode? Isn’t it open source? It is. And it is remarkable that Microsoft of all the companies has made a product that is just great in almost all aspects. But: It’s still Microsoft and that always bothered me. I have to use various Microsoft enterprise products throughout my working day and still deal with Microsoft induced bs in my free time in the form of tech support. Their recent moves vis-a-vis Microsoft Recall are questionable at best. Microsoft is very often not the least worst option and even though their free open source editor is one of the best you can get (but what about emacs), it is actually not the best IDE for PHP-based development.

Intelephense, a 3rd party language server and vs code extension for PHP is great and impressive. AFAIK it is still developed by only one person! But it can’t handle big repos and it lacks refactoring tools that you get when you use PHPStorm. A little earlier I pointed out that the Laravel Idea plugin for PHPStorm is amazing and there just doesn’t exist a comparable alternative for VSCode.

This is not a post about why PHPStorm is better than Visual Studio Code for PHP development, but there is another “social” point worth mentioning: In my circles almost everyone - certainly everyone at my current job - is using PHPStorm anyways. My company provided me with a license for it and all the documentation on how to setup a new project is basically written for PHPStorm users. When working together with another developer, it can be difficult to not get derailed by the different ways things work in vscode vs. PHPStorm. Especially when I am the one who needs help, I don’t want to be asked all the time “why don’t you just use PHPStorm…” as if that would solve the problem (it almost never does). I don’t want to deal with that anymore.

All of these things added up to me using vscode less and less. It depends a little on the project, but as it pertains to this blog post, I am actually quite happy that PHPStorm is based in the EU and that it became my main driver.

Actual in, YNAB out

YNAB - or You need a budget - is an US-based budgeting app that I have used (and at times loved!) on and off for years at this point. It has been much cheaper in the past and they recently raised prices (again). Well, fortune would have it that I was made aware of a pretty comparable open source solution that is called Actual Budget. Is it more rickety and less pretty than YNAB? Yes. But does it have basically the same feature set PLUS a bank account syncing feature that works with my bank (which is something YNAB still doesn’t offer) and costs much less than YNAB? Also yes.

I love that actual can be run super easily through the Malta-based hosting service PikaPods. It’ll cost me the equivalent of 16.92$ (so ~16€, but I don’t know if that includes VAT or not…) instead of 109$ (+ VAT; so 103.21€ + 25,5% = 129.53€) per year. So after thinking about it for a couple of months I made the switch. The world didn’t implode and I’m still budgeting.

Parting words

Sometimes something happens in the world and it somehow changes my whole approach to certain things. The very disappointing and worrying US-election and the (only slightly but still) better situation here in Europe - he says living in a country run by rightwing government that at this very moment dismantles the social democratic base that makes Finland so livable - made me reevaluate my setup: The apps and tools I use and what I’m willing to spend for them - be that time, money, brain cycles or all of the above.

I imagine that this’ll continue and that I will continue to change apps and services in a way that makes them more Eurocentric. As I said above, this is more about potential control (and actual control if switching to something self hosted) than anything else, but I would lie if it wasn’t also in part about a loss of trust.