Fellow Italian here, started working in Germany 5 years ago right after my B.Sc. in CS, will be moving to Paris in March. I have not been working for a startup, but if you love programming there are plenty of cool things to do.
I know what it means to feel isolated, but as you noticed you are only isolated "locally", online you can find plenty of like-minded people. Keep applying in the US if you wish, but you should know we have a lot of opportunities here in Europe as well.
I have no concrete lead for you, my professional network in Germany is limited and the companies I know require some knowledge of German, but feel free to contact me on twitter, would love to have a chat (username is the same as here).
I live in Leipzig and I have no name on the doorbell near my flat door. If they deliver a packet to a neihgbor I have to go out and ring the doorbell at the entrance, or guess which apartment it is :)
> Are ancient cities actually getting higher in altitude as old ruins get covered up?
I recently watched a TV show from a relatively old series about underground cities where they showed the underground of Istanbul. Very interesting, but I can't remember the name of the show.
"The course of the old racetrack has been indicated with paving, although the actual track is some 2 m (6.6 ft) below the present surface. The surviving monuments of the Spina (the middle barrier of the racecourse), the two obelisks and the Serpentine Column, now sit in holes in a landscaped garden."
In my spare time I am working on Seatbelt (http://seatbelt.io), a web app to help developers find pair programming partners.
It's cool because I think we need to bring developers together and share the knowledge, and I am convinced that pair programming is a powerful way to do it. There is much we can learn from working with people from different backgrounds.
Right now there is only a landing page with some copy, I work on the code when I find time. It's taking a while since I use this project to teach myself node.js (I am a .NET backend guy in my day job) but it's a fun side project.
Damn, it reminds me of one of the projects I worked on, a .NET Winforms project with about 2 MLOC.
It was the result of automatically porting a codebase written with a RAD system called Gupta Team Developer / SQLWindows[1]. The original language supported multiple inheritance and the converted code was a huge mess of tangled interfaces trying to reproduce that. The tool generated lots of duplicated code and some monster constructs like a static class with 140.000 lines of code, with all public methods.
I still weep for my colleagues who were left to tame that mess.
How do you cope with the pronunciation though? It is my 5th year living in Germany, and as an italian I find the pronunciation much more straightforward in German than in English.
Wow thank you for that, I just found out about her old blog and it looks very interesting!
For clueless people like me, if the images used in her posts look familiar it's because she is the co-creator of the Head First book series: http://www.headfirstlabs.com/kathy.php
Ironically (or not, and I missed your reference) random, un-nerdy Germans already fight with Youtube videos being blocked and are faced with a similar message very often [1].
I see at least two problems: the leverage that the other party actually has (GEMA, DT) and the willingness of the citizens to do something about it.
I know what it means to feel isolated, but as you noticed you are only isolated "locally", online you can find plenty of like-minded people. Keep applying in the US if you wish, but you should know we have a lot of opportunities here in Europe as well.
I have no concrete lead for you, my professional network in Germany is limited and the companies I know require some knowledge of German, but feel free to contact me on twitter, would love to have a chat (username is the same as here).