Weekly Review #141 - Warsaw's Tech Scene, Hacking Airport Lounges, and Empathy through Fiction
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Spent this week poking around Warsaw, Poland. Great place!Some fast facts:Has 21k programmers (same as Berlin) a big tech scene for tier 2 cityOld Town was completely destroyed in WW2, they rebuilt it by stealing the bricks from old towns in cities across PolandPopular place to for foreign companies to find cheap, good programmers, as things are Eastern European cheap but with Western quality education (Uber is there!)When communism failed, they put a stock exchange in the party building, lolPolish fame: The Witcher videogame, Estimote beacon software, big list of other startups hereSuper strong vegan scene! for super cheap, even I could be vegan thereThe day before I left, I coworked out of SFO's AMEX lounge....without a flight. My travel hacker friend Ben Yu does this regularly - with his Ameriprise Platinum card, you can purchase flights, then cancel them to get all your points back, and the boarding pass still gets your through security.So we drove to SFO, parked in hotel parking, took the shuttle to the terminal, went through security, and then....sat in the snazzy AMEX lounge all day eating their free buffet, showering in their nice bathroom, and availing ourselves of free wifi. The food was good! But the hassle of booking, canceling, and security makes it something I'd probably not do often.
Weekly Review #141 - Warsaw's Tech Scene, Hacking Airport Lounges, and Empathy through Fiction
Weekly Review #141 - Warsaw's Tech Scene…
Weekly Review #141 - Warsaw's Tech Scene, Hacking Airport Lounges, and Empathy through Fiction
Spent this week poking around Warsaw, Poland. Great place!Some fast facts:Has 21k programmers (same as Berlin) a big tech scene for tier 2 cityOld Town was completely destroyed in WW2, they rebuilt it by stealing the bricks from old towns in cities across PolandPopular place to for foreign companies to find cheap, good programmers, as things are Eastern European cheap but with Western quality education (Uber is there!)When communism failed, they put a stock exchange in the party building, lolPolish fame: The Witcher videogame, Estimote beacon software, big list of other startups hereSuper strong vegan scene! for super cheap, even I could be vegan thereThe day before I left, I coworked out of SFO's AMEX lounge....without a flight. My travel hacker friend Ben Yu does this regularly - with his Ameriprise Platinum card, you can purchase flights, then cancel them to get all your points back, and the boarding pass still gets your through security.So we drove to SFO, parked in hotel parking, took the shuttle to the terminal, went through security, and then....sat in the snazzy AMEX lounge all day eating their free buffet, showering in their nice bathroom, and availing ourselves of free wifi. The food was good! But the hassle of booking, canceling, and security makes it something I'd probably not do often.