Their status page does not reflect any issues at the time of writing, I can access the remote console for my droplets although their interface is very slow.
As someone working in the industry, I can say that unfortunately NHS funds are very poorly managed with lots of corruption within management. My believe is that a lot of the staff are passionate and hard-working, however at least an equal number of staff are worn-down, disillusioned and dispassionate due to years of managerial neglect and high public expectation.
There is also a believe that the NHS is a single national entity, which is not the case. Both Wales and Scottish have a national trust whereas England has 100's, totally 217 trusts as of April 2020 [1]. This does not allow for combined purchasing power, shared resources and causes duplicate effort in almost every area.
How about dentistry? Seems odd that for the most part that's not covered under the NHS. It wasn't until adulthood I understood all the jokes about British peoples teeth!
My hope is that we can move to another model that is directly free to the end user, reduce the eye watering waiting times and put the almost £200B annual funding to good use.
Although dental coverage on the NHS sucks, British people actually have quite good overall oral health outcomes. If you google, you can find that some studies place British overall oral health ahead of the US.
For anyone who's spent a significant amount of time in the US this shouldn't be too much of a surprise. Middle and upper class Americans have access to excellent dental care, but if you spend some time in the poorer parts of town, you'll see plenty of people with missing teeth and other severe dental problems. NHS dentistry is poor, but it's better than nothing (which is what a lot of poor Americans effectively get).
There's also the aesthetic aspect of it. Europeans in generally tend to be culturally less interested in tooth straightening and whitening.
Whilst I would generally agree, in the days of simultaneously juggling working and childcare, devices like tablets can be a game changer. When configured correctly with educational apps and sensible time restrictions, it is great to see my toddler learn things for himself.
The world has changed both with our roles are parents and the environment which we exist in. My 2 year old would quite happily be able to order food via an unavoidable touch screen interface at a fast food restaurant!
Discovering Laravel a couple of years ago was perhaps one of the most significant things that made PHP interesting again after 20+ years of working with PHP.
It's refreshing (as far as PHP goes) and worth checking out with an open mind. Performance on the other hand, that take a little more work.
Performance keeps getting better, particularly with PHP 7 and 8. And just last week, “Laravel Octane” was announced... it lets you serve a Laravel app using Swoole, and early benchmarks on a MacBook Pro suggest 25k+ HTTP requests served per second!
Laravel Octane is using Swoole which implements a complete webserver, so there won‘t be any php-fpm more. As you would need to restart the server for every code change, there won‘t be a performance difference between docker on mac and non-docker.
