So, I came to Canada almost two years ago from Ireland. To work in Game Development. Sick of working in the crappy IT stuff I was doing at home, just wasn't happy.
I stayed at a hostel called The Clarence Park and got on well with the Owner Danny. Long story short, Danny got me involved with his startup - an OTA by the name of OnlyHostels - as a developer, I understood what problems he was facing and he asked for help to fix some issues he was having and to help him develop the software further. It was meant to be a few hours a week and for my assistence I would be given free room and board. That was fine. It was easy to do, it was simple, and I could save money.
So, I took a day job in Construction, a night job doing my Game Development stuff and in between I worked for Danny on OnlyHostels - an upcoming OTA.
Long story short - fast forward a year and a half later, we have developed a functional but not complete hybrid channel manager and PMS system designed specificly for HostelOwners (in the owners eyes) but had many issues to do with Design that I was never happy with. But the core of the software was good. It removed the need for connecting to third party channel managers, like MyAllocator, Siteminder and so on yet kept the realtime approach that a dedicated channelmanager gave you.
Anyway. Never mind all that tech talk.
After a year and a half this few days a week had turned into a full time seven day a week job, but without pay. Yet I was still holding my full time day job and working at night till the wee hours of the monring when I got home, under the same terms. I had put aside my game development dreams and bet on this under a promise that I would be part of the team when it launched. But there was many issues with this.
After a year and a half I took some time off to go to Newfoundland & Labrador and some other Canadian provinces to see some of Canada. Since arriving on my two year visa I had not done any traveling or had any fun or pretty much done anything except work myself to exhaustion. It effected my relationship with my long time girlfriend, my finances and my chance of PR. I needed a break.
While on this trip, I had an issue with my amazon AWS account where an invoice was not paid and I was not aware of it - and as anyone will know if they have been to newfoundland's south coast, Signel strength on your mobile and data are not things that are readily available. So a few days in, a week in, the site went down and I had no knowledge of it. When finally I became aware of it I organised to get the site up.
However. While doing so. I came across a bunch of emails (as I admined the entire infrastructure I had bult in the cloud as well as developed the software) from the owner of the company and a guy who I had thought fired, but was his friend, planning to get some more free work out of me and then to fire me, change all the passwords and lock me out and leave me high and drive. This of course upset me. So I contacted my employer in a rage and asked basicly, WTF is going on. Met with silence. I got angrier and angrier and things spinned down and down into a load of shit that is now.
I asked to be paid for the invoices that had cost me money. It came to way over 350 dollars but I asked only for 350 dollars. Considering I normally work for over 60 dollar an hour, for a year and a half's work, 350 dollars was pittance. But it would get me out of a rut I was in at the time and I could, though angry, solve OnlyHostels remaining problems as the rest of their so called IT staff could not.
Again, long story short.... I had to teach them a lesson.
https://www.facebook.com/onlyhostels?fref=ts
HTTP://www.onlyhostels.com
I have forwarded their website on to a reputable and actually workable Hostel Site, locked them out of various accounts (but sent them the new user names and passwords, because I'm not a mean person, so let them fix it).
In addition, I am no longer giving them access to the source code that I developed and I plan on polishing it up when I finish my trip and posting it here... on hostel management under an openSource license. Either GPL or Mozilla maybe Apache. Not sure yet.
You will get
Open Source PMS
Open Source Decentralized/Hybrid Channel Manager (no need for third parties! connects to thousands of endpoints!)
Open Source CMS
Open Source OTA
At least something good came of it.
Though he's left me broke, with no money to my name, stuck in Canada, with two mouths to feed, no work and now I have to find a way to survive and get another job very quickly.
Absolutly horrible.
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