I'm an international student in the U.S. Tax filing for Nonresident Aliens on a F-1 or J-1 visa can be quite tricky, especially since there are almost no resources online that cover our situation. What information I could find are posts from tax software companies, and they are usually thinly-veiled marketing posts.
This year, I decided to make a guide on how to file taxes as a F-1 student or J-1 scholar. I cover not just the basics, but also advanced topics such as:
* How to claim a tax treaty benefit. Most countries have tax treaties with the U.S. where visiting students and scholars can get an exemption on income tax.
* How to determine if you're a resident alien or nonresident. This is a big point, because as a resident alien, you are taxed on global income.
* How to properly declare investment income on a F-1 visa.
My guide is independent, noncommercial, and open source. There are no ads. It's entirely self-hosted and made by me.
Since this is HN, I will share some notes about the tech stack.
I am using Ghost as the content management system (CMS), since it's a best-in-class CMS that is also open source. The frontend is a custom theme that I forked from one of the included defaults:
https://github.com/collegetaxguide/collegetaxguide-theme
The biggest thing that I learned building this is that modern javascript development uses a lot of toolchains. I used to work in Bootstrap and hand-write javascript with jQuery, but those days are long gone.
I tried to optimize the website as much as I can, and I learned about HTML <picture> tags. Using a <picture> tag, you can serve different versions of an image, and let the browser load the best one. For instance, you can serve the background image of your landing point in AVIF, WEBP, and PNG formats, and if the browser supports it, they will only load AVIF.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/pi...
I know that a lot of the more experienced developers probably already knew that, but it was very cool for me.
Thank you for seeing my Show HN. I'll be around to answer any questions.