overshard's comments

I've taken to hosting everything critical like this myself on a single system with Docker Compose with regular off premises backups and a restore process that I know works because I test it every 6 months. I can swap from local hosting to a VPS in 30 mins if I need to. It seems like the majority of large services like GitHub have had increasingly annoying downtime while I try to get work done. If you know what you're doing it's a false premise that you'll just have more issues with self hosting. If you don't know what you are doing it's becoming an increasingly good time to learn. I've had 4 years of continuous uptime on my services at this point. I still push to third parties like GitHub as yet another backup and see the occasional 500 and my workflow keeps chugging along. I've gotten old and grumpy and rather just do it myself.

Fun fidget utility! I find myself just mindlessly clicking stuff sometimes while I think and this gives me a little bit more to do.

Location: North Carolina

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, Django, Flask, JavaScript, React, Redux, Node.js, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, AWS, Docker, Git, HTML, CSS, SASS

Résumé/CV: https://isaacbythewood.com/static/pdfs/resume-isaac-bythewoo...

Email: [email protected]

I'm a full-stack developer who has been the team lead on numerous successful projects with over 15 years of experience in Web Development. I have a strong background in Python and JavaScript, and I have experience with a wide range of technologies.

I used to use Ubuntu for everything and was very happy in the massive Ubuntu ecosystem with a .deb for everything till I was forced to use Snap a few releases ago for installing even some basic utils I used on a daily basis. I then had Snap constantly hang on installs and just break for no apparent reason and waste my time debugging it. It didn't "just work" anymore.

Swapped to Arch and haven't looked back yet, Arch took me a lot more work to get set up but once it was it's been pretty invisible, which is how I like my OS to be.

I'd probably happily swap back to Ubuntu if I read somewhere that Snap was removed entirely/canceled or something.

Good luck on your link shortener project! I made an open source link shortener many years ago and eventually threw in the towel and quit. The problem domain for link shorteners is one of anti-spam and abuse. Charging for it makes complete sense to try and weed this out but having any amount of "free" I found to be a hotbed of reports thrown against my hosting provider and registrar for supporting spam. I found myself getting quickly blacklisted everywhere since spammers love to use new shorteners for bypassing their own blacklists.

I've not looked into the problem again in 10+ years since. If I did I would 100% skip the free plan.

I use this API in a few places such as a custom New Tab extension I made for myself on Chromium based browsers:

https://github.com/overshard/newtab/blob/master/newtab.js#L1...

Haven't had any issues with it!

Choose what fits your field. If you're doing ML you probably want Python. If you're doing web you probably want JavaScript. If you want fast native apps then Go, Rust, C++, C, and the rest based on what libraries you think you'll need and what you enjoy the structure of most.

I personally have had a career in Python for over 10 years at this point. What made me choose Python as my go to language was my friends and peers making fun of me using PHP for server side web development. Ruby and Python (Rails and Django) were the cool kids. So peer pressure could also help you with your decision as it did mine!

At this point in my career I care less about my language and more about what libraries are available as those determine how fast I can have an MVP. I'd determine what you are trying to build and come up with a list of requirements and see what libraries are already available for you to build off of.

Open source pet projects are a great starting point for learning. Come up with an idea, even if it's been done before, and build it.

And this is when comments in code are important! Any random numbers without a source are immediate suspect to me, especially in something that needs to be secure. It will save your coworkers and peers time trying to figure out why it's there.

My only issue with this is that I can go to my password manager and I have like 10 different Microsoft accounts over the years, some of which seem to be merged, some of which are not, some are from Microsoft acquired entities like Skype and all of them confuse me.

I seem to be able to use some of them to login to the same merged account and others don't work anymore at all.

Microsoft's entire auth ecosystem since Live has been a confusing mess for me especially when they acquire someone and start bringing them into the fold.

I tend to just avoid it, I'm not deep into the Microsoft ecosystem and rather not have the headache at this point.

Oh man, I always find it funny in a slightly schadenfreude sort of way when someone swaps to a new platform, goes to talk about how great that new platform is, and then the platform can't handle basic load.

That being said I do use Jamstack quite extensively, it can trivially handle huge loads due to it being mostly just static files that can be served through CDNs. This seems like it has nothing to do with Jamstack but it's still funny.

I honestly miss people building random stuff on the internet to showcase unique information on things like Geocities. They were almost always "ugly" but also always visually entertaining.

I remember skimming through hundreds of car Geocities sites by enthusiasts who had no clue how to build a website but wanted to show off their rides. It was always a rollercoaster of poor UX and bad quality images but something was also fun about finding the random image that was a link to some internal page that had more random links on it to more and more and more.

Now everyone just posts info on curated pre-designed platforms and blogs like Facebook or Blogger which takes out half of the appeal for me, I instantly don't care about anything posted on Facebook and don't have a Facebook account. There is some good content on Blogger and the likes but there's nothing fun about most of the posts.

I clearly have been visiting the wrong sites and probably could dig up similar content to what I miss. It could also just be me being old and grumpy.

VanNoppen Marketing | Full-Stack Django/Wagtail | Part-time | Remote or Morganton, NC

VanNoppen Marketing is a creative agency who develops websites from the ground up on Django+Wagtail. We are looking for part-time hires who can jump in-and-out of new-and-old projects.

Our projects are developed on Heroku with Wagtail using Django, Postgres, and Redis. For frontend we use Webpack, Bootstrap, and SASS.

If you're interested in an interview or have any questions send me an email: [email protected]

At my work I've gone through and setup a variety of "replacement" commands for commands that may have dire impact on production systems. All of these replacement commands dry run by default (or fake dry run/try to create a dry run the best they can) and require a "--do-it" (think emperor palpatine voice) flag to do the intended operation. I've had multiple coworkers thank me for this setup as it's saved people from silly typos and mistakes, one such being the different handling of programs in the use of and ending "/" in folders. ex. "/etc" is different than "/etc/" sometimes for certain operations.

I'd like to one day see a global flag on operating systems to dry run nearly all commands that changed anything.

Very cool project and basically a modern RSS feed reader for a modern web where not everything has a standardized feed to digest. Which is a little sad... Something like this is really useful for what it does but I'm afraid of how much upkeep might be required if it's scraping pages (which would be required for some platform so it's unavoidable).

Very good point here, that's definitely bad design on my part, I'll fix it.

That's a pretty cool hack, would love to see some kind of write up on it!

I thought about periodically asking what you're doing too but I'm not sure I like the intrusion of it? Time tracking is definitely something people forget about though and just let go from time to time.

Just in general, I've had jobs that "owned everything I thought of or created" while working for that company. My currenty employer does that have such an arcane policy which I am thankful for.

Nope, not in any way. There's a use for larger solutions like Clockify even if it's just personal stuff and not with a group. I just want a small timer with a log sometimes though and that's what Timelite is for. Clockify is a perfectly fine solution for that too if you need it's features.

Clockify is definitely a good solution, I have a larger project for group time tracking that I'm working on called Timestrap https://github.com/overshard/timestrap/ too.

The point of Timelite is to not compete with things like this but to be a lightweight quick time tracking solution. It in no way is a Clockify replacement, and if your entire company and development process goes through Clockify then Timelite may be a useless tool for you.