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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I have a portable monitor that I’m pretty pleased with.

    It has a magnetic cover that goes over the screen to keep it safe, and that same cover folds and goes on the back to act as a stand when it’s in use. Power and video are via the same USB-C cable.

    Nice and slim and stays in my bag most of the time but when I want a second screen I can whip it out in two secs.

    A screen that attaches to the laptop sounds convenient initially, but I feel like in practice it would be a hindrance and make your laptop clunky and bulky.








  • Any company that hides their documentation has an awful product that they are actually embarrassed about, from a tech perspective. They are hiding it because they are afraid to show it.

    I’ve seen this so many times, and it’s a big red flag.

    These companies work on the basis of selling their product the old-fashioned way, directly to management with sales-people and business presentations and firm handshakes, and then once you’re sold then developers (which management doesn’t care about by the way) have to do the odious task of getting everything working against their terrible and illogical API. And when you need help implementing, then your single point of contact is one grumpy-ass old dev working in a basement somewhere (because they don’t care about their own devs either) and he’s terribly overstretched due to the number of other customers he’s also trying to help, because their implementation is so shitty.

    Conversely, public documentation is a great sign that companies took a developer-led approach to designing their solution, that it will be easy to implement, that they respect the devs within their own company, and they will also respect yours.

    When I am asked to evaluate potential solutions for a problem, Public docs is like the number one thing I care about! It’s just that significant.

    Side story - I once worked with one of these shitty vendors, and learned from a tech guy I’d made friends with that the whole company was basically out of office on a company-paid beach holiday - EXCEPT for the dev team. Management, sales, marketing, finance, they all got a company trip, but the tech peeps had to stay at home. Tells you everything you need to know about their management attitude towards tech.





  • The fade should be slow and subtle. At first the client thinks they are just imagining it, but then they start getting customer support calls about the site being faded, and their bosses are pointing it out too in meetings, and as it happens more and more the panic really begins to set in.

    Finally they reach out to you in a desperation when there’s barely anything left of the site and ask you to urgently fix the problem, and you just shrug your shoulders sympathetically and explain it’s happening because they haven’t paid - but not like in a way that suggests you are doing it on purpose, but a way where it’s simply an unavoidable natural consequence, like if you didn’t pay your electricity bill your power would get cut and the site is slowly “dying” and fading away because of that.

    They’d pay so fast.


  • Yes - by most definitions. It’s powered by user-generated content and is based on interaction between users through engagement with that content, which is voted and scored.

    There is a difference which I personally feel makes reddit less harmful than other social media, however, which is the algorithm - or lack of it.

    In most social media, the algorithm exists to continually serve people the exact content they engage with in a constant feed, which is IMO the most socially damaging part of social media because it creates endless doomscrolling, toxic echo chambers, promotion of sponsored content, and a whole raft of psychological problems in users.

    The Lemmy homefeed is more organic, and scrolling through ‘all’ you see content genuinely from everywhere, in a less curated way based on upvotes, not individual algorithmic tailoring. And that’s maybe not as “engaging” but it’s far less damaging.



  • It’s good practice to run the deployment pipeline on a different server from the application host(s) so that the deployment instances can be kept private, unlike the public app hosts, and therefore can be better protected from external bad actors. It is also good practice because this separation of concerns means the deployment pipeline survives even if the app servers need to be torn down and reprovisioned.

    Of course you will need some kind of agent running on the app servers to be able to receive the files, but that might be as simple as an SSH session for file transfer.



  • That’s probably okay! =) There’s some level of pragmatism, depending on the sort of project you’re working on.

    If it’s a big app with lots of users, you should use automation because it helps reliability.

    If there are lots of developers, you should use automation because it helps keep everyone organised and avoids human mistakes.

    But if it’s a small thing with a few devs, or especially a personal project, it might be easier to do without :)


  • Sure, but having a hands-off pipeline for it which runs automatically is where the value is at.

    Means that there’s predictability and control in what is being done, and once the pipeline is built it’s as easy as a single button press to release.

    How many times when doing it manually have you been like “Oh shit, I just FTPd the WRONG STUFF up to production!” - I know I have. Or even worse you do that and don’t notice you did it.

    Automation takes a lot of the risk out.