Free Stuff for Developers
freestuff.dev
freestuff.dev
When the service transitions to being 10 dollars per month without notice (looking at you, Trello) how many times can you say "just add it to my tab"?
I'm only using self hosted, open source solutions from now on. Been burned too many times in the past, and yes, I do pay for some services - but that doesn't stop the providers from increasing the price or even discontinuing the service (Google) at any time
Something like postman, for example, is easily a multi-month or year project for a big team of devs to create/maintain. I've been using the free version for years and it's saved an amazing amount of time. I'd use the paid version if I had a bigger team.
Something like Cloudflare is a whole different scale altogether. Their free tier is a loss-leader for their enterprise plan, but even the free tier is better than most paid CDNs out there. And good luck trying to replicate that on a FOSS stack and shared infrastructure.
If you're worried about secret billing, either don't provide your billing info to begin with, cancel trial subscriptions as soon as you start them (usually they won't expire until the end), or use a virtual CC# service like privacy.com.
But npm has the popularity/quality/maintenance metrics for a reason; a lot of smaller FOSS projects become abandonware once their original use case is dealt with, or developers turn over, or whatever. There's a lot of smaller packages/solutions/projects that just don't see much love anymore.
I'm not against using FOSS or commercial. Just think there should be a case-by-case cost-benefit analysis. A $10/mo service should be evaluated differently than a $1000/mo stack, and labor value should be compared against both.
Case in point, my boss recently asked me to build a new project that wasn't a part of our regular stack in a somewhat emerging field (web mapping). I did a brief market analysis and let him know that different vendors could probably get it done in about 2 weeks at about $2000. He said that was too much, I warned him that building it in-house would take several months and be very buggy because we have no specialists in that field on our team. He said to use FOSS software to do it, so we did... it ended up taking about 9 months and a few hundred hours of dev time. Now it's built, but with minimal features and lots of bugs. And nobody else can maintain it. The project was in turn open sourced, because we built it from open source software and wanted to give back, but honestly it's shit code. And we're considering abandoning it already due to the high overhead. But you know, someone else is going to run into the same situation at some point, and maybe find it and fork it because it's open source... then probably go through the same rigamarole... well, now we have a proper abandonware factory.
shrug At the same time, I use (and thoroughly appreciate) redis, apache, varnish, chromium, brew, react, etc. Some of those are vendor-supported, some aren't.
It's just a mixed bag. I'm just saying that choosing something just because it's FOSS so you save $10/mo is a lousy reason. There's a lot of great commercial software out there, just like there's a lot of great FOSS software out there.
Well everything has + and - I agree self hosting open source might be best for some people if you want to deal with the headache (some people like it though).
For some cases, indiehackers who just want to prototype something, definitely find these list helpful (me at least :))
https://www.stickermule.com/unixstickers
And note these are pretty high quality stickers too.
If you really prefer the vi syntax, there is even an "evil mode" for emacs - https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil
(uEmacs is okay too).
That's okay though, I quite like that I can use Emacs like a souped-up vim, especially when Emacs sometimes does vim-like better than even vim could in so many workflows.
The source files are in a shared network directory, but VS code (the editor) is on my machine? Or is it something different?
Where would the compiler reside? Will the Compile/Build be executed on my machine?
Edit: found some answers: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview
I agree the current situation is ridiculous. Technical users use all kinds of WIndows detelemtrizers that sometimes do more damage than benefit. Moreover, MS is deepening the integration with their online services so at some point just using it without them tracking you won't be possible.
Windows de-telemetrization is ridiculous indeed. Scripts turn setting willy-nilly, then Windows updates does it again, it's like living in an abusive household. In regards of privacy, it's very clear that the priorities of the system is vastly different from the users', to the point where fighting it is completely moot. And this brings us to your last point, where I agree again, the turning of desktop software to online services, and websites into phone apps make any effort to take back privacy absolutely futile. While maybe not the number one priority, but a very convenient side effect that this is practically unachievable with this kind of architecture.
Might be others but I wasn't actually looking, those were just the ones I noticed.
I have an idea to make a GUI, so people just put links, benefits and tags, the other stuff will be pre-filled, but still will go through github's pull request.
Let me know if you have an idea to make it easier to contribute
It helps pre-fill some content before adding new stuff via github pull request
(Was going to suggest expo)