bluehatbrit

I'll also vouch for Arq, I've been using it for several versions now and they're all pretty solid. The website is a bit difficult to navigate but the tool itself is solid. I use it across windows and macos machines at home and have never had an issue with it, for both backup and restore.

I've just added the numbers of my kids school onto the list and it's been fine for me. I've never had them contact me from anything other than the schools number, but I'm in the UK and I would be very surprised if a teacher tried to call me from their mobile phone or something.

First of all, thanks for sharing numbers. I live in the UK and often hear folks from the US touting huge salaries and I figured living costs must be higher but never knew by how much.

Second, this is absolutely wild to me. Is this your monthly expenses? I live in a pretty decent sized city in the UK and my mortgage is just under 1k per month. There's no way I could even attempt to spend 2k a month on food. That said I don't send my kids to private school, the state schools in my area are very good.

The idea of earning anywhere close to 500k is utterly mind boggling to me.

It looks like the team behind it have been moving it towards more of an open standard over the last year. There's now a CLI reference implementation, and the Jetbrains IDE's have an implementation for it.

There's also a thread for Zed about a path to implementing it there [0]. Hopefully it'll become a bit more common over 2025.

[0] - https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/11473

You should probably check it, in the UK this is pretty standard, and I believe it is in the US as well. I suspect most of Europe is similar as well. It will vary by company and industry, but in my experience when you ask HR and Legal to put together a contract for a knowledge-worker, this is a standard edition by them.

I've never had a job actually assert anything around this personally, but I do make sure to have anything notable signed off by my employer as "mine". That's assuming it's unrelated to my employers field of course.

Great thanks for the info, this is along the lines I was thinking. I'm guessing that means you also have dedicated user accounts on the shared host for each developer? I suppose that would be pretty easy to manage with some ansible.

I've always liked the devcontainer approach, and in particular github codespace. But I've wanted to run it on hardware we can buy and manage. This approach sounds like it gets you 95% of the process, just missing a bit of the convenience around env per branch like codespaces can do. But that's hardly a problem really.

Do you have any more detail on how you're handling this on a shared host? My understanding is that the base remote containers + remote ssh extensions would require the code to exist directly on the remote host, and then the container to be created afterwards (and bind to the host directory etc). Is this what you're doing?

I use it at the moment and don't really find any noticable difference between running directly on my host, and in a dev container. If I were to measure the performance I'm sure there would be something, but it's not noticable in my development cycle.

They also seem to be pushing it beyond vscode and into something which is editor agnostic. It's not quite there yet on that front, but I'm excited for it as I've been dabbling with other editors recently which don't support devcontainers directly and it always pulls me back to vscode.

It's on a journey for sure, but I've had no performance issues when using it straight out of the box over the past year.

I work mostly in web / server side development, it's not really a problem I've had for a number of years now. Some of my colleagues use various linux distros, others macos. No one is using Windows that I know of.

Each project we have requires a specific tool chain version (python, elixir, ...) and specific versions of things like postgres. All dependencies are listed with some kind dependency definition file (pyproject.toml, package.json, mix.exs). If you bump a package it's done in the definition file as part of your changes and goes through CI for packaging and releasing. The rest of the team will get the new package version as soon as they pull your changes and run `just deps` or whatever. CI is the ultimate determining factor of whether your code actually "works".

We also package and deploy with containers, but this isn't the real determining factor for any of the above.

I think GP was probably exaggerating but there are far fewer owning companies than actual vpns. This article does a decent job of showing it https://vpnpro.com/blog/hidden-vpn-owners-unveiled-97-vpns-2... but may be a bit out of date now (Oct 24). I believe it, or a similar one, made the rounds on HN a year or so ago.

Honestly, I don't receive any emails which are even worth summarising. I unsubscribe from marketing emails, and the humans who email me aren't writing more than a couple paragraphs at most. It becomes more effort to hit a summary button, wait for it to generate, and then read something of roughly the same length.

That third link is not related to Polywork the startup. It's an opinion piece which happens to use the same term.

The Co-op (referred to in [0]) is also a bank, funeral directors, insurer, and solicitor! They're really quite successful to be honest.

Nationwide is another example of a successful cooperative as well (large UK bank, particularly in the mortgage space). They're customer and employee owned I believe, my wife and I got £200 last year as a profit share for being customers.

I'm a huge fan of the model, but it's difficult to get going. I think they're also more expensive to run as their operations tend to be a little more complex.

> Developers want to use PaaS and also AWS or Azure so they can put it on their resume for the future.

I think this is a little disingenuous. Developers want to use them because they already know them. The services composing them are also often well documented by the provider.

I say all of that as someone trying to move a company away from aws, and over to our own hardware.

I left pretty soon after lockdowns, the writing was on the wall for me. Both on the flexibility, and the direction. It was also around the time the CEO announced he didn't want to be a company paying top market rates for top people.

Given the contract I had stated on-site, I found a fully remote role offering 30k more.

The stock price seems to have settled in the past year but I still think it's overvalued. They're slower than ever, and talent seems to be draining slowly.

I recently caught up with a few people I used to work with who are still there. From what I gather, the consolidation is still happening and not moving very quickly.

Lots of internal politics, people not wanting to lose their areas, etc. I'd guess that's partly why they've also just done some more layoffs, but thats just a guess.

Exactly my memory as well, even the upper-middle leaders seemed thoroughly confused by it.

They're renting out the space or making a royalty from the sales. So it's not really competing with them, it's a way to make money with absolutely no maintenance or stock management. It'll be less profitable for them, but the rock bottom overhead makes it worth it.

I can't imagine so. A match is over when one persons conker is destroyed. If you were purposefully missing, you'd be throwing the game. Theirs would still take a battering from hitting yours as well.

> Also, doesn't the conker spiral around your hand hitting it and hurting you?

Not usually in my experience, the string isn't that short and you're holding it at one end. Injury is still possible though, but that's part of the fun!

Ah yes, that would work pretty well! You'd have to be able to guarantee any migrations can run within the timeouts, but at a per-tenant level that should be very doable for most cases. Not sure why I didn't think of that approach - great idea.

I might have to try this out now.

Appreciate the response (and the blog post itself)! I probably worded my question poorly, but I'm more wondering about executing schema migrations against a large number of DO's as part of a deployment (such as 1 per customer).

I suppose the answer is "it's easier to have 1 central database/DO", but it feels like this approach to data storage really shines when you can have a DO per tenant.

This is probably a really stupid question, but how would one handle schema migrations with this kind of setup? My understanding is it's aimed at having a database per-tenant (or even more broken down than that). Is there a sane way of handling schema migrations, or is the expectation that these databases are more short-lived and so you support multiple versions of the db (DO) until it's deleted?

In my head, this would be a fun way to build a bookmark service with a DO per user. But as soon as you want to add a new field to an existing table, you meet a pretty tricky problem of getting that change to each individual DO. Perhaps that example is too long lived though, and this is designed for more ephemeral usage.

If anyone has any experience with this, I'd be really interested to know what you're doing.

We're doing this as an internal tool so right now the priority is to make it useful for us. We use tailscale already so we've decided to support that initially. But the auth is setup in a pretty modular way, so anyone should be able to write a different provider for whatever auth system they want to use. I've not come across OpenZiti before but I'd imagine it would be possible to write one for it.

My last job had an internal tool for deploying all, or a reduced set of, their platform into a kube namespace. We called them One Time Environments and used them for testing and development. They were fantastic, really fast to spin up, and pretty cheap to run as they were on our own hardware. I've never found anything similar that doesn't cost an absolute bomb of money.

Now I've moved to an early startup and I'm really missing the tool. So I've started putting together my own with a few improvements.

This one can support multiple infrastructure types such as ECS, K8S, and anything else you could write an agent for. It's also going to do the same for zero trust auth, starting with tailscale.

Once we've got it up and running we're going to open source it. Could be a few more months though.

Building it using elixir, phoenix, and live view as that's my background.

As you say, nginx does complain about the cert files not existing, so that's pretty close to what I do. I just start with the non-ssl version, let certbot do it's thing, and then copy the result after it's deployed (if I remember). It's mildly annoying, but it takes about 2 minutes in total so it's been like that for 2 years now.

I'm sure there's something smarter I can do, like reading back the result afterwards or someting and altering my local file. But honestly, once nginx is configured for an application, I almost never touch the config again anyway.

I suspect I'm more likely to move everything over to cloudflare tunnels and ditch dealing with ssl locally altogether at this point.

That's really interesting, I personally don't read those tone differences based on the casing. Neither approach carries different warmth or formality to me at all.

I wonder if this is a regional or generational thing?

Mine is dead simple. I just have a repo with all my ansible in it, and have a nested module called "service". It takes in an app name, domain name, backup schedule, and a true/false on whether it should get a public nginx setup.

Then it finds the compose file based on the app name. It templates in the domain name wherever needed in the compose file, and if it's meant to be public it'll setup a nginx config (which runs on the host, not in docker). If the folder with the compose file has a backup.sh and restore.sh it also copies those over, and sets up a cron for the backup schedule. It's less than 70 lines of yaml, plus some more for restart handlers.

The only bit that irks me is the initial tls/ssl setup. Certbot changes the nginx config to insert the various certificates, which then makes my original nginx config out of date. I really like nginx and have used it for a long time so feel comfortable with it, but I've been considering traefik and caddy for a while just to get around this.

Although another option for me is to use a cloudflare tunnel instead, and then ignoring certificate management altogether. This is really attractive because it also means I can close some ports. I'll have to find some time to play around with traefik and caddy first though!

I just use the github registry, but I've been paying for their personal pro subscription for years now so it wasn't really an "additional" cost for me.

I suppose like anything, it's a preference based on where the majority of your experience is, and what you're using it for. If you're running things you've written and it's all done the same way, docker probably is just an extra step.

I personally run a bunch of software I've written, as well as open source things. So for me docker makes everything significantly easier, and saves me installing a lot of rubbish I don't understand well.