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17%? Hah, I just got hit by layoffs at my last employer that targeted 25% of the workforce. Guess what happened to the CEO...

That's right. Nothing.

It's very heartening to see all of the stories here.

I've put the last few years of my life into working on komorebi, a tiling window manager for Windows[1], https://notado.app, a content-first social bookmarking service, and https://kulli.sh, a "bring your own links" comment aggregator which shows you comments from hn, reddit, lobsters, lemmy etc. on an article all in one place.

Unfortunately I was laid off after 5 years with the same company last month, and nobody seems to care about any of these projects when it comes to recruiting. There are people who use them that have reached out to me very kindly offering to make referrals, but the job market and mainstream interview processes value LeetCode more than shipping real code these days.

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi

Yabai, and chunkwm before it, and kwm before that, are probably the most important pieces of software that fundamentally changed how I interact with computers.

I moved over from macOS to Windows and WSL full time back in 2020 and eventually ended up writing my own tiling window manager for Windows, which I never would have done had I not had the experience of using yabai on macOS.

I don't think it's a exaggeration to say that my experience with this one piece of software completely changed my trajectory as a software developer for the better.

There is no doubt that this is a cool technical feat, but I don't think you'll catch me handling cron-like scheduling like this alongside application code.

I can see from comments like vvpan's that there is a fatigue around managing services in AWS/GCP/etc, but I have gone very much in the other direction in the last few years towards bare metal servers managed with NixOS. I feel much more confident in handling scheduled jobs on bare metal with Systemd timers than tying myself even deeper into a specific language+deployment solution ecosystem.

These days I mostly read and save on mobile with the Notado iOS shortcuts, but of course everything works pretty much the same way with the browser extension too.

All websites/apps that I read comments on (HN, Reddit, Mastodon, Twitter, Lemmy, Tildes, Lobsters, YouTube) have a "Save Comment to Notado" action when sharing permalinks which makes saving interesting comments a breeze.

When I'm reading something in Safari, I just highlight the text I want to save with my finger and then use the browser share button (not the text share button) to hit the "Save Selection to Notado" action.

If you check back in my comment history here I've written before about how I'm a big believer in RINORIN (read it now or read it never), and for this reason I completely eschew read it later-style reader apps. If it's not immediately interesting enough for me to read when I see it, I just let it ago, trusting that if it's important enough, I'll be exposed to it again sooner or later, and at that point it'll be interesting enough for me to read it when I see it.

I use RSS to distribute my web highlights[1] on specific topics and even my Kindle highights[2] for longer series. It's also nice and easy to reuse these feeds on my website homepage to give a dynamic feel to a static website.

Ultimately I had to get with the times a bit and find a way to share my highlights as photos[3] and videos, especially on modern text-hostile social media platforms, but I have a soft spot in my heart for the topic-specific RSS highlight feed, and it's one of my proudest achievements.

[1]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development

[2]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/terra-ignota

[3]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/using-rust-chrome-and-nixos-to-t...

Looking forward to this hopefully final big upgrade on my 20k LOC web service[1]. The upgrade from 0.4 to the first rc of 0.5 was a slog, but I've already upgraded to 0.5-rc.4 so this should hopefully be comparatively painless.

[1]: https://notado.app

I'll also add that I run multiple services (pretty much every hosted project listed in the "projects" section of my homepage) on either a NixOS VM or a NixOS dedicated machine these days (I gradually migrated everything from Kubernetes).

Not only is this now way cheaper (which increases profit margins for paid services I run), but it's also significantly more reliable as a one-person developer and de facto SRE.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that people who are interested this might also be interested in a tiling window manager for Windows[1]

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi

I've been trying to encourage people to give NixOS in VMs a try as a safe way to build up a nice working environment while still maintaining your daily driver until you're interested in/ready to switch. I have a starter template for NixOS on WSL[1] with an accompanying walkthrough[2] if you want to get an idea of how much effort this might require on your part.

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/nixos-wsl-starter

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmRXXYxq8k4

I think things are pretty good with nixos-anywhere[1] now. I made a video last month walking through the process of provisioning a VPS on Hetzner Cloud[2] if you want to see what the process looks like in real-time.

[1]:https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr22CyoyRo4

Oh cool, this is one of my things! Happy to answer any questions anyone has about this.

This article resonated with me a lot and had me reflecting on my journey writing komorebi.

I started writing komorebi because I had recently migrated to Windows and was really struggling without a tiling window manager. I didn't know anything about Win32 APIs when I started, or much about Rust either, actually.

Fast forward to today, and komorebi is sitting at 35k downloads, supported by a huge Discord server, a vibrant community, and hundreds of people watching me develop it on YouTube.

I created some incredibly important and impactful systems at $dayjob some years before I started komorebi. It was at a real low point in my life where I was struggling with depression, and I still _feel_ that when I look at the codebases and interact with those systems today. I wonder if others do, too. In some ways, I'm glad that those codebases and those systems are not public for others to see for that reason.

I am however, very glad that komorebi is out for the public to see, because I built it in a place of joy, hope and serenity, and I believe that those feelings are there to be seen in both the codebase and the product.

I have a slightly different take on this: I save the text that I care about, and have some automation set up to archive the source URL of the text to archive.org[1] (which works well enough for me, even if it's not 100% perfect, because I'm only archiving it for the greater context of the highlighted text, which I rarely go back to).

I just got myself an Nvidia 4090, and I'm looking into using local LLMs to feed my data into (I think this is called retrieval augmented generation?) for various assistant-type use cases.

I'm particularly excited to potentially be able to go through my saved Kindle highlights for multi-novel sci-fi and fantasy series in order to refresh my memory by clarifying key story beats before continuing with the next book.

[1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/notado-07-2023-update/

I won't be at a computer for a while to dig up all the links; but check out both my comment and post history on HN; the short version is that I ditched Readwise, Instapaper, Pinboard & co, and my entire histories there, and wrote something from scratch tailored to my own needs which is now also publicly available at https://notado.app

I generally encourage people to write software that is tailored to their own needs in this area rather than trying to contort themselves to fit into the bookmarking model, which I personally consider to be broken for highlights (I've shared a blog on this topic on HN too).

If anyone were to ask me for advice after describing the sort of fatigue that you have described with the popular systems and services in this product area, I'd encourage them to ditch the "read it later" mentality and try adopting a "read it now or read it never" (RINORIN) approach, and to stop annotating their highlights (because these fall out of sync with our thinking incredibly quickly).

> I’m tired of this. I think we overvalue thinking and undervalue taking action on that thinking. It’s easy to discuss ideas, which is one reason I think I’ve done so much of it and used to find it appealing.

> Lately, though, simply reading or thinking about ideas feels inadequate, even a waste of time. It feels wrong to me, because it goes against some of the things I value deep down–things which don’t have a specific word for them (that I’m aware of, with my non-native knowledge of English).

> It’s the value that seeks to do things, see the results of doing those things. Ideas made tangible.

This resonated with me a lot.

I've written before about how I ditched over-the-top all-in-one bookmarking, highlighting, annotating and read-it-later platforms for a single fuzzily-searchable database of highlights I take from anywhere (comments, articles, books, blogs etc.) and how much this has improved my life flow in general.

I don't think it's a coincidence that since that mindset shift, I've gone on to create a modest-but-profitable SaaS, a category-defining piece of open source software with a vibrant and active community, and that after a lifetime of watching from the sidelines, I have finally learned to dance to the level that I'm regularly referred to as a "good dancer" (still working on being able to accept this compliment, though)

I have quite a few of these sorts of keyboards, including the Ergodox EZ. I think for generalist usage they can be adapted to pretty easily, but as a developer, the lack of dedicated keys for [, ] and ' is an insurmountable obstacle for me.

Those keys are in my opinion perfectly placed on regular keyboards and no amount of layering, tap dancing or anything else will ever come close. Please somebody just make a split ergo keyboard where the right side has extra keys for regular programming symbols on the top layer. The two halves do not need to be symmetrical.

I like this one the most. Sums up my experience after drinking the kool aid. I feel invincible now whenever I make changes to my machines or dev environments.

Yeah this is true, but it works for enough websites to be a meaningful option, and it is almost always going to work better than something you have home-rolled (unless your core product is a direct competitor or something, in which case all bets are off ;))

A good is example of this is Pinboard which claims to offer website archiving. A friend has over 100,000 links saved (with an archival account) there. When we spent a few minutes looking at the archive links for those items a few weeks ago, we couldn't find a single correct, working, accessible archive from the most recently archived links (listed as archived 5 weeks ago, so also not up to date).

It's ultimately a cat and mouse game with many websites actively trying to sabotage archival efforts.

Unless this is a core functionality in something you're working on, most people will be better off using the SavePageNow API from archive.org and integrating with that. This is what I ultimately ended up doing for one of my projects.[1]

[1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/notado-07-2023-update/

I'm a big fan of mkcert for local HTTPS cert generation.

> As a basic rule, you can't use anecdotes to draw assumptions about wide group trends.

I think you missed the point again, because my post was not trying to use anecdotes to draw assumptions about wide group trends. It was an expression of curiosity and a desire to see data, which at least in my mind is quite opposed to drawing assumptions (or making an argument, or a generalized statement as you had previously written).

Nevertheless, this is an interesting post with some good information and I appreciate the time you took to write it out.

> They totally are, speaking for populations! This is how de-anonymization typically works. They also correlate with class and income.

This part in particular was very informative; I'll be doing some more reading on this thanks to your explanation.

> Your argument is basically "only group X dislikes Y" and it's based on an anecdote.

It's very unfortunate that you (and presumably others) read it like that. I am not making an argument or a generalized statement in my post.

If in doubt, you can also check my post history to see that I do not have a history of making any such posts.

I am expressing curiosity about how the recommendation algorithm might be tailoring content not just based on interests but on the inferred ethnic backgrounds of people (because interests and ethnic backgrounds are not correlated with each other).

I'm open to feedback on how this could have been phrased differently.

I had no idea these were produced by Rivian. I really enjoy the design of these trucks and I always smile when I see one on the street.

Basically my dream job

Alum here from the dept of Middle Eastern Studies, long before I ever thought about learning a programming language!

The friction with using Docker across arm and x86 was one of the big reasons that I ended up learning NixOS. Now, all the services on my personal remote box and all my one-man-SaaS services run on NixOS + systemd services and my life is so much easier and less stressful.

Honestly, if privacy is the primary concern, you should only be looking at self-hosted solutions.

I'm an DevOps/SRE guy by trade, spend my days wrangling supermassive Kubernetes clusters etc. I've come to the conclusion that the "middle class" is especially well covered by NixOS. Generally, for any situation where you're running a bunch of stuff on one big ol' server, NixOS is going to be the least stressful and most productive way to go once you become familiar with the ecosystem.

Your post is showing as downvoted for me right now. I tried upvoting it so it doesn't show as greyed out. Thanks for sharing this resource; I had not come across it before and I think it is a valuable resource to share and a meaningful contribution to the discussion on this topic.