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conor_fon GitHub Stacked PRs

This is a perfect example that I've often seen in practice. There's nothing blocking in this workflow at all, and no reason these changes cannot be made in independent changes. e.g.

1) API implementation - Including tests and docs this should be perfectly acceptable to merge and review independently 2) UX implementation - Feature flagged, dummy API responses, easy to merge + review 3) One quick "glue" PR where the feature can be integration tested etc

This prevents awful merge conflicts, multiple rounds of increasingly complex stacked reviews, and a host of other annoyances.

Is there any reason that the stacked PR workflow is better that I'm ignoring or overlooking?

conor_fon GitHub Stacked PRs

This just reeks to me of bad practice. Why use this as opposed to breaking your change into smaller PRs and merging them individually behind a feature flag or similar? With this, you have a marginally better UX for reviewing through the Github website, but the underlying issues are the same. The change being introduced is not sufficiently testable by itself, or it's (somehow) too tightly coupled to other parts of the UI/codebase that it can't be split. You still need to test for integration issues at every point of the stack, and some architecture issues or points of code reuse can't be seen from stacked changes like this.

Not for me, but I'm glad it fits other people's workflows. I just hope it doesn't encourage people to try make poorly reasoned changes!

conor_fon Why You Should Be Using Git Worktrees

Super interesting, thanks! I didn't think about how this issue could easily point to a major improvement that could be made on the package manager level. Unfortunate that in Python land only Conda supports it though. It looks from the docs that uv may also support it? https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/cache/#cache-directory

conor_fon Why You Should Be Using Git Worktrees

A great point. However it's not a reasonable amount of infrastructure or overhead for many companies or an individual project in my opinion!

conor_fon Why You Should Be Using Git Worktrees

Here's a quick blog post I wrote about the merit of git worktrees. Any thoughts or feedback let me know!

conor_fon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2024)

Location: Berlin, Germany

Remote: Preferred

Willing to Relocate: No

Technologies: Python (+ Frameworks), AWS, Linux, Docker, ...

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorjflynn/ | https://blog.randombits.host/resume (PDF Preview)

Email: hn@randombits.host

Hey, I'm Conor, a software engineer specializing in the backend, but capable of using whatever technologies required to get a problem solved. I have experience with large multinationals, but much prefer my time working with startups. I was the first hire in my current company, and am now looking for a new opportunity having helped the company find product/market fit, scale the solution, and reach a position of stability. Most of my details can be found on my LinkedIn, including links to my Github, Blog, and other technical works.

conor_fon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (October 2024)

SEEKING WORK | Berlin, Germany | Remote Preferred

I am a software engineer specializing in Python backends, but have demonstrated ability using whatever technology necessary to best solve the problem at hand. I have experience working with large multinationals, and startups, both in person and on a remote-only basis. My current role is fully remote, and involves software architecture/design decisions, PoC prototyping, DevOps, improving developer tooling, and general purpose programming.

The best place to see my professional experience is on LinkedIn, but feel free to reach out to me by any means you prefer so we can discuss opportunities.

Technologies: Python (+ Frameworks), AWS, Docker, Linux, ...

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorjflynn/

Résumé: https://blog.randombits.host/resume/ (PDF Preview)

Github: https://github.com/conor-f

Blog: https://blog.randombits.host

Email: hn@randombits.host

conor_fon Show HN: Workout Tracker PWA

Another interesting thing in this space is Traindown[1]. It's simply Markdown for your exercises. As an example for those who need convincing to go to a link, this could be a simple workout:

  @ Mar 03 2024 08:00
  
  # Unit: kg
  # Bodyweight: 70
  
  Squat:
    40 12r
    65 8r 2s
    40 12r
  
  Assisted Pull Up:
    bw-20 12r
    bw-5 6r
    bw 2r

It's much more free-form than this, which is a bonus for me and allows me to track metadata such as weight, time of day I'm exercising at, or general mood/feeling about the workout. I can ultimately just take these plain markdown files from the app (I use a basic Android app that visualizes this Markdown[2]), import them and do whatever processing I like in Python.

Highly recommended!

[1] https://traindown.com/

[2]https://github.com/traindown/transponder

conor_fon Show HN: Magentic – Use LLMs as simple Python functions

How so? What disadvantages does having strings as a first class Type have?

conor_fon Show HN: Magentic – Use LLMs as simple Python functions

Looks super cool! A few questions:

1) Can you get the actual code output or will this end up calling OpenAI each function call? 2) What latency does it add? What about token usage? 3) Is the functionality deterministic?

conor_fon Ask HN: How to Keep Up with LLMs? [Linux, Self-Hosting, Info]

1) Some general use cases:

  - Getting familiar with new APIs

  - Bouncing general knowledge questions off it

  - Having "discussions" to interact with it in a Socratic style

  - Giving some "personality" to automated services by calling it as an API

2) Thanks for the pointers! Will check them out today!

conor_fon Ask HN: How to Keep Up with LLMs? [Linux, Self-Hosting, Info]

Thanks, I will look into llama.cpp today :)

I don't have much interest in playing with the internals for now, but I generally like keeping my data personal and the services I use self-maintainable as much as reasonably possible! I also feel like I could find the token limits and price limiting with ChatGPT.

conor_fon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://blog.randombits.host

Try to write monthly about technical projects I've managed to complete. I'm beginning to mix it up to include more recently musings on non-technical topics now however!

conor_fon Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana

Hey everyone, this is a post I've been working on the past few months about setting up my own monitoring stack with Grafana for my home server.

I'd love your feedback on how this process could be easier for me, some resources on learning the Grafana query languages, and general comments.

Thanks for taking the time to read + engage!

conor_fon Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days

I presume it's related to how old the components are, not necessarily the console hardware itself. Seems like the main chip was released first in 2015

conor_fon Show HN: Beepberry – a portable e-paper computer for hackers

I love the form factor here. A few questions:

1) Have you considered how this could be made more mobile friendly? Most places I could see myself using a device like this, I wouldn't have access to WiFi. Is there an equivalent of a USB SIM card adapter that would fit here?

2) What sort of battery life can be achieved with this?

Looks great though! Am very likely to order an iteration of this :)

conor_fon Show HN: PiFrame – Display Currently Playing Spotify Album on an LED Matrix

This is a build log of a recent personal project that displays your currently playing Spotify album on an LED matrix.

Any feedback, questions, or potential improvements, please let me know in the comments!

conor_fon Show HN: DIYnDNS – I Don't Want to Pay for a Static IP Address

My goal is moreso to have publicly accessible services as I run some things for friends to use also, but thanks for the feedback!

conor_fon Show HN: DIYnDNS – I Don't Want to Pay for a Static IP Address

My ISP wanted me to pay ten euro per month for a static IPv4 address, so I set up a DIY Dynamic DNS system as I didn't want to use yet another external resource/tool.

Let me know about any improvements I could make and how I can improve my writing as I want to keep writing more blog posts in the future.

conor_fon Ask HN: Best Linux Setup for a Non-Linux User

Has elementary improved from when I last used it a few years ago? Felt like a standard arch install configured nicely. Things looked great but broke frequently.

I've heard mixed things about ZorinOS including things being less-than-open and fragile too?

Mint and Pop though I should check out

conor_fon What does it mean to trademark a color?

I do think trademarking a color is ridiculous. However, I read something before (likely on HN but I can't find it now) explaining the value companies like Pantone provide. When Pantone "publish" a color, they define how this color will look when displayed on different media, printed, digital, on concrete or on wood, or under different lighting conditions including UV or IR, etc etc. It's a lot more than just saying "I own #AABBCC".

I don't know the specifics of this case, but this looks like it falls firmly into the category of "I'm egotistical" as opposed to the "I am providing additional value" category.

conor_fon Ask HN: Why does every package+module system become a Rube Goldberg machine?

At least in Python's case, I think people are much too hard on the packaging system. I don't think anyone has significant issues with pip itself as opposed to the runtime it exists within.

Following from this, I think that most back-end applications should try solve their messy runtime environment issues with some containerization. Java/C(++) however...

conor_fon Hyperrealistic Deepfaked Tom Cruise in a Coffeeshop

The thing I find most interesting about people saying AI generated content is easily noticeable, is that they're always presented a question of "Do you think this is AI generated content?". Nobody consumes media with a list of questions they ask themselves for each piece of content. I expect people in the comments to explain how obviously fake it is, but barring the ridiculous scene, I'd 100% believe that was legitimate if I saw it with no AI warning.

conor_fon What Technologies Are You Future Proofing With?

Hof looks really interesting. The documentation is super thorough as well (for the parts that are written!). Starred and will keep up to date on it.

conor_fon What Technologies Are You Future Proofing With?

It definitely will, but as a product people are using, or as a tool/product most developers will be working with? I can see it being the drive force behind popular products, but typically there's not many ML/AI "experts" working to produce models, most of the development work is all around data pipelines and normal product features that will interact with an API that is using ML/AI.

conor_fon What Technologies Are You Future Proofing With?

Absolutely. I started learning Docker last year and Nix as a complementary tool this year.

Haven't had the opportunity to look at Kubernetes yet, and usually work higher in the stack than Rust I think! But thanks for the advice.

conor_fon Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

I find it funny that a large business is struggling where an open source product with an incredibly lean team is coping with no issues

conor_fon Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

Wow really? Have you got an article or something indicating that? Seems absurd to me that all cloud providers account for less than 20% of servers, either by traffic or sheer volume.

conor_fon Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

> Create new moonshots for them just because

This seems disingenuous? They're "moonshots" as they've low chance of succeeding. You could pick the most proficient engineers and out-of-the-box thinkers and put them working on a "moonshot" and they'd still fail. Giving that team a new lofty goal seems like a great idea since they have experience working on large problems and can likely prune good/bad approaches much sooner than a fresh team.

conor_fon Buy hi-resolution satellite images of any place on earth

I honestly expected the resolution to be better? The sample preview (https://app.skyfi.com/sample-preview) really isn't that great? Where it the idea this is 50cm resolution from?