joshghent

To use the wooley term “quality”, the top 20% might stand a good chance of making huge strides. But the remaining 80% of projects (in particular the bottom 20%) will atrophy extremely quickly. Yet, these will be the project that many push LLM’s too as their domain/technology is complex and/or outdated. Digital transformations that can be done quickly will be tantalising but ultimately unsatisfactory long term (as you describe).

Spotted over 100 “security issue but after whittling them down via reproduction scripts and validating they were real CVE’s - that number was around 30.

Even so - it was a huge win and something we wouldn’t have spotted.

It’s something I’ve now codified into repowarden.dev

Whilst easy to point to common sense needed, perhaps we need to have better defaults. In this case, the Postgres images should only permit the cli, and nothing else.

Great work on this - very slick UX and super quick.

Be cool to expand it to support the UK or maybe develop some open standard for the way data can be reported. I'm sure businesses would pay for a consolidated data api.

I actually have a use case for this in my product Loginllama. I need to grab information about the IP addresses. I’m currently using a different API but don’t really like the product.

Is it rate limited or have any key authentication? My email is me at joshghent.com if you want to chat about this more.

But these arguments seem a little tired now. Does a customer actually care what technology you use - absolutely not. If react is easier for you, go for it. If that’s HTMX - fine.

What matters is speed of delivery of new features. And react has huge amounts of support (and a large developer base) that makes development quick and cheap.

I’ve never understood these html purist arguments. As if React/Vue/Angular are desecrating this pure text language.

There are other issues of far greater importance - accessibility, multi-language, browser consistency, sane defaults and easy tooling.

If you’d like to work together my GitHub is @joshghent or my email is me [at] joshghent.com :)

I’ve faced exactly the same problems building my new product. But, on the other hand, Supabase was incredibly easy to setup, and meant I could worry about infrastructure later.

Pros and cons like with everything, and always wise to understand the flaws of the tech you’re using.

It's a difficult mindset to get into coming from full time. And I struggle to speak with people who are adamant that they need full time commitment to accomplish anything. But, those are the types of people I don't want to work with.

Although I have now built a decent client base, it was a huge challenge at the start to find remote, freelance and part time software contracts. It was usually a case of finding full time ones and convincing them that I could do part time.

It has been hugely rewarding and I find myself thinking about work a lot less outside of work because it's no longer the biggest chunk of my week (or doesn't feel like it).

• Website: https://joshghent.com (CV/Resumé can be found there)

• Location: UK / Remote (used to async and remote working)

• Technologies: NodeJS, React, Typescript, Terraform, AWS, Python, PHP

Raw thought on becoming a better programmer and human

Monitoring - Loads of cron jobs pinging slack (monitoring disk, CPU, Network I/O etc), Healthchecks.io, TurboAPI, Nginx Amplify. Mostly built up over time

DB - Done entirely via migrations. Most of the time they are small migrations so I can do it by running the command directly on the instance

Deployments - GitHub actions to build a docker image (there was a prebuilt template). Watchtower then runs on my server to pick up the new image and that's then deployed automatically. There is no rollback system as I've not needed that so far (and 99% of the time you won't).

Backups - DB backup is done via a cron pushing to AWS S3 Glacier. The app code is stored on GitHub already so no need to back that up. Happy to share the script if you like :)

All jokes aside though, this doesn’t seem too bad and I can put myself in their shoes to understand why they want this data. It would be difficult to monotone this information (asides maybe a nice shiny new Surface machine).