Yeah this is a fair point! I found the rhetoric in the de-goggling community to be a bit purist and defeatist at times and I'm more of a "better done than perfect" kind of person, but I also don't want to be unrealistic about Google's reach or suggest this is all it takes to escape it. I updated the post to reflect these thoughts. Thanks for the thoughtful comment.
> requires a lot more effort than just avoiding using google.com, youtube.com, gmail.com, etc.
Yeah this is fair! I don't want to give the impression that this is all it takes to get Google to stop stalking you. But I do think it at least helps. I found a lot of the chatter in the de-googling community to a bit purist and defeatist at times, but maybe I went too far the other way, here. I want to encourage people to do the same without thinking it's all hopeless or doesn't make any impact because Google's gonna get you one way or another, but I also don't want to paint an unrealistic picture, as if this is all it takes to wash our hands of Google's reach.
I love this! Probably because it's how I operate, too. It sounds hectic to a lot of people, but I thrive with a little organized chaos like this. Also when I have a dozen things on the go there's always at least one that is interesting enough that I actually want to do it.
Maybe an apt analogy for the "not food" described here could be YAML and other config. I have seen way too much logic buried in strings in miscellaneous config files. It's so annoying to work with.
There's an iOS app you can configure to automatically upload your photos to your nextcloud so they're available from anywhere (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nextcloud/id1125420102). You might want to set up Backblaze or similar for external storage, though, if you're using a small VPS you might fill up the storage pretty quickly.
I use Protonmail (with a custom domain) for email, so I didn't include anything about that here. It's possible to do with Nextcloud, too (and maybe I should look into it now that I have this.. would probably be cheaper), but seems like a bit more work to set up your own mail server. Several people have recommended mailinabox to me.
That's really reassuring to hear! I'm planning to stick with this for a year or two to see what pain it actually causes me, but I could definitely see maintenance headaches being thing to motivate a switch to something else. Hopefully I have the same experience as you, though!
Yeah I still use youtube sometimes, but I do it without an account. You do lose a lot, like remembering what you watched and better recommendations, but you also win some, like Google not remembering what you watched :)
Yeah I'm a little worried about the maintenance burden, tbh. I'm not actually a linux/sysadmin type person, but I was pretty keen to achieve my goal of being Google free by 2021 (which I'm happy to announce with this migration that I did :), though I still watch youtube anonymously sometimes). But I'm not sure it'll be the most ideal solution for the long term. I'll see what the maintenance burden actually is like through next year. Some folks have suggested looking at the docker installation options (as opposed to the snap package, which I use here), since it's apparently really easy to maintain. We'll see.
I use namecheap.com. The prices vary a lot, I use a .cloud domain, I think obscure TLDs and domain name choices are cheaper, but I'm not exactly sure how their pricing actually works.
That's a good point! I should add the total cost to the post. I mentioned I use the cheapest Linode server but didn't actually say how much that is. I pay $5/month (USD) for the server (except I got the first two months for free from some promo code I found on another blog), and $10/year (CAD) for carbon offsets. I also paid $5/year (USD) for the domain name I use.
Yeah it's actually cheaper (and simpler :) ) to sign up with a nextcloud provider if all you want is a nextcloud account. There are other reasons to run your own instance, but honestly I think most of them come down to the hacker novelty factor. One noteworthy one is having total control over your own data, I guess. Depending on the provider it's not always simple to export all of your data to migrate somewhere else if you ever want to.
For folks who would use nextcloud if they didn't have to care about all this server admin stuff I would definitely recommend Hetzner. Cloudamo [1] is also a good option with servers in North America, for people there who care about location.
Yeah I think Google is pretty hard to beat for anyone who only cares about cheap storage, unfortunately. One argument I have for that crowd is that there's nothing stopping Google from coming seeking rent in the future (like they're currently doing with Photos), once they successfully kill off all viable competition by offering their products at a loss, which they can afford to do but a lot of companies who only do one thing (like e.g. email) can't.
But yeah I also don't think Nextcloud or other alternatives will really take over unless security/privacy/ethics become a higher priority than cost for most people, which seems unlikely to me.
For me it was just the convenience of being able to have most of my cloud things in one place (like calendar, reminders, contacts, notes, etc). I suspect it's probably not the best solution for each of those individually, and I'm definitely curious what other options are out there, but it's quite a convenient drop-in replacement for a lot of Google's cloud offerings for people who are looking for alternatives. Also I should note I don't actually ever use the nextcloud UI itself, I don't disagree it can feel a bit clunky sometimes. I use 3rd party clients and use my personal cloud to sync everything via webDAV and cardDAV.
Yeah this is the hardest one to replace for me, too. Nextcloud has a photos integration that has reasonable facial recognition/grouping, but Google photos semantic search is really useful. Part of what makes Google so evil though is that they gave away the photos product for free for long enough to kill off any real competition. There are certainly loads of teams who could do it just as well or better, but not for free. And of course now that there are no viable alternatives, Google will start charging. Typical monopoly behaviour that should in itself constitute a reason to stop using them.
"Best" is a subjective measure. For a lot of people being tracked all around the internet is a non-starter. I would also argue that a lot of Google products have stagnated and are not the best on offer anymore. Hey and Protonmail for mail, Notion for docs/keep, and Sync for file syncing come to mind, but of course that's just me :)
The list is a bit fragmented. It doesn't really give Nextcloud enough credit. Nextcloud can replace _most_ of google in one shot -- calendar, reminders, contacts, drive, docs, hangouts, maps, photos, and more (https://apps.nextcloud.com/). I think it's not as popular because 1. it's not free (as in beer, but it is free as in speech) and 2. it's kind of fiddly to get up and running. You can either host it yourself or sign up with a provider, but either way it's not super intuitive and nowhere near as polished as what we're used to these days. But, if you're looking to get off of Google and don't want to sign up for 10 different things, Nextcloud is worth a look.
He seems to be confusing working long hours with working hard. Those aren't the same thing. I would even argue they're in conflict with each other. Nobody does good work when they're "obsessed" with something. Obsession is a sickness. Everyone eventually learns that you need moderation (in all things) if you're going to be around for the long haul.
Most software in the world is utter trash and I at least partially blame maniacs like this guy who keep people up hacking on it until they fall asleep. I wish more people would do what most people think of as "work" from 11-4 and spend their mornings and evenings thinking about how to do that work _well_ instead of just faster.
I find spec really interesting but struggle to find a good fit for it in my projects. I end up getting bogged down writing generators and give up, or end up breaking down functions into such small pieces that speccing every one of them results in an unreasonable proliferation of specs and generators. This was an interesting and helpful overview of some different ideas about how to take advantage of spec, so thank you!
Also I definitely share your feelings about clojure massively increasing my job satisfaction and teaching me how to think about programming in a new (and better tbh) way.
I have an onyx boox note 2 and like it quite a bit, but note taking only really works on the built-in app, play store apps that support handwriting input are not responsive enough so it's a very glitchy experience. The stock note taking app is a pleasure to use, at least, and it is nice to be able to install and use a variety of e-book store/reader apps natively.
This is nice, thanks for taking the time to explain and write it all out. I like UI testing because I dislike maintaining mocks and stubs all over the place (and haven't found a way to write lower-level tests that don't rely on them heavily), but this approach definitely seems interesting. I like that it also forces your views to stay simple and just call simple functions. A problem resulting from not calling a handler or calling the wrong one would be immediately obvious, the tests really deal with checking what happens when that handler is called.. this seems like a great way to isolate that and test it without the pain of selenium et al! Cool pattern, thanks for sharing.
> ... still continue to tell them the solutions they are supposed to deliver – nearly always in the form of a roadmap of features and projects with expected release dates.
This has always been my experience with OKRs. They were implemented by directionless companies with weak management as an attempt to bring structure, but the real reason there was no structure or coherence is that nobody in leadership agreed about what the company should do.
They ended up being such vague, arbitrary, and ambiguous goals, like "dominate this sector" or "become a leader in that vertical", or "hire x engineers by y time" that they were effectively meaningless. What does dominate mean? What are these new engineers going to do once they're here? Nobody had answers to these questions, yet achieving the OKRs was paramount.
I'm sure there are examples where they work well, but I suspect this author is onto something and the companies that use them successfully would be well managed with or without them.
This is totally my experience with OKRs as well. At my last company they were a feeble attempt by micromanagers to manage a bunch of teams into being self-managing. But at the end of the day they were giving us solutions not problems to solve, which obviously didn't work out well. Most of the software we wrote missed the mark and didn't get used.
Interesting, I hadn't thought about it that way. I always prefer a month or two trial run before I commit to joining a company for the long term. I just can't tell enough in a few hours of interviewing whether I'll enjoy working with the people or not. And also you rarely get to meet all your future co-workers in the interview. But then, this has always worked out well for me. I could see it being worse and/or disruptive if it led to a situation of doing one or two month contracts for a really long time.
What are people doing as alternatives to these kinds of interviews? The research is quite clear that technical interviews are worse than useless (literally -- they will select for the wrong traits in your candidate pool), yet they still seem to be the dominant hiring practice.
My current company does a few rounds of low-key chatting, some about technical stuff, then a 1 to 2 month trial period with the understanding that there is no guarantee of a job at the end, it only becomes permanent if it's a good fit on both ends. Obviously this is time consuming and expensive, but it works because we're a small and very stable company, which I realize is very much _not_ the norm. This does work great, though. They've managed to build a team of excellent, autonomous, highly skilled developers who stick around for the long haul. Wow, that sounds a bit self-aggrandizing -- I'm really thinking of my co-workers, I hardly count myself in that category. Maybe someday.
Anyway, I'm genuinely curious what other models you all use that work well. By "work" I guess I mean result in high quality and long lasting additions to a team.
> I know that reporting errors can be hard, and I'm grateful for anyone who does. I want to show appreciation for error reports by trying to do as much as possible with the information provided before asking for more details.
This might be coming from a noble place but sounds a little like shooting yourself in the foot. Bugs that can be reliably reproduced are the easiest to fix, and I've found the quickest way to get to a set of reliable reproduction steps is just to ask exactly what the user was doing when the problem happened. They don't always remember, but often do. Sometimes they even remember the time, which can be really useful for digging through logs, which otherwise are too voluminous to be relevant.
Maybe it's a cultural difference. But maybe we could "show our appreciation" for the bug report by just saying so ("Thank you so much for taking the time to report this issue. Users like you play a big role in helping us improve our software"), instead of soldiering on in the dark for 2 days.
You can have residency requirements. In Canada you have to be present in most provinces for half the year and live there for a certain amount of time before you get free health care.