overshard

I've taken to hosting everything critical like this myself on a single system with Docker Compose with regular off premises backups and a restore process that I know works because I test it every 6 months. I can swap from local hosting to a VPS in 30 mins if I need to. It seems like the majority of large services like GitHub have had increasingly annoying downtime while I try to get work done. If you know what you're doing it's a false premise that you'll just have more issues with self hosting. If you don't know what you are doing it's becoming an increasingly good time to learn. I've had 4 years of continuous uptime on my services at this point. I still push to third parties like GitHub as yet another backup and see the occasional 500 and my workflow keeps chugging along. I've gotten old and grumpy and rather just do it myself.

Fun fidget utility! I find myself just mindlessly clicking stuff sometimes while I think and this gives me a little bit more to do.

Location: North Carolina

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, Django, Flask, JavaScript, React, Redux, Node.js, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, AWS, Docker, Git, HTML, CSS, SASS

Résumé/CV: https://isaacbythewood.com/static/pdfs/resume-isaac-bythewoo...

Email: isaac@bythewood.me

I'm a full-stack developer who has been the team lead on numerous successful projects with over 15 years of experience in Web Development. I have a strong background in Python and JavaScript, and I have experience with a wide range of technologies.

I used to use Ubuntu for everything and was very happy in the massive Ubuntu ecosystem with a .deb for everything till I was forced to use Snap a few releases ago for installing even some basic utils I used on a daily basis. I then had Snap constantly hang on installs and just break for no apparent reason and waste my time debugging it. It didn't "just work" anymore.

Swapped to Arch and haven't looked back yet, Arch took me a lot more work to get set up but once it was it's been pretty invisible, which is how I like my OS to be.

I'd probably happily swap back to Ubuntu if I read somewhere that Snap was removed entirely/canceled or something.

Good luck on your link shortener project! I made an open source link shortener many years ago and eventually threw in the towel and quit. The problem domain for link shorteners is one of anti-spam and abuse. Charging for it makes complete sense to try and weed this out but having any amount of "free" I found to be a hotbed of reports thrown against my hosting provider and registrar for supporting spam. I found myself getting quickly blacklisted everywhere since spammers love to use new shorteners for bypassing their own blacklists.

I've not looked into the problem again in 10+ years since. If I did I would 100% skip the free plan.

I use this API in a few places such as a custom New Tab extension I made for myself on Chromium based browsers:

https://github.com/overshard/newtab/blob/master/newtab.js#L1...

Haven't had any issues with it!

Choose what fits your field. If you're doing ML you probably want Python. If you're doing web you probably want JavaScript. If you want fast native apps then Go, Rust, C++, C, and the rest based on what libraries you think you'll need and what you enjoy the structure of most.

I personally have had a career in Python for over 10 years at this point. What made me choose Python as my go to language was my friends and peers making fun of me using PHP for server side web development. Ruby and Python (Rails and Django) were the cool kids. So peer pressure could also help you with your decision as it did mine!

At this point in my career I care less about my language and more about what libraries are available as those determine how fast I can have an MVP. I'd determine what you are trying to build and come up with a list of requirements and see what libraries are already available for you to build off of.

Open source pet projects are a great starting point for learning. Come up with an idea, even if it's been done before, and build it.

And this is when comments in code are important! Any random numbers without a source are immediate suspect to me, especially in something that needs to be secure. It will save your coworkers and peers time trying to figure out why it's there.

My only issue with this is that I can go to my password manager and I have like 10 different Microsoft accounts over the years, some of which seem to be merged, some of which are not, some are from Microsoft acquired entities like Skype and all of them confuse me.

I seem to be able to use some of them to login to the same merged account and others don't work anymore at all.

Microsoft's entire auth ecosystem since Live has been a confusing mess for me especially when they acquire someone and start bringing them into the fold.

I tend to just avoid it, I'm not deep into the Microsoft ecosystem and rather not have the headache at this point.

Oh man, I always find it funny in a slightly schadenfreude sort of way when someone swaps to a new platform, goes to talk about how great that new platform is, and then the platform can't handle basic load.

That being said I do use Jamstack quite extensively, it can trivially handle huge loads due to it being mostly just static files that can be served through CDNs. This seems like it has nothing to do with Jamstack but it's still funny.

I honestly miss people building random stuff on the internet to showcase unique information on things like Geocities. They were almost always "ugly" but also always visually entertaining.

I remember skimming through hundreds of car Geocities sites by enthusiasts who had no clue how to build a website but wanted to show off their rides. It was always a rollercoaster of poor UX and bad quality images but something was also fun about finding the random image that was a link to some internal page that had more random links on it to more and more and more.

Now everyone just posts info on curated pre-designed platforms and blogs like Facebook or Blogger which takes out half of the appeal for me, I instantly don't care about anything posted on Facebook and don't have a Facebook account. There is some good content on Blogger and the likes but there's nothing fun about most of the posts.

I clearly have been visiting the wrong sites and probably could dig up similar content to what I miss. It could also just be me being old and grumpy.

VanNoppen Marketing | Full-Stack Django/Wagtail | Part-time | Remote or Morganton, NC

VanNoppen Marketing is a creative agency who develops websites from the ground up on Django+Wagtail. We are looking for part-time hires who can jump in-and-out of new-and-old projects.

Our projects are developed on Heroku with Wagtail using Django, Postgres, and Redis. For frontend we use Webpack, Bootstrap, and SASS.

If you're interested in an interview or have any questions send me an email: isaac@vannoppen.co

At my work I've gone through and setup a variety of "replacement" commands for commands that may have dire impact on production systems. All of these replacement commands dry run by default (or fake dry run/try to create a dry run the best they can) and require a "--do-it" (think emperor palpatine voice) flag to do the intended operation. I've had multiple coworkers thank me for this setup as it's saved people from silly typos and mistakes, one such being the different handling of programs in the use of and ending "/" in folders. ex. "/etc" is different than "/etc/" sometimes for certain operations.

I'd like to one day see a global flag on operating systems to dry run nearly all commands that changed anything.

Very cool project and basically a modern RSS feed reader for a modern web where not everything has a standardized feed to digest. Which is a little sad... Something like this is really useful for what it does but I'm afraid of how much upkeep might be required if it's scraping pages (which would be required for some platform so it's unavoidable).

Very good point here, that's definitely bad design on my part, I'll fix it.

That's a pretty cool hack, would love to see some kind of write up on it!

I thought about periodically asking what you're doing too but I'm not sure I like the intrusion of it? Time tracking is definitely something people forget about though and just let go from time to time.

Just in general, I've had jobs that "owned everything I thought of or created" while working for that company. My currenty employer does that have such an arcane policy which I am thankful for.

Nope, not in any way. There's a use for larger solutions like Clockify even if it's just personal stuff and not with a group. I just want a small timer with a log sometimes though and that's what Timelite is for. Clockify is a perfectly fine solution for that too if you need it's features.

Clockify is definitely a good solution, I have a larger project for group time tracking that I'm working on called Timestrap https://github.com/overshard/timestrap/ too.

The point of Timelite is to not compete with things like this but to be a lightweight quick time tracking solution. It in no way is a Clockify replacement, and if your entire company and development process goes through Clockify then Timelite may be a useless tool for you.

Add a confirmation sounds like a good idea. CSV exports are definitely on the menu, pretty easy to add.

I do want to add exports to json+csv, not sure how much more use ical export would be but I can add it to the list.

This is something I've been casually working on here and there for a need I had. I use a variety of project management solutions and they all track time differently, some don't even track time at all, and it's sometimes not very well implemented. I just wanted a way to track time quickly separate from my project management system that I can then enter later to make sure my time is accurate.

Hilariously, I've also used this for janky speed run time tracking while gaming since you just hit enter and it keeps going, it's not very good at that but it works...

Good UX also means having a site that doesn't 500 error when you try to read a simple static text article.

It still seems insanely difficult to track calories and macros with all the apps out there to do it. Most of the content for searching for your food is "community generated" so if I try to add a "Big Mac" (example, not eating big macs...) then I get like 30 results all with different amounts of calories and nutrition amounts also with slightly different naming.

Maybe this exists somewhere??? But if someone can make an app to help me keep track of my food intake in an organized, managed (only one big mac when I search big mac and maybe options to add/remove toppings), fashion I would be slightly less insane counting my protein intake.

Yes, this is a difficult task with how much food is out there and thus it has great value if someone does it extremely well.

This also fails to point out the surprising number of developers who know their algorithms, know every "coding question" for whiteboard interviews, can copy and paste a ton of code off of StackOverflow to create a quick mockup but also still don't know how to code.

I've known some very talented developers who could never pass a standard software engineering interview but if you give them a week to create a project they'll have something to you that works.

I've also known some very talented interviewers who have never completed a project from start to finish.

I think we just need to all agree that interviewing is hard for Software Engineering and no one has a good solution for it yet. I am constantly on the lookout for someone who finds something that is both effective and doesn't waste a ton of time for both the interviewer and interviewee.

I did an experiment with this and a crockpot years ago. I'm no hunter or fisher but I would drop by a store and pick up some sausages, chicken, or beef and a handful of veggies along with some kind of stock/broth, usually chicken, to keep the liquid up.

The experiment lasted for two weeks and, while there was a ton of flavor, I kept occasionally running into a piece of meat or a veggie that had clearly been sitting in there way too long and it was a huge turn off. Especially the meat. The veggies, if was a potato or a carrot wasn't too bad.

I think if you are continuously going through nearly the whole pot and have a family to feed this could be a great continuous lunch. For someone living on their own and just having it for dinner it got weird.

I just skimmed this article since it does seem like a bias post from a Headless CMS provider however almost all transitional CMSs that you can use/build also provide the features of a Headless CMS. WordPress has a REST API built in, Wagtail has an API built in via django-rest-framework. I'm sure if I looked almost every other CMS has solutions for this too.

The build vs buy decision is still straight forward. Does the headless CMS solution I'm buying provide all of the features my project will need with room to grow? Yes? Cool, why bother building it. No? Looks like I'm building my own on a "reliable framework" (tm) already used by hundreds of thousands of sites.

I feel like we are beating a dead horse here. Everyone I talk to knows Medium sucks. I personally hate the modal that comes up every time if I'm not logged in and how much of my screen is take up by fixed bars.

Medium has a community though. Facebook sucks, but it has a community. Twitter sucks, but it has a community.

You are going to get more people to see your post if you put it on Medium. You are going to get more "friends" if you are on Facebook. You are going to interact with more people if you are on Twitter.

Creating your own blog will now result in you having to manage your own hosting and possibly even do some "development".

Using another solution may not reach the community you expect to reach.

I find the discussion of HOW to get communities onto better platforms to be a more interesting topic than why the current platform sucks, especially when that platform doesn't even seem to listen to the criticism.

I agree with you, my only point is that accessibility costs something. It either costs time and money if you want to adhere to some standard like WCAG, it costs in hiring a better designer who doesn't make inaccessible design choices and understands basics like contrast ratios, and/or it costs in hiring a developer who has enough experience and common sense to know what is accessible and what isn't.

Accessibility costs time and money, there is no way around this. Not all companies want to pay that money. I don't think the entirety of the blame can be placed on developers.