solraph

I strongly suspect that problem is that Google Maps (and various other Google products) were effectively "done"[0] a few years ago, but the team needs to justify it's existence somehow, so product managers and engineers are literally just changing things to have something to do.

[0] With the caveat that there's no doubt a massive backlog of missing backend data like bike lanes and public transport data that still needs to be filled in.

Unless you want super lower power consumption, you're better off with an second hand ex-office micro computer like an Intel NUC or the various Dell/HP/Lenovo VESA mountable PCs.

Almost all of them have replaceable RAM and happily support an M2 and a 2.5" SSD if you want to RAID the storage, and you won't be relying on an SD card either.

~$100 USD will usually get you enough to run a bunch of VMs, not just a VPN.

Server the home (no affiliation) had a brief write up on some of them: https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...

I use syncthing to keep notes from Boostnote (as well as other things) in sync across multiple computers. I imagine the same would work well with emacs org mode.

Replying to this twelve days later, but anyway...

$199 was a bit steep. If it was a one off, may be I just would have paid it, but since it's an annual fee, it's totally worth it.

Honestly, most of the solar / power tracking, graphing etc for home-assistant now works out the box[0][1]. I literally installed a plugin, and changed a few check boxes in the config. Not saying it's trivial for anybody, but for me it was. The real time data has proven invaluable in reducing power bills by knowing when we're importing or exporting power (1:3 price ratio here), and used that to load shift the expensive power users.

Since then I've added some temperature & humidity tracking to work out which rooms are letting the heat/cold in and out, done some basic automation to know when the washing machines and dryer out in the garage have finished, and a sensor to tell me when the garage door is opened or closed. I used a combination of BLE sensors and ZWave.

[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2021/08/04/home-energy-ma... [1] https://demo.home-assistant.io/#/energy

My post was written from direct experience of having run and being on multiple interviews over the last decade. It's not a one-off thing. It's a depressing majority of applicants.

In the spirit of constructive discussion, I have several thoughts about why other people may not see this. One, it's quite possible this is a very locale specific phenomena.

Secondly, I have tended to work in - and therefore interview people for - very mainstream languages, I suspect the experience of someone who works in/interviews for Haskell would be very different.

Finally, it's entirely possible that most of the applicants are by definition, the ones who find it difficult to get and/or hold on to a job, and that throws out the experience of the recruiting process, and that means they make up a disproportionate number of applicants, despite being a minority of programmers in the workplace.

The problem is that the majority of so called programmers in the market cannot actually write code, and there's currently no other way to weed them out.

When I say they cannot write code, I mean that when presented with a simple problem such as toy robot or fizzbuzz which requires them to break down a problem into steps and implement those steps, they are unable to do so.

There doesn't seem to be any particular pattern to this. I've seen it across different companies, different languages, and different seniority levels. I am at a loss as to explain if these people know they are incompetent, don't care, or are just plain desperate for some kind of work to pay the rent. Nonetheless, until we find a better way to weed out the majority of applicants who can't actually write code, this is the best option we have.

Absolutely. I really want to love FP style programming, but I just can't get it to gel in my head. I'm totally on board with the concepts of side effect free programming, minimising state, passing around functions as parameters, etc...

But I struggle with reading it, and I struggle with writing it, and I struggle to build a conceptual framework of how FP style components fit together. I've been banging my head against the FP wall for _years_ now, and I still can't seem get a level of fluency that where I'm comfortable using it regularly.

That doesn't mean FP sucks, it just means my brain isn't wired that way.

The starter for me was that my solar inverter (Fronious) wanted $199 per year for more than three days history, but exposed a very readable JSON over http interface. I had low watt PC handy (HP Microserver G7) doing nothing, so installed Home Assistant for long term tracking instead. After that, it kind of just snowballed.

This is an under-rated comment. The industry as a whole lacks discipline. Nobody wants to do things that are "boring".

I've seen some movement in some aspects - I no longer have to fight for introducing automated testing - however this is mostly cargo-culting which means I have to fight for doing things in a relevant way instead of accepting copy/pasting stack overflow.

My personal theory is that the the demand for IT workers in general (devs, QA, "architects", program managers, ops, sysadmins... Etc) is so damn high relative to supply that our industry attracts and retains large quantities of people that are just plain shouldn't be here.

Witness the distressingly high number of devs that fizzbuzz catches out.

I don't know if they are in the wrong industry / career, are just generally incompetent, or could be good and just don't care, but it seems like the percentage of incompetents is rising.

From the linked article. > Use CAA records[0] to restrict which CAs can issue certificates for your site.

Disclaimer, I didn't know about them either. TIL.

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6844

My observation is that 1. & 3. in your list are very closely related.

> 3. As engineers become expensive, people who have little interest in the subject become sufficiently motivated to hit the minimum bar, bringing down the average talent/quality of the pool

Which is how you get 1.

> 1. "Discipline" is generally shied away from.

You'd be amazed how insular some people in the developed world can be. I had a house mate who moved from a major UK city to the other side of the world, but in her late twenties had never in her life eaten rice.

Rice!

> Yeah, reliable equipment probably is a bit of a nerdy preoccupation;

Maybe it's a cultural thing? My extended family (both biological and in-laws) across my two countries (AU/NZ) frequently discuss what items lasted and what did not. This has led to a surprising commonality in the brands we all end up buying, and it's usually because someone bought something and it lasted, so others have bought similar, and when something isn't as good as expected, that gets mentioned as well.

There's a pretty wide range of age, political opinions and incomes as well - but caring more about reliability and long term value for money over shiny features is pretty consistent.

From brutal experience I can tell you that's also been true for PHP programmers for a long time.

It depends on what you want to do. The problem is that PHP is hyper-optimised for serving up HTTP. That was great in the 2000s when the web was eating the world and the other options were Java, Python, and Perl, but is less useful in the current climate where there's so many more platforms and web development requires javascript.

By learning PHP, you are effectively locking yourself into the narrow niche of backend web development (ask me how I know!), whereas other languages have much broader target platform appeal.

As an example, the obvious competitor to PHP of Javascript already beats PHP by also providing backend web services, but also has support from AWS lambda, GCP Cloud functions, and even the somewhat esoteric embedded javascript for micro-controllers options.

> Do you shoot for what has had longevity, or what's rising?

Coming back to your original question - I think it's both. Depending on what you wanted to do, I'd pick Javascript (see above), then depending on what else you wanted to do, one of Golang, Python, C#, or Kotlin.

I don't think anyone who actually bothers to run the numbers suggests that solar will meet 100% of a buildings energy needs. However, even at 100 residents per acre[0], it's utterly possible to put about 4-6kw of panels and a solar water heater on every house. Having both of those on a duplex, I can tell you that my power bill is basically nothing now.

Naturally, that power output will differ by location, but it's doable.

[0] Based on my local area, this is a mix of row-houses, semi-detached, and fully detached housing.

I keep seeing this, but every power bill I've ever seen has a monthly connection fee. With solar panels, that connection fee is frequently higher than the consumed power charges.

Isn't that paying for the grid?

The GP is talking about how developing using docker on a Mac involves a separate VM running Linux, not the production deployment. If your application involves lots of files, then docker has to spend a bunch of time syncing files between the host OS and the Linux VM.

It's a pretty well known problem. If you're dealing with a few smallish files you won't notice it, but applications with lots of little files (Node, Python, etc) will have to sync all those files, and that can be pretty slow.

> > The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket.

> The single most important job for humanity right now is to save this one planet we have from destruction.

Aren't these two sides of the same coin? If we colonise Mars, but leave Earth a smoking ruin, then we've made things worse by trading a planet with a function biosphere for one without. If we wait till Earth is in perfect state before colonising another planet, we'll never leave, and be subject to many of the same risks.

> Code review discussions which would take 5 minutes take 3 days. You have to write multiple paragraphs instead of walking over and saying "dude, look at this right there, like _seriously_."

Honestly, I've found screen sharing better on a video call for pair programming. I can switch to the branch and share on my screen to code through a solution, give or take control of their workstation without crowding around a tiny desk, and if I need to have an in-depth discussion that takes 45 minutes to work out what core concept is missing, then we can do that without annoying everybody else in the office or needing to find a meeting room.

Three days is an epic amount of time for an open pull request to be resolved, unless there's been some massive miscommunication. To me, that would indicate there's some other problem with the team.

I'm somewhere between two and three decades in the field.

> when I'm going to either stop cutting myself on things

Never. You (should) get better at recognising some of the themes and danger signs, but the field evolves so fast that at some point you are going to work with something so new that literally nobody knows what the sharp edges are.

> land a position with some people who can show me their cool scars for a while.

Meetups, slack, discord, IRC, forums. Find the one that works for you and be a regular. Be an expert in one subject and be modest and willing to learn when it comes to others. Nobody has it all figured out.

> and uploads were just not being used enough for ISPs to justify paying for the upload capacity that was going unused

I think it was pretty clear at the time that the "nobody uses it rhetoric" was to get around the lack of upload capacity on the HFC network (High Frequency Cable, otherwise known as cable TV coax for the international readers).

The smoking gun is that you can get 250/50, but can't get 100/100 for any amount of money.

Coming back to the article, Australia is a perfect warning of why broadband requirements should mandate 100/100, and therefore force new builds to build fibre. If congress allows 100/20, then the USA can join Australia in re-spending billions redoing infrastructure over and over again, instead of just getting it right the first time.

I can't speak for the Canadian government - but to me this isn't about the better technology, it's about not cooking the planet. Given that 82% of electricity [0] is from Hydro, Nuclear, and other renewables, it's a pretty easy move for Canada to make.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Canada

It's better, but it's still rubbish. The FPTP system virtually guarantees a two party system, which means that whatever one party thinks is a good idea, the other is effectively forced into taking the opposing view, and the lake of anti-competition laws (or enforcement of?) around media effectively means that Murdoch media and the Liberal/National coalition are basically wings of the same party.

Having seen MMP play out on the other side of the Tasman, it's pretty clear that MMP produces saner outcomes.

My personal opinion is that is MMP forces coalitions more often. The upshot of which is that everyone is forced to be more willing to communicate and compromise and take on saner positions, because the opposition one term may turn out to be the maker of the governing party the next.

That's my point though, the alternative is glueing all those tools together, and Atlassian promises (and frankly often falls woefully short on delivering) to give you an integrated out of box experience.

I wasn't aware of this, I'll have to check it out. Looks like it would especially good for companies that can't or won't the atlassian tax.

The useful ones I've seen are where Confluence automatically indicates jira tickets that mention the page and confluence pages that link tickets that will have their status embedded.

It's just those two though, it's also the git branches, pipelines, and release integration from jira, being able to see the support ticket cases and / or alerts that were the cause of ticket/branch/release.

I'm in no way arguing that atlassian does a great job here, only that no one else offers that end to end integration. (Possible exception of phabricator mentioned in a sister thread)

That integration piece is key. The people who want to replace Atlassian tools usually focus one part of the suite (usually Jira or Confluence), but to replace them you all you need a set of tools that work together.

It's not just issue tracking, but alerting, issue management ITSM tools, source control, CI/CD, release management, documentation and I don't know what else that all need talk to each other and provide traceability from any point to another. You can do the integration yourself, but it's a gigantic PITA, and as the number of tools rises, the number of integrations you need to set up is going to rise terrifyingly fast.

I have a litany of complaints about the Atlassian suite, but none of the competitors have even have the services we need.

Best: Catch up, or go home. There's always more to learn, and if you don't apply yourself, you will get steam-rollered and you won't even know why.

Worst: The more confident someone is, the more likely they are to be full crap. But - just because you don't like someone, or they're full of crap doesn't mean their wrong and/or you can't learn from them anyway.