tigroferoce

I second this. I also am an extremely happy user of goat counter. Bravo, well done.

The company cares for the profit. In some way it's not Google's fault, but it's our fault, because we allowed the concept of a free internet to even exist. Free as in no money, of course.

What I see is that free as in no money sells well, while free as in freedom is not that interesting. We have what we deserve and what we have worked really hard to obtain. And this is sad.

One might argue that the users were "tricked" into believing that an ads-based system could be not evil, and that now that technology has become a key part of society it should be regulated (like driving, for instance, is). But then, again, we choose our regulators, and we have the regulators we deserve, so ...

I have worked with smallstep and I can't say anything but amazing things. It's a top quality project with clear doc and great UX. I really wish we had many more projects like this. Kudos guys, kudos.

So much this! We are seeing artificially low costs because the hidden costs (environmental and health) are split onto the rest of the society.

We need to campaign to make these costs clear and keep companies accountable

Also, to run your own service you must specialize in security AND devops. The two thing overlaps a bit, but not 100%. And you must hope that every contact you are talking to has the same knowledge.

And you want utmost security for your body, which is why you go to the doctor instead of self threat. And also doctors go to other doctors when they are ill.

The sad reality is that things are complex and you probably get suboptimal results trying to do everything yourself, what other spend their lives trying to accomplish the same.

WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers, but there were 50 people working full time to provide what people think they can provide in their spare time?

Also as the other end of any communication is quite scaring thinking I am communicating securely with someone, but then finding out that their server is compromised because of an out of date library or service.

5c. the shortcut for opening a private browsing window is different from every other browser and collide with the main shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+P) of the main IDE (VisualStudioCode)

Not really, since they never found a proper business model. So far, how do they make money? How do they pay the developers? How do they plan to be sustainable? Is there any place where I can see who donated them? Which share of donations is given by large companies that are constantly breaking the values the Mozilla foundation stands for? Was the news that Google will pay $400M per year to be the default search engine confirmed? If so, which share of their budget does this represent?

A lot of questions are not answered, which makes the whole FF a bit shady. As a user, how much can I trust FF as a browser? Before answering, keep in mind that the browser is the single most important software we use every day since it carries most of our activities. Is it safe to use software made by someone who is not capable of sustaining themselves?

Maybe you are right, but if you present yourself like a privacy-first browser, the paladin of the free internet, and then you end up taking money from Google, your position and credibility don't look great.

I agree. And also I really believe that any good software is made up of a lot of tedious and boring tasks, like editing the copies, making the QA, fixing bugs, and so on, and that these kinds of tasks are seldom done as voluntary work; what I'm trying to say is that without a company paying developers for doing this, it's difficult to have good software. Let alone to keep a service up and running 24/7.

To my knowledge, very few companies have found a way of monetizing decentralization in a sustainable and efficient way (I really hope someone proves me wrong with some replies to this comment).

I think it’s a different view. Technical-savvy people who know how the web was conceived and thought like decentralization because it promises freedom. In my (limited) experience users just want ease of use and nice UX, and just don’t take into account the long term implications of their choices. I’m afraid, like someone said earlier, that decentralization solves a problem mainstream don’t have and don’t want to have.

Yeah, don't tell me. We are two people and we are trying to do that, open source. I can confirm it's pretty hard :-). If you want to have a look, it's http://github.com/saasform/saasform

My point is not on how well it performs, but more on the fact that it is designed and tuned to maximise the screen time, which results in very unpleasant effect on young and children.

And to my view, when you are the largest player, by far the one with the biggest market share and you exploit children weaknesses to make some more money, well, then you are the lowest form of life on earth.

Because YouTube employs an evil recommendation system that is designed to maximize your screen time, even if this results into addiction. There are much better and more ethical alternatives, at least for some kind of videos.

I’m having a good time with nebula for educational videos. It’s not great, but it’s good enough and it’s very reasonably priced.

This so much! Thanks for saying it!

That's a set of great points. Thanks for suggesting :-).

We are getting started, so we have a limited bandwidth. However, we are thinking to developers and to how they will have to integrate. So fare we tried to keep that as simple as possible given the limited time we have. We created a couple of sample examples with two popular stacks and we are adding others in the next days (basically it's the most basic project you can create with such framework with the integration; the idea is that if you are familiar with the framework it should be easy how to integrate (plus the integration code is well commented and isolated, take a look https://github.com/saasform/saasform/blob/main/src/demo-expr...).

For the moment we kept the code as simple as possible, even if we know there is room for improvement. Also, we are almost always online on the discord server and we have weekly office hours in EU and US timezones)

Of course we don't yet have a stable solution for every thing, butwhat I wanted to highlight is that developer-first is one of our leading principles, even if it slows down a little the release pace.

Author here: I think it also depends on the type of product. Sometimes it's better to release features faster than having a great experience.

Ideally using the product should be as straightforward as possible, so that it easy by design. However sometime the product feels just like a stratification of incoherent decisions one on top of another. And it's so painful to use.

Agree. I must confess that Stripe documentation is great. On the other side their examples on GitHub are a little bit confusing.

I’d like to do something similar too. I’ve seen many enthusiastic posts on the upwork Twitter account, but every time I’ve tried to look there I’ve seen just very underpaid gigs and some fierce competition from places where cost of living is very low.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about this, just nothing that upwork might be a difficult road, at least until you get enough reputation.

Another possibility is to join things like toptal. It shouldn’t be too difficult, given your experience

I also had the privilege to work with clojure for a couple of years on a large project. That was wonderful. Hands down the best language/framework/approach to development I’ve ever had. I still find crazy that it’s not one of the main programming language out there.

Author here. No offence taken at all, everyone is comfortable with their particular stack and it should be allowed to choose it. In my past I have suffered some employer that forced me to use a particular stack and I hated it. I just didn't feel at home.

The main point I wanted to express is that we are (more and more) forced to choose some evil that we MUST accept because there are no alternatives or because alternatives are even worse. And this is sad.

Agree. I have worked with large consulting companies that had big banks or big telco as clients and it has been an awful experience.

Not only there is a appearance culture, but also a lot of politics is involved. It's like you are not trying to do your best for you clients, but mainly trying to take the biggest share for you. I know that companies must be profitable, but there should be some sort of Ethics behind.

Once, a few years ago, I told to one of the top managers in a company I've worked with that the requirements were wrong because it was clear that the client wanted something different; he replied me that it was even better, since this way the customer would have payed us to do the job and payed us again to fix it. I felt a terrible way of behaving. That day I started looking for another job.

Then I was lucky enough to land in a place where the culture is the complete opposite (to the point that they literally write in they job description that they look for "lazy javascript developers"), and I felt happy again. BTW, they are still searching for some, so if anyone is lazy enough and wants an introduction, just drop me a message at <dave> <at> <saasform.dev> and I'll be happy to help :-).

Author here. We are Emanuele and Davide. We are building Saasform to make authentication and payments open source and easy to integrate with your saas. If you're making a saas, our goal is to help you launch fast and stay focused on their core features.

Saasform is open source, provides authentication (signup, sign in, social login, ...) and it couples it with billing; this way you know that users land on your saas only if they are authenticated and have a valid plan.

We worked hard to make it as easy as possible to integrate and we are ready to help you integrate it into your saas and support you if you need additional features.

You conclusion is a very limited case and IMO is better met by allowing sex works to be a first class work and not by inventing a huge environmentally unfriendly solution.

Beside this, like the OP, I also fail to see clear cases where the cryptocurrencies provide significative advantage, let alone blockchains outside the cryptocurrencies.

You are giving for granted that there is a private someone that is payed to evict people from an house, but that's not how it works in many places in the world.

In Italy (and I bet in many other European countries) this is the public force that is in charge of doing this and there are a lots of exceptions (for instance, here, you cannot easily evict a family where there are children or sick people).

And if you involve the pubic force, then you are inherently accepting the concept of a central trusted authority, hence the decentralisation fails as a requirement.

Some [1] propose to split the week in a different way, so that you take a day off on Wed and one on Sun and you work on Sat, so Fri becomes like Thu.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALaTm6VzTBw

I think that clean code is more useful than documentation. However in some cases it's not clear why some code was written that way, more than how it was written. In that case a couple of lines of documentation helps IMO.

Also, if you write relatively small and short functions and you document the goal, the inputs and the result, then the code is quite self explanatory.

I read the same statement, attributed to other German generals, namely Rommel and Von Moltke I think.

OP here: I agree on some level. I have perfected my vim skills by actually modifying the production php source code in my youth. However as things get more and more complex, it helps to script them down so that you don't have to remember a set of commands in a given order. I see the deploy script in this case as a "documentation for lazy" :-).

We (Saasform - https://saasform.dev/) are building exactly something like that. Since payments are heavily tied with authentication (and since authentication and payments rarely are part of the core business) our idea is to delegate these two key (yet non-core) features to an external service.

We are currently building our MVP and we plan to release the first part as OSS by the end of the month. Eventually the whole core will be open source and there will a version as a service (a-la GitLab). The first release will be focused on startups to help them to launch faster, in the next versions we will add more growth/enterprise features.

Feel free to drop a mail to dave <at> saasform <dot> dev if you have questions, want to contribute or if you want to be among the first users.