epalm

Aren’t these the guys that preinstalled a root certificate to MITM you ads? Not something that can be casually forgiven.

Where’s the course on managing your reaction when the client starts moving the goal posts on a project that you didn’t specify well enough (or at all), because you’re a young eager developer without any scars yet?

This is interesting. I’m wondering how programmable this is. Would this project (or any similar ones) be able to POST a json payload with a field set to “now()”?

About the poor memory stuff, just get it in writing. “In writing“ could mean in an email, or a chat, or more likely in an issue tracker that has an audit log. When there’s a discrepancy, just link to where it was written down.

I was quoting from the article, which, admittedly, isn’t straight from the horses mouth. If there’s a discrepancy, one of them is wrong (I think I know which).

While there’s no display, the illuminated ring behind the grip does provide a visual indicator of what the iron is doing: solid blue means it has power but the heating element is off, a pulsing blue indicates the iron is heating, and orange means it has reached the desired temperature. If you flick the heater switch off, the ring pulses purple until it cools back off and returns to blue.

I like this mentality, truly, makes perfect sense. Check in often to make sure you’re building the right thing. Keep going until it’s done.

However, the client is going to want to know (A) how much it’s going to cost, and (B) how long it’s going to take. These are extremely reasonable questions in most cases/industries. To answer these questions with a shrug is a nonstarter. The client is working with a time budget and a financial budget, and they need to have some sense of the numbers.

If the Waterfall and Agile methods are opposite ends of a spectrum, somewhere in between is where I’ve found an acceptable middle ground for both developers and clients.

It glows purple while it's heating

This is not correct, it pulses blue indicating the iron is heating, and when turned off, pulses purple while cooling.

Looks nice, both the site and the app! The first thought I had though was, here's a central place where potentially hundreds, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands (or more, depending on how successful you are) of database credentials are stored. Your https://visualdb.com/datasecurity/ page says "Database credentials are encrypted before being stored" but how do I know that? Encrypted how? This equates to "I pinky promise I won't get hacked, and even if I do, all your passwords would be impossible to crack anyways". Security-conscious users probably will need a bit more than that. Any thoughts on using other authentication methods?

Edit: as other commenters have mentioned, an on-prem version would certainly ease concerns a bit.

Anyway... we all know disabling security or not implementing it in the first place can really save you a lot of time. At least in the short run.

The way I put it to my clients, and staff, is simply that security comes at the cost of convenience.

Nice roundup of tools!

Just a small note, on safari mobile if I expand the Edit and then Convert sections, they open on top of each other.

https://i.imgur.com/bSZdRTN.png

getting people to use even the first layer of threads is very difficult, especially non-technical people

Indeed. We use Google Chat which is roughly a Slack clone in terms of structure. A discussion will start at the root level, and then branch into a thread after a few comments, but some users will miss this and continue to use the root level, which of course gets mixed into unrelated comments. It’s easy to create a mess, and it’s even worse when a discussion has multiple threads.

This “thread-based” style of space/channel was forced upon Google Chat users late last year. Prior to that, we had the option of “topic-based” channels, where every discussion had its own thread and there was no root level. Any reply to a topic would bump the topic into view. These were great for some use cases (one topic for each software issue, one topic for each support case, etc), and were easy to understand for non-technical people, because you could explain it like “each topic is like an email chain”. We got into the habit of summarizing the first comment of each topic, which always remained visible, so you could browse the list of discussions, again, much like email.

Anything that you can relate to email is great for the non-tech crowd.

companies that offer a free service but start charging once they've locked in a client-base (I'm looking at you Heroku).

I don’t know much about Heroku, or if it’s been enshittified (yet?), but a company that offers a free product and somewhere down the line starts charging for it sounds fine to me.

And anyone who believed a product produced by real people working at a real company could be free forever was kidding themselves.

(In general though I agree with the sentiment of the article.)

I used Kali too, for Descent and other games. The chat rooms were true communities, probably one of the first times as a kid that I connected with other like-minded people (aka nerds).

This looks really nice! Something my staff would definitely appreciate, especially the ability to 'version' the text file (even if it's just different copies of yaml files in a directory). But the deployment aspect is a non-starter, I just can't tell my staff "install (the correct version of) graphviz (for your OS), then install (the correct version of) python, then run it from the commandline giving the yaml file as an argument". At minimum it'd have to be a standalone executable, and running it would need to be simplified, maybe not with a real GUI but perhaps "drop the yaml file on the executable" would suffice.

Perhaps I could rig up an internal webapp where a user could submit/post a file from an html form and it would download the resulting image, but that'd be a bit of a clunky process for the user.

More than that, the article says 36B last fiscal year. 25M is less than 1 tenth of 1 percent.

All that text and all those still images and no gif or short video showing the pendulums swinging!? ;)

Yes, this! In this day and age, if you’re applying for a remote position but you’re still fumbling around, unable to smoothly join a zoom meeting with a working microphone, it doesn’t bode well.

Heh, yeah, I was a heavy Prototype user back when it wasn’t clear which one of jQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, dojo, or mootools would ‘win’.

This reminds me of using xquery with MarkLogic circa 2010 to store the data, act as the middle tier, and generate the xhtml views, all in the same language. It had its quirks, but it was refreshing to do everything in one language.

I know exactly where the expectation comes from. The whole world has demanded absolute precision from computers for decades.

Of course, I agree that if we want computers to “think on their own“ or otherwise “be more human“ (whatever that means) we should expect a downgrade in correctness, because humans are wrong all the time.

My favorite part of Uplink was the module you could buy to talk to other hackers. Which of course turned out to be an actual IRC channel with actual people! I hung out in the channel for a year or two (via real IRC client, probably mIRC), and after the game’s popularity faded a bit it was a running joke when players would once in a while still join from the game and be pleasantly surprised to find “real people” in the game.

PS I remember now someone (Scaevolous? WolfLord? Rkiver? Zaptan?) had written an irc bot in python, and it was the first time I’d ever contributed to an open source project :)

It’s not possible for everyone to know everything. Almost no one knows how to fix their <insert technology here, cars for example>, but at some point in history the opposite was true. Abstractions make technology available to the masses.

However, too much abstraction, on a long enough timeline, where does it end? The blob-humans in Wall-E, where no one knows anything and everything is done for us?

I’ve definitely felt in the last ~10 years of my career that the tools and libraries I use in development contain “too much magic”.

Maybe Google is responsible for the attack, to be able to publish this blog post! <\tinfoil-hat>

Very cool, thanks. Looks like a lot of thought went into the UI, congrats on launching it!

Seeing as this is for business use where money is part of the data, is there a way to export all my data at once? Not only for having a backup, but also in the future in case I no longer like the service, or I outgrow the service, or the service shuts down.

This is probably true, but I’d bet the ‘nothing to hide’ crowd don’t know it.

My version of this is “Just go ahead and send me your browser history, I’ll wait.”

If you think they meant ‘dropped as in removed’, what I think they meant was ‘dropped as in introduced’.

What end-user friendliness is missing from syncthing?

Yeah, I do this when querying sql databases. I limit the data to some small/local range, iteratively work on the query, and when I'm happy with the local results, I remove the filter and get the big results.