pickle-wizard

I am a solo developer. I write most of my code by hand. I use LLMs to help me do research and to help find stuff in documentation. I also use it to do come reviews since I don't have anyone else to review the code. I do get a lot of value out of the code review. It often finds little things I missed or will tell me if my code sucks.

Really for what I am doing writing the code is never the bottleneck. I spend little of my time actually writing code. Where I spend most of my time on the design and requirements.

Microsoft built this so they can have a MongoDB compatible database service for Azure.

A few years back MongoDB changed their license to AGPL to make it harder for companies to take their code and offer it as a service. They did this because it competes with the MongoDB Atlas service.

At a past job the security team wouldn't let us have netcat or curl on our systems. So I just used /dev/TCP to get around that. The ergonomics were not as nice as using netcat or curl, but it got the job done.

I am still using VSCode. I do have the Claude Code extension, but I don't really use Claude to write code. I mainly use it for code reviews. Since I am a solo developer it is nice to be able to get a second opinion.

I use a passkey that is in iCloud Keychain.

There is a big difference between vibe coding and using an LLM to assist with coding. Vide coding is just accepting what ever slop it outputs and saying LGTM. You are not going to get quality code that way. You need to review what it does. I often find that it uses outdated libraries and deprecated functions.

Some ways an LLM can assist with coding: I recently needed to refactor a bunch of code. Claude was very helpful this and it completed in about 5 minutes what would have taken me a couple of hours by hand.

Also they are very handy when using new frameworks and libraries. As we all know documentation for open source projects is often lacking. Just yesterday I ran into this. I pointed Claude at the projects GitHub repo and had the answers to my questions in just a couple of minutes. Manually I would have been spending a hour or two reading the code to figure out what I needed.

They are very handy when debugging. Get a weird hours that makes no sense. Instead of banging your head against the wall for a few hours, an LLM can help you find the problem much quicker.

I was discussing this with a friend last night. If fuel prices get high enough I can see it happening.

In a past life I was a Domino admin and I ran it on an AS/400. It was great, handled incredible amounts of load, and required little maintenance. The only outage we had was when I accidentally deleted all the databases from the file system. Even that was pretty easy to recover from.

What about the old school processors like Authorize.net and Cybersource? It has been over a decade since I worked with them, so not sure what they are like now.

It has been 25 years, but back in college I had a job refurbishing and repairing PCs. Most problems were caused by cheap no name hardware. Most the quality hardware rarely had problems.

On a lark a friend setup Ollama on a 8GB Raspberry Pi with one of the smaller models. It worked by it was very slow. IIRC it did 1 token/second.

If you don't need color I recommend going with a laser printer. Not only for lower consumable costs, but better software support too. In 2009 I bought a Lexmark laser printer new for $120 at Frys. It has native postscript support, so it will work with anything without having to load software from the manufacturer. I systems ranging from an old Macintosh Quadra running System 7 to new Mac running MacOS Tahoe, a PC running Windows 11 and everything in between. It even works in Linux too.

The consumables are cheap too. I have just replaced the toner cartridge once and a new OEM one was about $80 on Amazon.

The same way you handle any fraudulent charges. Notify the bank and they'll reverse the charges.

Pricing is something I struggle with too. I really need to figure out my pricing model and price point as it makes a difference to some deferred architecture decisions. I can't put the decision off much longer as I'm getting to the point where I need to make a decision.

My biggest issue at the moment is that development of the MVP is taking way longer than I had initially thought. It's just me working on it and it has turned into a real grind. I am just so ready to get this done. I could hire contractors, but quality contractors are expensive and cheap ones don't deliver quality. Either way I would be burning runway and I'd rather save my money for later.

My other issue is that it is just me sitting at my home office working. I don't really have anyone that I can talk to. I started this venture after I took a sabbatical from work, so everyone IRL just thinks I'm unemployed farting around the house all day. Whereas I am working 6 days a week, I'm just not getting paid. I have tried to join some online communities, but there are just people stumping for their own start ups. I am considering joining a coworking space next year that is geared toward startups. The problem is that is also expensive, especially considering that next year I have to pay full freight on my health insurance.

Right now I am living off my investments. I have done well this year, but like others I am starting to be concerned that we might be in a bubble. I am pretty conservatively invested, but it would suck to have a prolonged 20 or 30% draw back.

I really need to bring on a cofounder to help with business development. Though I have to find someone willing to work for equity only as I don't have enough cash to pay them a salary.

So I guess you could say money is one of my biggest struggles.

I've been using SvelteKit.I find it pretty easy to use.

I haven't seen the site you are talking about, but I use http.cat. It illustrates HTTP status codes as cat pictures.

In my sphere most companies are going to either Hyper-V or the cloud. Hyper-V kinda won by default as a lot of orgs already had Windows Server licenses.

Do you have any legitimate traffic coming from AWS? My thought is to just drop all traffic from their ASN. Once they can't contact you for a while they'll move along and you could unblock.

Same. I signed up, found the conversations to be unproductive and unhealthy and deleted my account.

At a past job we had an object store that used SwiftStack. We just used SSDs for the metadata storage but all the objects were stored on regular HDDs. It worked well enough.

Just from reading the posters comments and word choice, I don't think they are actually a manager. I think this is just rage bait.

This is great, I've been needing a tool like this. I just bought a Pro license.

He wasn't a programmer, but a big beard UNIX admin. Of everyone I've worked with in my career he has had the most influential. He taught me 2 core things.

1. Information is meant to shared. 2. Never do manually what can you write shell script to do.

I started at $MEGACORP on the help desk. One day I noticed one of our AIX servers had a volume filling up. So I send him an IM that says "Hey I noticed that the log partition on server BLAH is filling up". He immediately called me and told me that the server does partitions, but instead used logical volumes. He then spent the next two hours explain in detail how logical volume manger worked, how to manage volumes and the implications it had with our SAN. At the end of the call I made a comment that I was surprised he was sharing all this information with me. He responded that he didn't want the type of job security you get by hoarding information. He instead wanted by job security by enabling the team to preform at its best, and he believed you achieved that by sharing knowledge. That phone call was only the first of many such calls.

The second thing is that he believed in automating everything you could. Using knowledge he shared with me, I quickly automated most of my help desk duties. Because of this I started working more with the system administration team and was moved onto it after just a few months. In my 20 year career every job I've had has revolved around automation. I really enjoy it and without his influence I would have never gone down this path.

I think a tool like this would be useful.

All of our local startup meetup groups only do online meetings, so something to facilitate in person meetings would be good. I'm looking for a cofounder, but it would also be helpful just to chat with other founders or early startup employees.

Since he is the RevOps guy, my first question would be how much is this going to save.

Once you go to buy Google Workspace + Slack + Zoom + Jamf + all the other replacements. I doubt it is going to be any cheaper.

--Edit to add. He says you need Gemini so you can be a AI company. Doesn't the Microsoft subscriptions come with CoPilot?

I don't use AI for writing code directly. If I am working with a new framework or SDK I'll ask it for examples of how to do something, and then write the final implementation myself. This saves a lot of time digging through poorly written docs or decade old StackOverflow posts. However do keep in mind that it does sometimes make stuff up, so you have to keep an eye on it.

I'm a solo dev and also use it to rubber duck what I am planning to do. I can give it my requirements and it helps me to refine my plan. This is what I mostly use it for.

I know people say it is great for writing boilerplate, but I just don't find myself writing much boiler plate.

That is an excellent price. Good option for folks that have old software and embedded hardware that can't be upgraded.

I was going to suggest this too. I use my registered agent's address on all official business stuff.

I haven't worked with mainframes since the z10, but back then you could get into an entry model for about $100k.

Though the sky is the limit. The typical machine I would order had a list price of about 1 million. Of course no one pays list. Discounts can be pretty substantial depending on how much business you do with IBM or how bad they want to get your business.