🌶️🥵Many people consume Facebook meta company’s tech stack wholesale, don’t know how to actually traditionally program their way out of a paper bag, and web dev and devops caused a massive layoff (250k people) at the end of 2022, start of 2023 because it was all vaporware. They consume the same software in droves if the other guy uses it.

There is an entire subculture around it that is just a bunch of medium.com writers, YouTubers and twitter handles just trying to get the clicks for their ad money. Some of these guys have never written valid software or done anything noteworthy. If you meet them head on you’d find they have enormous egos and can’t find a counter argument when presented with reason.

I’ll even add on that there are many programmers who don’t know how to code outside a web app.

Why is something like [react, graphql, react ssr, devops, tailwind, unit tests, containers] vaporware?

• there are other frameworks even with component libraries that are easier to read the code for large codebases, better maintained, and have cohesive full stack solutions, and even faster to develop in, to name one quasarJS or even just plain ecmascript
• if you look at the anatomy of these enterprises using these solutions they’ve evolved to have micro front ends requiring armies of workers.
• devops is a sales term, the actual implementation of it is so contextual that you’d probably find you don’t need a full time job for it half the time and most are relatively easy to setup inside of a business quarter
• not everything is Facebook scale: unless you’re padding your resume why did some of these get adopted? How complicated does your app need to be? Did you really need to transpile JavaScript for it?
• unit tests were code to test your code that you’re going to have to functionally test anyways: you’re telling me that you have to write your code…twice? How the hell did this ever get justified to mangers? Why did the culture not evolve into literal automated smoke tests of the actual builds, instead of testing whether a function that is probably type annotated is going to fire anyways???
• docker/containers suck ass: great that they solved a problem but created a whole new one. we moved to python and JS which were JIT without artifacts and suddenly everything needs a generalized build system to run it. C lang variants and Rust lang compile to a binary you can just run… Ship the small ass binary not an entire container to run your shitty web app

You know the stuff I don’t hear about?

• Javascript and Python were steps in the evolution but never the end goal. I’d even say the same of java. There are new solutions but JavaScript in the browser especially should be replaced.
• eye appeal is buy appeal
• that eye appeal shouldn’t always mean you need to use a library or framework; vanilla apps work okay too.
• binaries/artifacts/installer packages > containers
• automated testing of the actual end product
• well written logging to the point someone can tell what the application was doing without seeing code
• using all these compsci algorithms to actually write new products and searches from scratch instead of being a framework baby: do you actually need ELK or Splunk for your search? Really?
• you probably don’t need MySQL for a lot of projects, I bet you an async library with sqlite would be the same for many of these projects.
• small teams with feature rich apps using SSR, the value of an SSR web app
• the value of a SPA
• the value of traditional desktop software and not using REST APIs

No. They’ll just name an entire lineup of the worlds biggest computers after your daughter.

Those are all expensive, used Thinkpad is below the ground-dirt cheap…$150?!

My Thinkpad Ultrabook was insanely cheap even with a docking station. I do donate to Pop OS once a year though as a thanks for their work and I recommend the same. It’s like $12 a year on their site and they do great work.

Trying to get one of their laptops but thats in short order for me, for now.

Adding on:

• lack of quick shipping
• proxied payments like PayPal or apple gpay
• some use laptop kits that are supposedly cheap
• hardware different from software if it breaks and there’s no store or big company to ask for a refund from, you’ll be pissed
• some of the hardware reviews about bugs and their handling of them are damning

“I archived them all Padme. They’re gone…every single one of them. And not just the minor tickets.”

I want to call out a few QoL things here that will help lemmy:

• There are a lot of read-the-headline-not-the-article commenters which is natural in an aggregation feed of links; there are numerous posts a day where people rewrite the news’ headlines to fit their agenda where the actual article and articles headline doesn’t reflect ANY of what they’re suggesting. if you run these sub lemmies for news on your server, I encourage you to use a bot or enforce rules for news that simply scrapes the title out of the link. Otherwise people will post news links that lead to a real source but have a false headline.
• There is a staggering amount of people pushing for oddities like child porn acceptance and I keep seeing it. Unless an entire server is compromised, reach out to the mods and ask to get subs cleaned up. Give moderators the benefit of the doubt and a chance to act without breaking federation completely. Its important Lemmy moderates content but also communicates well amongst each other when something is going wrong.

For sure but it also depends on how deep your wallets are to invest in that. Whether that means literal compensation or just your time.

Write code to test your code then repl build and run it anyways and smoketest it to see if it actually works

Sounds like activities for people who don’t have real work to do. These tech layoffs cut deep because there was so much fluff in the industry. I sort of blame these companies that marketed devops too hard and oversold overcomplicated solutions, but it’s also the fault of the tech leads advising managers.

Thanks for weighing in. Yeah! This is basically what I am thinking I’ll have to do. I just tried Github actions and runners with a very small internal app and I liked it. I’ve never worked closely in AWS but I’ve gotten trained in/used Azure a few times and it’s basically the same thing on my end.

Robust tests, larger conditional workflows in github actions, and some sort of staggered rollout I think are the conclusion I’m arriving at.

Godspeed. I hope the transition goes well. If you need to baby step towards it, I felt like docker swarm was easier to approach but kubernetes is far more standard. I recommend budgeting training into the rollout if your shop can afford it. For CI/CD I recently had a great experience with github and github actions but I had a coworker setup on-premise gitlab in the past too.

Somewhat of a tangent - My experience with alembic of over four years is that it is leagues better than manual SQL dealings, and also very easy to understand what you’re looking at. But I have to say that when I used sequelize in NodeJS, it has an autosync and autoupgrade schema that made alembic look silly.

In regards to my own post I think for now what I’m mostly seeing is that for each new deployment - is going to have to have an internal smoke test, then staggered rollout of updates.

Reading what you wrote here - I think this is confirming my looming suspicion. Which is that there is no standard today for upgrading docker containers. Since upgrades happen app to app. For example if I have a docker-compose deployment and service A is lemmy, and service B is postgres the app in this case service A will have to have its own logic for handling upgrades or code migrations.

In other words, the upgrade process can depend on how the software developer writes the software; independent of docker/k8s/vm’s or whatever deployment strategy you are running.

I think what I was hoping for was that I’d ask if there was a newer smooth standardized way to do software upgrades besides A/B testing or staggered rollouts but I’m not really seeing that.

I’m not super familiar with Lemmy’s codebase but it looks like they’re using diesel ORM here and have migration handling on a case by case basis for some major changes. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/src/code_migrations.rs**___****___****___**

I don’t think GitHub is social enough or the right tool to address bugs, talk about issues, or completely missing - ask for expertise. It’s not even democratic enough and done in such a way that makes what to work on clear at times.

Some code is still more art than work or science but still there is a notion that maybe if there was a better tool than GitHub there would be no need for a discord.

Maybe try some of these - I found this awesome list in my research https://github.com/VPashkov/awesome-nim#gui

Thank you so much for posting. It’s really nice to hear from someone with experience first hand.

Maybe I’ll make a post about my experience with it after I ship out my startup to prod/app-stores. I was going to try to write a replacement to enms.io but since its already open source I can’t really justify the 2-3 weeks to hack something out,while also adding Nim to the problem set.

I have to say though, a reads-like python but compiles like c/rust/etc. has really garnered my interest. They had an excerpt about decentralized package management with nimble and that really made me raise my eyebrows.

And maybe some configs. Letsencrypt is great but SSL is still kinda a hastle

Edit: oh and if Lemmy has any sort of like unique IDs for usernames at a given domain. Could be something on the backend that keeps a unique I’d for each user encountered in the event a user migrates between servers. Mastodon notifies me if someone migrates.

Yeah agreed. I’m working on a solution but it’s going to cost the consumer. According to Zuckerberg the first sin of the Internet was making everything free. If you’re doing things in the dapp space it’s harder since every person needs a server not just an app in an ideal world.

These monolithic websites have a lot less of an excuse imo since they run on a shared server though.

I don’t know man, I watch a ton of YouTube everyday and YouTube also comes with YouTube music. I just prepaid for two years of their premium service and I might do another two in the event they raise their price, I want my access locked in. Besides OdyseeTV and Peertube are WIP. It was like $100 a year flat or something.

PIA and NordVPN are probably fine. If your pockets aren’t super flushed those are good services.

I have a lineage phone I keep on dial and I was using graphene OS for a minute but

The thing is that I live by my phone. Passwords, banking, pretty much the entirety of my actual life daily. I think graphene OS is great! But I also don’t have time or a the ability to have an AI review the codebase to validate that what I’m putting on my phone is safe. The truth is that these are unpaid strangers making a great product who’s work Im not a subject matter expert in. Android is a large codebase. I’m friends with a guy who works on it full time and even he feels lost sometimes. So I reversed my phone back to stock Android for my daily driver.

If I’m doing better financially in a few months I’ll likely buy another pixel phone or try fair phone with graphene. I just can’t justify the purchase right now and my phone works fine.

Just a reminder if you like these projects, donate to them!. I dropped about $1000 on open source stuff over the last year to include joplin, EFF, vueJS, graphene, lineage, and quasarJS. Every one of them does great work.

Hey how are you liking Opensuse? I’ve always observed that OS from a far but never had a good opportunity to sit down and tinker with it.

I’ve been in the Debian or mint/pop os camp squarely for awhile now so the cost of time to learn it is somewhat high since all my stuff just works.

You mentioned lack of packages, I feel like I have an abundance in my ecosystem. The store on pop os has so much stuff.

Maybe this is worth looking at? https://docs.docker.com/desktop/install/linux-install/

Hi! web dev here. It’s time to change your setup ever so slightly with VSCodium, and electerm too optionally: https://vscodium.com/ https://github.com/electerm/electerm

I usually install all my setups in PopOS or a server I’m developing on: https://github.com/gnubyte/debian-setup/blob/master/setup.sh

Then install Insomnia.rest, VSCodium, and finally electerm.

Basically I’ll program in nodeJS, BunJS, or python.

Then I’ll ask chatGPT via Rubberduck (link below) to generate a docker and docker compose live mount for my dependencies of my frontend and backends. Then I begin to iterate over my work.

https://github.com/rubberduck-ai/rubberduck-vscode

My latest flow is basically to start with chatGPT, write a four paragraph description of what I want, have it save me about five hours of boiler plate nonsense, and then disconnect from chatGPT to do the advance stuff like handle security, data structure relationships, etc. Sometimes I go back to chatGPT for how an algorithm should be implemented for efficiency inside a short snippet, then apply it again to my code. There was some great bloom filter work it was able to help me with.

Other stuff I’ve been trying is like podman and I’m interested lately in Jenkins to do builds since I realized I have too many projects that build and work a particular way, I can’t Shepard them all by hand. With that will likely come unit testing, both hopefully assisted by AI to cut down on time. I’d like to reinvest that time on hankerrank and frontend masters to start transitioning to something like rust.