Dealing with this now at work. Got a dev whose time in the industry should make him a senior dev but he gives off massive junior vibes.

• The need to change everything he touches

• Wanting to write clever code over straightforward code

• Everything “needs” a refactor

• Just deprecates things when he doesn’t want to learn them and writes a new implementation without updating old code

• Thinks he knows best while not understanding huge swaths of the codebase

• Everything he can’t understand in <5 min is stupid and wrong

If he was less competent (when kept in a box and closely monitored) I’d be pushing even harder to get rid of him.

I’m not understanding the CoPilot hate. It’s an amazing tool if you are competent. Even when it gets it wrong it still saves me 90%+ of the typing then I just correct what it did differently than how I want it.

Boilerplate becomes a breeze and I work way better when I have something to iterate on rather than coming up with it from scratch. It lets me play with and test ideas way faster and sometimes even does it differently than I’d do it which leads to learning new things and/or looking at the problem in a different way. I don’t blindly follow its output, sometimes I reject it wholesale, sometimes I edit it, sometimes it’s literally exactly what I would have typed myself.

I’ve got nothing against SSR, never have, but CSR or even better SSR+CSR side steps a metric shit ton of issues. I’ve written untold lines of code to render something out in PHP then needed to add jQuery logic to the frontend for UX/UI reasons and then I’ve had to duplicate UI generation in JS/jQuery to match what PHP spits back (think: add a new row to an interface after an Ajax call finishes). It’s hell, you have to keep the two in sync and it’s a bug minefield.

Compare that to CSR where all the DOM is generated though a single codepath. Now take CSR to the next level with SSR+CSR and you’ve got a winning combo. Fast initial render and SEO gains (if you even need that) and only 1 DOM generation pathway.

People want to sound all smug “Oh, back to SSR are we?”, “Uh yeah, we had to CSR first to get to SSR+CSR which is VASTLY superior to SSR alone”.

Tech is circular in that way. See also mainframes, to personal computers, to cloud or any other similar cycle.

Within the past few years Apple released a new API to access photos. In the past a developer could ask for full access and you could give it full access OR you could select a few images to give it access to. In both cases the photos you give access to can be read from the app.

The new API allows the app to ask you for a photo without needing to first request permissions. The photo picker that pops up is NOT controlled by the app and it doesn’t have access to it. The app ONLY gets back the image you pick (if you pick one).

A lot of apps that want you to provide a photo only care about that 1 photo and have no desire to have full access to your photos so this new API is great addition and it avoids annoying permission dialogs. There are, of course, legit reasons to want full access but now users have finer grained controls on what they share with apps as full access can revel a LOT of private data about you.

I much prefer having an in-memory database than mock what a database does.

Which sounds great in theory but then you get to find where your prod DB and testing DB differ and you have to keep chasing that. Unless you are using something like SQLite which has both (disk and in-memory) as an option.

I worked at a place that used a different in-memory DB (H2, IIRC) in place of our MySQL DB for testing. It ended up being hell to maintain and had to have hacks for how H2 and MySQL differ (tests would work in H2 but fail if run against MySQL or vice versa).

Yeah, I’ve been paying $5 (or is it $10?) a month for my Ghost blog on a digital ocean droplet. It’s not worth it, my plan is to move to a static site generator (probably CloudFront -> S3 deployed via GitHub actions in a private repo) at some point. The features of Ghost don’t really matter to me and I hate maintaining the install/updating. Ghost feels like it’s moved more into “self-hosted substack”-territory which I have zero interest in, my blog posts are all public. Also, you can’t hack static files so security isn’t a worry with SSG which is super nice.

Not sure which SSG I’ll go with, when I was younger I would have written my own but now I’ll just pick something off the shelf that has nice themes lol.

If you have one of the new M1/M2 macs you can look at Rewind.ai. I’m not sure if it meets all your needs but it does run 100% locally which is nice. It’s not free though.

I ran ZoneMinder for years before buying a Reolink NVM and now I couldn’t be happier. I’m a huge self-host-er but unless you want to babysit it ZoneMinder is a pain to self host. I ran it in docker, I ran it on raw metal, I tried multiple plugins/configs. Nothing beat the plug and play of a Reolink NVM. I say this as someone with multiple servers and ~150TB of storage locally.

Skip the headache and buy something off the shelf for this.