Not 100% programming but I’ve been getting into homelab stuff lately. Yesterday I got Fedora installed on an old MBP, and I’m hoping it’ll be a good moonlight client to my main gaming desktop.

Now the living room TV can be run from the MBP and folks can still watch TV while I’m gaming. Then if I’m in the mood I can do couch gaming.

The first attempt last night worked so well! I was shocked to be playing a shooter like Just Cause 3 without any visible lag. Very impressive!

For programming, it’s time I hosted my tarot card website on my home Ubuntu server. It’s been a few weeks of testing the site just by running it from the command line. I’m still a little shaky on the hosting stuff, but I think I’ll use a systemd service to ensure it starts up when the server reboots.

I seriously hope it’s like the rendering at the bottom of the article with two physical button areas (4 each), two physical joysticks, and two touch pads. That feels like the best of all worlds.

I want to love the Steam Controller 1 so much but the missing right joystick and the touch pad for the left dpad just feels so bad for so many games that were designed for two joysticks. It’s so hard to get the muscle memory right. I’m always trying to use the left pad as a dpad and tapping it wrong.

I wish someone could show me what I’m missing but it feels so frustrating

React has changed a lot with the addition of contexts but that’s the modern way to handle it without using some kind of state management.

I think most state management libraries are far more expensive to use than people realize. Contexts are pretty straightforward and Just Work so I’d keep using them unless you have a very good reason to switch.

I used my old standby QMK and just wrote the config with cursor/vim.

Here’s a cool picture of my soldering job, I didn’t test it until the end, and it all worked first try!

Like Commando series you say? Sold

I absolutely adore both of those journals! They are so goooood. Wow. Life goals to be serene enough to fill a cool looking journal like that without getting distracted by squirrels

I’m guessing it’s the lube slightly leaking out. I mean I wouldn’t eat it. It’s probably not going to short circuit anything and damage the board. It would be a foolish choice to fill keys with conductive lubricant.

I mean I hate that the steam controller is missing an entire thumb stick and a dpad, but I like the touchpad too. This just seems like an PS4 controller.

I suppose this is a hot take, but I’d never intentionally select a closed source paid database or programming language. Your data is the most valuable thing you have. The idea that you’d lock yourself into a contract with a third party is extremely risky.

For example, I’ve never seen a product on Oracle that didn’t want to migrate off, but every one has tightly coupled everything Oracle so it’s nearly impossible. Why start with Oracle in the first place? Just stay away from paid databases, they are always the wrong decision. It’s a tax on people who think they need something special, when at most they just need to hire experts in an open source database. It’ll be much much cheaper to just hire talent.

Meanwhile I’ve done two major database shifts in my career, and you are correct, keeping to ANSI standard SQL is extremely important. If you’re on a project that isn’t disciplined about that, chances are they are undisciplined about so many other things the whole project is a mess that’ll be gone in ten years anyway. I know so few projects that have survived more than fifteen years without calls for a “rewrite”. Those few projects have been extremely disciplined about 50% of all effort is tech debt repayment, open source everything, and continuous modernization.

I don’t think it’s going away until ECMA supports native types. Until then it’s the best game in town.

If a team decides to move away from it, it’s only few hours work to entirely remove. So even if it’s going away, it’s risk free until then.

But I cannot imagine why any team would elect to remove Typescript without moving to something else similar. Unless it’s just a personal preference by the developers who aren’t willing to learn it. It removes so many issues and bugs. It makes refactoring possible again. I think teams that want to remove all types are nostalgic, like a woodworker who wants to use hand tools instead of power tools. It’s perfectly fine, and for some jobs it’s better. But it’s not the most efficient use of a team to build a house.

Ho boy, my mind is a minefield of such topics. I’m compulsively drawn to obsess about new things for a few months and then never think of it again until someone brings it up.

This meme hit me hard, so true.

I like React because these days it’s pretty well known and just about anything I need I can find easily. There’s newer similar tools like Vue, or entirely different approaches like Next, but React remains a dominant choice for the time being. I’m sure fashion will move the industry along soon enough, but none of the newer tools I’ve seen really are such a huge leap forward that I couldn’t get stuff done in a few days of prep and tutorials. So for now, I’ll stick with react until I need to move or a client requests it.

For backend I’m increasingly preferring simple Restful APIs. If it can map an endpoint to a function and convert JSON into a dictionary or object, it’s probably good enough. I just wrapped up a project in ASP.Net Core and that pretty much just got out of the way and let me make web API endpoints.

You definitely described it perfectly: total chaos.

Titles are just “how valuable you are to that team”.

Every team has different needs, so a senior engineer in one team might be a junior on another team that has a totally different set of needs. There is also no standardized titles, so it mostly is just “whatever they want to call it”.

This is absolutely cursed and brilliant. Bravo!

Now I just need to find a place to use it.

Me too! That would be really cool to watch