@njoseph@social.masto.host
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njoseph

@njoseph@social.masto.host

A software developer going through a mini-retirement phase. Developing some small tech solutions to recover and rediscover the joy of programming.

Might consider doing paid remote work for free software or cooperatives.

Admin of https://social.masto.host

#Privacy #FreeSoftware #FreedomBox #SelfHosting #SmallTech #nobot

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

njoseph, to minimalism
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The SmolPhone

https://www.notechmagazine.com/2024/06/the-smolphone.html

#minimalism #smartPhones

njoseph, to random
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Software engineering is said to be programming over time.

Many free software funding models ignore this aspect, funding only new feature development. Projects that are decades old often need more maintenance work than new feature work.

Maintaining old projects also needs more expertise than starting new projects or adding features to an existing projects (at least in well structured ones).

This recent blog post from @AntennaPod is a good illustration of this.
https://antennapod.org/blog/2024/05/modernizing-the-code-structure

njoseph, to random
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I am implementing the programs from the book "Classic Computer Science Problems in Python" using Rust.

My current lifestyle and learning style requires the computer to be on all the time for this. I think the desktop I use draws 300 to 600W based on load.

Yesterday, I installed Debian with LXDE on a single board ARM64 computer. All I need are Firefox and Helix editor. I should avoid installing large Rust programs from source, but otherwise it is going great so far. Can use it for blogging too.

njoseph, to random
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This post by @baldur is very relatable, especially this part.
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-deskilling-of-web-dev-is-harming-us-all/

> No wonder we’re all fucked up emotionally and mentally.

Some of us got into this field because we love programming, not because it pays well. Seeing your work being thrown away every 2-4 years, your hard-won skills getting obsoleted by the latest trend and most of all, being forced to deploy your expertise to cause harm (in a profession that has nothing similar to a Hippocratic oath)

(1/4)

njoseph, (edited )
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@baldur

...can take its toll over the years.

In addition to the half a dozen skills mentioned, an enterprise developer also needs to be able to deploy their own code using the latest Terraform or OpenTofu or whatever and be on pager duty. They should also be familiar with at least a dozen of the 150 cloud services offered by each cloud company. They are all different from each other in subtle ways. Did I mention CI/CD systems? A little data engineering knowledge wouldn't hurt either.

(2/4)

njoseph, (edited )
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@baldur

And then there is observability tooling.

You should also keep up with the latest biosphere-destroying fad peddled by the tech bros.

If you are a senior developer who is assigned the "lead" role without any additional pay, you should also have people skills in addition to technical skills - mentoring, stakeholder management, project management etc. This is the best position to be if you want to burn out.

(3/4)

njoseph,
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@baldur

In my case, my involvement in free software both as a user and developer, however small, even during busy periods at work, has helped me retain my sanity and not quit web development for good.

(4/4)

keepassxc, to random
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Debian Users - Be aware the maintainer of the KeePassXC package for Debian has unilaterally decided to remove ALL features from it. You will need to switch to keepassxc-full to maintain capabilities once this lands outside of testing/sid.

njoseph,
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@keepassxc Though I appreciate having a minimal package, I think naming the packages the other way round would be less confusing to existing users - keepassxc-minimal and keepassxc.

njoseph, to random
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Why I oppose volunteerism at work — Asynchronous agile

https://www.asyncagile.org/blog/why-i-oppose-volunteerism-at-work

> Volunteerism at work can do more harm than good. I believe that employees should steer clear of it, when possible.

#layoffs #corporations

njoseph, to fdroid
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About 10 years ago, before fitness trackers and smartwatches were a thing, there were apps that simply plotted the path that you traveled on a map (e.g. ).

If you want to track an activity that involves moving around, such as walking, jogging, running or cycling there is an app on F-Droid called . It tracks the distance, elevation and time for each activity. It can show the traveled path on an app like and also plot graphs.

njoseph, to random
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It's been two years since I wrote a book summary. I picked a small book to start with.

LLMs have become a thing meanwhile. The point of me writing these is to help me remember what I've read by putting it in my own words.

I made good use of MediaWiki references and categories this time.

CW: If you suffer from depression, you might want to avoid this.

Hyperconsumption by Gerard Hastings
https://njoseph.me/mediawiki/Books/Hyperconsumption

#Consumerism

njoseph, to showerthoughts
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India is a European word. The people living in that part of Asia never called themselves Indians. The people living in North America whom Columbus ignorantly called Indians weren't Indians either. It's just a word European powers made up for the convenience of their colonialism. There was no nation state of India until 1947, and then it took a few more years to fully unify.

njoseph, to rust
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Wrote a little app launcher for all of my manually installed applications using Tauri in about 2 hours and with less than 100 lines of code. The .deb package it generated is just 2.8 MB in size. I added this to my startup applications using Gnome Tweak Tool.

P.S. One hour was spent fighting the borrow checker. AppImage is 164 MB.

#Tauri #RustLang #GTK #Gnome

njoseph,
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@supernov
I picked Rust + Vanilla JS.

njoseph, to rust
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Matthew Palmer: The Mediocre Programmer's Guide to Rust

https://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2024/05/01/the-mediocre-programmers-guide-to-rust.html

njoseph, to random
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> The Stack Overflow Podcast: Supporting the world’s most-used database engine through 2050

Episode webpage: https://stackoverflow.blog/podcast/

#SQLite

njoseph, to random
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There should be a global FOSS maintenance grant fund with no expectation of any new feature development.

njoseph, to random
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Do We Need AI to Revolutionize Work? - Cal Newport

> Other technologies have previously sped up the execution of administrative tasks (think: every major breakthrough of the personal computer revolution), but speeding up these tasks has a way of inducing even more to fall into their slipstream. The result is less a new productivity utopia than an even more intense level of freneticism.

https://calnewport.com/do-we-need-ai-to-revolutionize-work/

njoseph, to python
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The Software Foundation's primary blog is on Google Blogger?

https://pyfound.blogspot.com

njoseph, to accessibility
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Today I learned about tactile images. #accessibility

> How to Fix the Internet: Building a Tactile Internet

Episode webpage: https://www.eff.org/how-to-fix-the-internet-podcast

Media file: https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/1c515ea8-cb6d-4f72-8d17-bc9b7a566869/episodes/9c42d95e-c916-409b-85ad-36206f9bf7ac/audio/0f30b1cc-9d4c-4cc4-9827-2fa4b26232bb/default_tc.mp3

njoseph, to random
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Floss Weekly episode with Jeremy Ruston, the creator of @TiddlyWiki

https://youtu.be/OFstPn355xQ

njoseph, to rust
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Magit is one of the "killer apps" of emacs, which one might miss when using a different editor. Helix editor in my case.

gitu is a Git porelain offered in the form of a TUI app with keybindings similar to magit. It's still in active development. I've installed it using cargo for now.
https://github.com/altsem/gitu

njoseph, to random
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The next Nobel prize in economics is reserved for someone who can explain why some people do things that have absolutely zero possibility of earning them a penny.

njoseph, to random
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Helix editor has no project file explorer yet (like nerdtree or neotree).

It's taking me some time to get used to browsing files using yazi and then hitting enter to open them with Helix.

#HelixEditor

njoseph, to random
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Came back from a short vacation.

Today, I wrote a cgi-bin script in Python that allows saving either Feather Wiki or Tiddly Wiki files to an Apache server.

FreedomBox as a platform already has single sign-on, backups, user management etc., so I don't have to implement any of them.

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