danjac

danjac, 6 months ago to random

Personal keywords to avoid in job search:

• Microservices
• Blockchain/Web3
• ChatGPT/LLM

Anyone got their own red flags?

danjac, 4 months ago to random

https://blog.bennett.ink/agile-is-the-spoiled-child-of-a-decade-of-easy-money-7c94bfc1ddf2

#scrum #agile

danjac, 4 months ago to random

If you do contract work for a government agency, you have to live with the fact that their IT department will do their best, usually through bureaucracy and incompetence, to make your work nigh impossible.

danjac, 6 months ago to random

Dumbest advice in tech I've heard repeatedly: "build one to throw away".

I have never seen that happen, not once, unless the project or the company itself dies. Code that goes into production, into the hands of users, will need to be maintained and fixed, maybe for years.

If you have done it right, then it should be easy to refactor over time. If you did it poorly, the you have tech debt you will have to deal with. But it won't be just "thrown away".

danjac, 2 months ago to random

The reason I suspect Tailwind is popular is due to the requirements placed on developers by designers and PMs. I have seen many cases of clean CSS end up a mess - even devolving to style attributes - because every page just has to be a unique work of art with each paragraph and form input its own little delightful flourish.

Developers in general like clean, reusable code. Tailwind is neither. But with such stakeholders sometimes you just want the job done by Friday afternoon.

danjac, 3 months ago to random

OK so it's 2024. You are a web developer and you don't have any money, but what you do have are a set of particular skills.

What kind of side project or application would you build today, with the aim of making at least a decent side income?

danjac, 8 months ago to random

I don't know if it's unusual, but I only apply for positions where I have 100% match for requirements.

If you ask for e.g. FastAPI experience, I won't apply (I know Django and Flask very well, and am familiar with FastAPI, just never done any production work with it).

Maybe some people are happy winging it but you are going up against people with 100% match so why bother (except for resume/interview practice).

danjac, 8 months ago to esperanto

Thinking about how #duolingo is just dropping courses for less "commercial" languages for example #esperanto despite their popularity and that these courses are largely built for free by volunteer enthusiasts.

Perhaps there is an opening here for an #opensource platform for building and consuming language courses that can be hosted cheaply and can exist as long as people want them. Doesn't necessarily need to be a straight Duolingo clone.

danjac, 2 months ago to random

Even if you run a static site, DO NOT use Netlify:

https://answers.netlify.com/t/limit-bandwidth-to-avoid-high-billing-caused-by-ddos/13086

danjac, 10 months ago to random

I wonder what Prigozhin's endgame is here.

Take over Russia? Sure, but then he would need allies in Moscow to do it. He wouldn't have taken Rostov without some provisional support from other factions.

Would he end the Ukraine War? Maybe, he already said there was no reason to start it, so he has leeway to negotiate a ceasefire. When Lenin seized Russia he immediately secured peace with Germany.

Who knows though, the only thing you can expect from Russia is either chaos or tyranny.

danjac, 7 months ago to random

Putin may have a third-rate military, but he has learned how to weaponize the stupidity of Western voters.

danjac, 2 months ago to random

I suspect the death of Navalny was the final straw for leaders who thought there was the tiniest hope that Russia could change.

Putin is all-in, he has no successor other than an ugly power struggle between people worse than Putin, there is no semi-decent, democratically inclined replacement in the wings. And Putin knows he can now only stay in power through perpetual war.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/french-president-emmanuel-macron-ukraine-french-ground-troops

danjac, 6 months ago to random

Who in their right minds thought that GraphQL was a good idea?

It's lipstick on the pig that is the SPA model ffs.

danjac, 4 months ago to random

What I'd like to see is a TV show like Grand Designs, but posh people who decide to build their own web app.

Kevin McCloud appears halfway through the show in his hard hat, shaking his head sadly.

"Unfortunately their decision to use Kubernetes has led to a very problematic deployment. Meanwhile, their offshore React contractor has left for another job, leaving Jocasta and Tarquin trying to write the JSX themselves..."

danjac, 8 days ago to random

You get the impression from today's Tories (Sunak, Truss et al) that they don't really like Britain or its people very much. They regard the British people as lazy, "woke", workshy and ungrateful.

Hence all their talk about doing away with doctors' sick notes, discouraging work-from-home, "Singapore on the Thames" etc. They would much rather be governing an imaginary authoritarian country somewhere in Asia with zero workers rights.

danjac, 4 months ago to random

Companies do job postings for one reason only - it's a legal requirement. They will fill the position through their network or recruiters. It's a lot of make-work for people who make an effort in writing resumes and cover letters and HR who have to go through the motions of pretending to read them.

That's why the lists of requirements have become sillier over time, it's just to cut down on the make work by reducing the pool of potential candidates that won't be looked at anyway.

danjac, 3 months ago to random

At my usual point in Django project where I question why I went with async instead of just using rq

danjac, 5 months ago to random

At the point now when applying for all job applications where I hit 100% of the requirements are an automatic rejection.

Might as well crapshoot for stuff I'm only barely qualified for, why not?

Not in a huge hurry right now as in a job, albeit one I don't enjoy, so I appreciate I'm better off than many here. But never known the job market to be this bad, even in 2008.

danjac, 3 months ago to random

I see Starmer is indulging in that favourite Labour pastime, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

danjac, 9 months ago to random

One thing I don't do any more at work is try to push better approaches, architecture etc. Unless you are in an early-stage startup you will never have the leeway or clout to make it happen.

Instead I'll try and make little changes and suggestions here and there. Hey, maybe I can document this build process? How about a <button> instead of a <div> here?

danjac, 4 months ago to random

Github Pilot is a bit too expensive for me on my meagre Euro tech salary, maybe can get it as a work expense but that's on a different Github account anyway.

But, I'm not sure how it really helps my productivity. Most of the time, I'm figuring out a bug, or how to insert a feature with the minimum impact on the code base.

The actual writing of code is very secondary to that. Neovim or VS Code does the variable typeahead etc which safes a few strokes. Not sure what Copilot brings.

danjac, 6 months ago to random

It looks like there is an open source, non-profit alternative to #patreon, Ghost:

https://ghost.org/

Someone has done preliminary work on ActivityPub integration:

https://codeberg.org/quigs/ghostcms-activitypub

Has anyone used Ghost? What's their experience been?

danjac, 6 months ago to random

Someone posted their old BB software the other day: an artifact of another age, before social media all but destroyed the old forum culture.

I learned PHP back in the day reading the code bases of projects like PhpNuke. Today they would not only have dated UX, they would be horribly insecure.

But let's say your revived or rewrote them for today, with new UI etc. Maybe sprinkle on Fediverse pixie dust. Would they find a new audience?

danjac, 25 days ago to random

Rise of Skywalker is cinematic garbage and far and away the worst Star Wars movie, even including "I hate sand" Attack of the Clones.

But it does have one saving grace, in that it finally buried the movie career of that hack J.J. Abrams. Everything he's done since is just "executive producer" credit on someone else's TV show.

danjac, 2 months ago to random

French spelling is not entirely logical, but I find that once the common patterns and exceptions are internalized, I can guess the pronunciation of the written word with about 90% accuracy.

As an English native speaker I cannot tell you how to say the surname "Laughlin".