These days there are several aspects of software development that we take for granted. Perhaps we don't know how we'd manage without them. But it wasn't always that way.
Second rolling upgrade of arch in a row that has failed, this time catastrophically. pacman -Syu failed, leaving the lock file around. But then sudo was broken and I couldn't even switch to another TTY to log in. In the end, I hard rebooted (probably a bad move) to find that vmlinuz-linux is truncated. Booted from a USB drive and can't get pacman -Syu to download anything (although curl of the files works). Looks like the next step is to try to repair pacman...
I'm not thinking of hosting my own Mastodon instance just yet, but I wonder what the effects are on the continued growth (in quality as well as size) of one's network when moving to self-hosting.
One of the advantages I can see would be to tempt friends to join in who have been put off by the extremely low signal/noise ratio of traditional social media.
@underlap Regardless of any drops in content quality, as long as engagement metrics are stable or growing I'm afraid Reddit wins. I still see lots of links and discussions of Reddit content here in the Fediverse.
This gives to the leadership of Reddit and other large platforms the message they can get away with pretty much anything.
@underlap content migration has historically been a difficult problem to solve simply because all these companies and softwares operate in pseudo-competition with one another.
For example #nodebb can migrate posts from #phpBB#vBulletin etc., but it's all custom migrators.
Something as simple as a common format for data portability would go a long way towards ease of content migration.
I am not certain many users elect to use or not use platforms based on portability though.
@underlap You might also be interested in ActivityPods, something I’ve been hearing about but just recently discovered is farther along than I expected!
When I worked in CICS development and customers said the product was really boring, especially when installing new releases, we knew this was high praise.
This is why I love arch and xmonad. Rarely is there anything unusual in an upgrade. Just run one command and reboot - job done. Zzzzz.
People get into software development these days via a number of routes, but they usually start with some form of computer, even if it's only a mobile phone, and the internet. Born in 1960, my route into software development was rather different.
I'm not sure what to blog about. I have decades of experience in software development, from mainframes to open source to software standards and now university lecturing. I've lived through the introduction and waning of OO and the rise of testing and open source, plus abortive attempts to spread formal methods. I've coded in some PL/I variants, assembler, C++, Java, Go, Rust, and now bits of Haskell.
What would interest you? Any (polite) suggestions gratefully received. 😅
To those doing Advent of Code this year, in any language. What's the least effort approach to parsing you have found?
I find this aspect somewhat tedious and not really the nub of each programming problem. Or is it just me and you love writing parsers, in which case do say?
ERROR: 2023/12/02 18:03:28 database.go:1260: Failed selecting tagged posts: no such function: NOW
2023/12/02 18:03:28 "GET /tag:WriteFreely" 500 3.760051ms "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/16.6 Safari/605.1.15"
I am grateful for https://sslmate.com/ which helped diagnose a problem federating my new writefreely instance @glyn:443 and for https://whatsmychaincert.com/ which generated a chained certificate that ensures a missing intermediate certificate is always available for the TLS handshake.
Thanks to @proactiveservices for doing the diagnosis and pointing me in the right direction!