In another comment, I mentioned that I was “the guy who knew about computers but was more approachable than the IT guy.” Even the rudest people tended to soften their tone when talking to me. I think when it comes to IT, most people’s default reaction is frustration. Trying to turn that frustration into a lesson can be frustrating at any age.
My approach was always: let me fix it first, then hand over the solution. It’s entirely up to you whether you want to follow up with “how did you fix it?” In my experience, 9 out of 10 people didn’t ask. The 1 out of 10 who did were often just making small talk.
The conversation was usually about how they ended up in that situation and what they wanted to achieve. I fixed they talked mostly to vent. That is part of the process.
In software engineering and professional culture, we often ask, “What have you tried so far?” That can be frustrating. The person you’re helping isn’t someone you have authority over—you either help them or you don’t. This cuts both ways, as they do not have authority on you to have you help them.
My thesis always has been people are generally polite. It’s not about manipulation or being overly conscious of achieving a goal. Impolite people usually are struggling with something internally, so you should pity them.
I have worked with people in their mid 30s who had an utter disgust for computers. I was “the guy who knew about computers but was more approachable than the IT guy” at a large office. Even though some people hate doing this kind of work, I always enjoyed it. Sometimes, people would hang around my desk first thing in the morning to get help with IT issues.
I made contacts with the executive team when I had to sign them up for their ChatGPT accounts and set up their VPNs (which often just involved pressing a button). They saw a YouTube ad about how a VPN kept them safe, and they paid for a year in advance...
People of all ages can have a hard time dealing with technology. And to be honest, the IT ecosystem has become adversarial. About a decade ago, installing antivirus software would eliminate many risk factors. But these days, with sponsored content and advertisements, there are so many ways people can mess up their systems.
I am really interested in the concept of elder/senior citizen technology. The basic design concept for them is answering "what am I looking at?"
I created this tool (https://anftr.com/) for some of my ex-colleagues in their early 50s who were trying to navigate the world of office software. They were struggling with Microsoft Word and Excel, and I have seen them yell at ChatGPT and bash their mouses constantly, hoping the computer will load files faster.
Essentially, you focus on text and video demos. The foundational design concept for elder tech is providing clear instructions and minimizing interactions.
If you want them to sign in, you should not require them to press a button more than two times.
To address things they tend to forget, consider a human custodian or "IT concierge" model, please. The reality is that after a certain age, people really struggle to learn new things and prefer talking to a person for help. Technology has its limitations.
If you are working with users aged 50 to 80, provide them with a phone number and charge a subscription for the service or a one-time payment. It might be borderline exploitative, but I have noticed that elderly individuals want a "solution" rather than a lesson.
You explain how to do something, and if they are eager to learn, they will. You offer them a solution either way. Please do not create a monetization model for this custodian service and keep the charge as low as possible.
The money you receive from this serves purposes: it is designed to help them second guess and try to help themselves. If you do not charge for something, they will just keep asking you questions. When you charge for something, they perceive it to have more value compared to it being free.
Do not prioritize ease of operation that compromises their security.
I am sorry for the late reply. Everyone says "you need backup" but that is the thing, I need just scripts. But I will look into your recommendation for sure. Thank you!
My VPS was purged due to a platform hack. I did not keep a backup, and I am trying to figure out what to do. There is no plug and play solution for backup. From what I understand, I have to set up rsync and dump files via cron to a Raspberry Pi. But there is no snapshot-like feature.
I am using KVM from Cloudcone (their virtualization software was hacked about a week ago) and I am using RPI4.
Then I need to set up my old website again, which is a pain in the butt. I hard-coded cron and a git-based auto-deployment feature (I think).
I think the "Heroku story" was less about technical limitations, but everything except technical limitations. More than a decade ago, I started learning and building on Heroku and hosted all my side projects and client projects on Heroku. Then when they got acquired, I was naive; then they removed their free tier and that broke my trust.
I primarily worked on PoC/MVP development where I worked to bring ideas to something barely tangible. And Heroku's free tier decisions meant it was a barrier for developers to develop on their platform. Pay first, develop later. It was like the rest of the industry.
After that, I just exited containerized platform-based application development entirely because convenience and having that weird developer philosophy "I must not pay because I can find a way" was less of a reason than sustainability. For me, containerized application platforms was about POC and MVP. If there was growth then me or the client can pay for the convenience. But if there was nothing, pretty easy to delete the project.
Then I committed to replicating the Heroku experience with a small VPS, backing up via rsync, and moving from PostgreSQL to SQLite. I can even charge clients for hosting (+ maintenance) on my VPS.
I do not know, to me containerized application platforms are limited by commercial challenges rather than technical ones. I see tons of containerised application platforms, but the trust has eroded because of a single company.
I have changed my development facility and laid the groundwork to not commit to these platforms. Sustainability over convenience.
Sure, I understand and respect folks at fly.io, render, railway, and even the open source variants of these companies (Caddy etc.). But there is no sustainability guarantee for these platforms. It was not just about the "free tier", to me it transcends to a philosophical point about building applications in general. Sure, there could be a new era with AI making MVP/PoC development easy through hosting in containerised applications, but that is a tangent point.
If Heroku were doing everything right, there would not be a dozen application platforms out there, but they made mistakes and, in my opinion, made the entire containerised application platform model untrustworthy.
How does the govdirectory project work? Does it use web scrapers to collect the contact details? I checked the bot repository, and it was empty. https://github.com/govdirectory/bots I would like to know about their methodology and to be honest how it helps me.
There are only 46 countries listed there. I am not intending to be critical of the idea, but having contact information of government institutions is not an effective way to get things done, in my opinion. And most government websites and contact details are quite accessible because they are centrally built through national IT system and a unified software service (usually). In third and second world country the contact details is usually quite useless. You have to find the right person and sit in front of their office.
The issue with the government contact repository is that it does not connect 'I have this problem' and 'who do I reach out to'. From my experience, you have to invest time in doing research and finding out who to reach out to.
They have a name recognition and that's about it. I really wonder what kind of people actually buy IPOs. Except PLTR I can't name one stock that went public in the last 2 years that didn't dip below their IPO.
My approach was always: let me fix it first, then hand over the solution. It’s entirely up to you whether you want to follow up with “how did you fix it?” In my experience, 9 out of 10 people didn’t ask. The 1 out of 10 who did were often just making small talk.
The conversation was usually about how they ended up in that situation and what they wanted to achieve. I fixed they talked mostly to vent. That is part of the process.
In software engineering and professional culture, we often ask, “What have you tried so far?” That can be frustrating. The person you’re helping isn’t someone you have authority over—you either help them or you don’t. This cuts both ways, as they do not have authority on you to have you help them.
My thesis always has been people are generally polite. It’s not about manipulation or being overly conscious of achieving a goal. Impolite people usually are struggling with something internally, so you should pity them.