If I need to connect to my home Fedora machine from work, a simple "ssh fed.nono.io" works just fine — I don't need to activate my Wireguard VPN; I don't need to worry about address space collisions.
Thumbs up on Concourse CI: I like seeing all my builds at once on any easy-to-read dashboard. That’s why we switched from GitHub actions: the dashboard.
> ascetic tech monks where we did this for the love of the work and not purely for status or money
And this is not limited to 2010s! My father worked as a software engineer in Poland in the 1960s, and the communist party had a problem: every profession had at least one member of the communist party except the programming profession. But the Polish programmers weren't interested in joining, not even with the perks of a bigger apartment or cars. Finally they got one programmer to join the communist party, but he wasn't interested in programming, and only became a programmer so he could join the communist party & get the perks.
> not a single person has ever said to me "I'm doing this for the love of it".
I'm doing this for the love of it.
Maybe "love" is too strong a word, but I certainly "like" what I'm doing, and I "like" computers, and I have a computer side project that I "like" doing and don't get paid for. Heck, when I was a summer student at IBM I couldn't believe they were paying me for something that was so fun!
Measuring oneself as an engineer by the title of the salary band you're in is a disservice.
I remember at Bell Labs they had one title: MTS (Member of Technical Staff). You were an engineer, and that was that. (disclaimer: there were a handful of DMTSes (Distinguished Member of Technical Staff)).
No one said, "I'm an E7" or "I'm a Staff Engineer II". Those statements strike me as distasteful. And begs the question if we're being suckered by Human Resource's gamification of work.
I worked at a company, Pivotal Labs, where everyone's title was "Pivot". It made for an egalitarian workplace. That changed after the acquisition, and we got titles. My proudest moment? Not when I was promoted from Senior Engineer to Staff Engineer, but rather the after-hours work I did with Dimtriy to expand our offering to include IPv6.
At my current startup, there are no titles, and I'm grateful for that.
Sometimes I log into the root account to see the billing information.
I created an "administrator" account, but apparently it can't see the billing information, including the very-important amount of remaining cloud credits.
Maybe I could spend time fiddling with IAM to get the right privileges, but I have more pressing tasks. And besides, on my personal AWS account I only log in with the root account.
A year ago I changed my CONTRIBUTING document to say that I don't accept pull-requests on my very modest open source project (a special purpose DNS server)
I like coding, but am not fond of reviewing other people's code.
Also, the few PRs I received weren't up to snuff: for example, they included code changes but not tests. If they included tests, they weren't comprehensive. And they never included documentation changes.
I typically get a takedown notice a couple times a week, usually from my registrar (Namecheap) or from Netcraft, about 100 so far.
I keep a public (transparent) list of takedowns, on a public repo on GitHub. The commit messages are the logs. [0]
I have a way to dispute: raise a GitHub issue. I've only had two people dispute: one was legit, and I unblocked him, and the other ran a WordPress site which he didn't know was compromised. I did not unblock him. [1]
Please don't judge me harshly for honoring the takedowns immediately, but I do so because the remedy is simple: register your own domain, and don't rely on my nip.io / sslip.io service (which maps IP addresses to hostnames as a convenience for developers, e.g. 127.0.0.1.nip.io → 127.0.0.1).
Dealing with takedown requests is the least pleasant aspect of running FOSS project. I want to spend my free time coding, not blocking phishers, scammers, and grifters.
Sometimes the code isn't clear because the reason for the "if" has nothing to do with the code and everything to do with externalities.
For example, I wrote a DNS server that had to take into account that on many Linux systemd distributions a daemon `systemd-resolve` binds to 127.0.0.54:53, preventing my DNS server from binding to INADDR_ANY port 53.
So my DNS server has a contorted piece of code that, when binding to INADDR_ANY fails, iterates through all the interfaces and all the IP addresses and binds to each one individually.
Anybody looking at the code would rightfully ask, "What the heck?", but if they read the commit messages, the reason becomes clear.
Watch out! An issue is more ephemeral than a commit message: The issue might not always last, but the commit message will. If, say, a project is re-hosted from GitHub to an internal GitLab instance. Or maybe the original project dies, and all the active work is done on a fork. In such cases, the original issues are gone, but the commit messages stay.
So put everything that's important into the git commit message. Don't assume the issue will always be there.
I learned this the hard way when the company I worked at used something similar to GitHub issues (Pivotal Tracker stories) to record the important background to a commit, which was great until the story was purged (because, say, the Tracker project was deleted).
> every woman ... has vitriolic harassment faced (and/or sexual harassment).
I experienced being treated differently when I was playing a very attractive Blood Elf Warrior in World of Warcraft ten years ago: a fellow adventurer would continually give me gifts (valuable in-game items).
The third time this happened I realized he wasn't being generous—he was courting me! I had to come clean.
I messaged him, "Dude, I gotta tell ya: I'm not a girl in real life."
"You're not?"
"No, I'm a balding man in his mid-forties."
Long pause, and then he replied, "I gotta take a cold shower."
I never heard from him again, but he seemed like a nice guy who was trying to get a girlfriend by doing nice things for her, and I hope he found what he was looking for.
> ...and possibly also your ability to recognise something genuinely new.
I think we can still recognize something new: I found that playing "Vader Immortal" on Oculus Quest to be a genuinely new gaming experience. And I've been gaming on PC since 8/81 (when PCs were first released) and on Apple IIs before that, and IBM 5110s before that.
This.
On my fun side project, I don't accept pull requests because writing the code is the fun part.
Only once did someone get mad at me for not accepting their pull request.