It's not just Spotify, it's also Netflix & Co., so that adds up quickly!;) But I don't argue whether it's economical or not, my point is rather:
- Commercial subscription services are getting worse
- Self hosted solutions are becoming better
Jellyfin is a really nice piece of software & Navidrome looks really cool as well! And in some (not all!) aspects the open source alternatives are even better than their subscription equivalents.
That's true, I looked at it from pure consumerish selfish point of view. I appreciate the idealistic view and caring about artists, but in the end I believe:
- Most people will generally choose what's most convenient for themselves
- Streaming services will only change their ways if they lose customers. Any change they do is A/B tested, so the ads / price increases are definitely in their short term interest. Only when their customers churn because they cannot afford 10 subscriptions anymore or are tired of paying for ads something will change
- Depending on your taste you will need to subscribe to multiple servics. Shows / movies I enjoy are scattered across Netflix, AppleTV+, Prime, Disney+. And it's increasingly unlikely that IP is licensed out (i.e. no Star Wars on Netflix)
- There is a surprising amount of movies which are not on any streaming service (at least in Germany) OR they are but you still need to buy a digital copy or rent
- The UX of self hosted solutions like for example Jellyfin or other open source can (surprisingly!) be better than the paid solutions. I.e. no ads & and no UX redesigns
I'm not opposed to streaming services at all. I will subscribe to them as long as it's value for money.
However in recent years streaming services got worse while self hosted solutions got much much better.
Your point - subscription is cheaper than self hosting - may still hold, but the balance has definitely shifted in favor of self hosted solution.
I don't think it'll become mainstream in the near future (or ever) but for me personally it's worth it!
It's also not "either / or". You can both self-host and have subscriptions, but maybe you can cut down on some subscription services:)
I've built a small scraper for German apartment listings (prices, locations, size). I originally started out wanting to get a bit deeper into Django's templating system as well as component libraries and needing some data to build on. Hence I ended up scraping apartment listings which in and of itself is pretty interesting data. I ended up writing this blog post about it, maybe it's insightful for some of you!
I think a general problem with most of these problems is that they’re biased towards how big US tech companies recruit.
However non-tech companies also want to assess coding skills but don’t care about algorithms & data structures.
A bunch of programmers today are not software engineers but analysts, data scientists, data engineers. So it might be worthwhile to examine how to access these applicants‘ skills.
For example for DS roles more Kaggle like real life problems might be suited better.
I’m just using Ibis: https://ibis-project.org/
They provide a nice backend agnostic API. For most backends it will just compile to SQL and act as a query builder. SQL basically has solved the problem of providing a declarative data transformation syntax, why reinvent the wheel?
It may also look a bit boilerplate heavy but with the VS Code add in and code snippets it’s actually quite ergonomic to write. Just don’t attempt to type it all out by hand.
If you decide to give it a try there are some packages I’d recommend:
- State management: https://riverpod.dev/ is easy enough and quite powerful. The official docs still recommend Provider, but that’s basically deprecated. Riverpod is an improved Provider by the same maintainer
The setup may of your dev environment may take a bit (the mobile SDKs are quite big to download) but after that it’s quite smooth.
Flutter is “inspired” by react so you should feel familiar with the widget lifecycle. Unlike modern react though it uses class based components and when using stateful widgets (components) it’s split into two separate widgets.
I like Plotly’s interactivity, but the Python API would be so much better if it was typed. I need to google which attributes to change to get anything done all the time. Copilot helps a bit but also constantly hallucinates plausible but not implemented plotly settings.
I also failed when trying to create a nice violin plot as implemented with matplotlib in the Shap library.
That said I tried using other charting libraries but Plotly’s interactivity is a killer feature others don’t offer in the same way.
While I think auth is hard it is still doable without having to become an expert when it comes to the details. I recently played around with oauth2proxy and nginx and got it working: https://github.com/layandreas/oauth-proxy-example
* https://github.com/alibaba/open-code-review
** https://layandreas.github.io/personal-blog/posts/beyond-vide...