Fully retired now and one of the things I'd like to do is get back into hobby programming through the exploration of new and new-to-me programming languages. Who knows, I might even write something useful someday!
I'm a programmer, so I must know how to get X done in Y software.
I don't use
<social media app>
or<messaging system>
so I'm some kind of Luddite and can't possibly know anything useful about computers.
One thing that fascinates me about #1 is that the absolute raw dependency people have on Google doesn't seem to ever lead to searching for a tutorial.
That IT subject matter like cybersecurity and admin work is exactly the same as coding,
I think this is the root cause of the absolute mess that is produced when the wrong people are in charge. I call it the "nerd equivalency" problem, the idea that you can just hire what are effectively random people with "IT" or "computer" in their background and get good results.
From car software to government websites to IoT, there are too many people with often very good ideas, but with only money and authority, not the awareness that it takes a collection of specialists working in collaboration to actually do things right. They are further hampered by their own background in that "doing it right" is measurable only by some combination of quarterly financial results and the money flowing into their own pockets.
I host a personal instance of GoToSocial, because it's written in go, a language I want to learn. It supports RSS for those without a Mastodon account. (Not that anyone knows what RSS is. Most of the people I know are surprised when I show them how to bookmark something! 😀)
I also use RSS-Mastodon services to stuff my feed with things I'm interested in. This is not just for websites, but other socials that support RSS. So far, I've had the best luck with Mastofeed. (There is a different Mastofeed project that lets you embed a Mastodon feed into your website. I haven't yet tried that, but it's on my list.)
I think "federated" is in danger of becoming synonymous with ActivityPub. I haven't investigated the inner workings of ActivityPub, but I can't imagine any way for my personal ActivityPub server to interact with other ActivityPub servers except through some kind of automation.
There are other federated systems out there: email, RSS/Webmention, Bluesky, Usenet, etc.
I don't think anyone is less federated just because they choose to bridge to a federation rather than run the federated software directly.
Does anything ever truly die?
I've always thought the best way to kill a hobby was to turn it into a job.
100%
I tried turning my hobby of programming into my job. On the surface, I was reasonably successful, but the most enjoyable aspects of my hobby had to be set aside in favour of actual productivity.
Worse, the fact that I actually got pleasure from my work left me open to exploitation. When I finally woke up to that, I ditched programming in favour of "just a job" that paid the bills and was about a million times happier as a result. It's only recently, 15 years after leaving the field, that I find myself once again drawn back to programming.
In the spirit of "-10x is dragging everyone else down" I offer my take on +10x:
It's not about personal productivity. It's about the collective productivity that comes from developing and implementing processes that take advantage of all levels of skill, from neophyte to master, in ways that foster the growth of others, both in skill and in their ability to mentor, guide, and foster the growth of others. The ultimate goal is the "creation" of more masters and "multipliers" while making room for those whose aptitudes, desires, and ambitions differ from your own.
I tried a few. Zola was the only one I got far enough with to actually get my site deployed.
Some of that might be that I learned stuff from my previous failures, but I really feel like the combination of the way it works and the Zola-specific themes are what worked for me.
But typically when a field becomes more affordable, it goes up in demand, not down, because the target audience that can afford the service grows exponentially.
I've always been very up front with the fact that I could not have made a career out of programming without tools like Delphi and Visual Basic. I'm simply not productive enough to have to also transcribe my mental images into text to get useful and productive UIs.
All of my employers and the vast majority of my clients were small businesses with fewer than 150 employees and most had fewer than a dozen employees. Not a one of them could afford a programmer who had to type everything out.
If that's what happens with AI tooling, then I'm all for it. There are still far too many small businesses, village administrators, and the like being left using general purpose office "productivity" software instead of something tailored to their actual needs.
One of my dictionaries says a smirk is "To smile in a way that is affected, smug, insolent or contemptuous."
A smile typically suggests amusement, and I see nothing in that expression suggestive of amusement. I would call it something more like "displeasure at finding myself having to once again clean up someone else's mess." So maybe not actual disgust, but something related.
... if your company or your job depend are at stake, that's often a risk you have to take
Take all the risks you want. Just be sure that you're the one actually taking the risk, not the people whose data you manage. I get really tired of people and companies who claim that it was a necessary risk when they're not the ones paying for the bad outcomes.
You risk something by standing your ground, not in agreeing to that which puts me at risk.
All excellent points. I never worked at those scales or under those conditions, neither should I have been permitted to. And I had enough self-awareness to keep myself away from anything like that.
I guess when I read about this breach or that, the real damage seems to be a result of not having the basics covered. Whatever "basic" might mean for different scales of operation, encrypted at rest seems to be the the basis of public harm through theft of data, and it strikes me that if that can't be managed at a particular scale, then operating at that scale should not be considered.
Of course, but that just makes the case for security as a foundational principle even stronger.
Mistakes happen. They always will. That's not a reason to just leave security as the afterthought it so often is.
None of the things I mentioned have anything to do with errors and scope creep, but everything to do with building using sound principles and practices always. As in, you know, always. In class, during bootcamps, during design meetings, when writing sample code, when writing reference implementations, during the construction of the prototype that, let's face it, almost always goes into production. Always.
That is something I just don't get. I'm a hobbyist turned pro turned hobbyist. The only people who I ever offered my services to were either after one of my very narrow specialties where I was actually an expert or literally could not afford a "real" programmer.
I never found proper security to have any impact on my productivity. Even going back to my peak years in the first decade of this century, there was so much easily accessible information, so many good tutorials, and so many good products that even my prototypes incorporated the basics:
- Encrypt the data at rest
- Encrypt the data in transit
- No shared accounts at any level of access
- Full logging of access and activity.
- Before rollout, back up and recovery procedures had to be demonstrated effective and fully documented.
Edited to add:
It's like safety in the workplace. If it's always an add-on, it will always be of limited effectiveness and reduce productivity. If it's built in to the process from the ground up, it's extremely effective and those doing things unsafely will be the productivity drain.
That sounds ideal. Machines that are mostly maintained by experienced people and a community to help you gain experience.
This may not apply to your situation, but I found that most of my problems like this were related to "general vs specific".
Many people have difficulty generalizing from specific instructions so they need help every time something looks different to them. In an extreme case, found a person unable to choose a font in the header of a word processing document because the only thing they'd ever been shown was how to choose a font in the body of the document. It's not even that they were particularly dense, it's that they'd seen so much unexpected and unexplained variation in other areas that they started assuming that everything is an isolated task with a potentially distinct set of procedures. Now that I've switched from Windows to Linux, I'm getting a better understanding of how that happens, with many applications using different hotkeys, not implementing what I think are sensible "tab ordering", etc.
Many people have difficulty going from the general to the specific without also seeing several specific examples in a variety of scenarios. That kind of thing normally requires more formalized training. If their only exposure to your knowledge is through ad-hoc help desk kinds of interactions, there will be no opportunity to put everything together.
Thanks for your interest!
Apart from here and "self-hosting" and other communities, if you're a glutton for punishment, you can see what's up at https://walloftext.ca. I'm currently in the process of rebuilding everything from the ground up, including an associated mastodon-compatible instance. I've not yet rewritten my project outline to account for all the new stuff I've learned about in the past few months, but it's coming in the next few days.
Just note the most important part of my tagline: "Unstable by nature". Some would argue that applies more to me than the stability of the site and projects. 😛 Either way, chaos is probably the order of the day for at least the rest of this year. (And I mostly take summers off to reenergize by fishing, working in my shop, etc.)
Tension. Always tension. My mom had the same battles. My aunt never had trouble.
I suspect that buying a new mid-grade machine or better from a reputable dealer is the secret. I've bought a couple of $50 used machines because I don't want to spend 10 times that or more if it turns out that I'm not going to actually use it. I already do enough of that. 😀
Go find a sewing club and get their advice. That's what I'm doing the next time the bug bites.
Bluesky Social, or at least their PDS (personal data server) uses Go and their Docker package includes Caddy, a webserver written in Go.
I don't know what you're doing, but I have difficulty accepting that Go cannot meet your performance requirements.