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CarrotCodeson Staying Organised with a Spicy Brain

Glad the post helped! I totally agree about the notebook price, it is expensive, but I also enjoy using it all the time so it still feels worth it for me.

I have a formal diagnosis and informally discussed ADHD with the same professional but it was secondary :) I'm a bit reluctant to medicate when I feel like I have enough systems to "cope", but it's something I might try in the future.

CarrotCodeson Ask HN: Share your personal site

I agree, the whole rectangle being a link feels better - I've just pushed the change up. Thanks for the feedback!

CarrotCodeson Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://www.carrot.blog

I enjoy writing about server-side Kotlin (and a bit about livestreaming). I've found the process of writing about side projects to be really helpful in getting perspective, after being buried in them for a while. Hope folks enjoy reading :)

CarrotCodeson Ask HN: Is Kubernetes the only alternative for being cloud agnostic?

I think it's often better to "pick your poison" in terms of cloud providers and commit to it, with a rough migration plan that you can execute if you have to. There'll be common patterns in your systems that can be repeated if a large-scale lift-and-shift has to happen for some reason. But it's never easy, and I've found different clouds to have their own idiosyncrasies that make migration difficult - larger migrations will inevitably take time, effort, and lots of planning.

If you're looking for alternatives, or something lighter weight than Kubernetes, I've used Nomad (plus Terraform and Ansible) and some shell scripts to get repeatable clusters deployed and migrated between cloud providers: https://www.nomadproject.io/

CarrotCodeson I moved this blog from Medium, here

I'll usually want to use a custom domain, like carrot.blog, in front of a GitHub Pages site. But it's not strictly necessarily if you're OK with something.github.io

CarrotCodeson I moved this blog from Medium, here

I'm a big fan of the GitHub Pages + Jekyll + Cloudflare "stack" for getting a fast, cheap (free, usually) website or blog up and running.

If you're strong in a particular ecosystem you can switch Jekyll out for something like Hugo, but Jekyll continues to be rock solid for my purposes, and there's usually a guide or plugin for additional features.

CarrotCodeson Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?

Daisy is a Kotlin (server side) message processing library based on some boilerplate I’ve written a number of times privately https://github.com/CarrotCodes/Daisy

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying using Kotlin for backend development for a few years, and gave coroutines a chance this year. Feels great to open-source something that’s been privately useful, and hopefully contribute to the wider ecosystem.

CarrotCodeson Ask HN: What did you build in 2019?

There are currently 3 trustees of the charity, including myself, and no employees. It’s illegal for trustees to be compensated for work relating to the charity. We’re careful to pick problems (and solutions) that we can make and maintain.

I focus on the engineering, my partner focuses on anything design related, and our third trustee manages finances.

We do it because we’re passionate about it, and the legal structure gives us a lot of weight and ability to negotiate reduced rates with services we depend on. It also sets us up to pay other developers, if/when we decide there’s too much for us to do as a team. Folks might want to donate their time as well, but we will need to be mindful of properly compensating people for their time.

CarrotCodeson Ask HN: What did you build in 2019?

Thank you!

For interest, we also just submitted our annual report to our regulator, if you'd like to read about the first year of our parent charity https://www.kale.charity/reports

CarrotCodeson Ask HN: What did you build in 2019?

Adopt Animals (https://www.adoptanimals.io/) - a charitable passion project for free, independent, and ad/tracking-free animal rehoming listings in the UK.

We're partnering with one shelter in Edinburgh (Scotland) to start, and built the website and a pair of apps to showcase animal listings. We've had a few success stories of people finding pets already, which is really motivating!

If you know of a shelter in the UK who might want their listings on there (ideally they'll have a means of exporting them and we'll build an importer), let them know to get in touch with us :)

CarrotCodeson Ask HN: What are you working on?

I'm working on a charitable project around animal adoption in the UK: https://www.adoptanimals.io/

Other aggregators exist, but often have commercial ties, paid listings, and such. We're building something to give shelters a really nice website, and native apps, to list their animals, as a free public service :)

CarrotCodeson The art of over-engineering your side projects

I thoroughly enjoy over-engineering side projects, and writing about them (linked below). The trick for me is in managing expectations. It's completely possible for a learning project to evolve in to something widely used, just don't go in with that expectation.

https://blog.skywelch.io/2017/06/over-engineering-bunnies-io...