1,352 karma · joined November 22, 2017
These sort of pseudo-directories honestly bother me more than just plain old hierarchy. For example on Windows, "This PC/Documents" is really "%userprofile%/Documents", but to get to %userprofile% you have to go to C:\Users\<username>. But there's TONS of other stuff that lives in %userprofile%
- It's a separate, dedicated application to do just my source control
- Keeping repos in tabs makes it easy to switch between projects (yes, you could use screen or some other multiplexer, but it's just not as fast for me)
- I'm Windows
- Easier to review history / merges at a glance
- Sucks that SourceTree doesn't have diffing, but it's much easier to do diffs/merge conflict resolution in a UI
- Clicking through items to see what's staged/unstaged is quick
- Expose IR commands for turning our bedroom fan on/off along with some battery-powered candles
- Flashed it to a Sonoff S31 to detect if our electric fireplace is on/off based on power usage.
- Secondary ESP32 that controls said fireplace with IR commands and has an attached dfplayer MP3 module to play a loop of fireplace sounds
- Wired up some photoresistors to an ESP32 that are spaced to match the status lights on our washing machine. The same ESP32 has an accelerometer attached to our dryer that changes its state depending on vibrations of the dryer.
- There's an ESP32 in our garage that has two VL53L0X time-of-flight range sensors to detect whether the garbage or recycling bin is out. In my automations I check if it's garbage or recycling day and send a notification if the bins haven't been taken out.
All of my automations are written in C#/.NET using NetDaemon.
As a writer, it's good not great. As a low code dev, it's the best because you can do 99% of what you need to do with no licensing costs. As a regular beginner dev it's a great platform to learn on. As an experienced dev it's just terrible to get anything done and too many people never graduate from it for larger build outs. Here's just a random list of hot takes I have (keep in mind I have not worked on the platform since Gutenberg got introduced, though I imagine much of the backend code hasn't changed)
- It's not an application framework, so stop treating it like one. It's good at blogging and decent for laying out web pages. If you need it to do other things, use Laravel or Grav or something
- File management is completely unmaintainable for anything more than a personal site. I've worked on some larger 2000+ page sites and it's nothing short of a nightmare.
- Post/page versioning is basic. There are plugins that do a much better job at accomplishing this, but it's time that it makes it into core. I'm talking about an actual publishing workflow with visual diffs and such.
- The backend API is atrocious. Using methods like get_post or the_content are great examples of why people hate PHP. Inconsistent naming, unclear usage, no namespacing, etc etc makes it really hard to read code. I'm a .NET dev so I'm probably a bit biased but with the amount going on under the hood, a service layer is necessary.
- Being able to rapidly prototype with themes and plugins is great and part of the dev experience, but unfortunately most projects never mature past the prototyping stage.
- The community surrounding WP is great, and Wordcamps are a great experience. I've given a couple of (admittedly bad) talks at WC Milwaukee and was surprised at the range of people that attend them.
- One of the talks I hosted was about how to use Xdebug with WP. Maybe things have changed, but I threw the talk together because _maybe_ 1% of devs I ever interacted with in the WP space asked if I had stepped through my code with a debugger. var_dump is a terrible crutch that PHP devs rely on way more than they should. I know things have improved with Docker compared to the days of Vagrant, but even at the time WP devs seemed to lag behind the rest of the industry in this regard.
- Last thing, I have terrible nightmares still about the database schema. Too many plugins/themes rely on post_meta and (whether you agree with them or not) I think WP needs a proper ORM.
Quick Edit: I will praise WP's for its plugin architecture with actions/filters. I've replicated this in our own .NET-based application and really love just being able to hook into places without dealing with nasty hierarchy structures.
A fault of the phone? Probably not, it's more like the adapter works _too well_. It really only needs to be tuned for a few feet, realistically, but yet works up to practically 30 feet away with the adapter IN THE CAR 3 FLOORS BELOW ME. The adapter is marketed for use in the car.
Anyway, every so often when I had an iPhone it would prefer playing over the hands-free instead of the BT audio adapter... because that's preferable for music apparently??
I feel like the spec needs to be revamped. BLE was a good addition, but I'd love to see introduction of some sort of mesh and more accurate proximity detection. Apple had to mash two different techs together just to get AirTags to work.
- Microphone quality sucks and unless your headphones emulate two BT devices, your audio quality has to drop to a terrible early-2000's codec. - Now that I have a nice pair of headphones, it's paired to 10 different devices. They fight over what connects first. Most of my devices run with BT off to make it easier to connect.
Additionally, some industries like K12 or non-profits a lot of times have to try to squeeze as much life out of their systems as possible. These organizations would benefit insanely from better repairability and cheaper access to parts.
Of course motherboards are a bit harder to repair and usually means replacing the whole board, but it doesn't have to if we had a skilled workforce that could easily refurbish boards. Apple has taken great measures to make sure this never happens.
There's also the argument to be made for historic preservation. The retro computer community has been doing nothing but growing and I can already see in 20+ years time that these machines will be absolutely unusable without some sort of software hack. Even then, your onboard storage is shot and you have to boot externally.
You can make repairable, cost effective, well built, and top of the line machines. Apple just doesn't do it.
Not to mention that "just replace the motherboard" can often mean costing half, if not more, the original price of the machine. What happens if my SSD wears out? I just have to replace the entire logic board for one wear component?
Say it's not the SSD and it's something else like a voltage regulator. Now this motherboard is complete scrap. There's no harvesting of the RAM or SSD, so the part is probably $300 more expensive than it needs to be. And all those useful parts that are already scarce in a chip shortage will just be ground down and "recycled". These laptops suck.
I really think that Apple devices get so much clout mostly due to advertising.
My issues with my iPhone 7 radio made me switch to Android after they told me it was Qualcomm's fault that it wasn't bonded to the PCB properly.
My 2009 MacBook Pro 13" had some sort of issue where the SATA III part of the controller died and I was forced to either pay $800 for a new logic board because I had upgraded the RAM or use an optical drive HDD caddy which ran at SATA I(?) speeds. I had also had the logic board replaced once and the screen replaced twice less than a year after I got it as the screen had stopped working. Don't remember the actual cause of the issue, but seeing as it was covered I have a feeling there was a known issue with that line.
My girlfriend's 2011 13" MacBook Pro ended up with non-functioning USB ports due to a known but never recalled, even silently, issue with a chip on the logic board. Again, would have been a $500+ logic board replacement "fix".
My 2016 MacBook Air 13" started to develop a crack on the black plastic piece covering the hinge because of heat stress. I paid for the most "performant" SKU and after one major macOS update it was practically unusable.
My mom's 2017 MacBook Air 13" worked fine until this past year where the trackpad and keyboard died. Sure, got 5 years out of it, but this is also a very common issue as far as I can tell from research. Also, who the hell routes the keyboard through the trackpad? That's madness.
This is all anecdotal for sure, but I am staying away from Apple products from now on based on my experience. Especially these days with the machines having non-user-serviceable parts, I just can't take the risk anymore. What happens when my logic board inevitably dies? All of my data on that device is toast with no way to recover it. Ultimately you have to purchase something that's going to work and is serviceable... either by yourself or a service center.
This answer is so generic, but so apt. Everyone can throw around phrases like KISS or MVP or try to implement methodology like agile, but it's so hard to just identify _what_ you want (or need) to build.
We're looking at a major revamp/rewrite/refactor of our main product that previously had been built with the idea of being able to solve every problem our customers face. This decrepit, aging codebase has so many bandaid fixes for every conceivable "what if" scenario that it's just become unmaintainable.
- LDAP integration
- SSO
- Customizable icons per library
- Remote agent transcoding (i.e. install an agent on multiple machines on the network, give them the direct play stream to transcode instead of relying on the server to do it.)
- Dolby Vision support (current state of things is terrible)
- Apps for Android and iOS don't work well with large libraries
- No DVD/Blu-ray support. Not expecting full menus, but even a best guess at finding the main title would be sufficient.
- Automatic collection creation by path
I don't need their movies and TV catalog forced upon me. I have no interest in Tidal integration or searching streaming services.
Once Jellyfin gets intro skipping I think I'll be switching.