I’ve done thousands of reviews, been a senior for the last 4 years, and a tech lead for three of those. If I could distill what I’ve learned into a few tips:

Make sure you understand what you know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.

If something feels weird, explore it, your gut is a leading indicator of bad code.

Think about how you would know if there was something wrong with the code after its deployed.

Think about how hard it would be to change the code later on.

Those are probably my big ones for general code reviews, there’s more specific ones for v&v and embedded, but I feel like these apply to everything.

I generally don’t do GUIs for C. But I’m also an embedded C person.

When I have I’ll generate DLLs for the C portion then just pull them into a python based interface or something with easier to deal with gui implementations.

Programming languages are tools. Would you use a wrench to drive a nail? You could. But it would be painful, you’re gonna miss and whack your hand at least once.

If it’s a learning exercise, go for the C implementation, why not? I’ve written an XML parser in LabVIEW. (I never stopped to ask whether I should…) Is that the right tool for the job? Fuck no.

If this is an exercise in software engineering be an engineer and use the 99% already built and verified system to do the job it’s meant to.

Or you can write an entire theme park simulator in assembly because you like pain or something.

Off lease corporate thin clients with fresh ssds. You can get something that runs off a laptop power supply, will handle more than you’re going to throw at it, and they’re insanely cheap.

I moved to one from a pi when I got serious about home assistant.

I also run a stack of networking utilities on my OPNSense router.

Jellyfin has been a bit more difficult to transition, I’m still running it on my wife’s gaming computer. I’ve pre transcoded most of our collection, but not all of it. I need to find something very cheap but also capable of handling the odd 4k transcode.

The door monitor mostly helps when a kid walks off leaving it open thinking they closed it.

The freezer temperature monitoring has saved the contents several times. A breaker had tripped once and I didn’t notice, it let me know that I needed a generator during a power outage, and one of the kids snuck an ice cream and left the lid wide open.

So yeah, it’s been useful. It’s not needed 99% of the time.

Nothing needs to be, but I do like to monitor door status and temperature for my fridge and deep freezers with home assistant.

Anyone can learn to code well enough for a corporate environment.

As the repo owner, you can put in place PR guardrails to help you manage the workload it puts on you. You can enforce pre-commit linting and code formatting, mandatory PR templates, size limits on PRs, etc and these can limit the chunks of work you’re sent by this person.

This is part of creating a culture of good code, enforcing code standards and contribution behaviors comes with the territory as you move up the chain in your career.

Another part unfortunately, even if you’re not a supervisor is having sometimes tough conversations with contributors it’s just part of the deal.

“Hey Bob, I just wanted to connect with you. It seems like you’re having kind of a tough time keeping up with our standards (producing code that’s usable for our team, or something said tactfully like that), is there something more that I can do to help you? Or is there something specific you’re having trouble with? I just want to help you be the most successful that you can be, because the more successful you are, the more successful our team as a whole is.”

If you have a discussion or two like this and it’s not working out, then maybe you need to talk to Bob’s supervisor/manager directly about the issue. Sometimes people don’t even realize what’s going on.

“Tech writers learn about steganography, more at eleven.”

Is your upright the one with all the little compartments? That one looked to me like the most efficient upright design I’ve ever seen.

They’re pissy cause it being open source and more efficient means that it’s gonna be more cost effective for people to use. Which is real bad if your company overcommitted to the slop and needs to recover losses.

I’m a Minnesotan, currently at my kids hockey tournament. This is an acceptable scenario.

I bought a protectli awhile back. Mines 4 port 2.5 gbps nics, and it runs opnsense out the box.

You should take a look at their sfp+ model, if I were in your shoes that’s what I’d be looking at. It’s all in one, works nicely, is incredibly customizable, and is lower power usage than basically anything you’ll build yourself.

I use that for my router/firewall, then I use an off lease dell thin client to run my home assistant server, and a standard off the shelf buffalo nas. If you’re into immich, I’ll recommend jellyfin over Plex. I used it for years but they started collecting more data, sticking their own junk in etc. Jellyfin is open source and works great.

I’m glad to hear this, I keep looking at it. I’m a little worried about the hardware requirements for it though. I keep putting off getting hardware for a dedicated jellyfin server (it’s on my wife’s gaming PC right now and it bugs the heck out of her)

To expand on the 3-2-1 rule for the uninitiated:

3 total copies

2 onsite, using dissimilar media

1 offsite, for disaster recovery

Is it not safe to expose externally with ssl yet?

Ubiquiti has had outages in the past that meant you couldn’t manage the equipment right in front of you.

Even discounting the potential security implications of that kind of management, the rage I would feel in that situation is enough that I while my AP is nice, works great, I will never use any of their gateways.

I’m using a 2.5g protectli with OPNSense now, and it’s easy to manage, and all local.

It would be a crying shame if someone were to figure out a way to force those e ink displays to refresh fast enough that it kills the batteries on those things…

So how long till the Supremes rule that CBP is not only allowed to search your phone but also to perform colonoscopies at checkpoints 100 miles inland and sell the resulting videos to extremely wealthy perverts?

Beyond any issues with the owner of the company, these cars have multiple dangerous issues.

You cannot treat a company that makes physical stuff that can endanger lives the same way you treat a software company that makes a leisure activity platform.

Iterative design for a purely software environment is way more forgiving than iterative design for physical hardware or even software that interacts with physical hardware. You can profoundly fuck up the backend for a website and take the whole thing down until you could roll back to last known good production, you won’t kill anyone, but you’ll make the line go down temporarily.

If you profoundly fuck up an iteration on an embedded vehicle system and don’t catch it because you don’t respect safety regulation or existing engineering norms you can and will kill people.

Analogue doesn’t have firmware that can reject a device based on id.

So you can reverse engineer a replacement part if you absolutely have to.

It’s not the iPads themselves, it’s the addition of Bluetooth and/or wifi to support them. I agree that they can alleviate a lot in terms of paperwork reduction etc. My issue is the additional exposed surface.