Same. I’m lucky enough to have two within driving distance. I’m genuinely worried about them staying in business if PC building takes a nosedive thanks to the RAM/SSD prices.

1. Some kind of monitoring software, like the Grafana stack. I like email and Discord notifications.
2. The Dockerfile will have a HEALTHCHECK statement, but in my experience this is pretty rare. Most of the time I set up a health check in the docker compose file or I extended the Dockerfile and add my own. You sometimes need to add a tool (like curl) to do the health check anyway.
3. It’s a feature of the container, but the app needs to support some way of signaling “health”, such as through a web API.
4. It depends on your needs. You can do all of the above. You can do so-called black box monitoring where you’re just monitoring whether your webapp is up or down. Easy. However, for a business you may want to know about problems before they happen, so you add white box monitoring for sub-components (database, services), timing, error counts, etc.

To add to that: health checks in Docker containers are mostly for self-healing purposes. Think about a system where you have a web app running in many separate containers across some number of nodes. You want to know if one container has become too slow or non-responsive so you can restart it before the rest of the containers are overwhelmed, causing more serious downtime. So, a health check allows Docker to restart the container without manual intervention. You can configure it to give up if it restarts too many times, and then you would have other systems (like a load balancer) to direct traffic away from the failed subsystems.

It’s useful to remember that containers are “cattle not pets”, so a restart or shutdown of a container is a “business as usual” event and things should continue to run in a distributed system.

I speak standing on a hill if my own dead projects. Just remember personal projects are supposed to be fun and educational, maybe with a little resume padding for good measure. Scratch that itch you can’t get to at work. It’s great when other people enjoy them, but as soon as they become a commitment, they start feeling like work. To me, at least.

That’s why I think games or little tools are great. They small enough so you can throw them out and start over. People won’t get (too) mad if you stop maintaining them (if you open source them) because it’s easy for someone else to take over.

I don’t have a concrete idea for you, but I suggest starting with something really simple. I think simple games are a good place to start. Or create a front-end for some command line tool to make it easier on beginners. That way you can focus on the UI development you’re interested in without getting bogged down in the rest of it.

Pinned (major.minor.patch) versions and ignore-scripts should be the default. It’s insane that the default is to execute untrusted code from the Internet.

It reminds me of back when IE would let me download a bat file and execute it

/Getoffmylawn

True open source products are your best bet. TruNAS and Proxmox are popular options, but you can absolutely set up a vanilla Debian server with Samba and call it a NAS. Back in the old days we just called those “file servers”.

Most importantly, just keep good backups. If you have to choose between investing in a raid or a primary + backup drive, choose the latter every time. Raid will save you time to recover, but it’s not a backup.

This is a qualified truth. In theory what you’re saying is true but for example with Synology they use their own raid format and while they ostensibly use btrfs they overlay their own metadata system on top.

Gotcha. I face similar issues with Synology. Their hyper backup format doesn’t seem to be standard. I’m considering setting up Borg Backup for offsite so I can restore it onto non Synology devices later.

Was this Synology by chance?

I don’t understand your response. They’re talking about SQL the language. To my knowledge, sqlite implements its own dialect of SQL. What am I missing?

Would it count if they used one of these?

This is one of the reasons I prefer using ctrl-insert/shift-insert when it’s available. Unfortunately the Insert key seems to have disappeared from a lot of keyboards. Scroll lock sometimes works instead of ctrl-s and ctrl-q. I would be ok remapping ctrl-c to ctrl-break, but I still use ctrl-z to background a job. Would be great if terminals had a quick easy way to select your preference of Microsoft, unix, or CUA shortcuts.

Thank you for the advice. I did try to change the runtime a couple of times before, but I don’t know for sure if GE-Proton was one. I tried using Lutris again like I did before so I could select GE-proton, but this the installer would not even finish. Since I use GOG also, I decided to try the Heroic Launcher flatpak, and that installed Battle.net just fine. I’m now downloading WoW and I’ll keep you posted how that goes.

Edit: that worked! No noticeable issues so far.

That is exactly where I had to give up as well. It’s the bad file descriptor error.

I was just trying to get this working yesterday on Fedora 42. I have had it working before, with Lutris. All I did was use the configuration downloaded from the Lutris website. Basically it downloads and installs the Battle.net installer with Wine, so you will be running a custom Wine configuration for Battle.net. From there I was able to install and run World of Warcraft. That was about a year ago.

However, when I last tried it this week, I can install the Battle.net launcher fine, and I can log in, but it will keep giving me errors when I try to actually run it and I can never get to where I can actually install any games. The error is something about it going to sleep, but that’s about as far as I got.

Hopefully someone else can help.

Maybe, but imo it will be a short-lived niche until people learn to use AI properly.

When I use AI for coding I try to catch its mistakes as I go along. I rarely use the agent mode and just let it loose. I’ve done that as an experiment a couple of times, with hilariously bad results each time.

People will adapt and learn when you need to babysit the AI and the problem will eventually diminish.

Just my take.

I have a DS923+ with four Seagate 8TB drives in it that I really like. It’s easy to use and offers a lot of services.

However, like others have said, I do not recommend it for new purchases. If I were to do it again I would most likely set up an old PC as a server (though I went with the Synology mainly for power use reasons).

Synology is getting increasingly customer hostile, and from what I’ve read online their Linux version is so full of bespoke patches that they have painted themselves in a corner it will be hard to get out of. So, they’re likely to fall behind on keeping up with third party software. Their software is usually pretty slick and easy to use, but they discontinue things every few cycles.

The main thing I still use of theirs is Synology Drive, which was a pretty seamless move from Google Drive. On the flipside, their stuff is proprietary, so getting off of their platform can be challenging.

For my self-hosting needs I try not to tie anything to the Synology and just use it as a plain NAS. I use my Raspberry Pi or a VM instead.

I am a dev, and I enjoy the odd distraction. Sometimes. But not when I’m in the zone.

It’s not about being a dev or not being a dev. It’s about whether the tasks you are doing require you to hold a lot of state in your head. Sometimes you can’t write everything down. And when someone calls you in for a quick chat about TPS reports, all that state is thrown out and has to be rebuilt from scratch.

If I’m writing a short script where I can find my place again just by reading the screen, it’s not a problem. Me mentally refactoring code that goes across dozens of files and isn’t documented anywhere? Please, I’ll need some focus time. As a dev I’m not always in flow state, but when I am, I prefer if you let me finish what I’m doing.

In my humble opinion, being monocultural as a developer is a path to obsolescence. Be T-shaped: know your specialty really well, but also a bunch of stuff more superficially.

If you have a little hands on experience with Go on top of your Java expertise, you are imo more valuable to your employer. They may even be mid transition from Java to Go, where you would be very useful indeed.

Besides, it’s just healthy to keep learning new things.

As a dev: for all their flaws, web apps are easier to distribute, portable, and have a lot of support in frameworks. They also require little infrastructure in most cases.

As a user: web apps run without installing anything, are mostly portable between my browsers of choice, and run in a sandbox to protect my computer.

Probably 90% of my needs can be served by a web app if it is well designed. If I can’t have a web app, I will look for a flatpak version and failing that I will look for it in my distro.