monodot

Some years ago, I would say that this job title might have come under Middleware or Integration Engineer, or something like that, especially in big banks or firms like IBM. You might also try looking at job listings at a messaging vendor (e.g. Confluent).

Fascinated to read this post as I’m doing almost exactly the same thing. Just started using Xcode for the first time, a month ago. I’m not inexperienced with software development, but having to rely mostly on Xcode, Apple’s Developer documentation, information embedded inside WWDC videos, and random forum posts, has been a pretty rough experience.

So Claude has been a massive help, to get to a working app quickly. I am using it in a similar style to the author. Discuss in the UI, try really hard to cherry-pick from the code it generates, while trying to understand what it’s doing. Claude is not clever enough to realise it’s selling you out-of-date APIs, so i feel I need to be super vigilant, which chimes with what folk are saying here about the iOS upgrade treadmill. I’ve supplemented with a couple of technical ebooks as backup.

But the feeling of having your own app, that does something which improves your own life, running on that computer you’ve been carrying in your pocket for years, is extremely rewarding! (In my use case it needs to be an app not a PWA because it needs to integrate with device APIs.)

Agree, the Pocket recommendations on Firefox’s New Tab page are good and have helped me discover new websites outside my usual bubble.

They’re not the only company to do this. “InVideo” (a totally not open source SaaS product) also does the same.

Thanks for this. Didn't know about the 'tech co-op' scene, so appreciate the detailed info!

How does one find out more about this scene, and more importantly does it actually provide you with enough income to live on? (Rent is expensive in cities)

I wonder if this is aimed at elderly folk or people with elderly relatives. It looks like a device (with dubious reviews!) that you can give to them, which they just plug in to their laptop. That seems more convenient than setting up some software, especially if they live far away.

I’ve had an X1 Carbon for almost 2 years now as a development machine, and I really like it. My previous laptop was a 13” MBP.

The X1 is light and fast. I run Fedora, and work often in containers. I have the likes of Podman, VS Code, IntelliJ and Atom running and many Firefox tabs open, all without any problems.

Other good points are the 2xUSB ports, HDMI, and good battery life.

The main downside is the 256GB HDD, which fills up far too quickly, so I end up having to do a bit of housekeeping quite often. But as a dev machine, I can recommend it.

If you want to work in a RHEL-like environment (use a similar package manager, configuration, and so on), then you could look at Fedora (Workstation edition), which is in the same branch of the Linux family tree as RHEL.

Fedora/RHEL uses RPMs to install software, so you can check in advance whether your favourite application offers an RPM. Most of the major dev tools do, including VS Code, etc.

But whichever distro you choose for your desktop OS, you can still try out other distros by running them inside a container.

It took them a while to wake up, but I think Argos is better now. You can collect from stores, get it delivered, sometimes even same-day delivery. I value having a store nearby. I trust them far more for commodity products (chargers, accessories, etc) than venturing into the Wild West of Amazon sellers and reviews. I also feel I have more recourse if something goes wrong.

(And no I don’t work for Argos!)

A mini-tripod for a camera phone. It is one of the cheapest things I've bought (<£20 I think), but I've got way more value out of it than most purchases. It can hold a phone vertically or horizontally, and the head and feet are very adjustable. Perfect for joining work/social video calls, recording videos, or taking photos, I just love it.

I wrote a book and chose Asciidoctor, because it's got a lot of built-in features for writing technical docs, such as 'admonitions' (the "tip", "warning", "info" blocks, etc.), 'sidebars' (the boxed Q&A/ancillary blocks you often see in technical books) and code syntax highlighting, with per-line 'callouts' (i.e. you can write explanations of what each line in a sample code block is doing). It can also generate images from ASCII diagrams, but I didn't get amazing results, so I created my own diagrams as SVGs in draw.io.

It's easy to render PDF and EPUB, and Asciidoc syntax is not much of a jump from Markdown either. The biggest challenge is learning the correct name of the typesetting feature that you need, so you know what to look for in the Asciidoctor reference. :-)

So my process was as follows:

1. 1 "parent" Asciidoc manuscript, with individual chapters written in separate files and included with "include::"

2. Write sample code, marking each code block with Asciidoctor fencing, and then reference each code block from the manuscript. Asciidoctor will then include the code and add syntax highlighting etc. I also try to write the example code inside unit tests, so it can be tested every time the book is built.

3. Wrap the process in some sort of build tool. I chose Maven (there's an Asciidoctor plugin for Maven). The process builds the book PDF/EPUB, tests the book sample code, and builds any associated artifacts (like an example .zip file).

Now I'm writing a new short book, and this time I'm trying out Pandoc->PDF (via LaTeX). The learning curve is pretty steep, and the LaTeX errors are a bit WTF, but the eisvogel template (as also recommended by asicsp in this thread) is a great way to have something presentable very quickly.

> I'm also confused... who reads blogs but doesn't read the docs?

I’d say lots of people. Most people are searching for a specific solution to a technical problem. If they see a how-to blog that fits their use case in the results, many people will prefer it over the official docs.

Hey HN!

Live Curtain is a simple countdown clock and text banner in your browser. You can use it to share a message and a countdown in your online meetings, stand-ups, lessons, etc. It's free, no registration required. Just open it up in your browser, and then share the window in your meeting app.

Like everybody else, I've been in many online meetings and workshops since lockdown started. For most of these meetings, whenever we have a break, we leave the meeting open. To tell people when to come back, we might put some text in the chat, or verbally agree a time.

But I wanted to be able to display a message like "back in 10 minutes", in a nicer way. I also thought it would be a good learning exercise in how to write a web app. (I'm mostly in Java/DevOps/Kubernetes at the moment - and modern web dev has almost completely passed me by).

You type your message, set a countdown and optionally choose a theme. You can go full-screen too. You could potentially use it for kiosks, office monitors, or anywhere where you want to display a message and you don't want (or can't) fire up a slide deck.

I created a prototype of this in vanilla JS last year. (Lots of document.getElementById()...) It was great for getting comfortable with the basics of JavaScript.

Then I went away and created this 1.0 version in SvelteJS. I wanted to use the project to learn one of the modern JavaScript frameworks. I started with React first, but struggled quite a lot with it; getting a broad understanding of the React ecosystem was hard, and some of the tutorials I found online were out of date.

By contrast, Svelte has been a fun developer experience. The template project on GitHub is great, and then Svelte just gets out of the way. I'm surprised at what I was able to create, with little effort. The styling is done in TailwindCSS, which is a slog to begin with, but became easier after a while.

All hosted with Netlify, which has been a great experience also.

For me, this project has been about teaching an old dog new tricks, and having a tool that I can use day-to-day. Hope you find use for it too.

Tom

The problem with proportional pricing is, who decides the value? If your website becomes successful, and the word "facebook" becomes more valuable, what's to stop ICANN simply increasing the charge? Then it just becomes extortion from ICANN.

The new-generation TLD owners already do this with "Premium" names. Google does it with .app. A price is arbitrarily decided for your first year. Who knows what price it might be in a few years' time.

Yes, but in SERPs I think the main rivals to YT are independent blogs and content sites. Search for "how-to" type queries on Google, and it will often return videos from its own property (YouTube) ranked above text-based content. Google would prefer you to stay within its ecosystem. This is anticompetitive.