Responsible programming

As programmers we come a across quite often a question: “Is the application safe to deploy?”. I had to ask myself as well sometimes: should I deploy X or Y feature even if there is an edge-case bug in there? Of course later those edge cases are the bugs, that the users find. Even though they aren’t looking for them, but this just shows sometimes how far we get from the way our users would expect an application to work.

TrueNAS & Nextcloud

Awhile back I wrote about my experience in running TrueNAS and Nextcloud server at home. Thought I would give a small update how is that after 1.5 years. I’m still very happy with the whole setup, even extended storage in the server. Had some interesting experiences when I tried to upgrade Plex and Nextcloud jails. There I just gave up, I still update and upgrade them, but not via TrueNAS’ update functionality, but by logging into the instance and issuing the update commands in the container.

Rewrite, refactor, knee-deep in legacy - part two

I really don’t take on extra work apart of my full time job. At work I do get to try many different things. We get chance to work on both legacy and greenfield projects. So really don’t feel that I would need extra projects on the side.. :D This project that I’m gonna write about is a webshop, that sort of fallen into my lap. Back in 2010, when I started out with programming I’ve been doing webhops and inventory sites, using PHP, MySQL.

Rewrite, refactor, knee-deep in legacy - part one

From time-to-time we encounter some legacy projects - or the braver developers even work on them day after day. :) When working on such projects we do come across the exclamation that: “Starting from scratch would be quicker than trying to fix this mess!”. This normally comes from the frustration that legacy projects can cause. There are already lots of articles out on the interwebs about refactor vs rewrite. Failure and success stories and would encourage those who don’t have experience in deciding this question to read many articles, pro and con.

Time travel and privacy

In December of 2020 I read some articles that made me want to go back in time and use tools that I considered to be old. One of these articles was about the productivity score by Microsoft’s O365, another was about how our phones betray our trust (no surprise there). The content behind the following three links that made me think: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/nov/26/microsoft-productivity-score-feature-criticised-workplace-surveillance https://twitter.com/WolfieChristl/status/1331221942850949121 https://nrkbeta.no/2020/12/03/my-phone-was-spying-on-me-so-i-tracked-down-the-surveillants Mail and Calendar After reading the article about O365 and that GSuite also has something similar to that, I decided to go back to some kind of e-mail and calendar application like Thunderbird or Evolution.

MongoDB deprecating "count"

Prior warning: this post may turn into a rant. Prologue In the second half of 2019 at my company we have got an expected notice from our MongoDB provider, Atlas. The notice was about the usual pain that they do every now and then: force upgrade for old versions. At that time we were running MongoDB v3.4 and so now we got the notice to ensure that we have a driver that supports v3.

Bad dependencies and bad interface changes

Recently one of my colleagues has shared his pain about a nodeJS package that we use to zip files. His issue was that the library stopped generating the zip files and just hangs. Eventually found, that in the project the package in question has been upgraded, but with a small issue. The newer version has changed the interface and the same method instead of returning the instance it returns a Promise.

Custom keyboard layout in GNU/Linux

I generally like to use english keyboard layout for programming, makes it easier to get to the special characters. However, since I’m a hungarian, from time-to-time would like to use accented characters as well. E.g. á, é, ű, ú, ő… In GNU/Linux to change keyboard layout isn’t the easiest to do. As far as I remember (from about 10 years ago) in Windows there is a graphical app that helps you with this.

Git global ignore file

the repo and you don’t even want it to be listed in the .gitignore file of the repository. If you have multiple repositories, then there is a nice way to do it per user, using the core.excludesFile config property of git. This might be set in your git install already (it wasn’t the case for me, but still worth to check it): git config --global --get core.excludesFile If it returns path to a file, then just simply add your ignore pattern to that file (just a todo.