Hey all,

I’ve been an individual contributor for the last 8 years or so. I’ve moved up the ranks and salary progressions from jr. SWE up to senior engineer across a few companies.

A colleague in roughly the same role as me - but with a direct report - is leaving and they will be hiring for their role. It’s got me thinking that maybe I should start considering manager roles.

So I guess my question is if you’ve been doing SWE work for 20-30+ years, do you feel like you got passed up by others that took management roles and advanced into leadership? Or do you feel the extra headache isn’t worth it?

The more experienced I am and understand the importance of prioritization and limited resources, the more I understand how A LOT if not most of code quality/artisan details in software just don’t matter at all.

we are constantly being told deliverables and features are the utmost importance; even if it means you ship buggy feature, it’s better to ship on time rather than ship perfect.

recent shifts in industry due to artificial intelligent (not making this whole post about it, but rather as another evidence) has us care even less about code quality and whether products are given to customer in a great state.

we have our best engineers do less and less work on actual coding and do more on planning and designs.

I am not here to argue about whether these trends are right or not, I think they are mostly right and are at least better than alternatives. However, I think that means the industry does not produce remotely close to the best QUALITY products we can (namely whether …

Just had a meeting this week where this was uttered because of the development of AI.

I still think the language choice matters a lot based on if Im doing embedded or web development work and for how we want to hire developers in the future.

Maybe Im backwards.

When does our version of this come out? 🙃

https://mathandai.org/

20+ YOE, including several recent years as staff and sr staff at well respected Bay area company. Search is in MCOL+ Tier 2 City (Tier 1 is SF, NYC, SEA).

Market is hot for Sr+, especially Staff+, both for hybrid local and remote. There are as many Sr Staff and Principal roles out there than Staff roles alone. Very little junior and mid level, if any. Most roles are either distributed systems or infrastructure related. Surprising amount of C++ and Rust. Little to no web or mobile roles.

Loops generally start with HM, then to whatever loop the company does. Coding is de emphasized, but still lurking, and some companies still focus on it. Experience, communication, and strategic thinking is key. It seems AI is shifting the mindset for what a good hire looks like. There seems to be a shift in the shape of the market in general. I haven’t failed at any stages yet, but I did finish two loops and am unsure if one of them was a success.

Most roles hover around $200k-$240k …

TL;DR: There is a RCE exploit on Nextcloud Collabora and I got stung. I discovered the hacker by accident and I now want to know what other systems I can reasonably put in place to stop something like this happening again.

What happened:

• My homelab Nextcloud instance was compromised via CVE-2025-66208, an OS command injection in richdocumentscode (the bundled Collabora/CODE server that powers in-browser Office document editing).
• The attacker got unauthenticated remote code execution as the web server user (www-data) for roughly 16 hours before I caught it (by accident)
• Across ~16 hours of continuous, working remote code execution, the attacker ran a grand total of three unique commands.
• Command 1, run every ~3 minutes for hours: id. Just checking the shell still worked. Indicates a fully automated, commodity bot loop, source IP with a generic bot user-agent.
• One human operator logged on once, for about a minute, over HTTP/2 with a real browser user-agent and ran two recon commands …

Lets be honest, 80% of the services we run our labs are just tools to deploy, monitor, log, backup or do other server-related stuff. Cool for nerds, but nothing to write home about honestly.

The really useful and “fun” services, e.g. Vaultwarden, Paperless, Jellyfin etc. are rather sparse

I want to know whats your favorite “fun” service one might not know about yet.

I’ll start: Recently came across RECLIP and I throughly enjoy it. Used to work with halfassed browser extensions and sketchy websites littered with ads to get the same, now I have unlimited video scraping capabilities on my own server. It’s a simple but awesome tool. https://github.com/averygan/reclip

WORLD MONITOR is kinda fun, not really useful but makes your screens look like a mission control center from a disaster movie: https://github.com/koala73/worldmonitor

MIRUMOJI is a tool for people trying to learn japanese - load your favourite anime or shows, ebooks or whatever into it …

Ram is expensive as f nowadays :( I cannot get more

This wasn’t something I was ever expecting people to lose their data over but I guess it’s inevitable in this technological age.

Just bought 4 of these equipped for 500

And I don’t know if I should regret it and just salvage it for parts and sell it again, or use it for the next 30 years

(I have extra room and solar) Edit: removed “full” equipped since they only have 6 sticks in them each

TL; DR - a lot faster at the hard jobs and a bit faster at the easy ones.

PAR2 tools are awkward to optimise.  they all do the easy thing - Verifying - in seconds ..  the hard bits are repairs with lots of missing blocks, and creating a par set from scratch - which can mean generating up to 32768 recovery blocks.  that’s where they can be slow, because the usual way of doing the Reed-Solomon math is a big dense matrix multiply and the work grows - missing blocks x total blocks - double both and the job’s quadrupled.

Parfast produces exactly the same PAR2 files (it’s still Reed-Solomon) - it just solves it in a different way.  Instead of the dense matrix it uses a transform based approach - FFT style, same Galois field math - with a Forney-style back substitution step.   The setup cost is high but the blocks are generated linearly, so the more blocks the job needs, the bigger the win.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_error_correction …

For those interested, altHUB is opened to registration. I am using it since a month and it’s pretty good.

Just wanted to give a shout out to Newshosting. I changed my internet plan to 8Gb, and I have been getting a steady 780MBs. I wasnt sure if i would be able to saturate my line, but it has stayed steady.

Edit: Its more just a usenet in gerneral appeciation. I have Newsdemon as my secondary, and it works just as well.

Is there any semblance of the old internet left on Usenet, or is it all just downloading media etc?

If I don’t care about downloading “stuff”, but do care about discussing niche interests, is there anything for me these days?

I was wondering if these two have sales on Black Friday every year also if anybody can recommend any other good ones I have nzbgeek but I want another one to supplement it

If you have downloads for offline playback in your Plexamp library, you may not see this. But if your list is empty, this is what you see. Well played Plexamp.

Our newly reimagined and redesigned Plex experience is starting to roll out on tvOS!

Going forward, beta release notes can be found in the new topic.

Source: https://forums.plex.tv/t/121357/175

Yeah, for those who get their media that way, do you find with storage dwindling and movies or shows being released at break neck pace, that the only strategy right now is watch and delete?

Plexamp v4.50.12

Desktop is on the stable channel now. The mobile 4.50.12 builds are on their way to TestFlight and Play testing.

Mobile

• Overnight download refresh works again. Since early August the background wake had been declining every playlist, artist and album refresh while reporting them done, so downloads only refreshed when the app was opened.
• Bluetooth headset play works right after pausing. The output stream kept running for three seconds after a pause, so the phone told the headset Plexamp was still playing and its button sent pause instead of play. (Android)

Desktop

• A track change now replaces the notification instead of adding another one, so Notification Center no longer collects a row per track, and the notification shows the album artwork.
• Playing a download no longer empties its file on Windows accounts whose user name contains accented characters. Every download played this way was cut to zero bytes on first play, so those need downloading again. (Windows) …