Senior SWE, 12 YoE. The discourse around software development is incredibly chaotic and anxiety-inducing. I deal with the same emotions as everyone, but I manage to keep going despite having worked in a very poorly run company for a long time on a severely neglected product amidst product cancellation, brand cancellation, mass layoffs (one of which affected me), mismanagement, offshoring, you name it. I have managed to stay actively learning new tech, engaged on challenging problems, and having positive interactions with my coworkers consistently, even when one or more parties are being difficult to work with (which we all can be guilty of, myself included).

Here, I am to about share what keeps me grounded within all the noise.

This post itself is not a statement of fact, but a belief. But it keeps me going through all the noise and bullshit.

Also, a caveat: The claims I am making aren’t the only claims to be made, and there are other important things to know. For example: It …

There are two teams working on a project (FE and BE with a few members working on both like me). A few months ago the frontend team got a new senior dev after the previous one left, and he has 5 people under him.

A few colleagues have complained to me that he “micro manages” every task they get. When he assigns a task to someone he will already have decided how it should be implemented, maybe even made a diagram to go with it, all that is left is someone to type it out. He will call juniors explain the task, explain the solution and send them on their way. Now in my mind apart from it being boring and a bit annoying for the juniors, it is also very bad for their growth.

But here is the problem. The overall efficiency of the FE team has doubled and most importantly regressions have become almost extinct. We are one month ahead of schedule. That senior is prbabably the best programmer I have worked with. Whenever I have to review any of his PRs I know it will be a 10 minute …

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve noticed a pattern in mid-size companies where C-level execs come in, announce some big “transformation” initiative, stick around for 1-2 years and then leave. often before the results (good or bad) are even measurable.. Yet, on linkedin they “transforming organizations!”

I’m not trying to be cynical, but it feels like these “transformations” are more about personal branding than lasting change

Would love to hear if others have seen this happen and what are your thoughts on it

Edit: thanks for all the answers, didn’t expect that many! Wondering.. If it’s resume-driven as many mentioned, what about background checks? They’d fail the screening immediately if someone asked what they actual accomplished at a previous org. Or maybe they’re no background checks at all and it’s indeed a special secret club we’re not invited in

In my feed i saw a bunch of posts going “after reading the your brain of ChatGPT study i decided to change this about my use of AI” and it boils down to “thinking first, before asking Chat to solve it for me”, which…. I mean really….. Is that a revelation?

Did we really need a study to make people aware of this?

This isn’t a new phenomena by any means, but atleast back in the day on Stackoverflow, if you outsourced your critical thinking you were met with endless judgement and criticism instead of endless compliments

Study: https://www.brainonllm.com/

For the longest time, it feels like other departments of my company complain that Engineering is too slow. (Aggressive) deadlines often get pushed back and leadership had gone all in on AI assisted coding improving output by -100x-, -10x-, 10%.

Here’s the thing though, nobody is slacking, our folks have anywhere from 700-1.2k gh contributions over the year. We have to juggle feature work with meetings, incidents, and being pulled into oncall work. Hell, weve even cut the whole EDD process to increase acceleration (with some obvious tradeoffs).

I just wonder if this is normal across the industry.

👀

Have your self-hosted services been crippled by AI bot scraping? Mine aren’t popular or interesting enough, but I know plenty of yours are.

Got absolutely sucker punched with this one recently.

I had an issue where the drive that technetium was on filled up so I think it was unable to write to its database for 3 days, causing some very interesting issues with DHCP. These took a bit of time to flush though the system when got back home.

The comment about network reliability stung though. My partner works from home so would, in theory, have more knowledge about how the network is running than me she also has a very small tolerance for issues like this.

What tools do people recommend for monitoring traffic and such throughout the LAN? I would like identify any issues as they happen so I can try to eliminate them or at least have some charts and tables to hold up next time she comes in with the ‘percussive maintenance’ stick.

TLDR: Network Monitoring. How do?

So I recently deployed a Cowrie honeypot to mess around with it and try to get a feel for attack patterns and such. All the logs ship to VictoriaLogs through Promtail and visualized in Grafana. I’ve been building out the filesystem and processes to make it as believable as possible, as well as securing the host and container as much as possible before I add a nearly full suite of commands.

Well, I realized I didn’t do any form of rate limiting, banning, or container usage….I woke up this morning and the machine I aggregate logs on was seeing a huge amount of network traffic. Once I dug into it, I found that this bot from China shipped me 700 million logs, all within about 4 hours. It looped the same command millions of times, and constantly connected/disconnected.

Thought it was kinda funny. Most bots that get into the honeypot either immediately realize its a honeypot and disconnect, or run a set of command loops 10-20 times before exiting.

I thought some people …

Running Gameservers without downtime since 2016💪

Ninjacentral has just announced that they’re opening for 24 hours. Get signed up if you’re interested!

I just logged on and saw that registrations are currently open. Not sure how long for though!

Hey everyone,

The small but passionate team behind the Usenet Providers Map is back with another update!

After countless hours of research, design tweaks, and feedback, Version 2025-06-30 of the Usenet Providers & Backbones Tree is live! 🚀

Check it out here:

🔗 Interactive Map: https://usenet.rexum.space/tree
🔗 Table: https://usenet.rexum.space/table
🔗 Direct SVG: https://usenet.rexum.space/svg
🔗 Explicit Version: Click here

What’s New?

- Provider retention levels were updated across all providers.
- Several Usenet providers (NewsFusion, SMSUseNET, Usenet Newsfeed, and Z51) were removed due to ceasing operations.
- Abavia added a new US-based server available to XS News and EasyUsenet.
- Frugal Usenet has regained its multi-backbone status as an XS News reseller.

Why This Matters

Use this map to:

✅ Visualize provider/reseller connections and ownership.
✅ Identify backbones you might be missing (though one backbone is usually enough; they peer with each other).
✅ Compare …

Seems that DrunkenSlug has gone down. The site is still up but search results return a null.

Assuming I’m not the only one, but can’t see any others reports on this.

As I’m writing this, it looks like a database restoration is in progress…interesting.

Maybe not the right subreddit, if so just delete it.

Is there something going on in the usenet world?

I’m using SnelNL (dutch) as my app for searching and downloading in combination with a subscription to Tweaknews.

A few days ago, was looking for a movie I knew I came across a while back.

Untraceable (not the movie), nowhere to be found.

Somehow, the retention no skips from (now) 3 days ago, to 14 years ago.

Not only in my apps , but also in online pages(so not tweaknews fault).

Been using Plex for like 4 years. Started with a FireTV 4K but Plex never performed amazing. Slow loading times, 4K HDR content would never playback reliably, several buffering pauses during a film.

When that got too slow and I upgraded to a Samsung 4K TV, used the built in Plex app. It was slightly better, but 4K HDR movies were still a gamble, sometimes they were fine, other times not. Also, some episodes of TV shows would act corrupted and studder, even after clearing cache, reinstalling the app, and all that.

Tried fixing network issues, switching the server to different PC’s, nothing helped. Was looking for Plex alternative, but thought I’d try an Apple TV 4K cause the Samsung menus aren’t the greatest.

Instantly everything was WAY faster. Only tweak I had to make was enable “Match Framerate” in the Apple settings. After that, 4K HDR content plays back reliably smooth without buffering. Those TV episodes that acted like they were corrupted, play back with no issue. Menus and …

Hi, I’m currently developing an alternative to Sonarr/Radarr/Jellyseer that I called MediaManager.

Why you might want to use MediaManager:

• OAuth/OIDC support for authentication
• movie AND tv show management
• multiple qualities of the same Show/Movie (i.e. you can have a 720p and a 4K version)
• you can on a per show/per movie basis select if you want the metadata from TMDB or TVDB
• Built-in media requests (kinda like Jellyserr)
• support for torrents containing multiple seasons of a tv show
• Support for multiple users

MediaManager also doesn’t completely rely on a central service for metadata, you can self host the MetadataRelay or use the public instance that is hosted by me (the dev).

You might not want to use MediaManager if you are a power user of Sonarr or Radarr because it isn’t designed for the Trash guides (there are NO quality profiles or similiar in MediaManager). This is because MediaManager takes a simpler approach at selecting the best torrent:

1. Sort by …

I’ve got an android head unit. I generally remote access plexamp. It’s great. Dodgy signal black spots in my regular journeys does cause minor irritation though.

Yes. Plexamp has downloads. But they’re irritating to use when driving and anyway, I set myself a project where maybe my kid can stream shows and take it on a week long trip as an emergency ‘local’ solution.

Dietpi running on a pi4

512gb USB

Hostap, Plex server installed using the Dietpi gui

Temporarily connect to my main network to get my account to adopt it as a new server, and configure authentication bypass on 192.168.0.0/16 so I can use this at trusted networks like visiting my mum or whatever

Log out and in on the clients I expect to use in a no wan environment.

Now disconnect from my home network and start broadcasting a ‘travelplex’ ssid.

This all works fine. So far so good.

Now how to power it…. Sure. My car has a usb outlet, but it powers down when the ignition is off so I stop for fuel and it hard shuts …

I noticed that plexinc/pms-docker with the ‘plexpass’ tag hasn’t been updated in 4 years, yet their docker hub page still suggests plex pass users should use it for the latest plex updates. Some comments on here and other forums in the past have mentioned that this is fine because it updates upon the initial creation and during restarts - Here.

I just wanted to give everyone the heads up that this is not the case for the underlying operating system, it is running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) and had it’s last security patch in February 2021. Considering that many users will configure some form of remote access, this doesn’t seem like a great idea to me. I’ve never come across this detail in other posts so I thought it might be beneficial to some one you.

Updates wise (snippet in time, may vary each month)

• binhex/arch-plexpass (3 days ago)
• home-operations/plex:rolling (3 days ago)
• linuxserver/plex (today)
• Hotio/plex (20 days ago) …

Hi, I’m currently developing an alternative to Sonarr/Radarr/Jellyseer that I called MediaManager.

Why you might want to use MediaManager:

• OAuth/OIDC support for authentication
• movie AND tv show management
• multiple qualities of the same Show/Movie (i.e. you can have a 720p and a 4K version)
• you can on a per show/per movie basis select if you want the metadata from TMDB or TVDB
• Built-in media requests (kinda like Jellyserr)
• support for torrents containing multiple seasons of a tv show
• Support for multiple users

MediaManager also doesn’t completely rely on a central service for metadata, you can self host the MetadataRelay or use the public instance that is hosted by me (the dev).

You might not want to use MediaManager if you are a power user of Sonarr or Radarr because it isn’t designed for the Trash guides (there are NO quality profiles or similiar in MediaManager). This is because MediaManager takes a simpler approach at selecting the best torrent:

1. Sort by …