TL;DR getting a decent workflow up feels like programming with extra steps. Doesn’t really feel worth the effort, if you’re fully going prompt-engineering mode.

Fortunately, we don’t have any AI mandates at my company, we actually don’t even have AI licenses and are not allowed to use tools like copilot or paste internal code into cGPT. However, I do use cGPT regularly as essentially google on steroids - and as a cloudformation generator 🫣

As a result of FOMO I thought I’d go “all in” on a pet project I’ve been building over the last week. The main thing I wanted to do was essentially answer the question, “will this make me faster and/or more productive?”, with the word “faster” being somewhat ill defined.

Project:

• iOS app in swift, using swiftUI - I’ve never done any mobile development before
• Backend is in python - Flask and FastAPI
• CI/CD - GHA’s, docker and an assortment of bash scripts
• Runs in a digitalocean server, nothing fancy like k8s

Requirements for workflow:

• As cheap …

Hi all,

I (3YOE) am mentoring a new grad at work who is very much a “workaholic rockstar developer”. He is currently helping me work on the backend for a new project but I find mentoring/working with him to be very tough. He is extremely knowledgeable for a new grad and picks things up extremely quickly, but he works ²⁴⁄₇ and tends to message me at 2-3am on the weekends with work questions (i ignore them until Monday morning for my own sanity lol)

The most frustrating part working with him however, is that he does not take feedback well. Anytime I mention he should do certain things differently or provide comments on his PRs, he will get quite defensive and basically politely tell me that “his way is better”. While there have definitely been a few things that he has taught me, theres many things I find he is arguing for the sake of arguing.

Most recently he submitted a PR with hundreds of files updated and thousands of lines of code. When I rejected this PR due to the …

Finally, relief: tax regulation hurting the US tech industry is striked off for good - for the most part.

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-section-174-is-reversed

Hey folks,

Looking for some experienced perspective here. I had a 1:1 with my manager recently and I think I said too much. I’m a very introverted, pragmatic engineer (90% technical, 10% social skills), if I’m being honest — and I usually just want to write code, close tickets, and feel good at the end of the day.

In the 1:1, I mentioned that working with a particular coworker (the project lead) has become really frustrating. I said that I feel like I’m only able to get things done in spite of him, not thanks to him. He’s very procedural, very rigid, and I feel like that slows everything down in an environment that demands more agility.

Well… that comment kind of opened Pandora’s box.

My manager told me, somewhat candidly, that this coworker is notoriously difficult to work with. In fact, they hired me partly because things weren’t moving forward with him. The implication I got (not explicitly said, but heavily implied) is that I was brought in to …

I have been recently reading and watching a lot about aviation and system safety. What surprised me is how applicable most stories, incidents, and conclusions thereof are to software engineering.

I also started reading The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker. The book has nothing to do with designing software; and most examples are from aviation and other “real” engineering fields.

That said, when reading about the many incidents and lessons learned the hard way described in the book, I keep nodding and thinking “well, that can be slightly reformulated and made a rule in software engineering”.

To sum up, this is a book I highly recommend to anyone, and, to be honest, it’s much more insightful than some pretentious system design books that encourage memorization of patterns and buzzwords.

Another example I can think of is “The Design of Everyday Things” by Dan Norman. The book has dedicated chapters on the …

Do you have any services that you consider to be absolutely rock solid? Never need any tinkering? You set them up once and they just work?

For me this is probably Backrest (and by extension, Restic). It never complains. Migrated servers? No problem. We’ll deduplicate for you. Doesn’t even have to be the same backup plan. Just point it to the same repository and it’ll figure out what you already have there.

I saw this ad today and wondered if there are any open-source options for easily self-hosting something like this. Obviously I could set it all up manually but that’s a lot of work for little benefit. Seems like a cool thing to have (although likely will never need to be used).

PROBLEM

Fellow selfhosters and moderators. It has come to my attention and to the attention of many others, that more and more projects are posted on this sub, which are either completely vibe coded or were developed under the heavy use of LLMs/AI. Since most selfhosters are not developers themselves. It’s hard for the users of this sub to spot and understand the implications of the use of LLMs/AI to create software projects for the open-source community. Reddit has some features to highlight a post’s intention or origin. Simple post flairs can mark a post as LLM/AI Code project. These flairs do currently not exist (create a new post and check the list of available flairs). Nor are flairs enforced by the sub’s settings. This is a problem in my opinion and maybe the opinion of many others.

SOLUTION

Make post flairs mandatory, setup auto mod to spot posts containing certain key words like vibe coding^1, LLMs, AI and so on and add them to the mod queue so they can be marked with the …

Hey folks,

I’ve been hacking on a fun side project called torrra- a command-line tool to search for torrents and download them using magnet links, all from your terminal.

Features

• Search torrents from multiple indexers
• Fetch magnet links directly
• Download torrents via libtorrent
• Pretty CLI with Rich-powered progress bars
• Modular and easily extensible indexer architecture

What it does?

torrra lets you type a search query in your terminal, see a list of torrents, select one, and instantly download it using magnet links- all without opening a browser or torrent client GUI.

Links:

GitHub, Blog about it

I’d love feedback, feature suggestions, or contributions if you’re into this kind of tooling.

Cheers!

Free account limits were upgraded by the admin from 20 API hits and 5 downloads to 300 API hits and 50 downloads for the next few days…enjoy while you can!

anyone notice this?

NZB.cat is down.

Anyone know or have an update? How to reach the admin?

I’m tired of modern internet communities. I want to seek suitable replacements. I was listening to a podcast and they were talking about old Usenet. Sounds like my kind of place. I’m sure it’s nowhere near its heyday but I’d like to give it a try.

I have a client on my computer, but is there something for mobile? I’m on iOS but I can go to a website if needed.

Thanks!

Starting yesterday July 12 and continuing thru today July 13 most of the articles in my newsgroups are unprocessed with missing parts and download as incomplete. Mostly articles with 2 or more parts. Anyone else experiencing this problem? These articles download just fine using Blocknews. Thanks

Wondering if anyone else has run into this. My father-in-law’s cable box (Rogers in Canada) lets you install the Plex app, but apparently it blocks access to personal media. We’ve got all the family’shome videos hosted on Plex and now he can’t see any of them.

He’s picking up a Roku so he can actually watch stuff, but still…

Rogers has really become a shit company as of late.

Never seen this before. Allows me sign in (my server not accessible outside my house) or skip to the free content. Interesting!

I did and I now understand. No more file conversion error, no more unsupported audio or video format, no more switching from system to system to play what I want and to top it off, the alexa integration is working like a charm.

Also it’s a pretty sexy box… and the ai upscaling on 1080p is out of this world!!!!

I can now enjoy dolby vision and atmos on my LG G3 + Q990D without compromising anything.

Thanks for the reality check! Never going back.

Now it’s time for a NAS update :)

I sent it to one new user already and they found it really helpful. If anyone wants to try/use it themselves, I can send a sanitized version of it in a few days after it’s developed some more.