Juniors are some of the most creative thinkers in this industry because they haven’t been conditioned to use tools and techniques that have matured over time. They’re more malleable to new tech. Their solutions come from a place of curiousty rather than ego and it just feels nice to help someone else grow in their career.

I miss being a mentor, I miss having study groups for certs, I miss my friends that were laid off this year and last :(

Hello.

As the title says, I’ve been working at a game dev company since the very beginning. At first, it was just the CEO and me. Years of grinding brought a lot of experience, but I also spent too much time just building features and solving problems. For all those years, I thought all that hard work would be rewarded (naive, I know).

We’ve shipped a lot of projects, and our latest one became really big and is performing well. But I don’t feel any relief.

In the beginning, there was constant pressure from the CEO: “We have limited time, we need to work faster, deadlines were yesterday,” and the list goes on. I thought it was normal - he was just scared the business would fail.

Now, after some real success and scaling the team, everything has become even harder: more pressure, more bureaucracy, and more toxicity from the CEO about “development being too slow” and “bad processes,” etc. The publisher is trying to control the company and make it dependent on them. The CEO sold part of …

Our seniors are losing like 20 hours a week to pr reviews and it’s becoming a real problem. They feel like they’ve stopped being engineers and turned into full time reviewers, juniors are sitting around waiting days for feedback, and leadership keeps asking why velocity tanked. We have about 8 seniors and 20 mid/junior devs. Seniors get pulled into basically every pr because they have the most context on how the systems actually work. The intention was good but the reality is they’re drowning. Trying to figure out what a reasonable split even looks like here. Is 10 hours of review per week reasonable for a senior? Less? We tried having seniors only review their specific domains but then nobody else learns the systems and we just made the bus factor worse. Curious how other teams have dealt with this ratio problem without sacrificing review quality or burning out your most experienced people

I WILL NOT PROMOTE.

So I built something that started off as a little side project but is now gaining some traction. Not “quit my job” money but a decent amount per month. I want to start pushing it even further on my LinkedIn and kind of build in public and document my journey.

I’m still employed and have no clue if my employer will have anything to say about this. This side project was developed out of company hours and on my personal device.

Any advice from people who have a job and a successful side project on how to navigate this.

I work at a big company in a respected org. The engineers there usually have 10+ years in the org and are very qualified. Recently (earlier this year), this manager joined the org from a different org and brought over a couple of his people. I’ve been reorged and fell into this team.

One of his people has a toxic behavior that is being somewhat rewarded. She does more of a program manager type of work (create documentation, presentations, meetings and connecting people) but doesn’t do any of the technical work. She lists herself as “strategic” lead on projects and at surface level looks competent since she’s skilled at self-promotion. As an example, she hasn’t submitted any technical PR in the past two months. Just two doc updates and typo fixes.

Normally, I’d say more power to her and let her life her life. However, this is affecting me. Since she’s clearly promo-hungry, she keeps attempting to steal the spotlight whenever she can. …

Started selfhosting 2 years ago with the usual stuff. Pihole, plex, some docker containers, it was genuinely fun learning how everything worked. Then my family started using these services. My wife relies on the password manager daily and kids stream from plex constantly. Suddenly it’s not my hobby anymore, people now depend on it

Now when something breaks at 11pm it’s “dad the internet isn’t working” because pihole crashed. Or my wife’s locked out of her accounts because the password thing stopped responding. I spent last weekend fixing stuff instead of relaxing because I realized one hard drive failure would destroy everything.

Still glad I selfhost instead of paying for cloud services but nobody warned me that once other people depend on your setup, it stops being fun and becomes real work. Now I understand why sysadmins drink.

Looks like self hosting Spotify (99.6% of songs listened to) is only 300TB

After around 2 months of trial, error, and learning, I finally have a stable self-hosted setup that I’m happy with (for now).

Stack: • OpenMediaVault 7 • Docker / Portainer • Homarr as the main dashboard

Services: • Jellyfin • Immich • Home Assistant • AdGuard Home • Sonarr / Radarr / Prowlarr • Uptime Kuma

The goal was simple, reliable, and low-maintenance, and it’s been rock solid so far.

I’m still a beginner with self-hosting, so I’m sure there’s a lot more to explore.

Bonus: it’s quiet, doesn’t look like a server rack, and is officially wife-approved 😄

What would you recommend hosting next?

dear diary:

I always were a tech savy dude, but rarely got in touch with linux or self hosting before 2024.

Early 2024 I started experimenting with a pihole + unbound on a rasperry 4, because I could’nt stand the amount of brainshrinking ads on the internet anymore.

Mid 2024, after Microsoft announced the end of W10, I completly migrated to Linux within a month (Using PoP!_OS as my beloved daily driver since then), because W11 is the biggest fraud that could have been brought among humans.

Then most streaming services raised there subscription prices like… monthly? This was the time I found out something named jellyfin existed. I bought a bunch of second hand media, some big HDDs and hosted everything on my main pc to tinker with. Shortly after I built a nice library. I cancelled all my subscriptions afterwards.

All what followed explains itself - bought a NAS, more HDDs, more media, imported all my audiobooks, worked out some plans to safely backup my stuff. It …

Hello everyone!

As we approach the holidays, we wanted to take a moment to look back at the past year with all of you. There’s something about working on Immich that makes time feel… different. A year somehow feels like three. Days blend into weeks, weeks into months, and suddenly we look back and realize just how much we have done.

We crossed the 1.5-year mark since becoming FUTOnians, and we still feel incredibly grateful for where we are. The whole team gets to work on what we love, every single day. That’s not something most people get to say, and we don’t take it for granted.

This year, we brought on more people full-time, some from within the Immich core team and others from outside the community. The team is growing, and so is the project’s scope as we work to make it the best self-hosted photo management system out there.

Immich Team (LTR: Chris, Zack, Jason, Alex, Paul, Daniel, Ganka, Mert, missing the Boet and the intern, Brandon)

[]( …

The (German) indexer Scenenzb bans streaming. Is this also common practice internationally? And how is downloading the NZB supposed to be linked to streaming? For example, if someone hosts at home and not at a large data center like Oracle or other VPS. Mass downloads are also not wanted, but that has been an unnecessary option since the end of unlimited Google Drive anyway.

I’ve been hearing about usenet for so long, and despite how I like to think I’m tech savvy, I was still deeply confused about what the concept was.

So I decided to learn what the deal was, and I think I have some rough idea now. My questions more or less concern indexers in particular. The first thing I thought about was that if headers contained the title and other easily identifiable information there shouldn’t be much thought to choosing an indexer.

However, people have pointed out the obvious that files with unobfuscated headers will get immediately taken down through DMCA requests. But now I’m not sure how do indexers accomplish their job, is it a manual process more or less? Do people upload files with obfuscated headers and then map the true headers in specific indexers?

Either way, the concept is so unique and damn interesting. Usenet seems to be a very good compromise between decentralization and reliability/speed

As an opposite to the “how many indexer” threads, I was wondering what folks ideal “minimum viable Usenet setup” would be on the indexer and provider side, for as little cost as possible, while covering most mainstream stuff.

I have played around with the idea of giving friends who are curious about Usenet a basic setup with a used ex-corporate minipc running Linux (or TrueNAS) and a basic arr stack - with a paid up indexer & provider for 1 year to get them going.

I have a bunch of the MiniPCs, the software is open source, so it’s only the provider and indexer combo that are the wildcards!

My current idea is geek and frugal (2 backbones + bonus). Covers most mainstream stuff, I think?

What would your minimum viable choices be?

I have paid for newsbin and used it for many years. It feels like it is no longer being updated and a lot of files I download are still obfuscated. What is the current best client I can use instead?

Currently using NZBgeek and NZBfinder. How many indexers or which ones would you recommend?

Hello Plex Community,

Just downloaded aggregar and started up the Docker container (was super easy tbh) and OMG has it totally changed my experience with Plex. One of my main pain points was creating dynamic collections that would create a Netflix-like experience. I have a large library, and navigation to find something to watch has always been tough and sometimes even led me back to a traditional streaming platform. Not only can Agregar create collections based on various lists (I use Letterboxd), but it can also automatically move those collections in Plex, so every day you’ll have a new layout. I have used Kometa in the past, but even as someone relatively tech-savvy, the YAML files were super finicky. Additionally, the changes in using Aggregarr seem to populate faster whichich makes trial and error a lot easier. I cannot recommend Aggregarr enough. The UI is really good, and I found everything to be pretty intuitive. Happy Holidays, everyone, and a happy New Year!

I’ve had PlexAmp for a while but since I have a YouTube Music subscription, that is typically my go-to music source but I do have a fairly sizable music library and quite a bit of it is in FLAC 2.0, some of it even in FLAC 5.1 or Atmos. I’ve spent a lot more time in the last few months on PlexAmp and I have to say, it’s actually a pretty cool product. Plus I have (aftermarket) wireless Android Auto in all my vehicles and it works flawlessly there too. I see a few places they could improve things but overall, it’s a very usable product. I’m on Android FWIW and I use Mp3tag & MKVToolNix to manage my media.

ive been running mine for almost 6 months and im just curious what other peoples collections consist of as far as media and storage amounts go

I run everything off of a portable 4tb ssd and have used up about half of it, i keep a few of my shows and a couple hundred movies on there, have gotten to the point to where im mostly satisfied with my library and dont rely on streaming anymore, and only add stuff every now and then per requests from family

open to thoughts and advice as i know some people have been doing this for years and want to see what my server could look like down the road

I was really hoping it was some kind of weirdness, but when I pulled the offending drive and put it in an external enclosure…lots of clicks. Repeated, rhythmic, almost scratchy clicks. Yikes.

I got it to come alive just long enough to start running diagnostics and then… Big crunchy clicks. BIG. Then just the hum of spinning and no movement from the head at all. I swore at it. Nothing. I waited 30 minutes, then tried the old specialist trick of banging it lightly. Nothing. I swore at it some more. Nothing. More aggressive percussive maintenance. Nothing. I tried a different enclosure. Nothing. I swore at while opening a browser. Didn’t help.

sigh

At least I haven’t lost data (yet). Yes, I already ordered a replacement. After the holidays I’m gonna grab two spares since all of the drives in that array the same models are of a similar age and hours. I imagine they all heard what I said about the dead drive’s mother, so they may not be inclined to …

In case anybody is looking for some inspiration, this is how I’m gifting Plex access to my family this Christmas.

The text says ‘Welcome to The Vault’, The Vault being my server name.

Every card has the person’s favorite movie or series on the front, and has instructions on the back on how to make a plex account and get access. Also tells them how to request new stuff to be added.

Happy holidays!