Biggest difference working with senior devs isn’t the technical stuff honestly. It’s how they communicate

Ask a junior something and you get like 15 minutes of context, explanations, caveats. Ask a senior and its “yeah that’s broken, I’ll fix it by thursday” or “no idea, ask Dave he touched that last”

just direct communication.

And when stuff breaks, seniors mostly just own it. “I fucked up the migration, rolling back now.” Meanwhile I’ve watched junior devs write 3 paragraphs in slack explaining why technically it wasn’t their fault before even starting to fix anything

i’m obviously not saying all seniors are like this, some never grew out of the excuse phase. But the good ones are simple - you ask a question, you get an answer. You need something done, they tell you when or tell you no. No guessing what they actually mean

Makes everything faster tbh. Less meetings trying to figure out what someone was …

A few months back I posted that a company I know hired consultants after years of back and forth tech decision making here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/s/NwpWAe9MjW

Well, an update. The consultants came in, interviewed a bunch of people, then presented a doc with all of the problems in the org. The newly appointed, non-technical CEO apparently was very impressed. The existing tech leadership was fired and the lead consultant was named interim CTO.

Naturally, they also brought on 20 to 30 engineering consultants from the same consulting company to “help” and emphasized “everyone’s jobs are safe.” The interim CTO said several times “we will have an initiative to get our code running on a modern kubernetes platform”…which everything already runs on.

The newly appointed non technical CEO is very happy that the company is now going to be running much more efficiently.

…as if I could make this shit up.

There’s a strong argument that in-person work is superior for junior developers simply because of “osmotic communication” which is the ability to absorb knowledge just by being in the room. We noticed this gap with our post-2020 hires despite our best efforts, they weren’t picking up the tacit knowledge that comes from sitting next to senior engineers. The solution was surprisingly simple: Open Audio Rooms.

We shifted from private 1-on-1 calls to public voice channels. If I’m pairing on a feature, I hop into an open room instead of sending a private invite. If we need a third opinion, a teammate can see we’re talking and join us without the friction of calendar invites or missed DMs. Even if you’re working solo, sitting in an open channel recreates the office “buzz.” You can listen in on problem-solving in the background or just feel less isolated. The best part is that unlike a real office, you have the ability to cut the audio and leave when you need …

I’m a senior full-stack engineer with about 8+ years of experience, currently employed, but interviewing after a long stretch at one company.

What’s been getting to me isn’t coding itself, it’s the interview process. The breadth feels endless. One interview focuses on frontend performance trivia, another on SQL optimizers, another on system design depth, another on algorithms I may never touch day to day. Even with prep, it feels impossible to predict what angle I’ll be evaluated on.

After enough of these, it starts to feel like a numbers game plus interviewer fit rather than a signal of real-world competence, and that’s honestly pretty demoralizing.

For those of you who’ve been through this at the senior level, how do you mentally frame interviews so they don’t erode your confidence? Do you narrow company types, take breaks, or just accept the randomness? Have any of you seriously questioned staying in software during these phases, and what helped?

I’m not looking to rant. I’m …

Early in my career, there was always someone around who had seen the problem before. You could ask a question and get context, not just an answer. Someone would notice you were stuck and offer a perspective without you having to schedule a meeting.

How do we encourage a Q&A environment?

Hello Everyone,

A month or so ago, I found myself in an argument on the r/yuri_manga discord debating self-hosted manga archive options. The general consensus was “CBZ is fine. It is what it is.” I said I would make something better.

So I did. My solution is the Bound Book Format.

The problems I’ve had with CBZ

1. No Random Access. CBZ spikes CPU usage when scrubbing through pages.
2. Slow Integrity Checking. Integrity checks can be time-consuming with large libraries.
3. If one file is corrupt, the whole thing won’t open.
4. Metadata isn’t native to CBZ, you have to use a ComicInfo.xml file.
5. If you have a long-running manhwa or manga, the same “Credits.jpg”, “ScanlationGroup.png” or blank pages are stored hundreds of times, wasting gigabytes.

The Solution (BBF)

1. Zero-Copy Architecture. The file is 4KB-aligned. We map the file directly from disk to memory/GPU. No buffers, no copying. BBF is DirectStorage ready.
2. XXH3 Parallel Hashing. …

The recent influx of AI has lowered the barrier to entry to create your own projects. This development in itself is very interesting and we’re curious to see how it’ll change our world of SelfHosting in the future.

The negative side of this however is the influx of AI generated posts, vibe-coded projects over a weekend and many others. Normally, the community votes with its voice. But with the high amount of posts flooding in every day, we’ve noticed a more negative and sometimes even hostile attitude towards these kinds of projects.

The stance of the SelfHosted moderation team is that the main focus of this sub should be on services that can be selfhosted and their related topics. For example, but not limited to: alternatives to popular services, taking back control over your data and privacy, containerization, networking, security, etc.

In order to bring back the focus on these main points of SelfHosting, we’re introducing “Vibe code Friday”. …

I’ve been selfhosting for close to 10 years now. Even longer if you count running a Minecraft server on my PC using Hamachi to share it with friends. I made a lot of mistakes that I want to share to hopefully prevent people from making them as well. Here they are, in no particular order.

Backups

I had to re-do my whole setup multiple times simply because I was too lazy to do backups. Of course, the 3-2-1 strategy is recommended, but you don’t have to do it right from the start. Even storing a copy of the important data on an external hard drive is better than nothing

Containers or even VMs over bare-metal

The first server I had was pretty much just an FTP server with a simple php script to do directory listing. For that purpose, running bare metal was more than enough.

Then I started exploring what’s possible and wanted to install some actual apps. Nextcloud, Jellyfin, git server, things like that. And boy, was that quickly becoming a nightmare of dependencies, …

I guess by now most of us know (and like) the big projects such as Immich, Paperless, Jellyfin, *Arr-Stack, Homepage, Vaultwarden etc.
What are your favorite selfhosted services that don’t get mentioned on here as often yet?

I know this question comes up every now and then, and i love it every time, because i discover at least 1-2 great services that i haven’t heard of before.

To go right ahead:

1. Blocky
   DNS Proxy - alternative to Pihole, Adguard Home, … Can be fully configured using a yaml file which is great for automated deployments.

2. Davis
   DAV server based on sabre/dav. It supports LDAP as an authentication backend, so it pairs great with something like LLDAP.
   I use it as a backend for the great tasks.org app.

3. Gatus
   Uptime-Monitoring. While not super unknown, i feel like it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as Uptime Kuma. Can be fully configured using a config file which is (again) great for automated deployments/GitOps, … I also found the …

I shared my Homepage setup about a year ago but it got removed (wasn’t aware of the Wednesday exception!). Hopefully this time it stays up :) I’m using gethomepage and have added several custom features and layout modifications for my homepage:

• Docker Container Controls - Added custom stop/restart buttons for each service that integrate directly with Portainer API. No need to open Portainer to quickly restart a container​
• Authentik Integration - Custom logout button that works seamlessly with my Authentik SSO setup​
• Live Cricket Scores Widget - Floating widget (using Crictimes) that shows live match scores and updates.​
• Home Assistant Weather Display - The “weather widget” is actually an iframe pointing to my Home Assistant dashboard using the clock-weather-card. Gives a much cleaner look than the default weather widgets.
• Custom Layout - Column layout system with better responsive width support.

Configuration Files: …

Hey all, I am fairly new to this and spent a good portion of my weekend setting up my docker containers. Followed a YouTube video and a couple guides online to set things up and it all seemed to be working as of Sunday night. Monday night I ran into an issue with nzbget where it kept repeating the same error over and over: “Could not resolve hostname news.frugalusenet.com: Error -3 - Try again”. Looked into the issue and tried resolving it by assigning DNS directly to Glueten and then restarting the docker VM. That seemed to fix it and all was well. Tonight I went to check on it again and it is back to throwing the same error over and over again. I am currently set up using frugalusenet as my newsserver. Nothing has changed since I had it working Monday night, so I am unsure as to why it would error out. Any help is greatly appreciated! I will try to answer all questions to the best of my ability.

When I log in, I am unable to access my account page/settings. The page at https://account.easynews.com/ is completely blank. I have tried to get to this site with two separate browsers and two devices. And I cannot open a ticket with their web form.

Is this just me?

Hello there, I want to start using usenet for some things I do but there are so many different options that its rather overwhelming to pick. I was just wondering whether you guys can answer some questions if you dont mind.

1. Is there any big differences between the backend providers such as Omicron and Abravia?

2. I see that there are multiple companies under each backend provider, if two have 10 years of data retention, will they have the same data?

3. Are there any specific companies to avoid?

4. Are there any pitfalls to watch out for?

5. Do you guys have any recommendations?

I was looking around and saw that easyusenet.nl are a good price and have good reviews but with all the options around, Im not sure overall. I dont need a vpn and I dont think I’ll need anything older than a year.

Sabnzbd downloads to a tmp folder, unpacks them to the completed folder and shows up as completed in history. My problem is that they end up as consecutively numbered files like “file.7z.001”, which I then have to extract manually so that sonarr/radarr can then grab the file. Is there a script or setting that can automate the extraction process?

Update: hey guys it seems that the +delete setting actually worked, but windows being windows, the setting didn’t take effect until I rebooted the pc.

Just saw this comment on the Plex forums. Did Plex have another round of layoffs to start the year? I think they had a round in July last year. I feel for the employees that were impacted, if this is true.

https://forums.plex.tv/t/are-the-desktop-apps-dead/935518/3

Today I retired my oldest piece of hardware.

A Western Digital Green desktop HDD with 109,306 power-on hours (~12.5 years).

This drive had a full career:

• Started in my main PC, mostly storing video games and documents
• Later trusted with thesis work
• Moved into a NAS
• Then a DAS
• Spent years in my Plex media server
• Replaced ~2 years ago by a bigger drive, but kept running for documents and photos storage.

It also survived several house moves, including a move to another country, which already feels impressive for a spinning disk.

In retrospect, this drive followed me through my entire adult life, from high school, through graduation, my first job, getting married, and everything in between.

It stored the photos, documents, and memories from all of those chapters.

SMART is now finally complaining, so I’m calling it retirement, not failure.

For the SMART-curious:

• Power-on hours: 109,306
• Start/stop cycles: 10,837
• Load cycles: 4,434,202
• Reallocated sectors: 0
• Current pending …

Essentially the above, I have a couple different versions of Aliens (1986). Two special editions, 4K UHD and 1080p Full frame, two theatrical cuts, 4K UHD and 4K 35mm scan, and the directors cut, in 1080p. When I have all of them merged, versions are not as descriptive as I’m looking for, so does that mean I’m stuck having 5 separate versions of the movie in my library? Attached is the file hierarchy, and the options for versions to play.

Recently moved house, had the server offline for a few weeks while I wait we for internet to be connected at the new address. When I went to start it all back up unfortunately discovered the HDD had completely fried itself, couldn’t get the system to recognize or recover it in any way. Unfortunately the only true back up I have is a few months old, and it’s really just the absolute basics.

So, I’ve bought a fresh HDD and am literally, right now about to install everything from fresh.

I previously based the server on Linux Mint, this time about I’m going to go with Ubuntu. Considering what else I might change from the original set up.

So..

What would you change in your own setup if you had to rebuild it from scratch?

Notes: This release requires an active Plex Pass subscription to download

Beta release note entries are appended between minor releases.

ITEMS ADDED:

• (API) Add support for ‘squareArt’ element type (PM-2959)
• (API) Added documentation for Metadata Providers (PM-3051)
• (Agents) Visibility of legacy agents during library setup must be explicitly enabled in global library settings (PM-3605)
• (Metadata) Add support for local ‘squareArt’ image for movies and TV shows (PM-2959)
• (Metadata) Add support for local clearLogo images for movies and TV shows (PM-4098)
• (Transcoder) Transcoder was updated to the ffmpeg 6.1 baseline. (PM-3882)
• (Web) Updated to 4.156.0
• (Linux) DEB/RPM packages automatically setup new gpg key

ITEMS FIXED:

• (Commercials) Commercials were not being removed from live-TV recordings (PM-4208)
• (Credit Detection) Process was timing out on large files (PM-4288)
• (Credit Detection) Transcoder update caused credit detection to fail. (PM-4167) …