Tech Watch & Dev

I have recently decided to tackle unfinished business in building with Java. Now I am relearning Java - which includes unlearning the old ways of doing things and writing the shortest possible code. In all of this I have been writing code by hand without AI generated code. Although I ask Claude for syntax clarifications and benefits and downsides of using certain methods…

Writing code by hand again gives me the right level of satisfaction after several weeks of AI-dependent development at work. Not only have I rediscovered my passion at home, but I am also working towards evolving my mental model beyond the JS/TS (I am a frontend developer at heart) ecosystem.

I believe programming and development as a hobby - like it used to be pre-industrial-scale-AI-adoption - is one of the few ways we could protect our sanity and continually exercise muscle memory. In the end I would like this to lead me to doing backend web dev in Java as well. Let’s see.

Real time communication isn't one size fits all. A common mistake in system design is picking WebSockets when all you really needed was server-to-client streaming.

I wrote a short 3 minute architectural comparison of the trade offs here:https://medium.com/@anirbansingha20/websockets-vs-long-polling-vs-server-sent-events-fa9bc1644cb8

What do you usually reach for first when building real time features ?

I'm an artist and sometimes I think about how I wanna throw instagram into garbage if it wasn't the only way I get in contact with my clients. Also, I don't wanna depend on algorithms, I just want people who want to look at my art. I'm very basic to webdev, only html, css and javascript, I've made a full stack course last year but it was pretty shit, so I didn't learn much. Any recommendations on how I could start developing a website like this? Picture a gallery like instagram, some announcements tab, maybe a portfolio tab. The only thing that stops me a bit is how to post new drawings and announcements easily without getting into the code, 'cause if it's too difficult then I would not use it

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Over the weekend I built a technical proof of concept showing an LLM running client-side in a browser using Llama.cpp compiled to WASM with WebGPU.

i have been working with spring boot and angular for a few years now and every api i have built or inherited is stateless. jwt in the header, no server session, done. nobody ever questioned it on any project i was on.

but i realized i never really asked myself why we do this by default. i know the usual answers like it scales easily and any instance can handle any request. but it feels like the state just moves somewhere else, to the token, to redis, to the database. so what are we really gaining ?

I pinky promise that I'm not a ClickHouse employee

I've known about Zod, a JavaScript/TypeScript schema validation library, for a while, but I underestimated the size of its ecosystem. After using it for some form validation in React, I thought I'd see how well it integrated with Express. Sure enough, there were several middleware libraries for Zod + Express, so I decided to give one a try. I went with express-zod-safe because it fit my existing setup with very little effort.

Boom, that let me remove roughly 150 lines of custom validation and typing code. For context, the template created by express-generator-typescript is a simple CRUD app with four API endpoints. I hadn't realized how much boilerplate I'd written just to validate objects in the route handlers, including validator functions and some custom request/response types. I also replaced my environment variable validation code with Zod.

Express has been around for a while, but I still find it useful for small projects and demos. If you'd like a quick way to spin up an Express + TypeScript project, check out express-generator-typescript.

I have a website right now that's built in Angular. It's largely static, so I figure an SSG is a good thing to finally try out if I wanted to rebuild it, as I enjoy Angular but it's a bit overkill for the site situation I have.

That said, I do have a few spots where I have lightly interactive elements, such as some pages with tables on them that have a text input for search functionality. Type in some text and it filters the table to that text as you type.

I'm trying to decide which SSG to learn, and for a basic site such as this, would you recommend going with 11ty or Astro, and why?

TL;DR: I usually bill this client $20/hr. They're a company based in Ontario. I quoted $3.5k / $5.2k / $7.4k for a stats dashboard that I also have to host on their server, wire into their messy setup, and make reachable remotely over a VPN. He said too high and that he's shopping around. Was it overpriced, or did I just pitch it badly?

I do small jobs for a lab that tracks production stats, at about $20/hr. I'm in a cheaper country, the client isn't. They asked for a fixed price to replace a Grafana board that only shows today's files, plus some PHP cron reports that fail without anyone noticing.

Their infra is a mess:

• exports land in a shared folder
• old scripts and cron jobs nobody really owns
• reports to management that break silently
• no backups
• no docs on how any of it fits together

I'd be installing and hosting it on their own machine, not my own server. On top of that I'd set up remote viewing and a VPN on their side so a few people can open it from outside the building and I can support it remotely.

What I quoted:

• $3,500: 3 desktop pages, with history, date ranges, compare to the previous period, filters, live reading of their export folder, and a nightly backup.
• $5,200: the above, plus phone and TV layouts, exports, and saved views.
• $7,400: the above, plus logins and roles, admin screens, an activity log, and the remote access and VPN.

Email reports and alerts were optional on top.

His reply: "very high to my understanding, getting a couple of other quotes."

Questions:

1. What would you charge for the 3-page version, given that hosting and setup are on their server?
2. Does being in a cheaper country matter, or do you price for the client's market?
3. Do I send a smaller, cheaper quote before his other quotes come in, or does that make my first quote look made up?