Tech Watch & Dev

I start the day with vscode, firefox and iterm opened

I finish the day with 5 vscode windows, 10 terminals and infinite tabs - and somehow my task backlog has growed...

How do you guys deal with this?

Ive been freelancing since 2018 as a fullstack dev. I used to make $80 - $120k USD/year, but this year I'm barely going to reach $15K usd.

Is the market that bad or is it just me?

Curious to hear people’s opinions on this one but since Covid a number of roles have adopted a WFH/Hybrid work policy. Some already had them but I personally have found I am much more productive working from home. When looking for new roles I see quite a range of office, wfh and hybrid work and honestly since Covid I have had absolutely no interest to return to a full office setting. Any other devs find this? Because I don’t fully work in a dev only place, it’s mixed with sales people and what not so there are constant phones ringing, interruptions, pointless office chatter.

Is there a possibility of being the only sre engineer in a company? Before choosing it I want to clarify it because if there could be then hes life could be problematic because he has to stay on call everyday. Also if it is not there then will be on call rotation right? Because I don't want to stay on call everytime that could be problematic. How many SREs are there in your team?

I have a .io domain with GoDaddy, I've read all the bad posts but they've been fine for me for the past 20+ years, the usual renewal prices are cheap enough and I only use them for domains, I host elsewhere.

Anyway, I have a .io domain, which I know is pricey anyway, but they want £66 a year for the renewal, compared to my usual TLD renewals at around £10, so I'm looking for valid suggestions of companies to move it to (and maybe my others). I use this domain for private email routing more than anything else and have the privacy package, if it were a business thing then sure £66 isn't that bad.

I've found many lists online, but you know the score, there's a million names I've never heard of so don't want to go blindly into someone else.

I'm in the UK, US registrars are fine although there's usually a currency conversion rate on top that would be nice to avoid.

All suggestions welcome, TIA

I’ve had interviews with Google and Amazon (two companies I used to dream of working for). They still use the traditional process of LeetCode, algorithms, and so on, without any AI assistance. Back in the golden age (before AI), I used to practice and solve a lot of questions. It was fun because you knew you needed that knowledge to build things successfully in your own projects. Nowadays, all the code in companies is generated by Claude Code, and software engineers just review the output to make sure it's correct, and that's it. 

To be honest, during those interviews, I didn’t care about practicing. I didn’t want to waste my time when I knew I wasn't going to solve a LeetCode Hard anyway, since I'm not that good at those types of questions. I guess I didn't care about getting into Google or Amazon anymore because I knew how high their bar is, and I just didn't have the energy to grind algorithms while having a stable job. 

I don't know, this AI era has made me want to do something else. The job has become boring; I just use prompts now, because there’s no reason to do something by hand when AI does it better and faster than you. I feel like I've lost that passion for coding. Has anyone else gone through this? What roles can you transition into that aren’t about coding and are more fun? 

I have just updated my website visualthings.net and I realize with horror how slow it is. This is not my first website but I am a bit puzzled about how long it takes to simply load. The images are as optimized as possible, there aren't any .js that I don't need. Could it be the style.css that contains too many unneeded elements? (I have worked from a template and left some parts as I wasn't sure yet if I would need them or not). Can a single CSS be what slows the whole process?

I have tried to find a tool that can analyze a website and come back with a specific culprit but haven't found any. If anybody can point me in the right direction that would be really helpful.

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Has anyone hosted with WordPress and used WordPress' internal mySQL server for their website? Database access is available in the business tier of WordPress (host) but I wondered if the user access (username/password) for the database changes if I go back to a lower tier later. This isn't a high traffic website so I can't justify paying for the business tier every month. If not, I can look into other options. Again, the hosting provider is WordPress.com

- Module Federation provides better performance, but no strong runtime isolation.
- iframes provide strong isolation, making independent deployment more reliable.
- This matters especially for large, legacy codebases where enforcing boundaries in code is difficult.
- A typed communication SDK, routing, and smart chunk splitting can reduce the performance cost.
- For large legacy applications, iframes can be a better tradeoff than MF

Hi everyone,
I recently joined a new company as a DevOps engineer, and I’m still trying to understand the existing infrastructure and CI/CD setup.
Our pipelines are running on AWS CodePipeline, and there are quite a few things I’m struggling to understand how the pipeline is structured, how the different stages work, deployments, and how everything is connected.
I’m currently learning, so I’d really appreciate it if someone experienced with AWS CodePipeline/DevOps could guide me through the basics and help me understand how to approach an existing setup.
If someone is willing to spend some time explaining it to me over a remote call/screen-sharing session, I’d be extremely grateful. I’m not asking anyone to access my company systems or credentials — I just want to learn and understand the concepts and workflow.

I make data stories for a living. Last week I read a log file for fun.

Whilst browsing Wikipedia at night, reading article about something, and then about something, and somehow ending up reading about something completely different to realise that, Wikipedia saves every change anyone has ever made to it. Someone fixes a comma at 2am, it's in there forever with their name on it. (Which seemed obvious, and somehow I knew always)

But what I realised, which was new to me, at the end of every one of those lines there are two things you can do. Undo them. Or thank them.

That's the whole feature. No message. No reply. They can't write back, and you can't take it back.

Then I started researching about the feature, three people built it in 2013. They wanted it to be as easy to tell someone they did well as it is to tell them they didn't.

Last month it got pressed 68,948 times, in sixteen languages. One every 38 seconds.

Almost half of those people pressed it once. One person, one time, then never again. And 9,055 people were on the other end of that. Thanked once, ever.

The most thanked account on Wikipedia is a German editor called Aka. 4,590,174 edits. They mostly fix spelling. Last month 403 people stopped what they were doing to say thanks for it.

Ninth on that list is InternetArchiveBot. Not a person. It repairs dead links. 129 humans thanked it anyway.

You've probably never seen this button. It only shows up if you're logged in. Nothing to do with Wikipedia. I just like the log.