They are but Lego bricks.
Sure, you could write a piece of software that handles it’s own database storage, encoding bits directly into a binary blob file; and it could include its own memory manager and a custom-written TCP-IP stack.
But the development practices of today are based upon herding together stacks of libraries and utility shims to assemble applications, services and platforms without any one particular task or subsystem taking away from the goal at-hand.
If you want to make a microblogging website, your effort should be on making a microblogging website, not on the backend storage systems.
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Block and object storage solve very different problems. Block storage is just a filesystem, stored on someone else’s disks; it’s suitable for general purpose use, and for loads with lots of updates. There are some serious constraints on size/performance (block stores bigger than few tens of terrabytes don’t work well), replication across large distances if you care about consistency, and latency.
Object storage is for blobs of bits that are read only or nearly read only (write means replace, in most systems; some support versioning). That makes them well suited for things like image stores, video streams, and lots of other things. Because the client asks for objects by id, it’s easy to do replication, multilevel caching, and to scale to zettabytes, if required. They usually also have metadata attached to them, which allows indexing, searching, etc.
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That’s just the problem. I’m Asperger’s enough to care what the infrastructure I am building on looks like. Which makes me infinitely unsuited for the modern, multi-layer-abstracted world of modern corporate IT. 
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Agreed. I’m the same way. But I also have ADHD and if I don’t leverage other people’s work, I get bogged down rewriting make(1) because I don’t like the quirkiness of Makefile syntax.
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some of the replacements are worse.
I confess to have written a web content management system in make(1). In my defense, that’s before web content management systems were a thing. (awk was involved, too. Not sure that makes it better, or worse.)
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A friend of mine wrote a jukebox/audio request system using lpr/lpd as the spooler. (For non-Unix people: that’s the thing that normally manages the print queue.)
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So… does anyone have a “good” mail client for android?
Not that I use mail all that much anymore. But it is kind of sucky to have to use my webmail client on my phone.
Clients already excluded from the selection:
- I am not going through the hassle of having my own mailserver and then channeling everything through the gmail app (which is good but google)
- K9–at least the last iteration I had tended to use too much data and battery… willing to try again if that has changed.
I have lived without android mail app for a couple years now but I find it would be a possible improvement to have one that actually checks for new mail for me.
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Not Solving Your Problem: mostly I ssh to a computer running mutt.
But K-9 seems to be the least hateful. Except that it got an update a few months ago and I am entirely unable to find a way of saying “collect mail now” - I can say “collect every hour”, wait for it to finish, then switch bacl to “collect never”, but I can’t locate a one-off collection option even though the documentation implies it should still be there.
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It turns out that our home WIFI has a limited amount of connected device at once. I’ve been going nuts working in my new job because of this. Every Friday there’s 3 of us here and the connection was utter poop because we are fighting over them.
Weird how this would never happen pre-COVID.
It’s fixed now. We can connect way more devices.
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If windows were not windows I would actually maybe maybe maybe have thought that I had to edit the effin’ hosts file on windows to get it right into my wsl: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
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Yay for snapcast! Basically it’s a self-synchronising audio player that you can hang in front of a stream generator (like mpd that I’ve raved about before), then tell multiple clients to play at the same time, and it’ll keep them in time with each other. Not a thing I want to do every day, but awfully useful when I do.
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We have an infrastructure freeze on. Basically, no change to production stuff because of the holiday. Sensible. Except I just got a bunch of tasks for stuff that wasn’t updated by the automatic update system, which is turned off, because, you know, infrastructure freeze.
Now I have to make tasks to check they get updated after the freeze thaws.
Today for the first time in 2 weeks or so I made progress on that one thing that I’ve been carrying around since the previous sprint. The architect gave me a hint that … diverged from the ticket description. but progress is progress and this means I can sit here and feel a bit relaxed.
This might also mean I am actually going to close that story this sprint. not done yet. but I just skipped over about 10 levels of error stack in one swoop.
This might then mean that maybe tonight instead of feeling completely stressed out because of lack of progress I might actually get to enjoy my Feierabend.
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I’ve been contemplating applying for more senior, technical role for the last week or so. This morning my boss called me to ask if I’d fancy doing his job in the new year.
Up until recently I’d always assumed I’d stay in a technical role but this new role would be a distinct shift into “management”.
I think I’m going to take it. It will be a bit sad to no longer be a software engineer though.
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Congrats?
Chances like that do not come along all that often 
Technical roles are fine but recently I would very much prefer not being in the technical details so much. I love programming but the more experienced you get the more likely you are to go from “implementing fun stuff” to “problem solving all day”
Latest iteration: exception on deserializing with an EOF exception–a new to me relative of the good old InvocationTargetException–which has to be due to some kind of version incompatibility in our set of dependencies… funny thing though: putting that class in another package eliminates the exception.
But just making the exception go away doesn’t solve the apparent underlying problem… sure it is just a test package right now. But what if one day it isn’t?
Yeah, so sometimes I wish I would just have to solve people problems.
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Thanks, I think I’m happy about it, hasn’t really sunk in yet. 
As a background, this is exactly how I ended up being a Scrum Master. Same boss was struggling to do it alongside his normal role and he asked me if I wanted to pick it up. At the time that wasn’t a role I necessarily saw myself in, but I’ve really leant into it over the pandemic.
(Incidentally I’ve spent a lot of that time telling the team that as the SM I’m not their boss. In the new role I actually will be. 
I also think this might mean I become the Product Owner so who knows whether I’ll still be SM. Having said that, the lines of my role have always been blurred.)
I do enjoy the technical stuff and recently I’ve just finished some tricky architecture/design stuff (and some of the implementation) that I was very proud of. There were however points where I was incredibly stressed with it all.
There is also definitely a part of me that figures riding on my boss’s coat tails can’t be a bad thing.
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Just don’t let them take away your soldering iron.
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I don’t get to use a soldering iron in my day job. Closest I got was jury-rigging an RS232 crossover cable.
But it is a good point. I don’t know whether it’s WFH related or just work related but my recreational coding has pretty much stopped over the pandemic.
I wonder if doing less at work will mean more inclination to do some at home
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Advent of Code, man! (See the “What are you Coding” thread.) Also the Weekly Challenge, which is mostly a Perl/Raku thing but they accept answers in any language.
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