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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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    1. Some kind of monitoring software, like the Grafana stack. I like email and Discord notifications.
    2. The Dockerfile will have a HEALTHCHECK statement, but in my experience this is pretty rare. Most of the time I set up a health check in the docker compose file or I extended the Dockerfile and add my own. You sometimes need to add a tool (like curl) to do the health check anyway.
    3. It’s a feature of the container, but the app needs to support some way of signaling “health”, such as through a web API.
    4. It depends on your needs. You can do all of the above. You can do so-called black box monitoring where you’re just monitoring whether your webapp is up or down. Easy. However, for a business you may want to know about problems before they happen, so you add white box monitoring for sub-components (database, services), timing, error counts, etc.

    To add to that: health checks in Docker containers are mostly for self-healing purposes. Think about a system where you have a web app running in many separate containers across some number of nodes. You want to know if one container has become too slow or non-responsive so you can restart it before the rest of the containers are overwhelmed, causing more serious downtime. So, a health check allows Docker to restart the container without manual intervention. You can configure it to give up if it restarts too many times, and then you would have other systems (like a load balancer) to direct traffic away from the failed subsystems.

    It’s useful to remember that containers are “cattle not pets”, so a restart or shutdown of a container is a “business as usual” event and things should continue to run in a distributed system.



  • I speak standing on a hill if my own dead projects. Just remember personal projects are supposed to be fun and educational, maybe with a little resume padding for good measure. Scratch that itch you can’t get to at work. It’s great when other people enjoy them, but as soon as they become a commitment, they start feeling like work. To me, at least.

    That’s why I think games or little tools are great. They small enough so you can throw them out and start over. People won’t get (too) mad if you stop maintaining them (if you open source them) because it’s easy for someone else to take over.





  • It’s a pretty common assumption in software, especially on Linux, that if anyone can access your home directory, then you can’t have any expectation of privacy. Some apps make the explicit statement that secrets are stored in plain text because obfuscation would just give you a false sense of security.

    The solution is to encrypt the data on a system level, e.g., with encrypted home directories. You could also create an encrypted volume in a file and store the profile in there. Make sure to protect your private keys with good passphrases.


  • They don’t, unless it is sufficiently controlled by medication. A doctor has to sign off that they think you can drive safely. Regulations vary by jurisdiction. Here in Ohio, USA you get a two-part license that says you need a doctor’s permit every time you renew your license to say you can continue to drive. Then you carry a piece of the paper (the second part) with your DL.

    For the doctor (neurologist) to be confident that you aren’t going to have seizure while driving, you have to have been seizure free for some time, plus maybe have regular EEG scans to confirm that you are not susceptible to seizures while being exposed to blinking lights. The blinking lights are part of the EEG scan. You basically hyperventilate (on purpose) while they flash lights at different frequencies and measure your brain waves. If the response is too severe, you fail.

    Like any condition, epilepsy comes in many forms and many levels of severity. Some epileptics can barely function and can have brain damage from too many seizures. Some people have no effects at all as long as they are on medication.




  • True open source products are your best bet. TruNAS and Proxmox are popular options, but you can absolutely set up a vanilla Debian server with Samba and call it a NAS. Back in the old days we just called those “file servers”.

    Most importantly, just keep good backups. If you have to choose between investing in a raid or a primary + backup drive, choose the latter every time. Raid will save you time to recover, but it’s not a backup.








  • Remote, because my commute would be 140 miles round-trip again. Otherwise I mostly enjoy working in an office with people and I don’t mind going in every few months or so.

    Remote is also nice because it actually makes it easier to collaborate with other developers when we can both be at our own keyboards and share screens.

    I work well alone, but I spend a lot in time in calls, either work meetings or collaborating on code. I do enjoy the social aspect of that as well.

    I use AI pretty much every day, but mostly as a search engine/SO replacement. I rarely let it write my code for me, since I’ve had overall poor results with that. Besides, I have to verify the code anyway. I do use it for simple refactoring or code generation like “create a c# class mapped to this table with entity framework”.