Gregory's ServerWhat's your favorite "simple" tech? Anything that fits the template "it's like <popular thing>, but with one tenth of the complexity"
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@sanityinc @plexus also, I don't know about lacking complexity exactly, but emacs tramp mode is both dumb and glorious.  @plexus definitely IRC, but CGI and SQLite make very strong contenders too @tomekw @sanityinc yeah I got a wired headset from Beyer dynamic. Love it! I'm very pro cables in general.  @plexus my nice fountain pen that I use for taking notes in class while everyone else sits there with an iPad or laptop @plexus if it needs to involve electrons, then cables. many things that have a battery don't need it, many things that have wlan/bluetooth don't need it @plexus my homelab is powered by a single python script that basically reimplements rsync over ssh and can trigger commands on changes to specific paths (like, /etc/nginx.conf changed => docker restart nginx) It's like... 10% of ansible I guess? But whenever I describe this to people they're like "have you considered kubernetes?" and it's well under 10% of the complexity of *that* @emily I once heard someone say "use kubernetes if you have a $1M ops problem to solve", and that has been my rule of thumb ever since. Less than a six figure ops budget = no kubernetes for you. @emily @plexus I was actually going to propose "docker, it's like kubernetes but simpler" for the same reason. I could run kubernetes at home, but really I've only got one computer so docker-compose is much simpler. (It's fine if people want to run k8s at home - all power to them, it's just not on my enjoys list) @SamJSharpe @plexus yeah, I do my containerization with docker-compose too (I have an /etc/compose.yaml and the above tool configured to do the `docker-compose up` thing on changes to it) @emily @plexus whenever someone says "have you considered kubernetes?", my answer is almost always, "yes, but no" 😂. Same reason I have a Mac laptop. I could (and have) run Linux as a desktop, but now I don't want to expend the effort doing it when I could be using that time to do things I actually enjoy - I'd probably do the same as you and create a quick Python or even Shell script to do a task and move onto things I personally find more interesting. @plexus putting my physical MIT ID card on the back of my phone instead of using my phone's NFC for whenever I need to scan my ID.  @plexus inline skates: seven league boots, but using attainable consumer technology
(Also strong contenders: the bicycle, musl) @plexus my gloriously dumb Mondaine swiss railway watch. Does 2 things well, looks amazing, can be read without my glasses Heck, add a t square, scale, couple triangles, and you can do some really neat and detailed things with paper and pencil! No ongoing yearly subscription to Autodesk either. In all reality, a good draftsman (they're a dying breed but I've got the privilege of working with one!) can draft a plan on paper slightly faster than civil 3d if you know exactly what you want from the start and do coordination on the front end. Where CAD saves (lots of) time is in the revisions. @plexus XMPP - I had so much fun building a web client just by reading the RFCs and I would definitely use it for general real-time messaging problems  @plexus Thing that most obviously comes to mind is my reMarkable 2 E-ink tablet. Beautiful hardware, but also just quiet and inert and so seems much more transparent in my working process than an iPad.  @daveliepmann @plexus I also scribble a lot on paper. The funny thing is that mostly the "diagrams" are so simple that they could have easily fit in my head. And yet it always helps. ✏️ 📄  @plexus Ansible, if it counts (I guess by modern standards there are 10x and 100x tools that do the same) |
@plexus server side rendering of web pages without javascript