Yep, and I see evidence of that over complication in some ‘getting started’ questions where people are asking about really convoluted design points and then people reinforcing that by doubling down or sometimes mentioning other weird exotic stuff, when they might be served by a checkbox in a ‘dumbed down’ self-hosting distribution on a single server, or maybe installing a package and just having it run, or maybe having to run a podman or docker command for some. But if they are struggling with complicated networking and scaling across a set of systems, then they are going way beyond what makes sense for a self host scenario.

Based on what I’ve seen, I’d also say a homelab is often needlessly complex compared to what I’d consider a sane approach to self hosting. You’ll throw all sorts of complexity to imitate the complexity of things you are asked to do professionally, that are either actually bad, but have hype/marketing, or may bring value, but only at scales beyond a household’s hosting needs and far simpler setups will suffice that are nearly 0 touch day to day.

The other day sometime similar happened to me. I mean I was used to that sort of crap on some dubious downloads, but most recently it was a pretty reputable software from it’s actual reputable site, and there were like a half dozen “DOWNLOAD” buttons in boxes and arrows and like a tiny actual download link. Made me research whether that site has been hijacked since I had last used it, and folks were saying it just went that way. Still very reluctant to grab it on any system I vaguely care about or keep anything remotely sensitive, since indulging in those sorts of ads destroys any twist I might have had.

Yes. For a long time I was trying to “play nice” and not go adblock. I didn’t mind ads that were unobtrusive and figured I’d roll with the ads for the sake of the sites. With things looking like this, and deliberately having ads load a little late and relayout the page to replace a link just as you were about to click in it, and ones that slipped even the pretense and pop up and ad instead of the actual link or button the first time. I would tend to just close such sites in disgust, and told my Google feed to not give me contemt from a couple of the worst owners that recurred.

The final straw was a site that made the play embedded video function be ads the first two times on clicking it, as well as looking like that. On top of just having to give up on sites more and more.

I read that majority of Internet users now use ad blockers. That didn’t used to be the case, and the large chunk of sites like this I’m sure is why.

Well, on one hand you had one line in a table in a formal web page.

On the other, you had that very awkward phrasing (if he merely meant ‘latest’):

because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10,

But maybe that was a misunderstanding and he did mean ‘latest’, but in the flurry of internet coverage, Microsoft never issued a statement highlighting the misunderstanding. Instead they let that run rampant.

In fact, it was very consistent with a lot that happened with Windows 10:

• The mass “free to upgrade for everyone going back to 7” toward the goal of getting their userbase largely on a consistent vintage that is more supportable
• The twice a year major updates that were pitched as ‘new features and functions’, with a more ‘rolling release’ feel

So while certainly that one lifecycle page did have it stated, I have to wonder why Microsoft was mum on the subject even as their community was ‘getting it wrong’. I wouldn’t be surprised if the reality is that they were seriously considering it. That guy might have even meant ‘last’ because he thought the ‘eternal update’ camp were going to win out.

which currently only has about one year of support left, officially

Well, no, “Version 23H2” only has one year of support. The 24H2 update will likely happen and likely have support until 2026. They do not list a retirement date for “Windows 11”, only for the updates.

You are right that for 10, the formal documentation listed an EOL. I can also believe that the “last version” was started by a misunderstanding. However, that “Windows 10 is the last version” spread hard and Microsoft made no effort to correct that at all. If there’s one thing internet sites love more than over-speculating about a potential mis-speak, it’s showing their fellow internet sites to be morons by posting Microsoft statements clarifying things. So Microsoft had to have noticed and still opted not to interject. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some “we are going to make Windows 10 a rolling release” sentiment bouncing around at Microsoft. It would be consistent with how they declared that new features and deprecations would come twice a year.

Problem is part of the standard allows the server to require attestation. So congratulations, they only bless their app, or maybe they only bless iphones.

If the service ignores that, then yes, it’s great. It’s as yet unpopular so it’s hard to know, but in adjacent industries I have seen them lock down the to the point it’s as asinine as “open your app to continue”

Who ys watchyng this yn the year of oure lord sixteen forty?

The chorus of: “I’m <insert some usually made up age> and <some asinine comment>”

I find more obnoxious than the “who’s watching/listening in <bla blah>” comments.

Broadly speaking I don’t bother looking at comments on youtube, the signal to noise ratio is on the floor.

For 90% of static site requirements, it scales fine. That entry point reverse proxy is faster at fetching content to serve via filesystem calls than it is at making an http call to another http service. For self hosting types of applications, that percentage guess to go 99.9%

If you are in a situation where serving the files through your reverse proxy directly does not scale, throwing more containers behind that proxy won’t help in the static content scenario. You’ll need to do something like a CDN, and those like to consume straight directory trees, not containers.

For dynamic backend, maybe. Mainly because you might screw up and your backend code needs to be isolated to mitigate security oopsies. Often it also is useful to manage dependencies, but that facet is less useful for golang where the resulting binary is pretty well self contained except maybe a little light usage of libc.

But it you already have an nginx or other web server otherwise required to start up (which is in all likelihood the case), you don’t need any more auto startup, the “reverse proxy” already started can just serve it. I would say that container orchestration versioning can be helpful in some scenarios, but a simple git repository for a static website is way more useful since it’s got the right tooling to annotate changes very specifically on demand.

That reverse proxy is ultimately also a static file server. There’s really no value in spinning up more web servers for a strictly static site.

Folks have gone overboard assuming docker or similar should wrap every little thing. It sometimes adds complexity without making anything simpler. It can simplify some scenarios, but adding a static site to a webserver is not a scenario that enjoys any benefit.

Because serving static files doesn’t really require any flexibility in web serving code.

If your setup has an nginx or similar as a reverse proxy entry point, you can just tell it to serve the directory. Why bother making an entire new chroot and proxy hop when you have absolutely zero requirements beyond what the reverse proxy already provides. Now if you don’t have that entry point, fine, but at least 99% of the time I see some web server as initial arbiter into services that would have all the capability to just serve the files.

“web development” casts a wide net.

The classic imagery of someone playing with frontpage back in the day, or screwing around with html in a text editor, sure. But those folks wouldn’t call themselves web developers (there was a phase over 20 years ago where anyone that cobbled together a geocities would declare ‘web developer’ on their resume, but I haven’t seen someone do that in ages).

However, you can get in pretty deep with code running in the browser as javascript and/or wasm. Backend gives them some nested dictionary in json or protobuf and they parse, manipulate, iterate over it, sometimes making some pretty complex visualizations. Basically a ‘web developer’ is nowadays on par with any Game or GUI application developer in terms of what they might be writing. There are a few things left out of direct reach by a browser runtime, but you have access to plenty and the backend abstractions to get something in reach of HTTP are often no easier than the thing being abstracted, it’s just reframed as ‘http’.

Ah yes, I’ve spent decades cringing when I meet a self-proclaimed or even peer-proclaimed “rockstar”, “ninja”, “guru”, “jedi”, or probably a half dozen other “cool” designations for a tech worker.

Looks more half empty to me

Gitlab is an interesting project.

Admittedly looks good and has the feature set, but…

You dig in at all it’s a mess. If it screws up, it’s a mess. Every five minutes they seem to have another extremely severe security issue. Even when it’s working right, it’s a resource hog.

Has the feel of a lot of mismatched stuff duct taped together, but the duct tape looks great. So as a user, great. As an admin, a bit of a mess.

You’re bending your team/process to fit agile, and not bending agile to fit your team/process

Yeah, this one is tricky.

If a methodology is supposed to help, but you don’t change your processes in any way, then it seems odd to assert that you are “adopting” a methodology.

In fact, I would say that the typical dysfunctional Agile shop basically “bends agile” to fit their process, meaning they undertake a superficial exercise to map a problematic process to Agile terms and declare victory. Sometimes taking the time to actually make the process worse in a way they wanted to, under the smoke screen of “Agile transition”. For example, in my company customers are generally using our projects together, so we had basically a set cadence of release dates. All projects were only allowed to target designated release days (March 1st, June 1st, etc.) A project, if it made sense could skip a release window, but the projects wouldn’t just release 2 weeks differently than all the related projects. Project owners declared this “not Agile” and said everyone just release whenever, much to the complaints to customers that now have a barrage of updates that are in no way synced up, with QA that tried to use the projects as the customer would abolished, so until the customer there’s no one using the “current” editions of the projects together in one place. Agile is perfectly happy with a prescribed cadence (in fact I would say usually I hear the mantra that you try to fit your work to the schedule, rather than letting the work mess up the schedule), but development managers didn’t like the way the release schedule tied their hands so they blamed Agile for a really bad quality move.

I’m all about processes that fit your team, I just think fixation on Agile branding does more harm than good.

In our case, tossing stuff in the backlog to never get done is just part of trying to get through life.

We have an… eccentric colleague who demands the craziest stuff that no one else wants. Now in a sane world, we explain that his requests are either extremely costly for a minor thing no one cares about, or, like 90% of his requests, run explicitly counter to what our customers want even if we could trivially do it. He is not a customer nor is he in contact with customers or marketing or sales, he’s in a different technical team but has an “armchair enthusiast” interest in my teams product.

We used to try to have that discussion to reject items to make it clear they will never ever get worked on. However whenever we did that he would demand hour after hour after hour of meeting to discuss each request that we want to reject and convince us why his requirement is the most awesome thing in the planet, and with enough meetings maybe we’d stop being so clueless and come around to recognize the brilliance.

So now we toss it in the backlog, and there’s always a point of comparison like “Customer giving us $40M asks for feature X”, and he has to rationally accept why X jumps ahead of his backlog items, even if he is displeased. One new project manager made the mistake of trying to close out the backlog items and the meeting invites flew about us daring to ignore his awesome requests.

So we have a chunk of backlog that every one knows will never happen, and in fact if our backlog ever dried up, then we’d have a big problem because then we’d actually have to have that tough conversation about why his ideas are bad. At this point some of his wacky stories have been on the backlog for over five years.

That’s about your team and/or your teams leadership, not scrum.

While true, that cuts both ways, a successful team is not successful because of ‘scrum’, it’s successful because it finds a methodology that works for them, which can be in terms of scrum, but even if no one was chanting Agile buzzwords, that team would still self organize in a similar way, just without the precise buzzwords.

What’s obnoxious is that a lot of folks, with a vested interest in, say, consulting, will give credit to “Agile” for teams succeeding and then simultaneously call all failures that ostensibly use Agile but fail “not true Agile”. It can be harmless enough when self-organizing, but then it doesn’t really matter if it is “big-A Agile” or not. People hung up on the “big-A Agile” may be expecting to cash in with consultancy money, or use it as a club to assert their authority by their self-proclaimed alignment to ‘Agile’. They are advocating for Agile, therefore if you challenge anything about their direction, they will invoke the magic Agile word to silence criticism about their methods. Once an organization has “acheived Agile”, ironically they frequently close the door on any consideration of methodology reform. “We are running Agile now, whatever you may think we are doing wrong the industry agrees with us because the industry uses Agile, so stop complaining”.

So Agile may be technically workable, but the frustration is that it is vague enough to allow anyone to do almost anything and still ‘fairly’ claim Agile, but as a brand word it confers unreasonable authority for certain folks. As the most prominent brand word in the world of project management, it is further correlated with the ‘default’ asserted methodology of any crappy group looking toward consultancy/self-help to fix their bad team situation with a bandaid of methodology.

While everyone wants more money, from what I’ve seen, higher paid people get more petty about non-cash stuff. So the person making not quite enough to cover them confidently may not have the attention to spare for non-cash BS. Then as they get their money comfortable, they then start getting swayed by other things. An important sounding title, having a seat with a view in the office, having their name appear in recognition announcements. Not so sure about this froofy stuff like ping pong tables, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone value that, however I’d imagine if candidates see people using such benefits that may give an impression of significant leisure time, which may be appealing, but a disused table would probably look worse than having no table at all.