From the "odd ways to fill your spare time" department: Reviving Netscape(R) Composer(R) in contemporary internet. Which feels like unearthing, respawning something horrible. Too: HoTMeTaL, anyone...? Interesting read nevertheless:
As a geek born in the early 1990s, who has been playing with computers from a young age, I think fondly of what tech looked like in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
So, naturally, when I got my hands on an old computer a few months ago, I installed Windows 98 on it as a way to revive software from my childhood and play around with it. Among the gems I wanted to revisit was Netscape Communicator, a software suite from 1997 centered around Netscape Navigator, which was the first web browser I ever used. One of the other applications included in that suite was a WYSIWYG web page editor named Netscape Composer.
https://plbrault.com/blog-posts/i-used-netscape-composer-in-2024-en/
Reading DHHs musings on technology and running services always is a good way to start a day. This one is no different:
https://world.hey.com/dhh/keeping-the-lights-on-while-leaving-the-cloud-be7c2d67
The magic of Basecamp 2’s incredible two-year 100% uptime, as well as all the other applications hitting 99.99%, come in part from picking boring, basic technologies. We run on F5s, Linux, KVM, Docker, MySQL, Redis, Elastic Search, and of course Ruby on Rails. There’s nothing fancy about our stack, and very little complexity either. We don’t need people with PhDs in Kubernetes or specialists in exotic data stores. And neither do you, most likely.
But programmers are attracted to complexity like moths to a flame. The more convoluted the systems diagram, the greater the intellectual masturbation. Our commitment to resisting that is the key ingredient in this uptime success.
Quite a strong wording in this conclusion but generally it's hard to disagree here. Just too many people throw in too much external and third-party complexity for the sake of it, stuff they don't completely know or understand, because that's "how you do it these days". In the end, still, reliability, stability, security of a system in day-to-day operations to quite some degree depends on whether (or not) people know how to handle their environment in as much detail as possible.
After trying so for a whole year now, I left a few brief experiences of trying to post pictures to the Fediverse elsewhere, trying to get myself to sorting things a bit more and somehow decluttering my daily screen time spent on too many different systems all at once...:
https://log.z428.eu/pixelfed365-learnings-from-a-year-of-federated-digital-imaging
Interesting read, found elsewhere (some people should know David Heinemeier Hansson):
Just over a year ago, we announced our intention to leave the cloud. We then shared our complete $3.2 million cloud budget for 2022, and the fact that we were going to build our own tooling rather than pay for overpriced enterprise service contracts. The mission was set!
A month later, we placed an order for $600,000 worth of Dell servers to carry our exit, and did the math to conservatively estimate $7 million in savings over the next five years. We also detailed the larger values, beyond just cost, that was driving our cloud exit. Things like independence and loyalty to the original ethos of the internet.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-big-cloud-exit-faq-20274010