• 14 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Ahhh, self doubt, my old friend…

    “There is probably a better way” is a fairly common feeling. In fact there probably is a better way. But at some point you need to be pragmatic and be happy with “good enough”. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good (enough) as they say…

    That said - follow your intuitions as well that things could be done better. Don’t be afraid to just re-write a bunch of things to see if an idea works better. Like grouping things from some “common.php” into domain specific functionality (dates.php, db.php, etc.). Or re-working how your front-end works. Maybe read other code or ask for code review from people more experienced, or even from an AI (yes, yes, I know, but they can be useful).

    One problem you can find yourself in is that you’ve created code that’s very difficult to understand, but since you’re “in it” right now you understand it completely. If you put the code down for a week or two and come back to it you may find it very difficult to re-learn. If using classes, creating a DAO layer, or some other pattern helps to make your code easier to read then it’s worth following.











  • Also, what can I expect concerning RAID? That is definitely the most concerning thing for me, as I’ve never worked with it.

    Generally speaking it’s recommended these days to use a software RAID rather than relying on hardware. If anything happens to that RAID controller you will need to replace it with a duplicate in order to mount your drives. Software RAID is controlled by the Linux OS and would be much easier to recover. There used to be a bit of a performance penalty for a software RAID but these days it’s negligible.






  • Right? This is the whole “lack of understanding” that I’m going on about. “But the install instructions for some other application said to do this.” So it becomes cargo-cult system administration.

    It’s how we end up with curl https://some.rando.url/install.sh | sudo bash -c as an acceptable way of installing software. Don’t understand it, don’t question it, don’t look at what that shell script you’re running as root does, just copy / paste / and go! I don’t want to care about the details!

    And you see it in the comments in this forum where anytime anyone asks a question there are dozens of replies like “just use yunohost” or “just rebuild your entire server with unraid” without addressing the one component that needs addressing or offering multiple solutions. It’s just “my click and forget solution worked for me so it’s the way everyone should do it.”

    This is how we end up with walled gardens - to protect these people from themselves. Self-hosting should involve some amount of learning about what you’re doing because “there be dragons” out there.

    I have nothing against yunohost or letsencrypt (the latter is simply amazing) - but one should understand that these things are components that are part of a larger system.

    </rant>