What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

Hey folks,

My wife and I saw a great flights deal on Delta and bought tickets for March 2025. We know that we have day 8 in Hobbiton just before we leave (which is a solid 50% of the reason she wants to visit New Zealand), but we wondered what else we should plan on for the first 7 days! I bet we spend a couple days in Auckland on the way in, and a bit of the evening of the 8th day, so anything local is great too.

We like a mix of (moderate) outdoorsy things, cultural/historic things, nice city things, etc. We definitely at least one day at the beach (preferably with a nice restaurant nearby) and are taking advice about where to do so. We will have a rental car beginning on Day 2 or 3, and would love to explore as much of the North Island as we can!

Any "can't misses"? Any local/regional museums or zoos/aquaria that are exceptional? We are absolutely willing to drive even as far south as Wellington, but prefer more days of smaller driving, so we don't just have a full day of driving in the middle there.

Much appreciated!

Recently I’ve been growing dissatisfied with my current workflow (Obsidian and iA) and looking to try something new, and someone recommended emacs, as long as I was up for the challenge. I figure it can’t hurt to try, and if I don’t implement it, well, I’ll have learned something.

I’m fairly comfortable with CLIs, but will likely use a GUI, and will be using on a Mac.

Anyone have advice for a total novice?

I'm in a decade-long predicament related to the management of a somewhat complex website for my publishing business, and I'd appreciate your advice. For context:

1. I joined the company as an original founder about 15 years ago. My initial roles mostly dealt with accounting, finance, sales, account management, etc. -- really, anything and everything I could help out with. I offered to take ownership of our website since I had a fair amount of web design and programming experience.
2. The original version of our website was a patchwork of PHP scripts from back in the days before Composer. I was inexperienced and didn't know anything about frameworks, etc. so I just started adding code.
3. Over the years, I built homebrew versions of user authentication, a backend (CMS, CRM, etc.), and our front-facing website (full-stack, from cloud hosting to CSS and everything in between). As the story goes, it became a spaghetti code mess that was only maintainable by me.
4. Realizing that I'd created a mess, my next long-term project was to slowly start transitioning the entire backend over to the Symfony framework, including many/most of the homebuilt components such as auth. This probably took 5 years in earnest. This way, I could at least begin to have conversations about getting outside help.
5. The other founder passed away unexpectedly, and I've found myself not having enough time to dedicate to the website. I can work on it here and there and patch it up when things break, but my fear is that we're going to become stale.
6. I've had several conversations with individuals and web development companies in various capacities over the years. These conversations ranged from "sure, I can help out with front-end stuff" to "we would like to rebuild your website from scratch using (insert popular CMS) and then manage it for the low cost of (insert high cost)".

Right now, all of the coding goes through me because it's the cheapest option (plus all of the context above). I'd like to explore delegating or outsourcing it again, but I don't know where the happy medium is as far as what needs to stay in-house.

Just to give an idea of the complexity, as it goes well beyond what you would think a publisher needs, here are some of the features:

• User auth/database with tens of thousands of users
• Single sign-on that connects those users to several other platforms seamlessly
• Content authoring
• Several "microsite" type pages on the front end that require their own CSS/JS needs
• Some unique features that were built because we couldn't find suitable alternatives, such as a webinar player that automatically generates certificates and stores them for the user, watermarked PDF downloads to include user information (i.e. to prevent piracy), etc.
• CSS from the Bootstrap 3 era that has been modified and bolted onto over the years
• Jquery stuff from way back in the day
• and on, and on, and on

To do things right, I would think that I need a server admin, a Symfony/PHP expert, and a front-end expert. But we're talking about what - hundreds of thousands of dollars per year? We can't afford that.

In my mind, an ideal situation looks like this:

• I am still able to see, modify, and keep control of our codebase (Git)
• Hosting is managed. This is where my second biggest* fear lies, in that I know enough server admin to be dangerous, but I lose sleep knowing that an intrusion is inevitable and there are smarter people than me that can help prevent one.
• I can assign out projects (e.g. we want to upgrade to PHP ## and Symfony ##, we want to redesign a page/template/etc., we want to implement SAML and connect it to another platform, etc.)

*My biggest fear is that, since I hold the keys to everything related to this website, if I am unavailable (or get hit by a bus) then I leave the business in a REALLY bad place.

Can anyone offer any advice on navigating this hornet's nest?

I have, despite my better judgement, gone back on reddit in a limited way after exiting completely for a few months. I decided to anonymize myself as much as possible and was using Redact to cover my history. It overwrites comments with random words plus a short message that the comment has been anonymized and deleted with Redact. It's been working great for quite a few months.

Today I logged on for the first time in a few days and my comments have ALL been restored, right back to when I opened a new account a few months ago after closing my ten year old account. Everything is there again.

Not sure reddit's point in restoring them, other than a stark reminder that comments and personal info mining is the point of reddit, not community engagement, just like all the other social media.

Curious if anyone has any idea on how to permanently delete comment history?

Building my first Progressive Web App, it's new territory for me but I've made it installable already.

I'm trying to cover a fairly simple use case, which is displaying a badge count based on the number of unread notifications. Intuition tells me that I'd just ping an endpoint on the server at a 5 minute interval, but I'm in new territory so I thought I'd open up the conversation to see if there's any gotchas to be aware of.

I'd like to see if there's anyone out there on Tildes who has experience in this domain - is the service-worker always on, or is it only active once the app has been open and then backgrounded? How do I know if the app is currently open? I would like the app to query for notifications more frequently when it's opened, and only intermittently when it's closed. Any tips?

Next up of blockbusters is Barbie from 2023 directed by Greta Gerwig which made a whooping $1.4 billion.

IMDb
Letterboxd
Wikipedia

Is this a proper blockbuster? Were you caught up in the whole Barbenheimer frenzy?

The rest of the schedule is:

• 29th: Edge of Tomorrow

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

I've been a hiring manager before across a few jobs. But, then, I was receiving maybe 50 resumes to screen a week with my recruiter. Y'all are, what, at a few factors to an order of magnitude more than that?

Are your recruiters now pre-filtering resumes before you see them? What is being used to determine whether a candidate gets an interview now?

What I'm seeing:

• Referrals almost never matter: I've gotten two interviews through my network after dozens of applications—and I'm fairly well networked.
• Experience at other well-known Tech companies doesn't get an interview
• Having the right skill set, based on the job description doesn't get an interview.

From the outside, it seems like a coin flip.

Meanwhile, I have LinkedIn's AI advisor routinely giving me flavors of "yes, you're definitely their kind of candidate" yet no responses after weeks followed by the occasional casual rejection email.

So what's happening behind the scenes? How do resumes get on your radar? How do you work from the deluge to hiring a human?

Sincerely,
A very experienced engineer and manager who is rather fed up with what seems like a collection of pseudo-random number generator contemporary hiring processes.

EDIT: I should have also included recruiters in the title of my ask.

Today I had a small accomplishment that involved solving something I was pondering in the back of my mind all day. In the moment (and even still, a couple hours later), I felt a sense of pride.

But I know that in another week I won't even remember this feeling. I'll have moved on to some other event in life and feel things associated with that.

Which leads me to my question - is there an effective way to save a record of your accomplishments that will keep or re-ignite that emotional/chemical response?

We can even extend this into work life a bit as well. If you use an issue tracker or ticketing system, I'd imagine your completed tickets are lost to the abyss unless they need to be searched for in the future.

Personally, I think a journal is too verbose. But I'm open to ideas.