I’ve been mulling over this for the past few weeks.

Even though I haven’t drastically changed lives over the course of my lifetime, I still feel like I’ve had eras:

• As a young adult in the UK and around the world, figuring things out
• As a student in Canada
• As an employee in another province
• And now as an independent consultant in Switzerland and France

Although I still live a comfortable western lifestyle, I do feel these different eras are akin to different lives. 18 year old me wouldn’t guess what 30 or 40 year old me became. Not only professionally but also emotionally and day to day.

To delineate my eras, I consider career/professional matters but also outlook on life, lessons learnt, relationships, country/city of résidence (or lack thereof).

Do you have a similar feeling? Why or why not? And what do you consider you life or lives to have been so far?

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

I first started getting into Podcasts in 2017 after hearing about them for years. I finally had a regular, medium length commute to an internship and was tired of the radio and listening to music in the morning. I did a quick search for "Best Android Podcast app" and saw that Pocket Casts was highly reviewed. Since I had enough credit in my account to purchase it, I went ahead and installed it and never ended up looking for another app. Since then, I've become hooked as my form of audio entertainment/information gathering over the years, and Pocket Casts has become an app that I use every day.

I was thinking this morning while opening my app, what would cause me to switch. I briefly considered switching when Pocket Casts moved to a subscription model, but the features that were included in that subscription are really only "nice to haves" for me and how I use the app. This got me thinking about how other people engage with podcasts and choose the app that they use.

• How did you choose your podcast app?
• Do you ever try out other podcast apps?
• Are there any features that would/did make you want to switch to a different app?
• Do you use a cross-platform podcast app or different apps on different platforms?
• What are your favorite/most used features of your current podcast app?
• What podcast(s) are you currently listening to that you'd like to recommend to others?

Hi!

I've decided to move some of my selfhosted things from on-prem (at home ;)) to the cloud, and at the same time I'd like to try and run this in EU, or at least europe. I'd like to get started fairly quickly as this was prompted by one of my home servers halfway dying on me.

The features I'm most interested in are approximately:

• Virtual machines.
• Storage. Cheap long term for backups (similar to S3 Glacier).
• Managed DB, most likely postgresql.
• Serverless jobs (similar to AWS lambda).
• IaaS (I've got a bit of experience with terraform, but it doesn't have to be that).
• Builtin monitoring.
• Git hosting, it's likely that I'll just go with github/gitlab here, but if there's a nice alternative I'm up for it.
• Automated sending of email. I'm using AWS SES atm, and I'm very happy with it.

Some other things:

• I intend to run a combination of services written by others, e.g. nextcloud and software I've written myself.
• I'll most likely be running linux only, but I prefer to select my own flavour where it makes sense.
• I much prefer managing permissions and users in gcp than in aws as I find aws way too complicated for my needs while gcp mostly just makes sense.
• I'd prefer a platform that's being developed and improving over time with big potential for the future.
• This is a hobby project, and some of these requirements may seem a bit contradictory or non-optimal, but that's ok.
• I have some experience running kubernetes (self-hosted), and I'm not a huge fan of the complexity and yaml files, at the same time OpenStack is getting kinda old, and I don't know if I think it's a platform for the future. But from what I see most of the options seems to be built on top of one of those.
• Cheaper is of course better, I don't have a company-sized budget, this is all coming out of my "hobby pocket".
• I live in Sweden, so datacenters geographically close is a plus.

Right now I'm looking at European alternatives to Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Scaleway is looking the most promising, but I'm really skimming the top when it comes to info atm.

Hope that makes sense =) I'm interested in all kinds of feedback.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?