Hey guys,

I have been flip-flopping back and forth on this idea for a while, and would love some feedback on whether peeps would find this valuable.

Although I still call my self a "software developer" (and try to code daily), for the last 8 years I have ran a small 5-person agency that I started from the ground up, so my role was really CEO/CTO/CFO/Everything-O. My company focused on delivering high-quality custom software. Not brochure websites, and not Wordpress - our niche was internal business software (or as I like to call it "boring software for boring businesses") - and for a client service company we got very high margins of return.

Last year my business was acquired by a larger company which was an amazing result after the time and effort I had poured into it. I have realised I now want to help other developers who want to start their own software agency, or maybe they already have and are looking for hints or advice on certain topics.

So I have started Dev to Agency - a part blog part guidebook for how a full-stack developer can start and successfully run a software development agency, the things to pay attention too (and the things to ignore), and the key-values that I feel helped my business go from nothing, to 7 figures per year, and then to being acquired (if that is a path people would want to take).

I have just published my first couple of posts, About Dev To Agency that is a rundown of what I hope to achieve with this, then a post about My small custom software development agency - which gives an overview of what I built and where I think my articles will add value, and lastly You are the gold standard which covers how I feel an owner/maker should set the businesses standards and practises based of their personal values.

I have never written a blog before (or really done any writing before), so it would be fantastic to get some feedback from the community, and if there are any developers that this could interest then please subscribe on the website.

Cheers,

Chris.

I usually setup debian or ubuntu servers. One of the pain areas I have avoided is email and usually just off-load the email to a 3rd party service. I currently need to setup a server with an email server and need a really simple straightforward tutorial. I thought I would see if the community has any suggestions.

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?

It's been a hell of a year but we've just about made it, even managing to keep some sports going through it all. How about we look back at the best, the worst, the biggest, the weirdest stories of 2020? Even with keeping my eye on the weekly round-up threads, I know I've missed more than a few.

There are lots of retrospectives about famous people that died and depressing virus talk on the news. But life is full of apparent contradictions and it is not uncommon to find joy even in the most desperate situations. What are some things that made you happy in 2020? Anything, personal or not.

General Programming Q&A thread! Ask any questions about programming, answer the questions of other users, or post suggestions for future threads.

Don't forget to format your code using the triple backticks or tildes:

Here is my schema:

```sql
CREATE TABLE article_to_warehouse (
  article_id   INTEGER
, warehouse_id INTEGER
)
;
```

How do I add a `UNIQUE` constraint?

I built a link sharing website where you connect to users that share your interests. When you upvote a link - you connect to other users who upvoted that link and LinkLonk shows you what else these users upvoted.

The more in common you have with another user the more prominently their other recommendations appear on your list.

The intuition is that the more useful your past recommendations have been for me, the more I can trust your future recommendations.

This is how trust works in meatspace - we keep track of how positive our experiences have been with other people and use that track record to decide who we can trust in the future.

Except that mechanism does not work online. It just does not scale to the numbers of users we interact with. We can remember around 150 other people (the Dunbar number). Beyond that our builtin trust mechanism breaks down. We revert to more coarse and primitive trust mechanisms such as tribalism and mistrust in everyone.

While we cannot personally keep track of every user on a platform - that is what computers are good at.

That is the idea behind LinkLonk. You don't need to remember the names of users who you can trust (in fact there are no usernames on LinkLonk). You simply upvote content that was useful to you and LinkLonk constantly keeps track of how useful every other user has been and ranks new content accordingly.

Another important part of trust is that if you misplace your trust in someone and they let you down then you need a mechanism to stop trusting them.

This is what the downvote button is used for: when you downvote an item, LinkLonk reduces your “trust” in other users that upvoted it. As a result, you will see less content from those users.

The above describes the basic idea. There are a couple more concepts:

• You start off weakly connected to all users, which means that at first you see content sorted by popularity. Rate something and refresh the page - the ranking will change.
• You are not limited to a single persona/interest. If you have multiple interests then you can create a separate collection for each of your interests. When you upvote a link you can choose what collection it belongs to. For example, if you are interested in woodworking and music then you can create two collections and put woodworking links into one and music links into the other. Then other people who liked your woodworking recommendations will only see your other recommendations from the same collection and will not get your music. This is mostly a way for you to help other users find relevant content. It’s optional. You can put everything into the “default” collection if you don’t feel like organizing.
• LinkLonk has another source of recommendations - RSS feeds. When you upvote a blog post LinkLonk connects to the RSS feed of that blog - as if it was another user. LinkLonk pulls updates from the feed and shows you the new entries using the same ranking algorithm: the more you upvote items from the feed the higher the other items from the feed are ranked. You can submit any RSS url and LinkLonk will connect (subscribe) you to it. My hope is that in the early days when we don't have many users you would find LinkLonk useful as a sort of an RSS reader.
• Moderation. When you downvote an item then you get connected to other users who also downvoted that same item. In other words, you will trust their other downvotes. If they downvote something then that item will rank lower for you.

Give it a try at: https://linklonk.com/register with 'tildes' as the invitation code. The invitation code can be used multiple times and I will keep it active for a few days. After that please DM me to get a fresh code.

I’m posting this on Tildes in part because I like the group of people that Tildes has attracted. And I also feel the topics of trust systems, content curation and moderation are relevant to Tildes and to its users (see: https://docs.tildes.net/future-plans#trustreputation-system-for-moderation).

What do you think?

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

I see some people using NixOs on their servers. I would like to try it out to self host some services and learn about NixOs.

I use hetzner and they have an NixOs iso available so I can just use that to install NixOs. But how do people manage remote instances of NixOs? They would just use ansible or something like it, to run nix on the host, or is there a better way?

Thanks

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?