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8 votes
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Checking the End Of Life dates for various tools and technologies
6 votes -
How do you design a Proof of Concept project for a new dev/test tool?
Input wanted for an article. Let's say that your company is considering the purchase of an expensive new application to help in the company's software development. The demo looks great, and the...
Input wanted for an article.
Let's say that your company is considering the purchase of an expensive new application to help in the company's software development. The demo looks great, and the feature list makes it sound perfect for your needs. So your Management arranges for a proof of concept license to find out if the software is worth the hefty investment. The boss comes to you to ask you to be in charge of the PoC project.
I'm aiming to write an article to help developers, devops, and testers determine if a given vendor's application meets the company's needs. The only assumption I'm making is that the software is expensive; if it's cheap, the easy answer is, "Buy a copy for a small team and see what they think." And I'm thinking in terms of development software rather than enterprise tools (e.g. cloud-based backup) though I suspect many of the practices are similar.
Aside: Note that this project is beyond "Decide if we need such a thing." In this scenario, everyone agrees that purchasing a tool is a good idea, and they agree on the baseline requirements. The issue is whether this is the right software for the job.
So, how do you go about it? I'm sure that it's more than "Get a copy and poke at it randomly." How did (or would) you go about designing a PoC project? If you've been involved in such a project in the past (particularly if the purchase wasn't ideal), what advice could someone have given you to help you make a better choice? I want to create a useful guide that applies to any "enterprise-class" purchase.
For example: Do you recommend that the PoC period be based on time (N months) or workload (N transactions)? How do you decide who should be on the PoC team? What's involved in putting together a comprehensive list of requirements (e.g. integrates with OurFavoredDatabase, meets performance goals of X), creating a test suite that exercises what the software dev product does, and evaluating the results? ...and what am I not thinking of, that I should?
7 votes -
Obsidian is now in public beta - A knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files
20 votes -
Jitsi Meet: Secure, fully featured, and completely free video conferencing
26 votes -
Multi-format text editor with chain-of-command processing
A while back I developed a desktop-based text editor (Scrivenvar) that uses the Chain-of-Responsibility design pattern to help me author fairly involved text documents. The editor's high-level...
A while back I developed a desktop-based text editor (Scrivenvar) that uses the Chain-of-Responsibility design pattern to help me author fairly involved text documents. The editor's high-level architecture resembles the following diagram:
https://i.imgur.com/8IMpAkN.png
Am I reinventing the wheel here? Are there any modern, cross-platform, liberal open-source (LGPL, MIT, Apache 2), text editor frameworks (such as xi or Visual Studio Code), that would enable (re)development of such a tool?
Scrivenvar is written in Java, but to my chagrin, Java 9+ no longer bundles JavaFX. The text editor was based on MarkdownWriterFX, itself based on JavaFX. This means there's no easy upgrade path, so I'm looking to rebuild the editor either as a cross-platform desktop application or as a web application.
8 votes -
What tasks on your computer have you automated?
After using Shreddit to delete my Reddit history periodically for some time now, I finally decided to make a cron job to automate it on a weekly basis. I use it to delete every post and comment...
After using Shreddit to delete my Reddit history periodically for some time now, I finally decided to make a cron job to automate it on a weekly basis. I use it to delete every post and comment that isn't whitelisted, which right now is just a tiny subreddit for a musician I like that I solely moderate and a pinned post explaining why I have a bunch of karma but barely any posts.
After setting this up, it got me curious as to what tasks other people automate in their lives in order to streamline their workflows and eliminate minor (or major) routine tasks.
So, what do you automate, and how did you go about doing it?
18 votes -
TabNine: Code autocompletion with deep learning
12 votes -
What are your favorite auxiliary tools/sites for Steam?
@Deimos clued me in to this site which lets you filter your Steam library using tags. I had no idea this was even a thing, and it made me want to know what else I'm missing. What are some great...
@Deimos clued me in to this site which lets you filter your Steam library using tags. I had no idea this was even a thing, and it made me want to know what else I'm missing. What are some great sites/tools out there that improve your Steam experience?
It should go without saying that they need to be safe to use. I know scam Steam sites are a dime a dozen, so make sure you're posting something that's properly vetted.
Here's a running list of submissions:
Site Function Depressurizer categorization tool Enhanced Steam/Augmented Steam browser plugin for better store UX HowLongToBeat game runtimes ProtonDB Linux compatibility database Steam250 highly reviewed games and hidden gems SteamCharts active player data SteamDB stats, info, price histories SteamGifts game giveaways Steam Filters tag filters for library SteamSpy sales data What Should I Play on Steam? random game picker 10 votes -
Apple will give indie repair shops the tools to fix iPhones
7 votes -
What's your "must have" software for a MacBook Pro, especially for programming?
Just got my first MacBook Pro, and I've been setting things up. Wondering what people's "must have" software on MacOS is and what programming tools you might recommend. I've heard that I should...
Just got my first MacBook Pro, and I've been setting things up. Wondering what people's "must have" software on MacOS is and what programming tools you might recommend. I've heard that I should definitely install
homebrew
so that I can have a real package manager like I've got on Linux.19 votes -
Under fire from game devs, G2A proposes new 'Key Blocker' tool
18 votes -
Krita 4.2 released!
13 votes -
A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World
4 votes -
End-user programming
12 votes -
Brain-imaging modern people making Stone Age tools hints at evolution of human intelligence
6 votes -
Timeliner: A personal data aggregation & personal data backup utility for Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc…
9 votes -
Facebook moves to block ad transparency tools- including ours
8 votes -
A collection of nerdy interviews asking people what they use to get the job done
9 votes -
Any literary translators here? What programs do you use?
I've started doing this amateurishly a few months ago, translating a novel slowly, and nowadays I'm thinking of going to a few publishers and asking for actual contracts. Currently, I'm using an...
I've started doing this amateurishly a few months ago, translating a novel slowly, and nowadays I'm thinking of going to a few publishers and asking for actual contracts. Currently, I'm using an Org mode file in Emacs to do the translation, but I'm not sure that this is the most optimal way to do it. I was doing it using paper for a while, but editing and commenting is more flexible in Org mode. Yet it is also rather cumbersome the way I do it:
<<pageNo.paragraphNo.sentenceNo>> Text, text text # some text with a comment # comment about the part between this comment and the above empty one more text, more text. <<...>> Another sentence
I'm thinking of adding some code to make this a bit prettier, though.
But are there anything that's better out there already. My preference hierarchy: Emacs mode, yayyy! > Open source app, that's fine > Proprietary app, shit! but better than nothing.
I'm not sure if this should go under ~comp, ~tech or here (~books).
8 votes -
Lambda World 2018 - What FP can learn from Smalltalk by Aditya Siram
6 votes -
Panopticlick: How unique is your browser?
29 votes -
Leathercraft - Tools of the Trade!
12 votes -
Contrast Ratio: Easily calculate color contrast ratios. Passing WCAG was never this easy!
6 votes -
Human language may have evolved to help our ancestors make tools
3 votes -
A LastPass CLI, for you LastPass users who also heavily use a command line.
9 votes -
Mod tools growing with user 'tools'
So, new here and looking around but haven't seen this addressed yet (though could be wrong! Happy to be linked if I missed something) One common failure I've seen in online communities of various...
So, new here and looking around but haven't seen this addressed yet (though could be wrong! Happy to be linked if I missed something)
One common failure I've seen in online communities of various sorts is that moderation tools don't get grown in parallel with user tools and abilities, rather they lag behind, and are often in the end built by third parties. This is the case with Reddit, but also in a bunch of other areas (e.g. online gaming, admin tools were often built to basically provide functionality that users realised were needed but makers did not).
I get the impression there are plenty of reddit mods here, so can we discuss what are the key features needed to moderate communities that would be better built in than coming from third party tools (RES, toolbox) . A lot of these aren't needed with 100 users but with a million they become pretty crucial.
My initial thoughts:
- Something not dissimilar to the automod
- Group user tagging (shared tagging visible to all mods, tags can be linked to specific discussions/comments)
- Ability to reply as a 'tilde' not as an individual
- Ability to have canned responses/texts (for removals, for replies to user contacts)
- Some sort of ticket-like system for dealing with user contacts to mods (take inspiration from helpdesk ticket systems)
- (added) space per tilde for storage (tags, notes, bans, canned text etc) of reasonable size.
Plenty more to add I am sure but wanted to open the discussion.
10 votes -
Script to jump to unread comments in a post
Okay, so I got tired of scrolling through some of the long comment chains looking for that flash of orange that indicates a new post so I slapped together this solution. It's not pretty nor...
Okay, so I got tired of scrolling through some of the long comment chains looking for that flash of orange that indicates a new post so I slapped together this solution. It's not pretty nor frictionless to use, but it's less annoying for me than scrolling for days just to find the new comments.
Basic usage is to open the javascript console or scratch pad (e.g., Shift+F4 in Firefox) in your browser, paste in the following line from the code block and run it. It scrolls to the first unread comment and marks it as read; on subsequent runs it will do the same thing for the next unread comment and so on. You will need to enable new comment tracking in your Tildes preferences as well if you haven't done so yet.
{var comment = document.getElementsByClassName("is-comment-new")[0]; if (comment != null) {comment.scrollIntoView(); comment.className = "comment"}}
I had hoped that I could make it into a bookmarklet but unfortunately CSP nixes that option. If anyone else knows of a better way to do this let me know.
10 votes -
beets: the music geek's media organizer
8 votes