I know quite a controversial and opinionated question, one that might easily get blasted with downvotes on a site like StackOverflow or even Reddit! Nevertheless, one which I believe is still relevant to ask and useful one even in 2023.

The problem with backend web technologies is that we are overwhelmed with choices. Whilst getting spoilt with choices seems like a useful thing sometimes, it might easily be an impediment in decision making too. Based on my experience, there are a bunch of useful stacks and I will work on any of them if you pay me to work as a freelance coder. Each has its own pros and cons but I'm yet to find the ideal one which according to me is something that should be easy to code and deploy while also better performing at the same time.

• ASP.NET: C# is the language I started coding web apps with in my last company and ASP.NET web forms was quite the rage back then. PHP was also gaining traction in the open source world and the webdev was mostly divided between the Enterprisey .NET aristocrats of Microsoft world and the poor PHP peasants of the FOSS world! One good thing about ASP.NET was performance. Since MS controlled the whole stack, they also put great efforts at making it work faster. The bad thing, of course, was dependence on a closed tech stack and a closed black box that generated JS functionality on its own.
• PHP: When I resigned from that company and started freelancing, I came to know about open source, linux, XAMPP, etc. That was when I realized that my own attitudes and thinking was more attuned to the FOSS peasant mindset than the wealthy aristocrat's! I didn't earn quite as much in freelancing with WP, Drupal, SuiteCRM, CodeIgniter, etc. but I found great happiness and contentment in being part of the open source process. Till date, PHP remains my favorite language for backend development and most of my web projects involve CodeIgniter or even pure PHP.
• Python: Flask is what got me interested in Python web development. The sheer minimalism and flexibility of that framework is what I found quite remarkable and quite a rarity in the frameworks world. And jinja2 template system was just fantastic. The other framework called django is more popular I think and I've worked on that too but Flask still remains my favorite. Flask is good in performance dept. too but I think it gets tricky once you start scaling with too many users.
• Java: I've never really bothered with Java web development except a few tutorial experiments on the Apache TomEE server. The multi-layered approach that Java takes not only has very steep learning curve but unless you're a very gifted programmer, it's practically impossible to beat the performance of interpreted PHP/Flask!
• NodeJS: Again, not much work here except brief hobby projects like http-live-simulator. The npm packaging system really turned me off initially with so many packages and issues with that system in the earlier days. Nowadays, I've heard that it's much usable but I've never gotten into it.

And now, we also have the evolving languages like Golang, Rust, etc. taking their baby steps towards web development too! Are any of them worth giving a try? If someone were to ask you for a backend tech stack recommendation while giving equal weightage to performance, developer productivity and ease of deployment, which one will you suggest?

I've got a crappy Chromebook running GalliumOS (Xubuntu) and Chromium is slow as molasses. I tried a few other browsers like Otter and Falkon. They're alright for most sites -- not Tildes, but this seems consistent with QT5 browsers.

Anyway, outside of text browsers, anybody have any light weight browser suggestions?

Last Thursday, at my workplace, we rolled out a software upgrade across the company. The server side was upgraded overnight to ensure there was minimal downtime, and we had instructions for users posted on our Intranet (pinned to the top for the next 4 days), on exactly what they needed to do to run the upgrade on their PCs and ensure everything was working correctly.

The instructions were written with the help of my 4-year-old to ensure it was clear enough for anyone to read and follow along.

I still received at least 40 messages and emails from people complaining the upgrade didn't work or that certain Outlook plugins are now missing (which was covered in the instructions).

My question is, has anyone found a good way to ensure people follow instructions, or the best way to ensure that your instructions are easy to understand and follow along with?

It is very frustrating to take the time to ensure things go smoothly and write what even my 4-year-old thought was clear instruction, and still have a third of the company not be able to figure it out?

This is not meant to be mean hearted in any way, I genuinely would like some advice or tips on how I can improve on this the next time around.

Thanks.

In terms of

1. Utility: It is useful!
2. Reliability: It will always work when you need it to!
3. Uniqueness: It gives you the option of doing things that would never have been necessary before it came along.
4. Aesthetic: It satisfies your sense of beauty: It gives you the same kind of feeling a painting or a poem would.
5. Transcendence: It transcends the zeitgeist and is the simplest it can and thus ought to be.

Mine are:

1. Vim
2. mutt
3. The Lucas Arts point and click adventure games
4. A Lisp interpreter
5. grep

Some of you have read the Typesetting Markdown blog series (https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/). The plan was to finish the last two parts with Annotated Text (basically markup for Markdown) and Figure Drawing (MetaPost); however, people have asked for a post on Markdown to EPUB, others have asked for high-quality PDF theme templates using ConTeXt, and some have requested rendering Markdown into HTML.

Within the realm of Markdown, digital documentation, typesetting with ConTeXt, R, externalized interpolated strings, and bash scripting, what would interest you for the next post in the series?

(Please flip through the blog series to see the topics that have been covered.)

It'd my understanding that C has stuck around in the UNIX world for so long, nearly half a century, mostly due to the inertia of legacy code.

If you could snap your fingers and magically port/fork the entire stack of open source codebases to the language of your choice, which would you pick and why?

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.

tldr; chunkwm has been completely rewritten and is now yabai

From the chunkwm site:

chunkwm is no longer in development because of a C99 re-write, yabai.

yabai was originally supposed to be the first RC version of chunkwm. However due to major architectural changes, supported systems, and changes to functionality, it is being released separately. There are multiple reasons behind these changes, based on the experience I've gained through experimenting with, designing, and using both kwm and chunkwm. Some of these changes are performance related while other changes have been made to keep the user experience simple and more complete, attempts to achieve a seamless integration with the operating system (when possible), proper error reporting, and yet still keep the property of being customizable.

For those who don't know, chunkwm was / is a tiling windows manager that is sort of like bspwm / i3 etc. I've been using chunkwm for a few months now and love it. If you're also an i3 user, the lack of a proper super key does make your key combos different, but overall its an excellent window manager. Both chunkwm and yabai use koekeishiya's Simple Hotkey Daemon (skhd).

Anyway, I gave the new version the day and its pretty good, but still has some quirks. It seems like development is moving along quickly, so keep an eye on it.

Wow it was hard to describe this in the title! I should have said "data-centric APP" not UI. Sorry! LOL
I have had an idea for 25 years that I keep NOT pursuing because I was convinced that the next big version of Linux/Windows/etc would include a more civilized way to manage data. It just seems obvious in my strange mind, I guess that means intuitive. I've discussed the idea and worked on refining the concepts with about 20 people and they all agreed.

My idea is based on a huge paradigm shift about managing all forms of data by the user. It's about how we manage data, not just file-system stuff or yet-another Windows/File Explorer or any of the numerous current Linux varieties. I'm honestly shocked that in 2019, the most original idea that's come about is to remove all the menus and toolbars (freeman) or add a bunch of tabs and hundreds of buttons (pretty much everything on Windows).

I am a software engineer and designer with 35 years experience - but with business class apps, not OS stuff. I am semi-retired and have a great deal of time to work on whatever interests me. And please note: Despite my advanced years ;-) LOL I am very current on the technologies I work with daily, which is mainly .net/c#. However, I just finished a year-long project that had a Java client running on a Raspberry Pi (which I love) paired with a WCF service running in IIS, along with an asp.net web client. Now I'm not an expert in any of that, but I'm not too shabby I don't think as I've made a good living and do mostly volunteer work right now.

I currently manage a massive amount of data, from files/dirs on Windows and Linux file-systems, to MSSQL and mySQL on both Windows and Linux, and of course some cloud data. And it takes several tools as you know, and it's incredibly inefficient and painful. And of course on Windows, Windows/File Explorer is - eh, I can't find a word strong enough. On Linux not much better. And I've spent the past two years searching, researching, testing, and praying.

My idea is to build an app that allows users - not just developers like me - but mostly aimed at business users - to manage data from various sources/technologies in a single unified and intuitive manner. The physical aspect is divorced from the UI which is divorced from the management engine. And it's grouped the way the user THINKS and WORKS with it. For example, let's say for PROJECT-A (and Client-1) I have various source code locations on 2 local hard drives, but also documents (technical specs, or maybe letters to the client, spreadsheets or timelines), and of course likely a database or two, some web-site links. How many places and how many apps would I have to use today to keep them all close by so I could get to them? Well, there'd be a couple of drive letters probably, maybe a few sub-folder levels deep, maybe documents on a network share, some collaborative docs in the cloud, and some web-site links in whatever-browser-you-use. You get the idea.

No file manager on any OS can give you much more than "Places" or file-system - drive letters on Windows or some mount points on Linux. Things like MyDocuments, MyMusic, MyInsanity - that stuff makes no sense because it's not how people work. What I want is a "work-space" where I can have any number of what I call "Data Sources" - and it doesn't matter what physical technology is underneath it - local hard drive, local sub-folder, mapped drive, unc mount, cloud, ftp - don't care - don't need to. I create a work-space, add data sources, order them however I want, name them whatever I want, and each "Data Source" has a manager or provider. A filesystem provider would make your data source look like Windows Explorer. But a database provider could look like MS SQL Server Manager or other db admin tool. And you put that workspace in a tab if you want, and have as many others in other tabs - or you put them on a menu, or on a popup that a middle-click brings up - doesn't matter. And everything I've just written, plus it's settings, is represented by Viewer objects. A hierarchical - tree-view or the likes - a flat view - a list-view - a preview pane, or editor pane - navigation tool (path/breadcrumbs) - a command line shell pane - drag/dock wherever in the tab you want. A main menu/toolbar + status-bar would be global and shared. And all THAT is bundled into a PARENT object - which contains the work-spaces, which contains the tabs, which contains the data sources + provider views/panes. And you can have as many of THOSE - parent objects - as you need, easily accessible in the custom titlebar at the top, or bottom, etc..

The point is - when I am working on PROJECT-A I manage it in a tab that contains ONLY the drive letters, or mount points, that are relevant (and named what I choose, meaning no drive letters forced on me even if that is the underlying reality nor any full paths or full URLs - just logical names I assign). This will NOT be some massive file manager with every folder on the system or 18 drive letters I'll never use. It will have all the web-site bookmarks I need, as well as databases I'm working with. This won't be an ALL-IN-ONE type of thing - you will STILL use your external apps, web browser, IDE or editor, mail app - but it will be a SINGLE place where ALL those data items get represented and where you can manage them in exactly the same way. I can copy/paste an email message to a file on my workstation, or copy a file from a network share to some machine remotely using ftp or http.

I hope this makes some kinda sense and doesn't just sound like the ramblings of yet-another aging geek who thinks he's got a great new idea. My usage scenarios are literally based on things I do every day, and are the result of observing myself as I work to see what my mind is doing. I do realize that we all work in our own way, and I've taken that into account. But there are basic things we all do concerning data management. And as I have hired, trained, and worked with a huge number of fellow programmers over my 35 years - without exception this was the most common soft point for them all. Keeping track of data. The same applies to all my clients. I've written software for accountants and attorneys, and a wide variety of business types - and without exception - every one of them had trouble with managing their data. One look at their Desktop or MyDocuments - or just watching them trying to find a letter in MS-Word - tells the whole story.

Ok there's my pitch - I'm looking for anyone who has interest, no matter what your skill level or how much time you can or cannot devote. We need people who can contribute only opinion and advice, as well as hardcore keyboard jocks like me who love to code for 36 hours at a clip ;-) LOL

I've tried a lot of browsers. Starting from Chrome, to Chromium, to Firefox, to Links, to w3m, to, eventually, Qutebrowser, which I use for most of my browsing now.

At least for me, I had four things in mind while choosing a browser:

• I want it to be light
• I want it to be minimal
• I want it to be keyboard-oriented
• I want it to be able to use modern websites

I won't be going through all the browsers I've tried, but those I mentioned are the big ones, so I'll just do a quick check-list of these things.

Chrome/Chromium:

• Weighs like a sumo wrestler 1/5
• Cluttered 1/5
• Just some shortcuts and extentions 3/5
• The model, the idol to strife for 5/5

Firefox:

• Apparently lighter than Chromium, though not by much 1/5
• Cluttered 1/5
• Some shortcuts, famous extensions 3/5
• On point 5/5

Links:

• Very light and fast 5/5
• Minimal, though can go smaller 4/5
• Yes 5/5
• Doesn't support javascript 1/5

w3m:

• As light as it gets 6/5
• Pretty damn minimal 5/5
• Even works for blind 5/5
• Does javascript, but hard to use with cluttered wesites like Reddit or any news site 3/5

Qutebrowser:

• It is quite small and feels fast 4/5
• Can be easily modified to not have anything on screen, and command line-like controls 5/5
• Great, but hint system fails with javascript 4/5
• Doesn't work with Reddit, for some reason 4/5

With the things that I look for, Qutebrowser is the answer, with w3m being the close second. Of course, there are different things to look for in a piece of software, and you may want the extra stability and extensions Firefox provides, or privacy of Tor browser, or the suckless nature of surf, so I'd like to hear what is your browser of choice!

Or phone, or after an OS reinstall, etc. Just got to thinking about it because I did a fresh install of Arch on my chromebook the other day, and I'd be curious what other people's priority software installs are. For me, after the basics like drivers, it's xfce, Firefox, Transmission, Libreoffice, and VLC on linux. Pretty much the same on Windows, plus a few utilities like 7zip, PuTTY, and notepad++. For Android installs I grab nova launcher, Hangouts Dialer, F-Droid, NewPipe and MoonReader before anything else.

EDIT: Forgot firefox on android, as well as ublock origin on all platforms.

Also not completely sure if this belongs more in ~tech or ~comp.

Maven tries to be the kitchen sink in a lot of ways - rigid requirements to use plugins instead of scripts, trying to wrap your scm, and even act as a docker wrapper... this is insanely frustrating and an anti-patter for the rest of the software space. I would rather find a new job than work at a company that keeps pumping out maven and jhipster apps. It doesn't play nice with CI, it uses an insanely ugly configuration (xml) and most java developers don't even really know what they are doing when they are using it.

Making a micro-service api? You don't need jhipster or maven or even java - there are so many other better alternatives. Need something simple? flask. Need something performant? go. And there are so many others in between that won't give you a NullPointerException, require you to download the entire internet just to serve some serialized json, or make your devops team hate you.

Interested in hearing rebuttals and other peoples alts and overall preferences.