The last project I fell in love with was Elasticsearch. About ten years ago. I was building a search and everything was wrong with solr. I switched to elasticsearch and it was smooth. They had built so much of what I needed. And at the time they were apache licensed which was amazing for us. The world’s kind of moved a long way since then. I’d love to fall in love like that again. I just don’t haveany opportunities.
Audiobookshelf - Self-hosted Audible. I cannot believe how smooth this is. I set up the docker container, tweaked the ID3 tags on my audiobooks (to group series), and that was it. The Android app is listed as alpha, but it has been nearly flawless for me. I am astonished.
Tailscale - A slick low-config VPN solution. Probably everybody knew about this except for me, but I recently tried it and it’s great. I had to tweak several things to fit my exact setup, but once I figured it out, it has been exactly what I hoped for. No more messing with dynamic DNS or opening ports. I just start the client and I’m home. I’m hoping I’ll have some extra time soon, and if so I’ll try to go full FOSS and attempt to use Headscale on a VPS.
Cursorless. It’s a spoken-language programming interface that allows the programmer (of basically any language) to use specific words to target existing text, move the underlying cursor/selection relative to that target, and then run a specific modification. Think of VIM but for voice. It runs in VSCode atm as a couple extensions along with an install of the audio tool Talon. www.cursorless.org
I discovered ruff earlier this year as the project was really taking off. It’s a python linter, and very recently now a formatter too. Its main selling points are that it is insanely fast and implements features previously provided by dozens of different tools. It was a pretty easy sell at work due to its speed, and the guy who initially wrote it now has a startup and they seem intent on expanding to cover more tool categories. It’s been a huge improvement for my work as a python dev.
I think one of the main issues is that ruff doesn’t really handle types yet. They’re getting there and once they have reasonably good type inference I suspect the list will be quickly checked off.
For me it’s primarily that all configuration is done in a single location. So if I know that I changed a config value somewhere and want to change it again, don’t have to search multiple possible config paths in /etc or .connfig. I know that if I changed something it will be in this single git repo.
Basically you have a config file for your whole OS and installed software, which makes backing up config files easier and also you can use it on other nixos computers, and I’ve heard the package manager is very good too. (I haven’t used nixos so I don’t’ really know how good the experience is)
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