With regards to what @trogus writes here: https://www.devrant.io/rants/520228
I have now purchased double monitors for $8.99. Until @trogus and @dfox figures out how to monetize this wonderful place, may I suggest that everyone buys something for their avatar? The margin on those should be close to 100%.

On the subject of how much I would pay for using devRant, on one hand I use it more than Spotify which would mean I should happily pay $10/month, on the other hand I shouldn't be using devRant so much since my time is limited and devRant isn't exactly a productivity tool.
I'd personally be OK with every 10th or 20th rant being an ad though for instance. As long as they don't appear in comments.
I hope we all find a way to sustain this great place.

Just now I was reading on https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/... about high availability. Now my Proxmox VE is just a tower (which happens to have ECC memory) that's stored in my storage room (and which is mostly used for experimental and home server purposes). But my mail servers.. those have been made with high availability in mind. Most importantly, I've made their services entirely redundant (but within the same datacenter). And when they have updates, I apply updates to one, reboot, see if it didn't break something and then do the same to the other server after the first one came up again. So no downtime whatsoever.
If memory serves me right, I think that I've been able to maintain these servers for the last year without any downtime at all (I reboot them every month to apply new kernels but they haven't both been simultaneously down at any moment). Does that make them High Availability? My interventions regarding their availability have been rather trivial. Is it really that hard..?

To all the cheap bastards out there, especially those who are here for a long time, become a ++ supporter and help to keep devRant running! (Okay that might was a bit dramatic, but still, keep it running as it is)

It was mentioned by @dfox here: https://devrant.com/rants/1467574/... that the numbers of the suporters program have gone down slightly and that devRant still looses it's creators @dfox and @trogus money.

If you're working in IT, you can't tell me, that you can't spare this little! Don't be cheap.
It's a different story, if you're still in school. I can even understand, that you don't have a dime to spare as a student. But when you're working (fulltime) as dev, tester, pm, recruiter, whatever and receiving a salary, then you can afford it.
So come on! Girls, guys, this is our home. It's awesome! Show your appreciation and hit that suporter button. It's a tiny amount every month, but if we all pull together, we can cover their server costs! Become a ++ suporter.

(And don't say we should create a crowd funding campaign, where you donate once, otherwise we'll be in the same situation in a few months, a bit every month on the other hand helps in the long run!)

This always gets me:
Developers complaining that their 4 year old / cheap ass computer is slow.

Get. A. New. One.

It's not that hard.
Here, let me do one for you:
https://computeruniverse.net/en/...

I just went to a site that delivers across Europe, and selected a cheap laptop with a decent CPU and SSD. Short on RAM, sure, and without a Windows License. But you can buy RAM for an additional 50$, and that brings you to a total of 550€, delivery included. And it will WORK. And it will be fast.

It's too expensive?
No, not exactly. Wherever you are in the world, if you can code decently, good enough to have the right to complain about development tools, you are eligible to at least 10$ per hour income as a freelancer across the globe. I've had such opportunities offered to me by many organizations, especially non-profit ones that need cheap employees. I actually was offered more but let's stick to 10$ per hour.

So that's 1600$ per month. Enough to buy 3 such laptops. Oh, taxes, I forgot. So you get 2 laptops. Wait! You need food and everything else. Well if you're in a country where that offer actually makes sense, then it's likely that you can live off of 400$ per month quite well. Maybe 800$ if you need to pay rent.
So that's roughly 1 month of work for a laptop that will make you not waste time on waiting for stuff.

Sweet! 1 Month! What does it get me?

Well assuming that you have no laptop, it gets you A JOB that pays you 1600$ per month.
But if you DO have a laptop, you can sell it for cheap, and benefit from the following:
1. Boot-up time from 30-60 seconds to 10 seconds.
2. Installing software - from 1 minute to 10 seconds.
3. Opening a browser - from 10 seconds to 1 second.
4. Opening an advanced text editor (Atom, VS.Code) - from 10 seconds to 1 second.
5. Searching for a file on your entire hard drive - from 1 hour to 2 minutes.
....
You get the point. Waiting is reduced by several times.

So how much do you really wait when coding?

Well are you compiling? Are you opening a new project and the IDE needs to re-index the files? Are you opening programs like a terminal emulator, browser and such? Are you using virtual machines for dev environments?
Well all of these processes become several times faster. Depending on how often you do it, you'll be saving yourself from 1 hour per day to upto 4 hours per day (my case, where a HDD would be just out of the question).

How much is that time worth? At least 10$ per day. If you're working for 20 days per month, 240 days per year, that's a total of 2400$. And for the life time of that crappy laptop of 2 years, that's 4800$ saved. And that's with hugely conservative numbers. Nobody pays 10$ per hour any more, except if you've just started in the industry. I know because I've been there.

Please, for all that's sacred to you, justify right here, right now, HOW THE FUCK can you not afford to get that 8GB of RAM, that cheap ass SSD for 100$, or even a brand new laptop (hey! it's even portable and has FHD graphics on it!) for 550$.

That's why every time I hear someone who is a professional developer complain that they don't have money for a decent machine, I have to ask: why the fuck are you wasting yours and everyone else's time?!

(Long post)

ARE YOU SERIOUS??

I never really used Facebook but I did use Instagram until around a month ago when GDPR kicked in and they asked every user about their age. For shits and giggles I entered "1 year old" which was followed by the app crashing every time I open it and on the web site a message like this:

"You are too young to use Instagram. You will have 14 days until your account gets deleted. If you think we made a mistake you can send us your personal id."

As if I sent anything personal to FB on purpose! Then so it be, I said. I downloaded my data (images and account details) and after two weeks I couldn't login anymore and I checked on a friend's phone within Instagram: My account was gone.

NOW LOOK WHAT I GOT TODAY:

A NEWSLETTER from Instagram! "Check out new posts by X, Y and 8 others!"
Now, these aren't new... I would get these emails when I havent logged in for a while. But seriously? My accounts should be GONE!

Sooo I logged in again. And when I tried I got this (freely translated):

"Apparently, you requested to delete this account. For more information, visit the help area: http://help.instagram.com/ (403) (/accounts/login/ajax/)"

So that's it. Yeah sure, "deleted". I didn't request the delete, Instagram did so on it's own. So it doesn't even listen to it's own commands...

Guys, where is this world heading

Today I created my first shell script for automation.

I have a git repository I use for backing up documents at the training centre I'm at for work. Not a specific project, just all of the documents and miscellaneous stuff. The need for this came about because they re-image the computers every month with a new version of windows (Because they're too cheap to register windows). And I can't risk forgetting to copy all the files onto my USB drive the day before they re-image.

So at the end of each day I open a git bash and type:
git add .
git commit -m "Backup - dd/mm/yy"
git push

Not a particularly laborious task but repetitive and time consuming.
So I decided to create a .sh script to automate the process
(The idea originally occurred because of this post: https://devrant.com/rants/329221/...)

So after about half an hour fiddling about with dates and $ signs, I came up with GitBackup.sh:
git add .
today=$(date '+%d-%m-%y')
commitMsg="Backup - "$today
git commit -m "$commitMsg"
git push origin master

Not much but proud to call it my first automation script.