So as quite some people know on here, I am strongly against closed source software and have a very strong distrust in it as well.
So next to some principles (and believes etc etc etc) there is one specifc 'event' which triggered the distrust in CSS (No not Cascading Style sheet, I mean Closed Source Software :P). So hereby the story about what happened.

I think it was about 5 years ago when a guy joined my programming class (I wasn't in uni although I studied but for the sake of clarity, lets just call it uni for now (also, that makes me feel smarter so why the fuck not!)) in uni. He knew a shitload about programming for his age but he was convinced that he was always right. (that aside)
Anyways, at some point we had to work in groups on this project (groups for specific tasks) and he chose (he loved it, we hated it, he had the final say) Trello for 'project management'. He gave everyone (I was running Windows for a little bit at that moment because the project was in C# and the Snowden leaks had not arrived yet so I was not extremely uncomfortable with using Windows, just a lot) this addon program thingy he created for Trello which would make usage easier. I asked if it was open source, he replied with 'No, because this is my project.' and although I did understand that entirely, I didn't feel comfy using it because of it's closed source nature. Everyone declared me paranoid and he was annoyed as hell but I just kept refusing to use it and just used the web interface.

*skips to 2 years later*

I met that guy again at the train station at a random day! Had the usual 'how are you and what's up after a few years' talk with him and then he told me something that changed my view on closed source software for most probably the rest of my life.

"Hey by the way, do you remember that project of a few years back where you didn't want to use my software because of your 'closed-sourceness paranoia'? I just wanted to say that I actually had some kind of backdooring feature build in which (I am not going to say what) allowed me to (although I didn't use it) look at/do certain things with the 'infected' computers. I really wanted to say that I find it funny how you, the only one who didn't give in to my/the peer pressure, were the only one who wasn't affected by my 'backdoor' at that moment! Also your standards towards the use of closed source software probably played a big part probably. I find that pretty cool actually!"

Although I cannot confirm what he said, he was exactly the type of guy who would do this IMO (and not only IMO I think).

So yeah, that's one of the reasons AND the story behind a big part of why I don't trust closed source software :).

Since we are using the same password on all our servers (both QA and Production environment) my team somehow decided that it would be easier to copy the private SSH key for to ALL servers and add the public key to the authorized.keys file.

This way we SSH without password and easily add it to new servers, it also means that anyone who gets into one server can get to all of them.

I wasn't a fan of the same password on all servers, but this private key copying is just going against basic security principles.

Do they want rogue connections? Because that's how you get them.

So, I've had a personal project going for a couple of years now. It's one of those "I think this could be the billion-dollar idea" things. But I suffer from the typical "it's not PERFECT, so let's start again!" mentality, and the "hmm, I'm not sure I like that technology choice, so let's start again!" mentality.

Or, at least, I DID until 3-4 months ago.

I made the decision that I was going to charge ahead with it even if I started having second thoughts along the way. But, at the same time, I made the decision that I was going to rely on as little external technology as possible. Simplicity was going to be the key guiding light and if I couldn't truly justify bringing a given technology into the mix, it'd stay out.

That means that when I built the front end, I would go with plain HTML/CSS/JS... you know, just like I did 20+ years ago... and when I built the back end, I'd minimize the libraries I used as much as possible (though I allowed myself a bit more flexibility on the back end because that seems to be where there's less issues generally). Similarly, any choice I made I wanted to have little to no additional tooling required.

So, given this is a webapp with a Node back-end, I had some decisions to make.

On the back end, I decided to go with Express. Previously, I had written all the server code myself from "first principles", so I effectively built my own version of Express in other words. And you know what? It worked fine! It wasn't particularly hard, the code wasn't especially bad, and it worked. So, I considered re-using that code from the previous iteration, but I ultimately decided that Express brings enough value - more specifically all the middleware available for it - to justify going with it. I also stuck with NeDB for my data storage needs since that was aces all along (though I did switch to nedb-promises instead of writing my own async/await wrapper around it as I had previously done).

What I DIDN'T do though is go with TypeScript. In previous versions, I had. And, hey, it worked fine. TS of course brings some value, but having to have a compile step in it goes against my "as little additional tooling as possible" mantra, and the value it brings I find to be dubious when there's just one developer. As it stands, my "tooling" amounts to a few very simple JS scripts run with NPM. It's very simple, and that was my big goal: simplicity.

On the front end, I of course had to choose a framework first. React is fine, Angular is horrid, Vue, Svelte, others are okay. But I didn't want to bother with any of that because I dislike the level of abstraction they bring. But I also didn't want to be building my own widget library. I've done that before and it takes a lot of time and effort to do it well. So, after looking at many different options, I settled on Webix. I'm a fan of that library because it has a JS-centric approach. There's no JSX-like intermediate format, no build step involved, it's just straight, simple JS, and it's powerful and looks pretty good. Perfect for my needs. For one specific capability I did allow myself to bring in AnimeJS and ThreeJS. That's it though, no other dependencies (well, at first, I was using Axios because it was comfortable, but I've since migrated to plain old fetch). And no Webpack, no bundling at all, in fact. I dynamically load resources, which effectively is code-splitting, and I have some NPM scripts to do minification for a production build, but otherwise the code that runs in the browser is what I actually wrote, unlike using a framework.

So, what's the point of this whole rant?

The point is that I've made more progress in these last few months than I did the previous several years, and the experience has been SO much better!

All the tools and dependencies we tend to use these days, by and large, I think get in the way. Oh, to be sure, they have their own benefits, I'm not denying that... but I'm not at all convinced those benefits outweighs the time lost configuring this tool or that, fixing breakages caused by dependency updates, dealing with obtuse errors spit out by code I didn't write, going from the code in the browser to the actual source code to get anywhere when debugging, parsing crappy documentation, and just generally having the project be so much more complex and difficult to reason about. It's cognitive overload.

I've been doing this professionaly for a LONG time, I've seen so many fads come and go. The one thing I think we've lost along the way is the idea that simplicity leads to the best outcomes, and simplicity doesn't automatically mean you write less code, doesn't mean you cede responsibility for various things to third parties. Those things aren't automatically bad, but they CAN be, and I think more than we realize. We get wrapped up in "what everyone else is doing", we don't stop to question the "best practices", we just blindly follow.

I'm done with that, and my project is better for it!

Never used a mac computer before but I need a new laptop and I'm considering the option of getting a macbook. I use ubuntu so I would have a dualboot but I would really want to get into iOS development. Does anyone have experience with running Ubuntu on a macbook? Does it work well out of the box? Is there anything I'd need to think about?