#GoodDevDigest

💸 Start with Render, not AWS

I started my pet project #1to100 with AWS and I paid 50€ monthly for the workload setup. In February I did not work on it and I still paid 50€. In March I wanted to continue and the first thing I did — I moved out from AWS.

Render has much better DX. I was able to migrate during 1 day. Now I have a Web Service node there and a database. Both running on the free tier. Which is enough for development, even if I will upgrade my setup — I will pay less than I paid to AWS. I even got deploy from master for free, which I did not had time to configure with AWS. The only thing which is missing there is an object storage, so I have to continue to use S3. But this is fine and render has this in their pipeline.

I enjoy render.com, first of all because of the convenience of the setup. Next time would start the new project I will do it there.

🦙 Try llama 3 on your local machine

Few days ago Facebook released their AI model Meta Llama 3. And what is cool — we can run it on our machines. I did not manage to run it properly using LM Studio. But I was advised to use another stuff — Ollama. This tool has swiftly. You can also easily run a UI for it, using Open WebUI.

The benefit of the model (besides usual stuff, that it is supposed to be smart) is that the generation speed is really high, it answers literally immediately. I use regular Apple M1 Max. Cool stuff to have an AI running locally!

🗺 Explore your JSON

It happens often, that we have a giant JSON and we want to find something there. JSON CRACK is here to help. It will render your JSON as a nice diagram which is easy to navigate. Just try it.

🦈 A peculiar fact about sharks

I'm currently reading "Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams". The book is great and full of facts, though the font is small and there are not that many pictures. So I read slowly. But the author shared an interesting fact — before scientists thought that sharks do not sleep, because their eyes were always open! Sooner than later they found out, that sharks just don't have eye lids and they DO sleep.

Now you have a fact to impress your friends!

⬛️ That was it for today.

#GoodDevDigest

🖼 I started to use Figma

Recently one random TG channel posted a random ad which was advertising the intensive course (marathon) about Figma for UI/UX designers. Obviously it's just a selling funnel for one of the modern IT schools. I'm not going to advertise it. But I thought it's an opportunity for me to learn the new instrument, so I participated.

Throughout the "marathon" I was just repeating what tutor did and now I can do Figma. Enough to cover my own needs.

How Figma can help a good dev:
* I will use it to prototype my #1to100 app. I was struggling to create a design, because I was doing it right away in the app. Now I can quickly draft it there, see and feel how all the screens may look like.
* Figma has their own Jam board or just board like Miro and Mural. We can use it to collaborate (boring, and Miro does better) and to draw nice diagrams. For example, with Cloud Icons plugin we have all the ... cloud icons quickly available!

You can also do this marathon at your own pace (1, 2, 3), also I was recommended this channel to learn even more Figma. ⚠️ This message is not an ad, I don't know anything about the school itself.

Does anyone of you use it for some purpose?

🐘PostgreSQL unknown features

Nice article about the less known features of PostgreSQL. We do know, that PostgreSQL is a great thing. Especially I like it's JSON capabilities, which allow us to store and documents and do complex queries about the content. But there is more, this article covers stuff from the unknown unknown part of our knowledge base. We just did not know that it's there so we would not search for it.

🌍 localtunnel — free ngrok alternative

ngrok is a great tool to tunnel internet request to your local server. But it quickly evolved to the paid one. You need to register, they added bazillion features that you don't need, etc. If you are looking for the free alternative — consider trying localtunnel. For example, it shall allow you to route webhooks to your local server.

⬛️ That was it for today.

#GoodDevDigest

📚 I listened to the book "Same as Ever"

The author promised to talk about the concepts or traits which remain the same despite the human progress and change. Interesting!

The book is quite short, only 6h and easy to comprehend. I think I was expecting more from it, but for the 6h the content is good. Overall the 2/3 of the book revolves over the simple idea that there is one thing which does not change — presense of uncertainty. Thank you, author, that helps! It does not make the author less right, he is right. We shall accept uncertainty and how things which are out of control influence our life.

But there was interesting insite from the book. It's about the people who we know think different. For example, Elon Musk, Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel. We know they think different and this allows them to reach certain goals and we may like it and respect them for this. BUT, we also may think that if they are great in certain traits of the complex matter, than they are also great in the more basic stuff (family, friendship, food habit, sport, etc). But they are not! People who think different do not think different because they are like average. This differences usually applies to the rest of their personality. And it's not good or bad, but it's unfair to expect it the other way.

🎧 Podcast episode "Expectations And Limitations Of AI-Assisted Software Engineering"

It appeared that Dave Farley, the author of "Modern Software Engineering" has a podcast. And he invited Birgitta Böckeler there. I've worked with Birgitta when SHARE NOW hired ThoughtWorks to help us to incorporate big Java monolith. So it was twice interesting to hear what they think about the AI assistants.

Insight from the podcast — how Birgitta suggests to evaluate the code assistants. We shall not answer the question if they are good or bad, if they replace us or not. But answer the more simple one — do they bring some added value to your work. In my case they are, I like github copilot and feel that it brings value.

🍪Cookie

Just this week we had a Tech day with our newly formed team. The team name is Customer Core and since we are tight on budget and designers time — we don't have a proper logo. So our logo is ⚛️.

Recently I was browsing amazon for the models of the brain, like this one. I will definitely buy one for myself at some point, but that's another story. And I thought a cookie cutter in the form of the brain. I saw that it's 3D printed and thought that maybe these models are available publicly. And yes, they are, you can purchase one, print it and make brain cookies yourself.

So I did the same for the atom cookie. I purchased the model and made cookies, the team was happy and I was happy.

⬛️ That was it for today.

#GoodDevDigest

🦆 DuckDB

Recently met an interesting concept. What if you can load ANY information to memory and do SQL queries against in? With DuckDB this becomes possible:

SELECT *
FROM read_json('todos.json',
               format = 'array',
               columns = {userId: 'UBIGINT',
                         id: 'UBIGINT',
                         title: 'VARCHAR',
                         completed: 'BOOLEAN'});

Given the price of the current compute and how powerful are our private machines, it makes sense.

📈Load testing

Simplest thing you can use for the quick load test is still ab. For more complex cases I once used vegeta.

There is now new kid on the block — oha. Written in Rust it is lightweight cli app which also has nice terminal UI. Will use.

📋Lists comparison

Several weeks ago, for a quick analytics I had to compare four lists. To understand how similar are they. I quickly found and online tool which have helped me. You just post txt of the lists there and it does all the basic math about it. What surprised me, that it also draws Venn Diagram, so you can visually see how these lists overlap.

🇺🇦🚙 Five pickup fundraiser

Last but not least. You still have a chance to donate any amount to help UAF to fight 🩸putin. We already gathered quite a sum and I'm thankful to you. Let's do another push. Please, donate.

⬛️ That was it for today.

#GoodDevDigest

❌ Say No to Notch. For a long time I got pissed that I could not find half of the applications in the menu bar of my Mac. Recently, I learned, that there is a free app to remove Notch. Yes, it makes your screen a bit smaller. But I did not feel it. From the other hand it brings back the convenience and transparency of using the menu bar — all icons are there.

🧹 Unclutter. Another app I want to recommend. Quite often, I need to attach an image or file to the mail. So far I was struggling the next way — put that file to the right bottom corner of my desktop, than drag it to the mail editor. But now it seems I found a better solution. Unclutter does four things for you:
* it is quickly accessible
* it stores history of your clipboard
* it has an area to store files
* it has an area to store texts

This reduces my cognitive load a bit, and each bit is important.

📚 I read Building a Second Brain and started to use it. This book describes a simple framework to organise your digital notes. And by having them it is expected, that you will unload your biological brain and give it more resources for doing what it can the best — creative work. There are two abbreviations which you need to know: CODE (Capture, Organise, Distill, Express) — this is the way you capture the notes and PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive) — this is how you store them. The framework is quite simple and quite abstract, it is enough to start with and at the same time each of us can adjust it to their own needs.

❓12 questions exercise. In Building a Second Brain book there was a passage about Richard Feynman and the way he processed information. He said, that according to his own observation each of us has just a handful of topics which we are curious about throughout the life. He had 12. And each time he learned any new information he quickly tested it against each of these 12 topics. Will it be useful there, can I apply it to this topic, does it improve how I understand the topic? If so — this was useful information.

To me it's an interesting perspective. Indeed the things I'm curious about are almost the same through out the life and even if they change — they do it slowly. I didn't yet collected my own 12 questions, but it shall be an interesting exercise to do. What are yours 12 questions?

⬛️ That was it for today.