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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2024

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  • I self-host and dabble with this stuff. Im an engineer for more than a decade.

    But I really struggled to find a solution that has a really high uptime with minimal maintenance. Ive set up some raspberry pi projects, including cams. Why would I want video to transfer to some company?

    But the trade offs were significant. Every few weeks, there was a new problem. Maybe my router. Maybe my internet. Maybe the Pi. Maybe something else. Maybe it’s my VPN when I’m trying to dial into the network. Maybe it’s my phone app no longer seeing the device. Maybe a update broke it. Maybe God hated me that day.

    After six months and spending 2-3 hours a month maintaining it, I burned out and just bought an off-the-shelf solution with a mobile app.

    Of course, I only use it for security and it doesn’t exist in the house. It grosses me out, but it’s been two years of plug-and-play and just working without setup.



  • This is unfortunately the world of open-source.

    1. Nerd tells you to use the open-source thing.
    2. Non-technical tries it and asks questions
    3. Nerd proclaims it’s not a real problem/your fault/not applicable/fix it yourself
    4. Some company takes that open-source version or idea, makes it easier for end users and monetize it
    5. Nerd gets angry and repeats step 1

    Source: I am nerd and I contribute to open-source.









  • Absolutely! But it also depends on the size of the company. Small companies can absolutely benefit from PMs. I used to take freelance clients as a engineer, and never accepted a job without a PM who was willing to block out the noise.

    In big companies though, I have a lot of disdain for PMs.

    Many literally spend their hours being the middleman between actual stakeholders. I recently had a project where the PM was just forwarding emails from one department lead to another. They didn’t understand the product or cared to follow any processes. Then distracting my team for status updates so they can build reports in Excel, so they can feed it up the chain if something was done or not.

    Fortunately, our retros are heavily engineer-centric and we can give harsh feedback/fire our PMs, which we have done successfully over the past few years.