Professional software engineer, musician, gamer, stoic, democratic socialist

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I’m not in the market, but I’ve actually had similar thoughts of building a project on top of NixOS that’s focused on self-hosting for homes and small businesses. I recently deployed my own router/server on a BeeLink mini PC and instead of using something like OpenWRT, I used NixOS, systemd-networkd, nftables, etc.

    DM me if you want to discuss more. I think the idea has potential and I might be interested in helping if you can get the business model right (even if it just ends up being some FOSS thing).








  • Yea I agree. Good UX is a lot of work, and I think FOSS projects rarely prioritize it. Even good documentation is hard to come by. When you write software for your own use case, it’s easy to cut UX corners, because you don’t need your hand held.

    And good UX for a programmer might be completely different from good UX for someone that only knows how to use GUIs. E.g. NixOS has amazing UX for programmers, but the code-illiterate would be completely lost.

    I believe that the solution is “progressive disclosure”, and it requires a lot of effort. You basically need every interface to have both the “handholding GUI” and the underlying “poweruser config,” and there needs to be a seamless transition between the two.

    I actually think we could have an amazing Linux distro for both “normies” and powerusers if this type of UX were the primary focus of developers.








  • Gleam is cool. I wrote some services with it to see if I wanted to use it for more projects. It seemed like a good option because it would be easy to teach.

    Things I like:

    • fast build times (I only tested small apps though, under 2000 LOC)
    • strong static types
    • runs on the BEAM
    • easy to learn
    • pattern matching
    • immutable + structural sharing
    • currying (with parameter holes)

    Things I don’t like:

    • no re-exports
    • it’s possible to have name collisions between packages; authors have a gentleman’s agreement to always create a top-level module with the same name as the package
    • some standard library APIs seem missing or immature (it’s still pre-1.0)
    • it can be hard to get good performance out of idiomatic code for specific tasks (see immutability)
    • no format strings; best you can do is "Hello, " <> name. It starts to get cumbersome
    • parsing/serialization is all quite manual boilerplate; there’s nothing quite like serde
    • no field/argument punning
    • no method syntax; you just have to scan the docs to figure out what functions can be used with a given type
    • you can’t define the same variant name twice in the same module; I believe this is a limitation in how the types are translated to Erlang records
    • you can’t call functions in pattern matching if guards
    • you can’t have dependency cycles between modules in the same package
    • hard to write FFI correctly; you lose all the comfort of types