There's an old saying, "Unix is user friendly, it's just fussy about it's friends."

Ceph, GlusterFS, and I suspect SeaweedFS (but I haven't used it) expect high speed, low latency connections to their peers. So they won't work well over the internet.

There's some info floating around about using IPFS as the backend for Jellyfin, which in theory should allow you to share media between friends, but I haven't tried it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHujBhq4J9A

Another (mostly) retired Unix sysadmin here. I never could make Python work in my brain, but last year discovered Svelte/SvelteKit and really like it. I'd always kinda hated on JS, but actually it's pretty nice these days.

"dammit emacs" ...

OMG I forgot all about WAP gateways ...

$500 a year?!? Hey buddy, thanks for looking after our IT systems, here's an extra $1.50 a week ...

So I'm neither a marketing or sales guy, though I have done a bit of both.

What I'd say is that if you are trying to create a successful business / product ... you need to be considering marketing/sales before you actually build anything. The classic tech founder mistake is to build something nobody wants. Or that costs more to produce/support than you can sell it for.

I've got a funny story about a dotcom era business I worked for, where an amazing tech team built this product that was miles better than anything our competitors were doing. We spent 18 months getting it all built out etc. And then the business guy came in and ran the numbers and pointed out to us that our return on investment was longer than the replacement cycle of our hardware. Oops ..

Mostly I mean the assumption that's easy and that you can just "do sales and marketing" after the fact. Sales people are too "sales" to work for free. :-)

I see tech people doing this to sales, marketing, and bizdev people sometimes as well. I've created this thing, it's all done I just need someone to sell/market it ...

same.

I’ve done a lot of tech recruiting. Reference checks are invaluable, especially if you do them over the phone (instead of email/text).

People are wired to be honest, even about the faults of their friends. Tone of voice, pauses and side comments are often the most useful parts.

By the time you’re checking references you’re not normally trying to determine if the candidate is psycho or incompetent, you’re trying to figure out the specifics. Are they going to be a good fit for the team? How will they handle the stresses, structures, or freedoms of the role? What kind of support are they likely to need and can the team realistically provide it?

And to OP, yes. Absolutely, ask to meet with employees. Ask the hard questions, you’ll probably get surprisingly candid responses.

I've worked for several very, very rich men. The pattern I notice is that they always get surrounded by people who make sure that they never, ever hear "no".

Imagine living in a world where every inane thing that comes out of your mouth, somebody immediately makes it their mission to try and make it happen. You no longer get any kind of useful feedback from the world and your opportunities to learn from feedback are greatly reduced.

I agree, I think in the end, it does make them crazy.

I’ve lost my music collection twice. Once when I gave away all my cds in a fit of minimalism, once when our house got broken into and they took all our cds.

It’s farking annoying and takes forever to get all your music again. At the very least make sure you have a list of albums so you can remember what you had.

Yeah, so worth it! The first time I moved a service to a new box and realised all I had to do was copy the compose file and docker-compose up -d ... I was sold.

Now I'm moving everything to Docker Swarm which is a new adventure. :-)

Miniflux?

Another old school sysadmin that “retired” in the early 2010s.

Yes, use docker-compose. It’s utterly worth it.

I was intensely irritated at first that all of my old troubleshooting tools were harder to use and just generally didn’t trust it for ages, but after 5 years I wouldn’t be without.

I'm really liking the look of stalwart, but it's quite new. Mailu seems to be pretty nice, good features and not too resource heavy. Mailcow does everything, but it's a 🐷.

you win!

THIS SO MANY TIMES.

Put the cone on yourself and you’ll know instantly why dogs hate it. :-)

We did the long sleeved thing four one of our collies and it worked great.