Here's what I did that worked for last two teams I managed. We used slack as a hub for everything, we had some brittle [1] services so there were cron scripts that ran every minute and would alert to slack when it was down @ing someone. Likewise rolled own dumb logger that just simply existed as a middleware initially to capture requests and responses and certain events were logged to slack and disk in the code with `event(enum, json)`. This slack bot could also dump certain info for users or events with some slash commands provided you had an id. From these logs and other bits added over time could see when execs connected or someone had difficulty with auth, a job or method took abnormally long and current active sessions etc. This grew to support ceo, marketing and other devs and got pretty involved at some point we had small services tied in that could visualize geojson over a map for a trip completed, dump a replay session or get all stacktraces for the day. Also for 3rd party services we couldn't tie into directly used a proxy setup where we didn't call it directly but inside a wrapper where we could capture data so a call to `api.somesite.com/v1/events` became `mysite.com/proxy?site=api.somesite.com/v1/events` in our apps so when our clients called this we knew and could again log.
Since this seems close enough to the similar problem I had you could take a look at this approach and start with what's being requested or the repeating problems and have a central hub for others ingest these via discord or slack and appropriate channels #3rd-party-uptimes, #backups, #raw-logs, #events. From this we rarely used our dashboards, bugsnag or had the need to ssh into any server to pull access or error logs.
- [1] This one was particularly so because they had a org policy to randomly reset vpn passwords and the only way to change it was using a desktop client to basically set the same password again.
> The core technical challenge, as you can imagine, came from trying to do something that Apple otherwise does not allow
I think the main question most would ask is what affordances can you give or details you can share to prove that this will continue working in future versions of the os since the foundations seem brittle.
I use Wallpaper Engine on windows for one purpose mostly to avoid burn in since my monitors are always on but I've grown to like it over the years and would like to try something on mac but would hate to purchase software that stops working or future update comes with a readme of how to "re-enable" it.
That’s totally valid. In the end, all apps on Apple platforms exist at the liberty of Apple. I have several friends who’ve seen their app stop working on Tahoe or previous macOS due to subtle changes in the SDK or the OS.
I think Backdrop fills a specific need that Apple does not want to cover, much like other utility apps like Bartender etc. It will likely require continuous updates, but I’m not new to that, having supported my Trim Enabler utility all the way from OS X Leopard to current macOS.
I love using AI to prototype that something is possible then go and build it myself while borrowing bits from that initial MVP. The other night I wanted to build a browser extension that could intercept requests from a tab, claude got me something working in about 10 minutes with a couple prompts and a local storage session and then I toyed with the UI a bit to see what was possible.
Now after a weekend morning I have something much slimmer, predictable and sophisticated running... my extension shows a list of repeated responses and I can toggle which one to send to a localhost api that has a simple job queue to update a sqlite db with each new entry, extract the important parts and send it to my lm studio gpt oss 20b endpoint for some analysis and finally and send me a summary on telegram.
I know what I want in my head but cutting down the experimenting or PoC step down to minutes vs hours is pretty useful and as a competent enough dev it's elevated what I can get done now so I can take on more work than I would have by myself previously.
The first thought that popped into my head when I saw the post title was someone pressing the up arrow 24 times to find that `ls` they used a couple hours prior.
You might be interested in the book "The Cuckoo's Egg"!
It describes how in 1986 the compute time accounting at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was off by 75 cents - literal theft of compute time, in other words. Long story short: it was a hacker in Germany, compromising a large number of US government computer systems in order to spy for the KGB.
This is an excellent recommendation for an excellent book. As the hackers were German, the hackers' perspective is somewhat well-known in Germany, and it's interesting to learn about both sides.
I just learned that a documentary on this topic with Cliff Stoll exists: The KGB, the Computer and Me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gHNVNRQTJg - I haven't watched it yet, though.
Misc comment but I find it odd that the author seemingly intentionally killed those old posts, you couldn't google "game physics" a decade ago and not see his timestep post which helped a lot. Glad I run my own archiver.
Could be a new tab "collab" or something to do with joint work maybe, one could post a site, repo or detail a past work experience and anyone who was around or passed thru could reconnect, discuss stuff and share anecdotes. Thinking long dead internal faang tools, stuff like op's post, abandoned repos, old shareware etc. Could also be a place to find cofounders or people interested in starting or working on stuff together.
That would be interesting to see. Kinda like a tell-hn, but for old/abandoned projects? I've worked on a few of those internal projects (such as time-traveling vector db for ML tools back in '19), and stuff like that.
Dunno how useful it would actually be, but an interesting thought.
I would be into this. I'm basically trying to teach myself development by doing things with abandoned projects I find interesting. While nothing I do is even remotely production-ready, it would be cool to pair with someone more experienced to gain better understanding and perspective since it seems remarkably hard to find a mentor.
Disagree, I use a tsp of cane sugar in mine, you can't agitate it efficiently by hand and it needs to be piping hot to help it dissolute. You need something like a cheap $10 handheld milk frother/mixer or something that can get into it better than your hand going anti-clockwise. I typically add a small amount of hot water and get a thick sweet enough paste then add more hot water if I'm doing instant and for ground the same but add a strain step at the end.
Since this seems close enough to the similar problem I had you could take a look at this approach and start with what's being requested or the repeating problems and have a central hub for others ingest these via discord or slack and appropriate channels #3rd-party-uptimes, #backups, #raw-logs, #events. From this we rarely used our dashboards, bugsnag or had the need to ssh into any server to pull access or error logs.
- [1] This one was particularly so because they had a org policy to randomly reset vpn passwords and the only way to change it was using a desktop client to basically set the same password again.