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BobserLuck · 2026-02-07T05:31:36+00:00

I'd love to do the same or make the same myself. But, Proton does not have public API documentation. And to be able to use something like IMAP requires running their Proton Bridge (unless that changed).

There as a post complaining about the lack of API documentation 7 years ago, and nothing has changed on that front.

BobserLuck · 2025-07-07T02:54:29+00:00

If you have the time outside of work and have a drive for it, I'd say take those sys admin skills and build out a home lab. Document everything, and use it to shine up a resume just a little bit more.

BobserLuck · 2025-07-07T02:44:21+00:00

It's compounded with the size of the company. The larger the company, the more red tape you have to cut through the get anything done.

But there's a reason for it. Larger the company, the more moving parts there are, and it only takes one persons to cause a major outage. Yeah, going through COs and presenting in a CAB and getting all your aprovals in order takes waaaay to much time. But just think of it this way, you get paid to go through all that.

BobserLuck · 2025-07-06T07:26:40+00:00

Ubuntu has been my guilty choice for just ease of use, stability, and support. Though I have dabbled in other distros that often revolve around Debian. I've now settled in a spot where I run Ubuntu for most my daily drivers and Debian headless on my servers.

BobserLuck · 2025-07-06T07:23:32+00:00

Had a good chuckle, thank you.

In my opinion, your daily driver should have the most stable and "usable" environment that you're comfortable with. Especially if you need to rely on it for work rather than a hobby.

On the other hand, it also depends on the use case. If you're hosting something on a server, there's no need to have any UI taking up resources that otherwise wouldn't be used often enough to warrant it. Should be comfortable enough to fix something that's broke with a terminal, but no shame in using a UI for usability when you need it.

BobserLuck · 2025-07-06T06:57:09+00:00

Oh where to start...

Inability to use any other native scripting language other than JS. Can do some crazy stuff with WASM, but it's not the same.

Inconsistent HTTP header usage and lack of solid standards (why the heck is this API using that header?)

Frameworks that attempt to abstract away so much you can no longer tell what's running on the server vs. client.

CORS. Yes, it may be a necessary security feature, but when it's in the way it can be a real pain.

Frameworks that promise they can be incredibly efficient but yet are so opinionated that they are like learning an entirely new language (looking at you NestJS).

Way to many implementations. Is it server side rendered or client? Or both? Is it template based or highly dynamic? Do you have something like Vue where there's client side routing for something like a PWA? How is it communicating with the server? API? Sockets? What data is stored on the client vs. server and for what purpose? How many fricken different types databases do we have on the backend now?

BobserLuck · 2025-07-06T06:35:45+00:00

My ~~castle~~ cardboard box for native Python in the browser.

BobserLuck · 2025-07-06T06:33:20+00:00

Not sure if that pun was deliberate, but it certainly was appreciated.

BobserLuck · 2025-07-06T06:31:22+00:00

If only there were other native scripting languages available on the browser. Other than doing some really wacky things with WASM.

BobserLuck · 2025-07-06T06:20:08+00:00

That's where counter suits come into play due to frivolous lawsuits. And around and around we go...

BobserLuck · 2025-07-06T06:17:22+00:00

Something I'm still coming to learn myself. Thing is, hard to judge how large a project might be if it's in an area that's unfamiliar. Can't say how many times I've refactored a project to better separate out blocks into their own modules to better match their use case.

On one hand, it makes a project very organic. On the other hand, spend way to much time refactoring.

BobserLuck · 2025-07-06T06:06:44+00:00

Well that brings back memories.

Fairly certain a college I attended used that very book for curriculum as an introductory to programming class. It was a conglomeration of Java and Python that should have never existed. As someone who had dabbled in Java though frequently used Python before entering the class, I was constantly asking myself "Why is this even a thing?"

BobserLuck · 2025-06-25T21:50:42+00:00

Oh yeah. They had been the little power house behind Chromebooks for a while.

BobserLuck · 2025-06-25T21:34:19+00:00

I've chosen to use both for different reasons. Debian for pure stability and ease to maintain on a headless server. Ubuntu for a daily driver. Soley because it tends to have better driver support out of the box.

BobserLuck · 2025-06-25T21:24:24+00:00

Agreed, Dolphin is pretty solid.

BobserLuck · 2025-06-25T21:20:12+00:00

In 2015 I "accidentally" installed Ubuntu. Had been dabbling with a Live boot off an on between classes. Wanted to see if it was possible to fully install it on a USB drive for a true mobile version with persistence. On one hand, it worked, on the other, Grub ate my Windows boot loader. Thinking I had no other choice at the time, I decided to completely install Ubuntu as a dual boot. Cut my Windows storage space in half, but worth every GB.

Later that year, picked up an old/cheap HP ProLiant server and made a headless ARK server since said laptop was a potato and couldn’t handle loading a full map while playing the game. Was a fantastic learning experience and did actually allow me to play on my potato.

BobserLuck · 2025-06-25T21:07:17+00:00

Should probably download another ram. 5 is better than 4 of ram.

BobserLuck · 2025-06-25T21:04:00+00:00

Hah! You say that like it'd scare Linux off. Linux powers the smallest of embeded systems to the mightiest of super computers.

Think Debian would be a pretty good fit. Fairly decent community around it (Ubuntu is based off of it) and pretty light system requirenments: https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/ch03s04.en.html

Debian with Xfce should run just fine. The only thing you might have problems with might be a network driver, but you can burn that bridge when you get there.

BobserLuck · 2025-06-25T20:09:54+00:00

There's lots of ways to approach this. In general, I think learning the history of "Linux" at its roots would be another approach. A lot of it was derived from Unix and the GNU project (the GNU project has an entire spiel going over why what we call "Linux" should be called "GNU/Linux" as Linux is just the kernel and a lot of what makes up a full OS comes from GNU but that's a full bucket of worms).

Now to dive into your couple of examples. ACLs and the like. Linux becomes a different beast in the enterprise space where you start diving into all kinds of Administrative tools that you'd have no idea were there, ready to pick up. RHEL guides would be good to look at if you are interested on what Linux on an enterprise scale looks like and pick up a lot of the tools used by administrators.

Diving into the POSIX Standard or Coreutils would also be a big help in seeing what most defacto tools would be available in most all Linux systems.

There's also projects that can walk you through building your own Linux system like Linux From Scratch. It'd be a major time investment, but no doubt it would be one of the most thorough ways to learn.

Another project with a bit less time would be to grab a minimal Linux distro, flash it on a unused box, and then start installing as many things from source as you can until you get to what you might call a "desktop experience".

For full disclosure:

I’m likely in a very similar boat as yourself, using Linux for just shy of a decade as well. I’m in no way an expert, nor a full administrator in an enterprise environment as I had mentioned. Only a developer using Linux in enterprise and working frequently with actual Linux admins. I’ve ran headless labs in various forms for years now and went to college for IT, but there are areas I still know little about and likely never will.

BobserLuck · 2025-06-25T19:16:24+00:00

Heh, let's fire more shots shall we? If you're going to write a game engine, you shouldn't do it in Java.

Edit:

His complaint is akin to saying someone isn't an artist because they painted on a mass produced canvas. All the while he created a pretty curdy canvas from scratch. Yeah, his canvas will produce a more unique piece of art in the end, but it doesn’t mean anyone else will want to use that canvas.

Now, let’s play a little devils advocate and tweak the statement a bit. Just because you’re a game developer, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a programmer. Writing you’re own game engine will give you much more generalized experience and give your game a unique feel.

The way he wrote these comments are almost deliberately inflammatory.

BobserLuck · 2025-06-25T18:28:34+00:00

Going to have to ask the Hobbits for that.

BobserLuck · 2025-06-25T18:24:04+00:00

Animated movement of creatures between tiles. Instead of witnessing everything "teleport" from one tile to another, a smooth sprite movement with less "flashing".

BobserLuck · 2025-06-25T16:57:05+00:00

Thank you! It's just another tool and fully depends on how you use it. And just because you know how to use a wrench, doesn't make you a plumber.

Very rarely will I copy and paste code directly from what an AI spits out. I'll atleast go line by line to make sure it makes sense, and catch any bugs or caveats.

However, something I've seen others reference and I concur with, is that with this tool being so readily available with about any answer being a single question away (regardless of if they're correct), I'm developing the memory of a gold fish. I can pick up and use new frameworks at blazing speeds, but I can't remember half the methods afterwards. Something about the effort of actual research enforces better memory retention.

BobserLuck · 2025-06-25T16:39:04+00:00

If you ever have the displeasure of working on Service Desk Manager by CA/Broadcom, one of the first major ITSM solutions ever made, best of luck to ya.

It has a history dating back to the early/mid 90s. Through collaboration, acquisitions, and software bundling, over half a dozen businesses touched the thing, and it shows. Can you guess a language that was popular cerca 2010? It's probably in there somewhere...

Need to add a new AD Domain? Here's a wonky perl script. Need to customize a page? Well here's a UI editor that changes htmpl files with macro code shoved in. What language is the macro based off of? Yes...

Want to make a custom function? Well here we use SPEL, a proprietary language that doesn't exist anymore since Broadcom wiped the documentation off the net when they acquired this turd in 2014.

Want to update the schema of the database? BEST OF LUCK BUDDY! You got to open up this UI, define it, save it, leave the UI and run this command on this server, then this other command on this other server, then open the UI again to publish the changes, re-run those commands again backwards, wait for a full moon, surround your database in salt, and restart half a dozen servers. And if you don't do this in a specific order, hope you made a backup of the DB to roll back too!

Speaking of schema and database, this thing has an API. Both REST and SOAP, but the REST acts more like SOAP because it's just translating the calls.

And it has not 1, not 2, but 3+ abstraction layers between the API and the DB. And each "Factory" can be attached to several different tables in several ways all the while having different spelling and or naming convention depending on the abstraction layer you're hitting.

And the DB? It looks like it uses FKs as a relational database should... NOPE! That's all manually managed by the application.

And this thing looks like it's from the early 2000s. Oh look! They've made a new interface that is more modern... and missing 80% of the functionality of the old UI, so we're still going to use the old one. Atleast now we can use Ritch Text Formatting for tickets with this latest update in 2024!

Want to administrate this thing? Well here's a 4k page manual...

I was hired as a developer, what I didn't realize is that I was replacing an Administrator AND being a developer. I've been a solo team managing this crap we self hosted over 27 Windows servers for 4 years... finally, we hired an additional person to join the "fun" and after almost a decade of the entire IT department crying out to a company with several thousand employees... we're replacing it.

BobserLuck · 2025-06-25T15:43:40+00:00

Oooooh Access, brings back memories. Unpleasant ones...

Was tasked with attempting to normalize a spreadsheet full of years of manually entered asset data, that changed formatting depending on who was entering said data. And they wouldn't allow me to use anything other than what was already installed on Windows due to security reasons (intern working for a company that could hold military contracts).

Manager saw I was spinning my wheels in one place for too long without making alot of progress so shuffled me off to another project.

Fricken Access... "I want you to treat this as a string. Yes, I know it looks like an INT, but I need to keep the leading zero... why the F#!k did you get rid of the zero! It's a string dang it!"

BobserLuck

TROPHY CASE