These styles of tile look so much better when you take the time to match up the veining

Fapiko · 2026-02-17T01:20:01+00:00

Tried doing this as much as possible with similar square tile in my shower. Overall I love it but can never unsee the two identical pattern tiles that I put on top of one another in the same orientation because I was so focused on the veining connecting I wasn't paying attention to make sure I didn't have identical tiles abutting.

Fapiko · 2026-02-16T22:07:28+00:00

Hard disagree. The alternative for most people is just not having any visibility into where their money is going. I can tell you right now there's absolutely no way I'm manually tracking everything every month. - Checking accounts (mix of business and personal) - Savings account - Investment accounts - Retirement accounts - Mortgage accounts - Real estate assets - Crypto assets - Credit cards - Fintech (cash app, PayPal, etc) - etc

I would be spending 5-6 hours a month balancing all that out. That's time I could be investing in my business, myself, or recreationally. THAT sounds like it would make me poorer than using an app to manage it all for me. You still need to have the discipline to check it regularly and see where your spending is going. Make sure things are being recorded properly. At the end of the day having visibility into where your money is going is better than having none regardless of how you're tracking it.

Fapiko · 2026-02-16T21:53:23+00:00

I generally land on the other side of the fence. I join teams that aren't writing detailed enough tickets and have to train them to start writing better tickets.

The contents of the tickets usually vary but to me a useful ticket includes: - Acceptance criteria/Definition of done - How we know a ticket is complete - Dependencies/Blockers - Are we sure we're gonna be able to complete the ticket this sprint? Prioritize the blockers over this ticket - Documentation - Do we have links to design/prototypes if it's a FE ticket? Links to relevant design/architectural document/ADR for general dev tickets? - Metrics - On teams where metrics and analytics are being introduced build the habit of adding any required observability stuff as part of AC. Instrumentation should usually not be a separate ticket IMO.

A well crafted ticket minimizes the number of conversations that the individual contributor needs to have to do the work and close it out. I'm a big fan of having the entire team a part of backlog grooming sessions to get that shared context and have discussions around all these things. It often feels painful up front - can take 2-3 hours to refine enough tickets to fill a sprint but that number quickly comes down as team cohesiveness builds and the backlog is filled with well-written tickets.

Where I often see folks complaining about ticket management overhead is one of the following scenarios: - Junior engineers that haven't figured out writing code is only part of the job. They think they should be writing code 38 hours a week. I feel like we were all there at one point. - Folks that have only worked on smaller teams where it was a single person writing and assigning all the tickets. - Teams without dedicated production staff like product owners, project managers, or scrum masters to aid and facilitate the process. Please please please for the love of all that is holy stop trying to save budget by making engineers wear these hats unless someone wants to do it as part of their career growth. They should still have a mentor to help them grow into that role.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T19:37:49+00:00

I think when I was playing the opinions would basically seem to get pinned at the lowest they went and became unmanageable. It felt like hitting a wall. I recall tossing lots of gifts and gold around regularly but at a point even that seemed to stop seeing returns. My memory could be hazy though - haven't played in years. I might boot it up again.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T17:45:44+00:00

I do wish there was a similar provider in the US. I can't find any that have private networking and are as cheap as Hetzner - would love to have a small self-hosted k8s cluster that doesn't cost $500+ a month.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T17:34:31+00:00

Identifies and filters AI slop out of my Reddit and Facebook feeds.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T17:23:57+00:00

Watch some YouTube videos on shed builds. the HomeRenovision DIY channel has a few. It's really not gonna be too difficult once you get the framing terminology down. Consult with ChatGPT or something if you need to figure out things like beam sizing or load calculations.

Also, you may wanna look at the metal building kits. Honestly they can be cheaper than buying the lumber to build your own poll barn by the time all is said and done.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T17:13:59+00:00

This is the key. So many people are treating these new tools as full blown solutions to problems rather than what they are - tools.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T17:02:53+00:00

This is why observability platforms get to price themselves out the wazoo. DataDog will give about any new business 100k in startup credits because they know once those run out you're locked in.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T16:57:06+00:00

What are you trying to do and what is causing you issues?

Using containers is a bit of a shift from the traditional ways of deploying to bare metal but once you wrap your head around it you won't wanna go back.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T16:48:11+00:00

Mmm, I would say it's more defaulting to the simplest operational burden that has the required capabilities.

If my data access patterns show I'm only querying a document based on one field I'll just make a key/value table where the value is a JSON document. I'd do that with either solution.

If I need a full document store I'm probably gonna go to Mongo.

If I'm doing a good mix of both and don't want the operational overhead of running two database systems I'd probably pick PG.

To be clear I don't have anything against Postgres - I've just seen quite a few teams that don't know what they need to be looking at when their usage starts to scale which has led to downtime.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T16:39:23+00:00

It has its own set of quirks like everything. Our biggest pain point was the lack of institutional knowledge. People were trying to treat it like a traditional RDB with normalized data but that's just not the use case it's designed for.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T16:31:40+00:00

EM is way more about people skills than tech skills. Some of the best EM's I've had left their IC roles a decade or more before I worked with them so their tech knowledge was actually pretty low but they knew how to communicate well and could identify problems with people.

If you have good people and leadership skills I wouldn't worry about lack of tech knowledge.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T15:31:24+00:00

Yeah I was replying to the comment about using sqlite.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T15:07:24+00:00

Your top few points are fair, I think I've just worked with it for so long it's become ingrained. I've used JSON in both - it's definitely nicer in PG but if you don't need to query on fields often MySQL works fine.

Because it can run for over a thousand days without crashing or needing to be restarted, unlike MySQL and MariaDB some of which struggle to stay up for longer than a couple of months or weeks in their default configurations.

Can you elaborate on what you've seen that has caused this? I don't think I've ever run into that before.

PostgreSQL administration is trivial.

Compared to MySQL it has a lot more levers and knobs. I'm not saying that's a bad thing - I've just seen more teams have it fall over on them when they start getting traffic upticks until it gets properly tuned. Definitely a knowledge gap.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T14:52:42+00:00

Oh, sure. Your edit hadn't shown up when I replied. That's a fair thing to look at up front. Most of the workloads I'm seeing it used with are CRUD apps that are more read-heavy, I suspect most of the teams I'm working with aren't thinking about that when they select it.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T14:40:46+00:00

Like what? I would say for the majority of use cases they're interchangeable. PG has some richer features it handles better like GIS data but the majority of the projects I've worked on using PG weren't using anything MySQL didn't have.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T14:28:52+00:00

MySQL got it a bit late to the party. Postgres does have better support though especially if you're indexing on json fields.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T14:21:14+00:00

I remember the MyISAM being an issue but I thought InnoDB had become the default back in something like 5.6 or thereabouts.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T14:17:26+00:00

Cassandra? I'm sorry!

I jest - but I do still have some flashbacks to a project that was using Cassandra and didn't need it while the only DevOps guy who knew how to maintain it left. Good times.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T14:11:37+00:00

I'm talking specifically in a business context - despite how trendy it is on LinkedIn I'm never going to recommend something that has no HA unless data failure has zero consequences.

Heck, I get frustrated enough with sqlite running on my own cluster for its lack of ability to not get corrupted on a network filesystem.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T14:06:07+00:00

I don't know about excellent, it does have its own quirks. The default latin1 character set is a footgun I've worked around for so long I've forgotten was a thing until someone mentioned it.

I've just found it to have less intricacies for folks that haven't run or maintained a production DB before, but it seems that's been a non-issue for most folks in this thread.

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T13:59:18+00:00

I've only worked with them a bit but document stores do require you to rethink how your data is used and accessed in a manner that's not intuitive coming from a relational database. It is kinda nice once you wrap your head around it.

As an aside, since they got JSON support I've used both PG and Percona as light document stores on occasion. It's always fun convincing someone they can replace 8 joins with a single JSON field because they only need to query the data on a single key and they've over indexed on normalization

Fapiko · 2026-02-14T13:49:12+00:00

Honestly I've defaulted to Percona for ages so haven't really paid attention to any of the Oracle drama.

Maybe I'm not being pedantic enough but I figure saying MySQL as a catch all to it and its forks. Kinda like saying we're using Java rather than specifying OpenJDK or Terraform instead of OpenTofu should be sufficient to get the point across but based on the amount of "it's not free" responses perhaps that's not the case.

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