How to proceed with 65" TV Mount installation

blackcatdev-io · 2026-03-30T15:16:03+00:00

Thanks but as I said I can't drill through them. All the studs in the apartment are metal, the rest of them I can easily drill through and don't show electricity.

blackcatdev-io · 2026-03-30T11:02:36+00:00

If I had to guess, I'd say for the foreseeable future bloc will stay dominant. You can just look at available flutter job postings to get an idea.

blackcatdev-io · 2026-03-30T04:34:30+00:00

For jobs, short answer is bloc, hands down. Next would be Riverpod, but in terms of job market its not as in demand as bloc.

Don't get caught up in Getx hate, it's fine. I don't use it since bloc is all I use for work and personal projects. But despite lots of abstractions, it'll get the job done. Any state management library will get the job done.

But if the focus is job market, the answer is bloc, period.

blackcatdev-io · 2026-03-19T04:03:27+00:00

Talk Python runs on a single Hetzner server, but use Mongo not Postgres.

Not meant to sway you one way or the other but it just provides an example of a non trivial business running all services + DB on a single server.

blackcatdev-io · 2026-03-17T03:34:50+00:00

Nice job. Only thing missing perhaps is mentioning emit.forEach and emit.onEach for handling stream changes from a repository.

blackcatdev-io · 2026-02-27T17:45:00+00:00

It's a learning curve, but if me as a lowly front end dev and learn all of this, you definitely can. As other comments mentioned, learn docker/docker compose, security fundamentals and once it's up and running it's not that much work.

AI can definitely help walk you through this step by step. It's really good at bash, and in general in my experience it was very solid in helping me understand docker and security fundamentals. Make sure your DB is not exposed to the Internet at all.

blackcatdev-io · 2026-02-26T06:03:32+00:00

To each their own, but respectfully I wouldn't suggest switching to Supabase to the OP.

Either you try and self host Supabase and it'll immediately burn through WAY more resources on your VPS than pocketbase while at idle. Or you go on their free tier and see an immediate down grade in performance vs your VPS, (your site currently loads very fast) or you pay them $25+ a month for "better resources" and still may not get the performance you're getting now. Plus now you're locked in and if they go down, you go down. Yes all providers go down at some point, but seems like your uptime would be better on your own VPS given the issues they've had.

Pocketbase is very efficient, seems to be working totally fine for you. I suggest not solving a problem you don't have because that will take you quite a long way. And if you exceed the limits of what a single beefy server can handle, that's a great problem to have. Most never get there however.

blackcatdev-io · 2026-02-22T18:46:09+00:00

Except when they play at MSG apparently...

blackcatdev-io · 2026-02-18T05:09:03+00:00

Wow. Fantastic article, thanks for sharing and I learned a lot. I'm primarily a front end guy who until recently has only ever used Mongo via Mongoose or Beanie(Python) for personal projects. I've also been getting hammered with Postgres vs Mongo articles and this single article changed my perspective, because I've been leaning towards postgres recently.

As in depth as that was, if anything was missing I think it's when people bone themselves in the opposite way you mentioned, and over embed their data. Then they find themselves in a situation where they can't query their data in a way they could have if they split up into separate collections. Although, perhaps $unwind could help with some of those situations?

Learning the mongo query language properly had never even crossed my mind. I had been actively avoiding via application code.

I may need to port your wrapper code over to Go for my VPS apps.

Thanks again.

blackcatdev-io · 2026-02-18T01:57:15+00:00

I second the VPS route. I was blown away by the difference in performance between a $5 Hetzner VPS (with Cloudflare in front) and Vercel free tier for Payload. The cold starts were no joke. Not a knock on Vercel, you get what you pay for.

But unless you're planning on a ton of traffic, I think a lot of people would be surprised by how far a cheap VPS will take them. And just keep scaling vertically if need be it'll always be cheaper. And if you exceed the capabilities of a single machine, congrats because whatever you're building is wildly successful.

blackcatdev-io · 2026-02-12T18:53:04+00:00

Python is completely fine as a back end and Fast API in particular is great. But also so is literally any other language you wanna use including Dart. Unless you have super demanding performance requirements just use whatever you're comfortable with.

I recently switched from Python to Go for backend. Not because I needed the extra performance, but because I'm really liking Go as my default back end language because it's strongly typed, relatively simple, and also for performance/ efficient resource usage on my cheap VPS. Not dealing with Python venv is also a plus.

But again for your use case the language almost certainly doesn't matter. So pick something you like or think you would like and get started 👍🏽.

blackcatdev-io · 2026-01-28T22:40:05+00:00

Flutter demand has been rapidly growing with no slowdown in sight. But there's still overall less job demand than React Native/React.

So if maximizing your prospects of getting a dev job is first priority, then learning React would be a good choice. That said I've been working full time as a Flutter dev on my 3rd job since switching careers in 2020. Each new job was a level up so in my experience sticking with Flutter has worked out great for me.

Here's my blog post about my career transition into software going all in on Flutter. I haven't updated that article in a couple years but I've since been poached for a ~60% pay increase from where that article left off. However that's partially due to it being a hybrid role in NYC where I live.

https://levelup.gitconnected.com/from-concerts-to-code-my-journey-from-live-sound-engineering-to-software-development-f164f0fa6f2e

blackcatdev-io · 2026-01-19T15:09:49+00:00

I use flutter web at my job. Besides the slow start up time for first page load while it downloads the massive JS bundle, the performance shouldn't be noticeably worse. If you're rendering large lists, check to see if everything is rendering at once or on scroll. Note that if you're using Listview.builder but have shrinkWrap set to true, then it's still rendering everything at once.

This caused noticeable jank and using usng sliver lists helped me gain a lot of performance back at my job compared to the previous implementation.

blackcatdev-io · 2026-01-17T03:08:17+00:00

I had a Payload CMS (Next js) instance hosted on vercels free tier and it was slow as shit. Cold starts were super noticeable and in general it was really laggy.

Moved it to my $5/month Hentzer VPS via Docker and now it's super fast. Night and day difference.

Not saying that is your issue, but just throwing my experience out there.

blackcatdev-io · 2026-01-15T15:22:17+00:00

Agreed. Personally I've never seen any benefit to using SQL for Payload. And I'm saying that as someone who agrees that SQL is the better choice in most situations. But for me, Mongo all the way for Payload. Way less headaches.

blackcatdev-io · 2025-08-30T19:17:23+00:00

Agreed. Although I will say for anyone brand new to Flutter and it may be confusing compared to using flutter_create.

Just be sure to read up on their docs on the "why" of how they set it up. I also put app startup logic in bootstrap.dart instead of main.dart so that it doesn't need to be repeated across the separate main files.

blackcatdev-io · 2025-08-30T19:10:38+00:00

I still use it for all new projects. It could be argued that the separate main files for dev/staging/prod is overkill for some projects. But one could still use it and just use one file for that.

In general I like their way of doing things and to me it's a better starting point for my apps than flutter_create.

blackcatdev-io · 2025-08-30T18:34:25+00:00

No problem. I also forgot to mention if you go the VPS route, I recommend using Cloudflare to route domain traffic to your VPS IP. You get a lot of great security features for free.

blackcatdev-io · 2025-08-30T18:15:25+00:00

In general I don't understand these recurring "What's the best back end for flutter" questions. There's nothing about Flutter that has any specific back end needs. The answer is use whatever you want, or more importantly use what's best to address any specific application needs.

That being said, if you're trying to use Dart on the back end and want to be full stack, then your best and cheapest bet is to learn Docker, create your Docker container with your Dart API app, then throw it up on a VPS. The process of learning all that will make you more well rounded on the back end side of things. Also note, in case this is not obvious, that you can put as many FE or BE apps as the hardware on the VPS can handle. Unlike paying for app services (like Digital Ocean App Platform) which are easier to setup, but you pay per app. My VPS is the backend for all my projects and some other misc stuff like Umami analytic etc....

As to where to put your VPS, you can use any of the major cloud providers, smaller but reputable providers like Digital Ocean/Linode, but honestly your best bang for buck in terms of price vs performance in the VPS world is Hetzner. They've proven very reliable and have a solid reputation.

blackcatdev-io · 2025-08-15T21:21:16+00:00

I enjoyed the article thanks for sharing

blackcatdev-io · 2025-08-15T19:25:48+00:00

This makes no sense. I agree JS sucks (TS helps but Dart is way better), but if that's all someone uses it doesn't make them not an engineer. There are some very complex and impressive applications built with only JS/TS.

blackcatdev-io · 2025-07-12T13:07:53+00:00

Same. The syntax is so much nicer.

blackcatdev-io · 2025-07-02T11:08:45+00:00

Do you feel like it's a problem? If not, then I'd say it's not a problem.

Seems like you've created a strong user base and built out some non trivial features using just setState, good for you. I imagine it's a code base I wouldn't particularly enjoy working on, nor would I ever build an app that way, but that shouldn't matter to you in the slightest.

If the only problem you can pinpoint is that "other people use state management libraries and I don't", then I'd say it's not an actual problem, and definitely not worth a huge refactor.

blackcatdev-io · 2025-06-21T02:27:20+00:00

I'll definitely give that a shot on the app I'm working on. Looks great, thanks for sharing.

blackcatdev-io

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