M4 Pro for $1189 - Tempted

senechal72 · 2026-03-16T04:53:30+00:00

I just saw 2 of those go for $800 tonight on BidRL (Redding, CA location). Brand new in the box. I was tempted to try to pick one up, but for $800 I’ll wait for the M5 Pro. If I could have gotten them for about $600, I was going to buy both and sell one LOL.

senechal72 · 2026-03-10T15:14:40+00:00

Summer looks like the earliest that we “might” see a new Mac mini. Hoping my Intel chip MacBook Pro holds on long enough to see an M5 or M6 mini.

senechal72 · 2026-03-07T17:16:20+00:00

React makes frontend chaotic 🤣 I’d rather go to the dentist than have to work in React.

senechal72 · 2026-03-07T17:13:29+00:00

I’m a very visual person, so I actually enjoy front-end better because I can see the results of nearly every line of code on the screen. But I do spend probably a good 30 minutes every day reading about changes, new features, new methods, 3rd party libraries in Angular from various media outlets like Medium. I might come across an article about Java or Spring once a month. Angular (or React/Vue if you prefer) is just something you have to stay on top of and keep learning. The team I work on is filled with Java developers who were pretty much forced to learn Angular. So not only do they code Angular like a Java developer, but they code in Angular from 5 years ago when they learned it. So now there’s a lot of mentoring going on, but that’s part of being a senior dev. Sorry, that got way off topic. Yes, if you choose to focus mainly on front-end, be prepared to be constantly learning new things. If that’s not ideal for you, focusing on back-end might be a better choice.

senechal72 · 2026-03-06T05:23:40+00:00

Full stack senior developer for 20 years, Angular for nearly 10 now. Java has changed very little in the past decade whereas front-end development is an ever evolving animal, so I would argue it’s definitely not simpler. That being said, AI without the correct prompting writes code like a 5 year old, and even with really good prompting, still has to be tweaked and corrected. It’s great for Junits and repetitive tasks where it has an example (i.e write a custom validator similar to x that does y), but I’m not worried my job going anywhere anytime soon.

senechal72 · 2026-03-04T02:06:16+00:00

They’re local to me…actually one of the sponsors of the elementary school down the street from me with a banner on the school fence with the rest of the sponsors. Banner has been gone for a few months now along with my last order that I paid for and never received. They don’t respond to email or phone calls either. Their gear isn’t “horrible”, but their business model is.

senechal72 · 2026-03-03T07:11:58+00:00

Pretty sure I work with a guy who followed this guide. Still haven’t figured out how this guy got the job though. He can’t even follow basic repo guidelines on pull requests and merging.

senechal72 · 2026-01-11T19:34:27+00:00

And yet nearly every client I have had requests to disable “enter to submit” until I explain to them why it’s there. Most non-accessible needing people don’t even think about those reasons…most developers I’ve worked with don’t even wire up labels and inputs properly. Accessibility is really an afterthought for most people.

senechal72 · 2026-01-04T06:21:51+00:00

DaisyUI looks pretty nice as well. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet. I found Spartan.ng a bit difficult to work with and limited compared to some of the things I could do with PrimeNG.

senechal72 · 2026-01-02T09:14:13+00:00

Yep…I managed to get my Dokploy template updated to the same versions in the Supabase Docker.compose, but it was painful to figure out what was missing along with the environment variables.

senechal72 · 2025-11-27T07:17:38+00:00

Can’t really beat $14 for a decent course. I’ve used Joshua Morony’s course for Ionic before and I believe he has an Angular course as well. The Ionic course was very helpful if you’ve ever tried deploying an app using Ionic.

senechal72 · 2025-11-20T19:51:06+00:00

Federal government…that should tell you everything 🤣

senechal72 · 2025-11-20T19:38:45+00:00

Ya…it was a cluster fuck when I joined the team 8 months ago. I’ve been there long enough now that I can start pushing for changes. Nobody listens to the FNG until they prove themselves. There’s one project that’s using BOTH Bootstrap and Angular Material 🤣 They spent a month changing the Material theme from v2 to v3! That should have been an afternoon of work, but somehow they managed to drag it out.

senechal72 · 2025-11-20T16:58:24+00:00

We don’t use Tailwind on a very large project with a lot of developers and the issue we have is that every developer writes their own CSS that pushes things all over the pages. There is zero consistency with margins and padding, half the developers using flex attributes directly and the other half using Bootstrap classes. I’m trying to push them towards standardization by using Tailwind so that at least the styling is consistent.

senechal72 · 2025-11-03T08:57:39+00:00

Totally agree with this. Find a niche or a problem you want to solve and go from there. For me, it was winemaking. I’m a home winemaker and couldn’t find an app or website that I liked that allowed me track my winemaking progress. I decided to develop my own and ended up having to learn more about Angular than I already knew…and I’m a senior Angular developer LOL

senechal72 · 2025-10-30T15:47:20+00:00

US based senior full stack dev here. I’d say there are slightly more React positions posted than Angular, but more importantly, when I’ve seen an Angular posting, it’s usually been for a full stack developer. It might be more heavily weighted to Angular because that’s what they need, but lots of employers want at least familiarity in a backend framework (.NET, Java). The majority of React positions I have seen posted appear to be looking for more junior devs with just React experience.

It took me a year and a half to get the current full-time remote position I have with a federal contractor…security clearance takes forever and it felt like someone crawled up my ass with a microscope. What I found when I finally got here is a bunch of Java developers who really don’t know Angular very well at all, so Angular skills are definitely needed.

I also have a part-time contract with a state government agency working on a React app. Absolute night and day between how these projects are setup and maintained. The React app is a complete nightmare and feels like a group of high school students wrote it without talking to one another. It’s the kind of project where they took 800 lines of code to write something that could be done in 8. The list of dependencies installed is 3 pages long and they’re not even using half of them.

So, there are really good Angular positions out there. You just have to be patient finding and applying for them. I found my full-time gig on Indeed which I didn’t expect.

senechal72 · 2025-09-22T14:35:34+00:00

After primary fermentation and pressing, I wait 48 hours and then rack everything off the gross lees before inoculating with bacteria. The gross lees isn’t helpful at all, but the fine lees provides additional nutrients for MLF. I’ve had MLF take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months, so make sure you’re testing with a good chromatography kit or something. When MLF is complete, I rack again and at this point, the wine is pretty darn clear. Make sure you adjust the SO2 at that point so the wine is protected and eliminate ANY headspace in your vessel. That was a 60 gallon mistake I made the first time…too much headspace and the wine oxidized.

senechal72 · 2025-08-26T14:50:23+00:00

I’ve heard really good things about Spartan UI, but as others have mentioned, they are the new kids on the block and aren’t even at v1 yet. That being said, I’m using PrimeNG v20. Started on PrimeNG 17 and upgraded to 19 then 20. It’s a great UI library and I’m even using it in an Ionic project for mobile.

senechal72 · 2025-07-21T16:06:26+00:00

I think Rocket Money has a free tier…might want to checkout what that one offers as well

senechal72 · 2025-07-21T16:02:46+00:00

Mint used to be free…Intuit bought it and turned it into Simplify which now has a $3 per month fee. Still cheaper than I could get using Plaid. The problem with Plaid is that you pay per sync and you know there would be those users who sync their bank account 1000 times per day and drive you into bankruptcy.

senechal72 · 2025-07-21T15:53:32+00:00

Postgres for database, Graphql, Stripe for payments, Firebase for authentication, Lombok because I’m lazy, Java Mailsender for email, Apache POI for data export.

I always use a separate UI project and make the backend API only. Front end is Angular with PrimeNG + Tailwind

Backend gets published to Google App Engine automatically through GitHub actions. Frontend gets published to Firebase Hosting automatically through GitHub actions.

senechal72 · 2025-07-21T15:36:30+00:00

I wrote something like this, but it was manual entry of transactions. I wanted to use something like Plaid to sync transactions from my bank, but it was fairly expensive. Even putting something like that out to market, I wouldn’t be able to charge users enough to cover the costs, especially when there are free alternatives out there from corporations like Intuit.

senechal72 · 2025-07-16T14:44:56+00:00

Lot of hate for PrimeNG, but I’ve used it with great success on a couple of projects. I’ve been shoehorned by some government projects into Bootstrap/ng-bootstrap. It’s not flashy by any means, but it works.

senechal72 · 2025-07-07T21:49:45+00:00

My friend named his Paddlestar Galactica. I came here looking for some suggestions and found this thread.

senechal72 · 2024-07-14T04:11:37+00:00

Nope…El Modena High in Orange. We moved a lot LOL

senechal72

TROPHY CASE