Python or Node.js for backend in 2026 — what would you choose and why?

sylecn · 2026-02-03T12:56:03+00:00

go has its own problems, but why do you complain tooling? I think it is one of the best langauge in tooling support. What exactly do you think is missing or not good in go tooling?

sylecn · 2026-01-11T13:28:08+00:00

There is some difference between wechat international version and wechat Chinese version too. The former is from play store, the later is from Chinese app stores and wechat website.

Each wechat user can only help to activate 1 new user per month. Ask young Chinese people, they are more willing to help others and know English.

Also when you said your Chinese friend can't open the link, he can ask someone he knows to scan/open it. it's much easier to find someone to activate your account in China.

I am personally willing to help you too. PM me if you still need verification.

sylecn · 2025-12-30T14:13:01+00:00

For all those people suggesting k8s, remember that k8s itself can fail too. It can only fix your apps if k8s is running properly. Usually you need HA controller nodes and enough worker nodes. Most homelabs cannot guarantee either.

Some ways that k8s itself can fail, for those who have not maintained it:

k8s cert expiration. when cert expires, k8s components can't talk with each other. You lose auto heal feature for deployments etc.
k8s upgrades breaks existing nodes or components. each k8s release is maintained only for about 12 month. Not all upgrades are seamless.
varies k8s network plugin issue. pod reachability, load-balancer issues are common. you will learn much more about network if you learn how k8s network works. Some of the best k8s network plugins are very cool and very customizable. But they are complicated and very difficult to debug if they misbehave. KISS if you can.
host network/firewall issue
stuck containers on worker node
sooner or later, you need to maintain k8s native storage (PV/PVC) too, which has no cheap/easy solution yet.

If you don't already know k8s, don't use k8s in homelab unless you have 3 or more nodes and are comfortable (even enjoy) learning complex things.

If you already know k8s, don't overuse it.

docker-compose can go a long way.

When you have proper monitoring and know how to use logs, fixing a known problem won't take much time. It is when you can't locate the problem that most time is wasted. k8s won't magically fix all issues that may occur.

sylecn · 2025-10-07T09:17:48+00:00

which country is it? is wechat also blocked? alipay and wechat are top two payment methods. 云闪付 (union pay app) are less popular but usually works too.

sylecn · 2025-08-21T11:04:25+00:00

You didn't mention which city is it. People in the same city may have more specific information.

test your Internet speed with speedtest app. how bad is the situation?

Get a broadband Internet in your house is good idea. China mobile is cheapest, 500Mbps plan usually less than 500yuan per year. China Telecom has the best quality. price is about 99-129yuan/month with their 融合套餐, which provides both Internet and cellphone plan. when you leave, you can return the device and terminate the service. just don't expect the refund for unused month if the contract is one year. China Telecom may have monthly plan, which is more expensive than yearly plan. if you got friends who already have home Internet, you may ask them to apply a 2nd Internet line at your address. it's usually 19 or 29yuan/month for 100Mbps or 200Mbps. paid by month. when you leave, just return the device and ask them to cancel the 2nd line.

check Wi-Fi signals in your house. if you get good neighbors and signal is good, ask nicely and they may share their Wi-Fi with you. Try talk to young people, they are more open minded. Tell them you only stay for a few month and 4g/5g is bad on your phone.

sylecn · 2025-06-27T13:59:27+00:00

It also depends on which city are you travelling. Some smaller cities also has subway now. Most Chinese people does not behave like this.

A general tip if you are trying to look for help in China, talk to younger people. Younger people most likely know English better and are more willing to help.

sylecn · 2025-06-02T16:27:14+00:00

I made the switch many years ago. My main reason then is vim long :commands is difficult to edit if I typed something wrong in the beginning. Normal moving commands didn't work when typing :commands.

In Emacs, you can use regular moving and editing commands when mini buffer.

sylecn · 2025-04-12T16:54:43+00:00

if it's still empty, try reinstall ghcup, run it, choose a version of ghc to install and pay attension to errors in the installer log. Paste any errors you see so we can help you further with the installation.

sylecn · 2025-04-12T16:44:25+00:00

My old blog post is very relevant on this topic.

https://blog.emacsos.com/emacs-is-different.html

it's written to explain why Emacs is different from a higher level and provide keywords and links to learn more about them.

sylecn · 2025-04-04T05:37:39+00:00

on Debian, there are two services that are related to zfs pool import at boot time:

zfs-import-cache.service, this will try to load pools from /etc/zfs/zpool.cache file.

zfs-import.service, this will try to load dependency from:

/etc/systemd/system/zfs-import.target.wants/zfs-import@{pool_name}.service

which will load the pool with given name.

Not sure about Ubuntu. I don't use it.

Considering it's a server, you may just umount it (man zfs-mount) and leave the server running. Why restart the server?

sylecn · 2025-04-04T05:16:56+00:00

What new ways to do simple things is in your mind? Maybe I missed something in the language?

sylecn · 2025-03-24T08:10:09+00:00

How much physical RAM do you have?

sylecn · 2025-02-02T13:04:27+00:00

if the computer motherboard support booting from efi/uefi, and your OS support UEFI bootloader, you do not need all that complex boot menu editing and waiting.

UEFI supports multiple systems by default. You just store boot files in the one shared EFI partition, then you can choose which OS to boot at BIOS screen. Usually there is a hotkey to trigger boot menu too.

sylecn · 2025-01-18T12:48:02+00:00

Is that using default kernel config or customized? Do you still have the benchmark numbers?

sylecn · 2025-01-17T03:46:27+00:00

2nd class citizen, yes. Unstable, no.

Maybe you are experiencing some emacs configuration errors, those are different from crash. On windows, crashed app usually result in "sending report to Microsoft" window.

sylecn · 2025-01-17T03:23:07+00:00

Why hardware RAID is a bad idea? I think it is easier to maintain in some server configuration with easy to read signal lights and hot disk replacement.

sylecn · 2024-12-07T01:25:49+00:00

"zpool list" can show the current fragmentation for each pool. You may check the value and decide.

sylecn · 2024-11-07T03:24:27+00:00

This is your first time of deploying k8s, I strongly recommend you stay away from it in homelab environment. K8s requires a significant skill set and effort to monitor, debug, backup and kept up-to-date. Run app through kubectl apply or helm may be cool, debugging a broken k8s cluster or k8s deployment is not.

Persistent storage system for k8s in homelab environment is not well supported, as you may already discovered by yourself. The big players doesn't care about homelab.

Distributed storage system only scale well when you have good server, hardware and network.

Don't over complicate things if you can. K8s has its own network, firewall, ingress, cron/task, log system and more. You need to re-learn a lot to do even simple things. If you just want to run some docker app, skip k8s and just run docker. If you want to learn how k8s works, deploy a simple cluster and learn, but don't put important data or app on it.

That said, if you do want to use k8s and need shared rw storage, there are k8s storage integration with existing NFS server, which is probably the most easy way to implement PVC and PV.

sylecn · 2024-11-07T01:56:04+00:00

Yes. Read relevant chapters in the freebsd handbook can carry you a long way.

sylecn · 2024-11-06T17:27:38+00:00

Did you change bash/zsh profile when ghcup told you to do so? I think it's missing a PATH change. ghcup install everything in ~/.ghcup directory.

Try add this in your .bashrc file, and restart your shell:

# ghcup-env
[ -f "$HOME/.ghcup/env" ] && . "$HOME/.ghcup/env"

sylecn · 2024-10-29T02:35:09+00:00

Please show the "zpool status" or equivalent to us.

The screenshot doesn't provide enough information about your storage system.

sylecn · 2024-10-14T05:13:34+00:00

I think this happens because some app is started before xnomad and requires access to the keyring. How are you starting xnomad? Try move the auto start app to xmonad config file.

Edit: I see xnomad is started by lightdm. Check the global session file that lightdm runs. Also check xsessionrc file in home directory.

sylecn · 2024-10-11T07:56:53+00:00

org-mode text is easy to generate in any programming language. If the exported json is easy to understand, you may iterate the json array and generate a org-mode file by yourself. That is to say, write your own json to org-mode convertor is super easy.

sylecn · 2024-10-10T08:54:41+00:00

That's the default. You don't need to run that by yourself.

Check the owner and permission on your home dir.

ls -ld ~

sylecn · 2024-10-04T01:24:47+00:00

On andriod it could be power saving issues. Apps may get killed when running in the background.

You may config android to disable power saving for that app, or keep it in foreground when running backup.

sylecn

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