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>On the web today, [...] In order to submit an edit for this page, I hosted all my code on microsoft's servers.[...] I assume you're talking about people using

by jasode 5y ago

>On the web today, [...] In order to submit an edit for this page, I hosted all my code on microsoft's servers.[...] I assume you're talking about people using Github instead of hosting their own server? But before Github, people also avoided hosting code on their own servers or paying $10/month for a datacenter VPS -- by using previous services such as SourceForge or Codeproject.com. If a bunch of people need to do activities <X> and <Y> but <Y> has higher priority in life, then some other service conveniently doing <X> will emerge. That's what Github is... it's a natural emergent phenomenon arising from people not wanting to mess around with running self-hosted Gitlab on a laptop, or Raspberry Pi, or on a $10/month Digital Ocean droplet, etc.

sodimel 5y ago
Agreed, perhaps the reason so many people use this service is because it may be because it solves a problem. But another approach (my point on the rant) is the "I don't want to know how things work, I just want them to work" approach, which I think more and more people are using these days (we can relate this to mechanics, where everything is getting more complex). Because things are getting more complicated under the hood but seem "easier" to understand (because we're adding piles of abstractions on top of piles of abstractions), fewer people tend to take the time to create things with the "old" technos and really learn how things works. (ps: this exact txt file is self-hosted on a dell optiplex fx160 with 4GB ram and an old processor, bought $20 in 2017 on ebay)
- simonw 5y ago
  I know exactly how to self-host - I ran Trac for years - which is why I keep all of my projects on GitHub now. I know full well how much work it is to keep something like that maintained and secure and properly backed up. I also know how many things can go wrong - including nasty things like missing billing emails when a credit card expires and losing the associated instance. "GitHub, by default, writes five replicas of each repository across our three data centers to protect against failures at the server, rack, network, and data center levels" - I can't compete with that! https://github.blog/2021-03-16-improving-large-monorepo-performance-on-github/ https://github.blog/2021-03-16-improving-large-monorepo-perf...
  - sodimel 5y ago
    I don't really know what to think for big, critical applications because I've never had to manage one myself. I can agree that looks very difficult and time-consuming, and that indeed companies devoted to the sole task of maintaining all the stack up and running are amazing. However, for small-scale projects, personal blogs or website, I really like the idea of self-hosting. Knowing that all the data are in my home is reassuring (apart from the fact that my house could catch fire). (I realized that you're one of the co-creators of Django; thank you very much for this masterpiece)
    - fragmede 5y ago
      > apart from the fact that my house could catch fire Your house feels like a fortress, until something happens to you or someone you know. Not just a natural disaster, like a hurricane, tornado, flood, or earthquake, but small disasters too. House fire, as you mentioned, or having your house burgled, some crazy power company glitch, or something as mundane as a child with a cup of water in exactly the wrong place. Even if you are meticulous enough to drive backups off-site backups, that somewhere is probably close enough that it's possible for a natural disaster to take out your house and your backup site. Encrypt your data and save it somewhere geographically far away, if it's really important to you. It's doable manually but for everybody else, imo, an online service (eg Dropbox or Google Drive) is easier, which means it's more likely to happen and not fall off the bottom of the Todo list.
      - habeebtc 5y ago
        I have thought about this some. I do prefer having local copies of everything, because I don't trust The Cloud. Malicious actors can get your account shut down, and then all your stuff is gone, locked up and the key thrown away. My solution has been to run a RAID 1 NAS device for all my local stuff (including all my media I want to stream in the house - nice having movies and TV when internet is down). 4TB drives, rated for NAS usage. Important documents, and sentimental photos (many GB's worth from the last few decades) I periodically back up onto an external SSD and put in my fire safe with physical documents of importance.
- geofft 5y ago
  > Because things are getting more complicated under the hood but seem "easier" to understand (because we're adding piles of abstractions on top of piles of abstractions), fewer people tend to take the time to create things with the "old" technos and really learn how things works. That isn't necessarily true. I suspect the same number of people are taking time to really learn how things work, but the abstractions are allowing more people to get involved in writing and contributing to open-source software, developing services, etc., so the apparent fraction of people doing stuff on their own is lower. But if it weren't for the abstractions, it's not that we'd have more people doing things under the hood, it's that we'd have people not doing them at all. I'm one of the folks who insists on knowing how things work under the hood, and it's an enormously valuable (and fun) professional skill, but it also frankly limits what I can do. I won't write projects in React because I don't really understand what React is doing and I don't feel comfortable with that, so my dashboards are cronjobs that template out some HTML and upload it to static hosting. (Which is fine, my job isn't making dashboards, my job is debugging prod systems.) Meanwhile my coworkers are throwing together incredibly impressive UIs very quickly. If it weren't for React, neither of us would be writing these UIs. I remember open-source development in the pre-GitHub days. There was, frankly, a whole lot less of it.

by jasode 5y ago

sodimel 5y ago

Agreed, perhaps the reason so many people use this service is because it may be because it solves a problem. But another approach (my point on the rant) is the "I don't want to know how things work, I just want them to work" approach, which I think more and more people are using these days (we can relate this to mechanics, where everything is getting more complex). Because things are getting more complicated under the hood but seem "easier" to understand (because we're adding piles of abstractions on top of piles of abstractions), fewer people tend to take the time to create things with the "old" technos and really learn how things works. (ps: this exact txt file is self-hosted on a dell optiplex fx160 with 4GB ram and an old processor, bought $20 in 2017 on ebay)

simonw 5y ago
I know exactly how to self-host - I ran Trac for years - which is why I keep all of my projects on GitHub now. I know full well how much work it is to keep something like that maintained and secure and properly backed up. I also know how many things can go wrong - including nasty things like missing billing emails when a credit card expires and losing the associated instance. "GitHub, by default, writes five replicas of each repository across our three data centers to protect against failures at the server, rack, network, and data center levels" - I can't compete with that! https://github.blog/2021-03-16-improving-large-monorepo-performance-on-github/ https://github.blog/2021-03-16-improving-large-monorepo-perf...
- sodimel 5y ago
  I don't really know what to think for big, critical applications because I've never had to manage one myself. I can agree that looks very difficult and time-consuming, and that indeed companies devoted to the sole task of maintaining all the stack up and running are amazing. However, for small-scale projects, personal blogs or website, I really like the idea of self-hosting. Knowing that all the data are in my home is reassuring (apart from the fact that my house could catch fire). (I realized that you're one of the co-creators of Django; thank you very much for this masterpiece)
  - fragmede 5y ago
    > apart from the fact that my house could catch fire Your house feels like a fortress, until something happens to you or someone you know. Not just a natural disaster, like a hurricane, tornado, flood, or earthquake, but small disasters too. House fire, as you mentioned, or having your house burgled, some crazy power company glitch, or something as mundane as a child with a cup of water in exactly the wrong place. Even if you are meticulous enough to drive backups off-site backups, that somewhere is probably close enough that it's possible for a natural disaster to take out your house and your backup site. Encrypt your data and save it somewhere geographically far away, if it's really important to you. It's doable manually but for everybody else, imo, an online service (eg Dropbox or Google Drive) is easier, which means it's more likely to happen and not fall off the bottom of the Todo list.
    - habeebtc 5y ago
      I have thought about this some. I do prefer having local copies of everything, because I don't trust The Cloud. Malicious actors can get your account shut down, and then all your stuff is gone, locked up and the key thrown away. My solution has been to run a RAID 1 NAS device for all my local stuff (including all my media I want to stream in the house - nice having movies and TV when internet is down). 4TB drives, rated for NAS usage. Important documents, and sentimental photos (many GB's worth from the last few decades) I periodically back up onto an external SSD and put in my fire safe with physical documents of importance.
geofft 5y ago
> Because things are getting more complicated under the hood but seem "easier" to understand (because we're adding piles of abstractions on top of piles of abstractions), fewer people tend to take the time to create things with the "old" technos and really learn how things works. That isn't necessarily true. I suspect the same number of people are taking time to really learn how things work, but the abstractions are allowing more people to get involved in writing and contributing to open-source software, developing services, etc., so the apparent fraction of people doing stuff on their own is lower. But if it weren't for the abstractions, it's not that we'd have more people doing things under the hood, it's that we'd have people not doing them at all. I'm one of the folks who insists on knowing how things work under the hood, and it's an enormously valuable (and fun) professional skill, but it also frankly limits what I can do. I won't write projects in React because I don't really understand what React is doing and I don't feel comfortable with that, so my dashboards are cronjobs that template out some HTML and upload it to static hosting. (Which is fine, my job isn't making dashboards, my job is debugging prod systems.) Meanwhile my coworkers are throwing together incredibly impressive UIs very quickly. If it weren't for React, neither of us would be writing these UIs. I remember open-source development in the pre-GitHub days. There was, frankly, a whole lot less of it.