Daniel Quinn

I host my stuff with Hetzner in large part because their tools are straighforward and easy to use and they're based in a country whose laws respect privacy.

If you're hosting with a company that's US-based, you have to worry about their laws affecting your site, which isn't an acceptable requirement in my opinion.

The Windows mentality is one of products. If you have Product A, you can use it to talk to Product B. Whenever I've been forced to work with Windows-based systems this has been evident in the documentation. In Linux land however, integrations are done on protocols. If you have Product A it speaks Protocol X, so you can talk to your product so long as you conform your communications to said protocol.

The benefits here are huge: so long as the protocol is open, any software (critically: software you want to write) can talk to Product A and get the job done. This is why the Linux world is superior to the Windows one: transparency.

I don't actually like Flask. Sure it's lightweight, but it's only light because it doesn't do much of anything without help. Setup & configuration is necessarily messy and the documentation actually encourages some questionable design patterns.

I only used it in this project because I was 100% confident that the web service in question was only ever going to need to do one thing and one thing only. It's also convenient that i could just do a apk add python3-flask without having to worry about using pip to manage packages.

Heroku is great... if you have a small site you want to deploy quick & easy and/or don't have the basic dev/ops skills to do it yourself. It's also great if you need to scale and have a tonne of money you don't mind spending on hardware you could get for ⅛ the price.

Heroku goes out of its way to distance you from the end-product: your site. You write some code, commit, and push, and like magic it's on your website. Neat! But... why is everything so slow? Why is my available memory so abysmal? What year is this?

For the amount we currently pay Heroku to host 2 websites and 4 celery processes, I could get 18 servers with 32GB of RAM each from Hetzner.

Heroku is nifty, but their magic is stupidly expensive and from where I'm standing, not worth it.

I used Gentoo Linux for more than a decade and even though I've since moved onto Arch, I still love it.

Gentoo is what you use when you've got a very particular setup in mind: maybe it's an odd piece of hardware (I installed it on a Sheevaplug that ran a vending machine years ago), or maybe you want to build a machine capable of cross compiling a bajillion other things for different architectures and plug said machine into a swarm. Gentoo is great for that: maximum customisability and total control of your operating system.

I'm routinely frustrated by Asana because it's clearly a tool created by designers, imposed on developers.

• No integration with code repositories.
  • No task numbers
  • You can't reference a ticket in a commit and expect any feedback in Asana
  • You certainly can't close a ticket with a commit.
  • There's no link between CI progress and a ticket.
• No Markdown support (you can't even put links on text!)
• Boards and task lists aren't linked.
• It suppresses middle-click so you can't open more than one ticket at once.
• It logs every last change to things like assignments, but then folds up the conversation to suppress past comments.

Here's what it does have:

• Pretty backgrounds
• Cute little creatures that appear at random

This is not a tool for engineering. Please don't force your nerds to use it.

Sentry is a thorough tool that does one job, does it well, and gets out of the way. It plugs into pretty much any project in a variety of languages, front-end and back, and the reports it generates are surprisingly useful and easy to follow.

It's big, it's bloated and gobbles down around 2gb of RAM on a bad day, but I use PyCharm because it's an amazingly powerful tool. You may think that your editor is all you ever need, but nothing beats PyCharm's insight tools, built-in linter, massive library of extensions, and broad support for common frameworks like Django.

I use it every day and after 6+ years, I still love it.

I use Python because it's a beautiful (both visually and in terms of function) and multi-purpose language. In Paperless, Python is the primary connecting tissue holding all of the parts together: it's the basis of the consumption engine (communicating with Tesseract OCR via pyOCR) and the user-interface (based on Django).

Django is an amazing web framework that comes with everything you need, and makes it easy to turn off the stuff you don't.

In the case of Paperless, I needed a simple way to build a site that had a pre-built "CRUD" interface, and that's the Django admin. Django also supports things like management commands and signals, which we use throughout the project along with its built-in testing framework.