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Man, this could have been written just for me! :)

I'm so guilty of abandoning projects in the past before they're even remotely done. It's mainly due to losing interest in the subject itself rather than dealing with the bugs and legacy and bad code decisions as you get further along the journey.

I used to get bent out of shape about it and criticize myself for it but I came to realise that it meant I didn't really have enough interest in the thing I was building in the first place.

Case in point (and a bit of a shameless plug tbh) just this morning I finished, end-to-end my current project I've been working on for 4 months: a .NET hosting site like tiiny host where you drag your zipped .net project onto the page and it gets automatically hosted with a unique url and whatnot.

For the last month or so, I've been at the really fiddly stage where all the moving parts came together and they all had bugs that had to be fixed both independently and together with other bugs and finally it worked this morning (still to polish it though).

I usually don't get to that stage and have abandoned a great many things over the years but this project has captivated me from the start with only a minor loss in productivity (due to a health issue with a family member tbh).

I'm now at the fear stage the author mentions - will anyone want to use it? We'll soon find out!

The long and short is that I discovered that I abandoned things frequently in the past but I realise I just wasn't that into the ideas! I don't worry about it as much now.

But, great article :)


You mentioned tiny hosting; I recommend trying https://static.app/ as they offer unlimited traffic, which could benefit your projects as they grow.

I've used this many times myself and it works great.

However, as I mentioned below, I read something recently that says local account options are being removed in an upcoming version (I can't find the article now).

I presume it means the binaries are being removed from the ISO so this may no longer work (except for Enterprise and LTSC I'd imagine).


I read recently somewhere that this has been removed in the latest (alpha?) build now... their intention is clear: this install belongs to Microsoft, not you!


Microsoft shenanigans is the reason I switched recently to a Chromebook (Acer 516 GE 16GB - bought for £400 on EBay) and with minor exceptions it's been really easy.

I am a .NET dev who needs to remote into work via Citrix. I work locally on my own .NET stuff in JetBrains Rider and I can do it on the Chromebook now.

It's not perfect but, damn, it's really close: After installing the Linux Dev Environment I have all the tools I need.

The only issue is that sometimes when I open Rider, the font sizing is off - sometimes it's small, other times it's large. But Ctrl + MouseWheel takes care of it. Once or twice I had to restart the linux VM (right click, Close Linux and it's done) but that's it.

Anyway, the point is that nowadays there is becoming less and less reason to stay on Windows and I think Microsoft knows this too, hence trying to lock you into their ecosystem as much as possible and trying to dangle things in front of you to keep your attention.

But who would have thought that for £400 I can run all my .NET stuff on a Chromebook. Not only that, I switched from a 14700K on Windows to a 1260p running ChromeOS and coding/compiling is just as fast. It's nuts.

Side-note: Windows peaked at 2000...


A drag and drop hosting solution for .NET projects - Like tiiny.host but for .NET.

Should be ready for early adoption in a month or so.

It was one of those shower thoughts along the lines of "I wonder if it's possible to drag and drop host .net projects..." :)


I'm currently working on a .NET hosting solution where you zip your published .NET app and then drag the zip file onto the site and it's automatically hosted and a unique URL is created. Takes about 3 seconds once the zip file is uploaded.

Kind of like tiiny.host but for .NET... it's almost ready too :)

It was one of those "I wonder if this is possible" type of ideas I had in the shower and would you believe it... it bloody works :)


That’s sounds like a cool useful project!


Thanks. Just getting rid of the showstopping bugs at the moment... as always, works great on my local dev machine :)

It'll be running on Hetzner in the background so I'm just working on getting all the moving parts synchronized (and writing the docs!) and it will be ready for early access.

Hopefully in a month or so.


> It's worth noting that this is 100% about providing more information to vehicles rather than requiring vehicles to use the feature.

I'm calling it here and now: this absolutely will become mandatory in the nearish future. 100%.

Same as in Europe with the speed regulator thingy in the cars... advisory at first now mandatory in many places.


Rear cameras are required now, or will be in a few years. Dunno if this is a California thing or national, but just like the third brake light, this is already happening.

California is also working on legislation to require cars to be aware of where they are so they can notify the driver if they’re speeding.


* For some definition of near and mandatory

Even when they started mandating airbags in new vehicles, it took something like seven years to go into effect so car manufacturers had time to plan. And then they didn’t make cars that didn’t have airbags illegal.

Even the most universally embraced ideas take time to roll out.


I agree: it won't happen overnight.

It will happen within a handful of years though. Too much potential for control to let it pass...


We have to get the `internet` or some other network rolled out first.


Airbags aren’t a useful tool for data/control.


What about a partial vacuum?

Perhaps there is a hapy medium between air resistance and cushioning? Reducing the air by an amount might help.

Although, I'd be surprised if they hadn't thought of this already :)


a partial vacuum of only helium, tightly sealed to keep in the helium. The tight seals will work to make sure that when there is leakage, only helium leaks in. and if there is no helium component to the air outside, you'll just get helium leaking out thus improving your vacuum.


I think that parents have the overwhelming bulk of the responsibility for what their kids have access to but as I've said to my parents in the past: "You're up against Nobel Prize winners who work for an organization with the goal of getting you addicted to <insert_app_here>".

When you have thousands of devs trying to break your will power, you're really gonna struggle.

Social media has passed me by (almost 50yo) and I have zero interest in it but I have no doubt that if I did start using it, their algorithms would break me down, no matter how strong willed I am.

Unfortunately, like all addictions, the solution is probably abstinence.


But its trivial to fight against for the parents - just don't give them the damned phone/tablet/tv remote etc. Till teens there is little rational justification, and massive evidence against it.

But then real challenge starts - folks with microscopic attention spans themselves are supposed to actually spend hours with their kids on activities that hardly give any dopamine kicks. Kids are really just a brutally honest mirror image of the parents, and very few parents these days like that.

Had few colleagues recently visiting wedding in Singapore. The stuff they said about the city itself is pretty sad - no western parent they saw was actually raising their own kids, cheap (often abused) nannies from ie Philippines were in charge of that. They allow kids anything, no discipline, no boundaries because who wants to be fired if kids complain. And then when whole family minus mighty nanny goes to ie restaurant, they often saw a parent literally begging 7 year old to have 30 minutes for themselves ('I'll buy you any toy, any food, anything, just give us 30 mins please' kind of story). I wonder why they even bothered having kids these days if they couldn't care less about them afterwards, while giving it all to some empty corporate careers and partying.

Or those 'super parents' who travel with kids in the car a lot. Then you look inside and there are X tablets neatly arranged in the back. Our kids are used to stare outside instead or read books/magazines, important 'boredom management skills' that can't be taught otherwise.


I see it frequently myself: a parent in the supermarket pushing a child in a buggy/pram and the child is watching something on the phone... usually with high volume.

I used to get angry but I genuinely feel sorry for the child now: I suspect they will have zero attention span when they grow up and probably won't read books etc - There is no long-term upside to it.


They're selling prams with tablet/phone holders now, so the kids can learn to swipe before they can walk or even hold up a tablet. Better start as early as possible with "digital skills" I guess.


> the solution is probably abstinence.

That doesn't bode well, discussing this on a community site.

That also means to ask our kids to only ever establish social ties in setups we control: as adults have moved online (again, we're on a forum having this discussion), there's so fewer places irl to get random information. So a kid has to go through us to get anything, including information about what they want to watch/read/see.

A kid won't stumble upon a movie when there's no local theaters. Bookstores have also become way more limited if they're still there. Record shops are dead. Other kids recommendations only go so far, especially if they are also restricted. Libraries are the last bastion for a modicum of natural discovery imho.

Today for a kid to come into contact with something their parents don't care about, social media access is the main avenue left.


I don't want it to look like I'm picking on you here (see my other comment above) but that's a naieve take on things.

Not sure you realise but in the corporate world it's about politics and money. People (above entry-level staff) do things to look good to their boss. That's it! And saving money is a great way of getting promoted: "Look boss, I just saved us $500k a year in license fees!".

Saving $X per year using a "free" tool from Microsoft will always trump anything you pay for especially if you are all in on Azure, O365 already. It's a no-brainer.

Not only that, once the decision is made, it will likely never be changed until the higher-up that made the decision moves on, quits, or is fired, no matter how wrong or bad the decision was (well, within reason, of course!)

I'd love it to be as simple as making a good case for the competition, and I've had to make that case many times over the years, but the reality is that a bundled product from Microsoft will win in a place that uses other Microsoft stuff, vs a paid product thats 100x better, faster, stronger, whatever.


It's like the old adage of why Enterprise software sucks so badly to use.

It's because it's being sold to managers and executives who don't actually end up using it, and never have to deal with the consequences of buying it.


Exactly. If you want a great example of this, look no further than Jira!


Maybe an unpopular statement but I don't think Jira is that bad by itself. It's just a very flexible and configurable system which ultimately ends up reflecting structure and complexity of the host organisation.


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