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#developer

80 posts70 participants2 posts today

I use computers every day and, personally, I wish there were wayyyy fewer of them.

The issue with modern engineering, technology, and infrastructure is that we have taken all of our hardware problems and turned them into software problems. They are, as a rule, easier to deploy, but much harder to maintain and repair.

In a reasonable system it should not be possible, to hack a gas pump, or for there to be a need to update your refrigerator's firmware, or for an important component to be decommissioned overnight because a tiny startup on the other end of the world went belly up.

The value of physical hardware is that it can be directly inspected and manipulated in a way that software can't. It's harder for hardware to lie or cheat or hide anything whereas secrecy is a norm in software. The material of software is capable of misleading and confusing it's operators in a way physical objects struggle to do without a gimmick of some sort.

Hardware can be coerced to continue running indefinitely whereas old software needs the equivalent of a specially crafted, hermetically sealed life support system to outlive its usefulness for even a few years.

I'm reminded of when so much of the tools and infrastructure in our lives was stupid, direct, gravity fed, lever operated, simple machines that did one thing and did it well.

Now stuff breaks because a wildly abstracted system of captured photons that we tricked into doing math decided that just one out of those gajillions of uncountable particles was in the wrong place.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy software. It's never been easier to just make a tool to solve hyper specific problems. I guess the issue is that software-centric solutions have just bled into so many applications to the point that it is wildly inappropriate and just plain annoying.

Okay, my website is down because I’m using an Azure Static Web App (free version) on an MPN subscription, and I kind of used all my credit, so now it’s paused until the next billing period.

Might take this opportunity to look around for a UK or European based hosting provider instead. But all the ones I’ve seen so far are Wordpress based :blobcatflop:

Don’t suppose anyone has any recommendations?

Supply-chain attacks on open source software are getting out of hand

It has been a busy week for supply-chain attacks targeting open source software available in public repositories, with successful #breaches of multiple #developer accounts that resulted in malicious packages being pushed to unsuspecting users.
#security #supplychain #opensource

arstechnica.com/security/2025/

Gloved hands manipulate a laptop with a skull and crossbones on the display.
Ars Technica · Supply-chain attacks on open source software are getting out of handBy Dan Goodin

curious to hear from everyone's structure: do you and the teams in your company actively use or follow #devops principles or is it more the traditional "here are some #developer​s'" and "there's operations" workflow?

also, do you actively measure #dora metrics? do the dev teams work in #silos? is there a dedicated #SRE team?