I don't understand the sentiment. OTEL is better than anything I've ever used before. Do I like every part? No. My personal no-no is the automatic instrumentation which I always bypass and just DI it myself, I don't like the "global" by default approach in Golang and I had to fight team mates who were all for using it. That said, no other observability library that I've ever used was so good overall.
The perf is meh, but tbh if you look at the kind of code we, regular developers write for work, it's probably still vastly better.
Setting up Kubernetes (eg with Talos) really is a one-time investment in the sense that you have to figure out what you're doing (what operators to add, how to connect them to they work together, etc.) and is a valuable skill also for work.
Of course then there's the maintenance - updating operators, Kubernetes, whatever else you have, but you don't have to do it and if you want to do keep up with recent versions then it's just as much work as on Ubuntu or any other distro. The upside with k8s is that you can definitely roll back (I'm just assuming you're using GitOps).
Besides, you'll probably want to add all of that Kubernetes functionality at some point anyway - eg you may just at first deploy your server/app via ClickOps, have some issue, decide GitOps is the way to go, then decide that you really need to have automatic certs, then decide that DB backups would be good to have. With Kubernetes you just keep extending it and never really have to "rethink" the approach cos it's really difficult to shoot yourself in the foot unless you really want to and have a shred of understanding (and to clarify I'm speaking about small deployments), and of course because you're using it yourself your knowledge grows meaning that your expertise grows.
I was in US three times for work events. Every single time I would try to walk somewhere and would be forced to navigate around pickup trucks stopped in the middle of a freaking crosswalk. Sometimes those cars were so large that I could stand right in front of it and I’m convinced the driver would not be able to see me. It was by far the worst thing about my time in the US. Like you have so much space, why do you need to block the damn crossing?
So I’m personally a huge fan of k8s and while I agree it may be „complicated”, it’s because deploying applications is complicated. (I want to point out that there is no requirement no set up cert manager, ArgoCD, external secrets, etc. - and many people who’d consider a VPS would happily slap a .env with an unencrypted secret then ssh to update, but when they choose Kubernetes they take the long route of doing proper GitOps and complain that there are so many things to configure :)
But I found funny that the OP summarized to use Kubernetes when CTO is no longer the only dev.
You can actually treat kubernetes as a glorified docker compose engine. Deploy pods, deploy nginx instead of ingress controller, deploy certbot cronjob instead of cert-manager, and believe it or not, it'll work! On a single server!
People often compare Kubernetes with thousands of additional services to a simple VPS, but that's not apples to apples comparison.
> many people who’d consider a VPS would happily slap a .env with an unencrypted secret then ssh to update
I just want to point out that you can totally still do this with Kubernetes. Of course it's not correct, but you can save that unencrypted secret in a .env file right into your container while you're building it - no need to use Kubernetes's support for supplying environment variables from the manifest. And of course, you don't even need a Dockerfile to build that container - you can just exec into a running container, paste it in, and then docker save.
Kubernetes doesn't save you from making stupid decisions, it just makes it easier to make better ones.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough - that was my point as well. You can do that, but when people switch to Kubernetes a lot of them do a proper (or better) job of avoiding that, but compare to previous experience where they'd just ssh to update the env, etc.
Website with solitaire/card games. There are so many sites, but all of them are either full of bugs, full of ads or both. So long time ago I've decided to write a site for myself that works really well, and then I shifted my attention to other projects.
This time - I'm so close! I probably need few more weeks to somewhat polish the game and fix the rendering quirks and I'll be ready to put it online for easy access when I'm bored lol.
Hmm, but weren't you already rating websites by clicking on the search results before? I don't see how that changes the game - and I must admit I don't know much about SEO - but in my view we were always rating results and that was influencing the position. Now they make the linking obsolete or at least less important signal... that's good? It means that relevant content is going to be surfaced to the top. Win-win honestly (and yes, Google will continue to use users-generated signals to drive their revenue like they always have).
This is great! I've been trying to get into local models for a while as I share the sentiment that local models will eventually be so good that there won't be a need to use frontier models for most coding tasks (perhaps that's already true today?).
I have zero experience building computers - where would I even start? I mean, aside from the things already well documented and mentioned in the blog post.
Building computers is very easy. I would suggest watching a YouTube video to get the general gist, and then once you buy the parts, just Google for whatever doesn’t go well.
I built my first Pentium 4 one when I was like six, so I’m sure someone much older that’s into tech can do it without an issue.
There are also tons of Discord communities that are willing to help you live if you encounter any issues.
I agree, but for small tasks - <20 lines that I can understand in a minute or two - perfect. Thinking about it - I have hundreds, if not thousands of tasks that I would like to do, improving pipelines, migrating from one tool to another, but never have time. The only question is - if I don't have time to do it, do I have time to prompt it?
The perf is meh, but tbh if you look at the kind of code we, regular developers write for work, it's probably still vastly better.