I’ve had a great experience with the TrueNAS Mini-X system I bought. ZFS has great raid options, and TrueNAS makes managing a system really easy. You can get a box built & configured by them, with 16 GB ECC RAM and five (empty) drive bays, for about $1150 at the most affordable end. https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/

One thing to be careful about: you can’t add drives to a ZFS vdev once it’s been created, but you can add new vdevs to an existing pool. So, you can start with two mirrored drives, then add another two mirrored drives to that pool later.

(A vdev is a sub-unit of a ZFS storage pool, and you have to choose your RAID topology for each vdev and then compose those into a storage pool)

The common wisdom about backups is the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which recommends:

• 3 total copies of your data, including your original or “production” data
• 2 different forms of media
• 1 off-site copy

Proton Drive can be a decent off-site backup, but it would be a good idea to make a separate backup of your data on a different form of media like an external hard drive, just in case Proton Drive goes down, or the data there gets corrupted and you need to restore a known good version.

What worked for me is learning some better letterforms from some free images from the Write Now book (by Getty-Dubay) on italic cursive. It’s a different kind of cursive from the awkward one I was taught in school, and it’s a lot easier to write and read.

I think the biggest improvement in my handwriting was just finding letterforms in that book that are both easy to write but that are also more clearly distinguishable when you write quickly. For example, just putting a little curl at the bottom of my lowercase T’s, I’s, and L’s made them a lot more aesthetically pleasing but also more clearly distinct from other letters.

Once you find some letterforms like that, it just takes a little practice to rewrite your muscle memory.

“Spam trap” and “spam honeypot” are exactly the keywords to search for. I found a bunch of info about some services you can use to set them up. I’d recommend adding “-avoid” to your search filters because every email marketer has their own article titled “About Spam Traps and How to Avoid Them” which just pollutes search results if you’re actually looking to set up your own.

Speaking of a “black hole” email address, are there any addresses set up for the purpose of catching spam? Like if Gmail had an address for spam that contributed to its spam detection.

Tridactyl!

Learning new programming languages is an awesome way to expand your programming brain. If you want to stay in the same scientific computation niche, you can check out Julia or Mathematica. If you’re just looking to broaden your horizons, the world is your oyster. For me, learning Clojure really cooked my noodle but made me a much better programmer since it taught me functional programming.

Also, just read other peoples code! You can learn the conventions that way. Though for you it would best to find other products within your niche, because I’m not sure if general web dev code would be super helpful.

There are techniques that are broader than any single language’s conventions, and I think learning those are how you can improve. That’s hard to teach, though, and it comes from experience with a few different languages, in my opinion.

And honestly, I can totally respect the “conventions be damned” attitude, because at the end of the day, you’re trying to make something that works, and if nobody else is reading that code, you’ve made the right trade-off.

They’re valid concerns, for sure. I have less issue with this article in particular than I do with some of the other things he’s written. In the context of his other opinions, I feel pretty dismissive of whatever arguments he presents, valid or not. He’s extremely biased and I think folks have to take everything he says with a grain of salt.

That’s from an article that the author wrote recently https://nuejs.org/blog/tailwind-misinformation-engine/

This person thinks Tailwind is just a grift to make money, prioritizes separations of concerns over all else (I contend they have SoC brain-worms, but I don’t want to get too spicy), and ignores all the actual arguments people use for Tailwind, like how it’s specifically built to suit component frameworks over someone raw-dogging that HTML and CSS. Their argument boils down to “get good” which is the argument that folks use when they’ve never been on a team and have never had to make actual trade-offs.

I’ll suggest Elixir. It’s a language that runs on the same virtual machine as Erlang, which has proven to be great for ultra-reliable and excellent at managing many, MANY concurrent processes.

Elixir itself builds upon this great foundation with a syntax similar to Ruby, but entirely functional. It’s a delightful language to read and write.

There’s no way of knowing if anything we’ve determined via science is “correct,” we’ve just developed a model that is consistent with our observations. There are still plenty of unanswered questions in astronomy.

One of the all-time classics! I think all devs should read this.

Oh you’re so right, I never use those so I completely forgot :X

In Elixir & Erlang, they don’t even have a for-loop construct. You have to use recursion. And I think that’s beautiful. I also think tail-call optimization is beautiful.

ixSystems sells pre-built machines running TrueNAS. They’re a little pricier than building on from scratch of course, but they have ECC ram and have everything set up out of the box. Funds also support the development of TrueNAS. I got one earlier this year and I love it. Fussing around in the web UI requires some technical know-how, but if you get it set up for them, I expect it to run like a dream.