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Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

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Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#41

Post by agent281 »

miloignis wrote: post #25
boplicity wrote: post #9

A local dev environment that works. Doing this again, and again, and again.... ...truly sucks. After not working on a codebase for a year, or two, I usually need to set up everything again -- and often run into very stupid/pointless issues that waste an hour, and often much more, just to get to the point where I can start the actual coding process. This is pretty much why I've stopped coding. I don't have the time to…

I think local reproducible dev environments is a great and less-intense way to get into Nix (the package manager)! https://devenv.sh/ is built on top of Nix as well to make it more approachable and user friendly for exactly your use case.

I’ve been toying with the idea of using Nix for dev environments at work. What does devenv add on top of Nix?

Edit: And if you know, how does it differ from devbox?

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#42

Post by dotnwat »

_huayra_ wrote: post #21

A sane build system + package management solution for C++. I have to cobble it together via CMake + Conan every time and I'm praying I get put on a new Rust project someday, but my position and sizeable comp are mainly for being a "legacy janitor".

We've been a CMake shop from the beginning, but have recently been testing out Meson to see if it could work for us and we've been pleasantly surprised by how nice it is.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#44

Post by Traubenfuchs »

Deployment pipelines, CI/CD, (dev)ops. It's my biggest pet peeve ever that every company I have ever been to has written highly customised CI/CD/(dev)ops tooling that I had to fight with or adapt at some point. I don not understand why anything beyond heroku/dokku complexity is ever needed. The needs for teams to manage infrastructure is lunacy in this day and age.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#45

Post by lrvick »

boplicity wrote: post #9

A local dev environment that works. Doing this again, and again, and again.... ...truly sucks. After not working on a codebase for a year, or two, I usually need to set up everything again -- and often run into very stupid/pointless issues that waste an hour, and often much more, just to get to the point where I can start the actual coding process. This is pretty much why I've stopped coding. I don't have the time to…

I ship a Dockerfile and Makefile with every single project that contains absolutely everything I need to build, test, and debug that codebase.

I cd to a project and run "make shell" and I am back in a docker container with every tool and the current working directory mounted in it with permissions all mapped 1/1, scripts in path, etc.

The only tools I need on a dev machine are an editor, a browser, a container runtime, and make.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#46

Post by seanw444 »

kinggencha wrote: post #18
dmak wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with 1Password or Bitwarden?

Not sure how easy self-hosting those are, but any paid-for and/or online offering by a third party is useless. This should have been clear long ago, but the LastPass breach should have made it obvious.

Self-hosting Bitwarden with the open source Rust re-implementation of the server (vaultwarden) seems like a good option. I've been looking into setting it up for my company.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#47

Post by petiepooo »

probably_wrong wrote: post #36

My parent's computers. In the ancient times known as "the 90s" you could find PC technicians who would run anti-malware, dig into the register, and overall tune your computer while leaving everything more-or-less as it was. Those technicians are long gone, replaced by people who make easy money by wiping your computer clean and putting your old files in a folder called "Backup". I'd gladly pay someone to do it right,…

You can blame the ever-increasing complexity of MS Windows for that. My parents are now on Linux, being that the only things they do on it, other than open the occasional email attachment, are all browser-based. It's easier for me to occasionally run an apt-get upgrade remotely than it is to try to keep Windows free of infestations.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#48

Post by ezekg »

dmak wrote: post #19
ezekg wrote: post #6

A licensing system. That's actually why I ended up building my current business 7 years ago. So you've found a problem -- now build a solution. :)

Could you elaborate? are you talking about something like MIT license? or something like 90s software where you get a key for an app?

A license key system. Particularly one that also manages license entitlements and activations (e.g. what machines or nodes a license is allowed to be used on).

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#49

Post by johnjeremy »

alanbernstein wrote: post #35

A photo deduplication tool. For some reason I always resort to writing small, scenario-specific python scripts. A couple of reasons I can recall: - 3 or more input directories which have specific roles like "main archive, prioritize", "temp folder, remove from here first" - multiple levels of equivalence test, including file name, exif tags, checksum, perhaps perceptual hash (e.g. for flagging downscaled images to be…

I found this library worked extremely well for finding and removing similar images https://github.com/elisemercury/Duplicate-Image-Finder Maybe this doesn't fulfill your main and temp folder requirements but worth a try.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built more than twice and wish someone had built for you?

#50

Post by lrvick »

miloignis wrote: post #25
boplicity wrote: post #9

A local dev environment that works. Doing this again, and again, and again.... ...truly sucks. After not working on a codebase for a year, or two, I usually need to set up everything again -- and often run into very stupid/pointless issues that waste an hour, and often much more, just to get to the point where I can start the actual coding process. This is pretty much why I've stopped coding. I don't have the time to…

I think local reproducible dev environments is a great and less-intense way to get into Nix (the package manager)! https://devenv.sh/ is built on top of Nix as well to make it more approachable and user friendly for exactly your use case.

I would note that while Nix is very well designed, and may be incredibly useful in untrusted dev environments, it should not be used to compile anything that touches production. Nix got where it is so quickly by mostly ignoring basic supply chain integrity like author package signing. It is always one compromised Github account or single dev workstation away from a massive supply chain attack.

Nix, NPM, Brew, Pip, etc all have basically the same blind trust security posture and should thus not be trusted. I generally suggest Debian in a container for a dual use dev/compile container made of signed/vetted/reproducibly-built dev/build/debug dependencies.

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