Writing the Humadroid story for it’s blog was more than a trip down memory lane; it turned into a brainstorming session that brought two new features to light. It’s funny how reflecting on your journey can spark inspiration for the road ahead. Let me share with you what’s been brewing in my mind and how your feedback can play a part. 1. Capturing the Pulse of Team Changes: The first idea hit me while reminiscing about the teams we’ve built and evolved over the years.

Navigating the journey of a solo technical founder comes with its unique set of challenges. From coding to deploying applications, the technical aspects often come naturally. However, the multifaceted roles involving accounting, marketing, design, and notably, product development, present a broader spectrum of challenges. While resources abound for tackling marketing and accounting, discussions around product development are notably scarcer. For small teams or products, the key often lies in the articulation of problems through brainstorming and discussion, a task that typically requires a collaborative effort.

Kamal’s effectiveness is undeniable. Its integration with power-efficient bare-metal servers, such as those available on Hetzner.com, elevates its appeal, allowing for the simultaneous deployment of multiple Rails applications (or applications developed with other frameworks) on a single server. This setup can be further enhanced with the inclusion of additional components like PostgreSQL or Redis. It’s important to note that while each service in this configuration operates within its own namespace, Traefik does not share this characteristic; only one Traefik service can be included in our setup.

Although there are some existing solutions to expose local port to the internet, I’ve decided to use self-hosted solution. I’ve prefered this over hosted one for few reasons: I wanted to have some pre-configured subdomains I wanted those subdomains to be fixed and/or reserved just for me Custom domain was a nice addition Cost of hosted solution was just too high to justify it. It was just a fun exercise Idea is simple - anyone accessing address like some_name.

Protobuf or more precisely Protocol Buffers is a data serialization format developer by Google and it is designed to be language-agnostic. What’s important (and what makes it a better choice than ie. JSON) is that it automatically provides validation of data, preserves order in arrays and provides pre-generated classes that do all the hard work with set of setters and getters. Magic is done by compiling .proto files with schema into language files.

Disclaimer - I found this solution thanks to my friend Piotr who needed it for different use case, described below. Recently I had to use multiple repositories on one server with different deploy keys. Solution suggested by github docs was not viable, because I could not alter hostname easilly, as it suggest. It turns out, that actually you can use different keys on per directory basis, when using git. It’s doable thanks to git conditional includes:

It turns out, that I’ll will do hell lot of writing in weeks to come. So this is, what I’m focusing on now Writing for Engineers - this is great summary about writing in tech companies. At the end you can find few recommendations, eg. “Leverage small writing tasks as exercise” - and I find it super important. Email should be well strucutres, support ticket should well describe the problem to avoid confusion and bring understanding.

Longer break, than initially anticipated and planned. Actually spent either on vacation or quite busy building… a treehouse for my kids. At some point I (probably) will share some photos and details about it. Emery – personal workspace for busy people - this is… interesting. Testing this this week. As they call it - Personal workspace for busy people. Normally I use sort-of bullet journal, but I was missing something that could help me put my tasks on a calendar.

I wanted to have a break from normal, day to day stuff at the company (one or the other). But as soon as I got to our destination and I found out, that there is no network coverage nor internet, I started to feel unsafe. One of todays links is about our attention span. For me is also about how addicted to tech and connectivity are we. Life is not short- “The most surprising thing is that you wouldn’t let anyone steal your property, but you consistently let people steal your time, which is infinitely more valuable” I’m not sure yet about how I feel about recent wave of stoicism, but this resonates with me.

I’m on long overdue vacation, so this weeks set of links is shorter than I’d like it to be. Same as the next one (most likely) will be, as my connectivity is limited. On traveling light - https://levels.io/carry-on-world-travel/ and https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/06/20/backpack.html. I’m a hoarder that would like to become minimalist. Or at least have less useless stuff. But in the end I still buy (or print) a lot of shit. Reading such posts every few weeks makes me think about making a change.