ohlookabird

Thanks for the pointer to this fantastic talk. The excitement, thoroughness and dedication they put into this project along with their entertaining presentation is wonderful.

I do the same and transactions work well most of the time. I use ZFS as filesystem for my DBMS (Postgres), which allows me to do consistent snapshots. Being able to rollback has been helpful for testing complex or large queries as well.

Works very well in my experience. I never get unwanted ads. The only time this is mildly annoying is during election time. Parties usually distribute flyers/pamphlets with their ideas (which are otherwise known, but still interesting to compare to each other).

Yes, this helps a lot! For me, it also helps to have a training plan, or simply calendar events that remind me what exercise I should do at a given day. Usually this allows me to trick my mind and avoids the decision whether or not I should exercise and I will "stupidly" do what the calendar says. This made it much easier to develop a habit.

Very useful, thank you!

For many years I worked in a high profile research institute (neuroscience) as an RSE without a PhD. Still don't have one, and that's okay (for the path I'm on). Quite a few of the other RSEs in the institute don't have one either. In total I'd say maybe 50% didn't have a PhD.

With coding, I often find Antoine de Saint-Exupéry helping me to limit myself: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Absolutely! Noticing that it usually takes ~20min for me of getting into the groove was a profound revelation for me a few years ago. I noticed a pattern that if keep on powering through those initial 20min, there is a good chance you can continue being productive for a few hours or even the whole day.

But why would you not be able to reply with the aliased email? I do this regularly. Of course your mail client needs to support this, but using Mutt this is absolutely no problem (just change the FROM header) and I have heard from other users who use Thunderbird that they can also create new identities (just not as easy on the fly). In fact I wrote a small script for Mutt that would automatically set the correct sender if I reply to an email that contained a wildcard. Works pretty well.

How do you mean? This is exactly what I can do with my setup. If you are referring to the use of Gmail: I prefer to run my own infrastructure as long as this is possible.

Nice! I do something similar, but using an automatic aliasing scheme so that I don't have to manually configure an email address for each service and other users can use this without me knowing their aliases. In my setup, aliases can contain wildcards, represented as percent signs. If an alias phil.%@domain1.com is set up, all your examples will be sent to the respective aliased address. I use Postfix Admin with a MySQL database. Hence the Postfix setup looks like this:

    virtual_alias_maps = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql_virtual_alias_maps.cf,
                         mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql_virtual_alias_maps_wildcard.cf,
                         hash:/etc/postfix/virtual

The first file is just regular aliases, and is basically a simpler version of the second file (no SQL selections/filters) and could also be merged into a single query with the second file:

    user = mail
    password = <password>
    hosts = 127.0.0.1
    dbname = maildb_postfix
    query = SELECT a1.goto FROM alias a1
            LEFT JOIN alias a2 on (a2.address = '%s')
            WHERE '%s' LIKE a1.address
            AND a1.active = '1' AND a2.address IS NULL

This works, because the percent sign in the alias is picked up by the LIKE keyword. A setup like this allows me to configure many aliases through Postfix Admin's web admin page, including optional wildcard aliases (depending on which users wants that). It has been working very well for me over the past 15+ years. Also, I haven't looked at that SQL query since then and would likely write it in a nicer way today.

Note: with the above code SQL injection could be possible through an alias name, but given that in this setup I am the only one managing the mail accounts, I was willing to take this risk. :-) Postfix Admin might do some cleaning/validation, but I haven't checked on it.

Found it also a while ago (maybe also on HN), and was captivated by it. I had to spend a whole Saturday reading through it. Absolutely horrifying.

I only get this when loading the page:

This page crashed. Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'destroy')