People wouldn’t mind paying taxes as much if they knew where it was going, instead of it going into a black box and no one really sure if it all makes it out to the needed services.
Hi! I'm a member of the Community team at DigitalOcean. I wanted to thank you for your kind words about our tutorials. This kind of feedback means a lot to us. We're glad we could help you get your web site set up.
Thanks for the tutorials and for keeping them up to date. I’m probably not their target audience for the most part, but when I need to do something in an unfamiliar stack, [stack name] + digitalocean is usually my first search. Wish you guys had a little more of a professional oriented products (think AWS/GCP) and no ‘max 10 servers’ kind of rules so I could use it.
You can contact their Support to get that increased. Just guessing at the reason, but if there was no limit, what happens if someone hacks your account and spins up a 100,000 node cryptocurrency mining farm?
The same thing applies to AWS, and AWS doesn't have '10 servers maximum' limit.
Beyond anything, it tells people about their target audience, which is indie development. That's fine, and it's a great market to be in. But in the case I have to spin up 17 servers in 24 hours in three continents, I can't really afford to deal with DigitalOcean's support under that kind of stress. This doesn't happen often, but when it happens, it absolutely breaks you.
AWS most definitely has service limits that apply to all products including ec2 for this exact (and other abusive) reasons. In fact, the aws limits are even more convoluted and can hit at random if not tracked. More details here: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_ru...
Yeah, as I was building out some apps over the past year it was a game of ‘which account limit will I hit next’. Most of them require a support ticket to be raised, and justification.
Hey Rolleiflex - Thanks so much for being a DigitalOcean customer! We would be happy to increase your Droplet limit if you get in touch. Just visit the support link from your Cloud control panel to make the request or drop me a line directly (first name @).
For what it's worth, my account has a limit of 25 and I've never requested an increase. So I guess after some period of use and payment they trust you and increase your limit automatically?
I've been a DO customer for 5 years but I'm not sure when my droplet limit was increased.
FWIW, I find AWS limits confusing and seemingly random. Also, the fact that you can't limit total spending is _very_ unfriendly to (at least indie, as you point out) developers. I have no experience with DO though, maybe that will change with this offering.
Have you actually dealt with their support though? Your example of going from (seemingly) zero servers to 17 across 3 continents in 24 hours (indicating unforeseen absolutely incredible traction and growth) seems significantly less likely than getting a response from their support team increasing usage limits within the same timeframe.
As a Linux SysAdmin I love coming across a tutorial from DigitalOcean when Im searching for a howto because I can always be sure that they will be updated, well written and very complete. A big thank you to you and the rest of the team!
They are also great in demonstrating knowledge in a new field. For example, if you do C# at your day job but you want to move into Go. Showcasing side projects can demonstrate some experience. This helps sidestep the "well, I don't have Go experience" issue.
This -- exactly. I know of at least one person who's done this and a few others who were able to move into areas of their preferred language (i.e. going from a job that was mainly web/C#/MVC to mainly REST/C#/Angular or React) by doing this.
Even within a larger organization it's possible to use side-project examples as a demonstration that you're ready to move from a team that uses one discipline/language to an unrelated team. While a large organization might be willing to move a senior developer who's a less-perfect-fit from a different department if they've demonstrated that they can be trained/learn what they need to know, it's a lot easier if they can demonstrate that they're a lot more than a "less-than-perfect fit"
IRC is an open protocol. Messages like what you see can be hidden by the client or suppressed by the server. And free intermediary servers can keep logs.
It's amazing to me how people think Slack is this amazing tool. If someone had thrown millions of dollars at IRC, it wouldn't suck.
But instead, you'll fork over your personal info and insist I do too.
This has been my experience on the last two small things I built. I just reached for the jquery (or even just regular JS) because I didn't need that much.
Isn't it cool to have choices? I don't care if it's not cool to use jquery anymore. I shipped stuff and I'm not even sorry.
Front-end stuff doesn't have to be complex, but it is. For example, a lot of places using React think they need Redux too. And React-router. And many other components. React itself is quite simple. But the architectures that developers build are often incredibly complex.
This was the case with jQuery, Angular, and things that came before.
I see two main problems in software development, especially on the front-end. First, developers jump on brand-new ground-breaking frameworks and use them in production, learning how they work as they go. This results in brittle systems. That's not necessarily bad, but it's not always great from a maintenance perspective. React is hot right now. But there are a ton of in-production Angular 1.x apps out there because that was what was hot when those projects started.
That brings me to the second problem in tech - developers doing the "hot new thing" displaying a ton of hubris. It's "easy" and "straightforward", implying that anyone who doesn't get it just isn't smart or will be obsolete soon.
I'd worry more about losing my job due to not keeping up with machine learning rather than not learning whatever new JS framework people think is hot right now.
Here's the deal - web developers figured out server-side rendering 20 years ago, and managed to make turning databases into web pages easy about 12 years ago. It's possible to create applications that people love using a lot of that technology, with some JS on top. It's certainly faster to go to market with something that way.
Not every app is Facebook. A lot of the stuff people work on outside of HN fall into one of two categories:
1. Apps that are behind a firewall - internal in nature, used by a handful of enterprise users.
2. Apps that won't be around in 3 years from now because the company will shift focus/replace it with an off-the-shelf product/company gets acquired.
In both those cases, I'd look for the simplest approach to get something running, and simplest to maintain.
Bottom line: it's easier to leverage existing skill-sets than it is to ask people to learn a whole new thing all the time.
Anyway, at the end of the day, I don't really get too worked up about how another person chooses to solve the "make the browser display a web app." Every situation is different. React can be simple. So can server-side rendering with some Knockout/Stimulus/Intercooler/jQuery sprinkled around.
Maintainable quality code that makes money wins in the long run. Whatever you implement it in.
Because you can use this plugin for more than just emails. I've used this in a lot of backend systems that support rich-text interfaces but don[t support markdown.
> Like many students, she took classes she didn’t need, partly due to poor advising and partly because she was feeling her way toward a major.
I taught at a community college. A lot of people there are really just feeling around for what to do with their lives. A lot of them also didn't do so well in high school and needed to skip ACT/SAT requirements to get in to a 4 year school to do what they really needed. This translates into lots of general ed classes/GPA boosters.
When a student doesn't know what they want to do, it's hard to give them good advice. And if they didn't take school seriously in high school, it's harder for them to start doing it more seriously now.
Combine that with not knowing where you're sleeping that night, or trying to concentrate on an empty stomach, and yea, it'll take you a while to dig out.
I learned a lot of empathy teaching at a community college. Now, sure, we could talk about "personal responsibility", but there are a lot of things at play here. Lots of responsibility to share.
I understand that and if someone took 4 years to get a 2-year degree, maybe it would make sense. Keep in mind somehow she had enough resources (loans, financial aid, etc.) she should have been able to complete three 2-year associates degrees from scratch. Even if she was feeling her way toward a major, took some classes that she didn't end up needing, and had to take some remedial classes, there is no way someone who was trying (and it sounds like she is) shouldn't have been able to graduate in 6 years. The article said she talked to an advisor and implies she was trying to follow the advice she was given. If that is the case, this really should be considered educational malpractice on the part of the college.
That's her side of the story. Which I'm not saying is wrong. But, again, it's awful hard to advise people who don't have any direction.
I also didn't notice if she went full time or not. I had many students who took 4 years to get a single degree, because they only took 3-5 credits a term. Our program was 68 credits. They worked 40 hours a week.
I had young adults in my class who would attend every 8AM class - never missed a day. But they never turned in work. I asked a few of them why. Same story: "If I'm going to school, my parents stop harassing me." Other students didn't know what they wanted to do, but being in school deferred student loan payments, so they just kept enrolling on purpose, kicking a can down the road.
There are a lot of young people who do not know what they want to do in life. Heck, there are older folks like me who still don't.
I miss the hell out of teaching, but I don't miss seeing students go into massive debt aimlessly floundering their way through school. And I don't like that colleges take advantage of that fact either.
>I taught at a community college. A lot of people there are really just feeling around for what to do with their lives. A lot of them also didn't do so well in high school and needed to skip ACT/SAT requirements to get in to a 4 year school to do what they really needed. This translates into lots of general ed classes/GPA boosters.
Then I think we need to stop expecting that there's going to be some special path they'll ever take in life that's specific to them as individuals, at least work-wise. We should instead set up a general path that someone can take to earn a living without needing a personal drive in any particular direction, and let them be a unique individual outside work.
I think that pretty much describes an Associates degree in pretty much anything. You graduate with a 2-year degree of mostly general ed, but a few classes in something you think you might be interested in. If you want to get a 4-year degree you should have a much better idea of what types of things you'd be willing to spend another 2 or 3 years learning. If you don't go on for a 4-year degree you at least have an associate degree which is a huge step in employability above just having a high school diploma.
It seems to me that system that have you choose major at first instead of expecting you to continue "well rounded" unfocused general education would be better for those students.
Even if some would transfer midway, having to pick up goal and then have clear path to it would be easier for less preared students.
That's the system many universities have. Community colleges are intended to serve students who are unprepared for universities, can't afford to attend universities, or have other nontraditional backgrounds. Most community college administrators would argue that your suggested changes would make the college less able to serve its students.
There is always a tension between meeting the needs of the nontraditional student body and making sure students make academic progress. I agree with you that community colleges are not balancing that properly, but I don't think that something as strict as you suggest would be the answer. Making students choose a major when they don't know what they want to do with their lives is going to result in a lot of wasted time if they change their minds.
Most of the majors outside of STEM fields end up having the same coursework requirements anyway. Even at the University of California, many students spend the first two years taking the same courses. So, it's not clear that making people choose a major at community college would make much of a difference, except for STEM majors. It's only after transferring that most of the major-specific courses are encountered.
The aspect of community college that stood out most to me was how you could avoid interacting with the administration other than registering for classes. I think it would be a great step for community colleges to require every student to meet with an academic adviser at least once per year. Of course, that would probably require more advisers.
Many community college students aren't even trying to earn a degree. They just want to take specific classes to learn new skills or because it's fun. Nothing wrong with that, and no need to force them to pick a major.
