Things we wish we didn't know

zb is a tool for reproducibly building software, similar to Bazel.
(See the comparison page if you’re curious to know the differences.)
When a software build process is reproducible,
it will produce the exact same output
when given the same inputs.
Reproducibility is a desirable property for a software build process to have:
it simplifies debugging,
it enables build speed-ups,
and it is essential for digital supply chain security.
However, reproducibility is a difficult goal to achieve.

I have been using IntelliJ Idea at work for a decade or so by now, and it’s been a reliable companion. JetBrains IDEs have a bit of a reputation for being slow, but their feature set is incredible: powerful refactoring tools, a great VCS UI (though I like magit even more!), a huge number of supported frameworks, integration with just about any testing library for any language, code coverage tools, powerful debuggers, etc.

Why do people keep telling me to use PGP? The answer is that they shouldn’t be telling you that, because PGP is bad and needs to go away.

Storage for private, distributed, offline-first applications. Earthstar is a specification and JavaScript library for building connected applications owned and run by their users.

Everything you need to write flexible, future-proof Rust applications using hexagonal architecture.

Code discussions contain relevant information. Isn’t it a shame that we
keep these in the centralized GitHub/GitLab servers, far away from our
decentralized Git code? As soon as we move provider, we’ll lose all old
discussions! And how do you ever find the pull requests back from 5
years ago? Symfony has implemented a lightweight solution to this problem
years ago using a less-known feature of Git: Git Notes.

Sales pitches are the only place where “self-serve dashboards" work. In the real world, it's a different story.

Why "business" people don't use metabase/power-bi.

Living specification of the IRC protocol. Does not include brand new behavior, just existing behavior present in IRC software and/or networks (new extensions are IRCv3's area).