Nice. I have a recent story about this.

Basically, we have a process to sell something that is too big, complex and extensive for smaller customers so the idea was to drastically reduce this process to be able to give smaller customers the ability to sell that process.

So, in January, I got an email with the assignment to do this. Since we don’t do it like this, I say he should submit a ticket in our tracker and plan it into a release to have some sort of structure and organisation in what is being done and when. Such a thing should also happen with our project manager because, well, he is the person managing what is being worked on so he should know what is going on and what is important. This doesn’t happen.

4 Months later, the person sending the mail asked me what the status of that is, I didn’t know because I was busy with our other stuff that actually followed our organisation.

This feature is super-duper important and already promised to some customers so it needs to happen quickly. Okay, we plan it in a release and I start working on it. The Plan was that since this was a “1 Task Process”, doing that in our existing process, wouldn’t make much sense and we decided to do this in a separate process that then relies on the codebase of our “main” process. While working on it, more and more issues popped up that made it really complicated to do it like that because our existing code just relied on a lot of things even if they are not in use. This meant that, to use it in the capacity as I needed, I would have to rip a lot of stuff out of the existing codebase and made this more commonly useable even though this wasn’t “used” in the process anyway.

Yes, that sounds weird but you need to know that this is a codebase grown over 15 years so weird things are to be expected.

I do all of that and the sales team has a meeting and I was asked if I had already something that could be presented there, which I had, sort of.

This is presented in that meeting and suddenly this is not enough. “There needs to be other places to be involved in this as well and the customer needs to be able to make changes after the fact”.

So, from the initial “1 Task process” we are now at a more complex process to handle the additional stuff of involving a separate entity of the customer, starting another process and being able to make changes to the initial variables.

I don’t necessarily have a problem with changing things, but the utter lack of thought or planning of the person submitting the feature request is what drives me nuts. I mean, you had 4 months to think about what this should do and all you could come up with were 4 bullet points that just barely resemble the current state. Adding to that, the constant emphasis on “This is important and needs to happen ASAP”. I mean, in literally every mail that person sent to me was the “this is very important, this needs to be priority”.

It is like, yeah dude, I got that the 2nd time you wrote that to me but you could have at least invested some time yourself to properly think about this more than 10 minutes. To maybe notice that what you want isn’t enough to do what you need.

“Smart” apparently doesn’t mean “it does things on its own” but simply “you can control it over our app”

I don’t know where I read it but IIRC religion is being used as a simple answer to very difficult and possibly uncomfortable questions: why are we here and what is our purpose?

It is fairly easy to believe that something, a god, created us instead of that the existence of humanity was just a fluke, a stroke of luck enabling us to evolve were we are now because it is just easier to grasp even if it is proven. That we evolved from simple beings into more complex organisms instead of just “being created”. Evolution creates so many quite difficult questions that it is easier to understand and believe that someone just wanted us to exist.

When someone is believing in a religion they also always have some form of " it won’t be over" scenario like when you die, there is nothing truly “the end”. You just won’t vanish and this can be terrifying for many because the following question could be, what sense does it make to live at all when our existence is just so insignificant in comparison to everything else?

So, in short, it is an easy too to make sense of things that almost everyone can understand it.

Unfortunately, things like this can and will be abused.

Well, i mean i would be all for that but in reality it might not be that easy. It could rely on dependencies that are proprietary that cannot be shipped or provided with the project.

It could alone be that the connection is hard coded in the game itself so instead of just booting up the server and being able to play you would now have to do something to the game itself too that it finds your server. Nothing really that cannot be addressed, I mean people could do that with ragnarok online private servers but not something your normal gamer could do.

Probably depends on the background as well. They could have hardware running (multiplayer server) that gets so little activity that there is no benefit and only loses them money.

It also doesn’t look like the game has steam integration.

Connectivity or rather the lack of it…

I have a Samsung TV and recently got a new cooling fan and now when I start the fan when my TV is on, it says it detected a new device. I don’t know what my TV would want with a fan maybe control the speed for more immersion?

But there is also no way for me to disable that. I also got regular requests of my neighbor’s to connect to my TV until I disabled the notification for it. No, I couldn’t disable that my TV doesn’t even allow it to be seen, I had to enable to not automatically connect devices and disable that notifications are being shown. That thing isn’t even connected to the internet.

Could also be “Continous Integration” (from CI/CD - Continous integration/Continous deployment/delivery)

judging by the “Why build a new CI?” section their old “CI” was built on Azure DevOps so I would go with Continous Integration here.

as a player, Streaming boxes that have an Android OS are great but Google Supplies Android TV as the default launcher with those devices which has gone downhill for a while now.

80% of your UI is now covered with Ads.

So if you switch to something like an Nvidia Shield or something like that definitely use a different launcher instead of Android TV. I currently use the Projectivy Launcher which is so god damn clean and only contains what I want to see.

A year or so ago I actually tried to get into Jellyfin and it wasn’t really that pleasant experience.

A bit of background: I am mainly a Java and JavaScript developer and have used Plex for over a decade now. I even developed a Plugin for Plex with Python. Naturally, Jellyfin came across my radar so I checked it out but they didn’t have a Metadata Provider for the Metadata Source that I needed for some of my Libraries. There were alternatives but this would require to completely change my libraries which I wasn’t interested in.

So, I set out to just do it myself. I did know some C# but was by far not as up-to-date as you could be but I didn’t really care because I wanted to see how that project went and if I could get into it I could learn more about C# while doing it.

However, while I could get the Plugin compiled and loaded into a Jellyfin instance and even get some metadata downloaded, I quickly hit brick walls. From what I could tell, there weren’t even method comments for, you know, methods you need to implement so that you can write a metadata provider.

Not being able to resolve this through trial and error or looking at other currently active Providers (who seem to all do things differently, so no consistency) I asked on the Jellyfin Subreddit for help and got told to use the Matrix Chat instead. This was already annoying because that isn’t how you amass knowledge that someone can fall back to and find when they have questions because Matrix is a walled garden. Regardless I asked there as well and didn’t get any help or the responses didn’t really help me.

So, I shelved the project.

What I want to say here is that FOSS Projects like Jellyfin should prioritize their documentation. The easier it is for people to understand how things work and “get into” the project the more people would be willing to actively contribute. I know that what I described above could just be my inexperience or lack of understanding and knowledge of C# and everything around it but I would imagine that many developers are in the same situation as me and would like to contribute but can’t get over those hurdles. This is even worse for new developers who might want to stretch their legs in the Open Source community but are still learning.

Reading this with “we need developers” and “you can contribute to our documentation” looks a bit contradictory to me because shouldn’t the “experienced” contributor not create the documentation?

I use a pihole which is a small computer that checks every domain request and blocks them when they are on one of my blacklists. This works great for browsing the web because you just don’t see most ads anymore. I also use adblocks for, for example, YouTube because pihole can’t distinguish between ads or legitimate requests when they come from the same domain.

I also download all videos from YouTube to watch. And I also don’t have cable.

Basically, I see so few instances of ads anymore that any few ads are getting so annoying. The 1-2 ads in front of a YouTube video or in the middle, I just don’t watch that video anymore.

But when I really noticed that was when I was spending the day with my father and we were watching a TV show on some free provider, every 10 minutes there were 1.5 minutes ads. Which is by far better as normal TV in my country (Germany) but damn, this was really annoying after just a single episode and I’m glad I don’t have to see those at home. It just interrupts the flow.