[conspire] I am the very model of a Scary Devil Monastery

[Steve Litt]

Nick Moffitt said on Wed, 1 Nov 2023 11:47:35 +0000

>Well now, I just ended a good long run as a SysAdmin/GSA/SRE/whatever
>they're calling it this week at a major Linux company.
>
>I've literally never held another job during the nearly 18 years I've
>lived in the UK, and this is my very first P45 of my entire life.
>
>On advice of counsel, they have many fine qualities and I wish them
>well.
>
>So what's good in the free software world these days?

Everything! Free software is a wishing well. But first:
What is a P45? The only P45 I've ever heard of is the Kahr P45 pistol,
and I doubt you meant that.

Here are some of my perennial free software favorites:

* Vim
* VimOutliner
* Bluefish (for HTML creation)
* Python
* C (and NOT C++ !)
* Runit (init system the djb way)
* All the GNU utilities
* Inkscape
* Dovecot
* Fetchmail
* Procmail
* Linux and BSD
* The Void Linux distribution
* dmenu
* UMENU
* LXDE, LXQt, and Openbox
* ctwm
* dash for scripts, bash for interactive
* HTML5 plus CSS
* Javascript (That's my story and I'm sticking to it!)
* 

As you can see, a lot of my favorites were around before you went to the
UK. As Rick can tell you, I'm a retro-grouch greybeard stuck in the
past afraid of change curmudgeon and I like it that way :-)

Here are some of the things that have impressed me lately:

* Qutebrowser
* Harbour language 
* Nginx
* Unbound/NSD

There are a lot of new computer languages such as Haskell, Go and Rust.
These are extremely promising languages, but they don't match my
skillset because I'm much better with smaller instruction sets, and
also I'm currently not that good with functional programming. I've
investigated them, and you should too, because a lot of people are
having great success with them.

There are zillions of new web frameworks. I tried Rails for awhile in
2004: Not a fan. Python has Django, Flask and Bottle. Bottle is the
simplest, and it's pretty good, but I've had limited need to create web
apps. Perl has one too, but in my opinion Python, Lua and even Ruby
have surpassed Perl. Perl was great when it had no competition, but
those days are gone.

From what I hear, knowledge of the whole virtual
machines/containers/mass-deployers (Ansible, Chef, Jenkins, etc) is
necessary for jobs and contracts in today's software industry.

Some relatively new softwares I think suck include systemd, pulseaudio,
dbus, and Gnome3.

SteveT

Steve Litt 

Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21