I very briefly tried a couple zwave light bulbs with a USB zwave adapter for Home Assistant, but couldn’t get it reliable. I do like the mesh + low power idea though and played around with ZigBee dev boards previously.

I have settled on mostly Tasmota firmware on ESP8266 based devices. Lots of switches (from the CloudFree shop among others), smart plugs, and other devices. I also like to assemble my own sensor/relay boards, which Tasmota is great for. I did have to set a fixed 2.4Ghz channel on one router, and later set “IoT mode” on my Unifi network, to avoid devices falling off the network. I also have flashed most of the devices, but am happy to do that (not so different from uploading an Arduino sketch once you’re used to it).

Didn’t expect the snake to turn the box. Excellent loop.

I have ESP8266 WiFi modules running Tasmota firmware for a few parts of this. Some report temperature (and humidity just for fun), I like DS18B20 sensors better than SHT30s which seem to have a bit more self heating. Then I also have Mitsubishi mini split heat pumps for which there’s a Tasmota control library. MQTT for communication + HomeAssistant for UI + AppDaemon for automation scripts in Python.

Examples of the UI in HA:

Yeah, every time I find some weird annoying behavior or some missing feature in MySQL, PostgreSQL is doing it right.

That said, also ask yourself if you really need a relational database, or whether an object store or append-only / timeseries db would fit better.

“Will I have root on my dev machine” is on my list of interview questions, now.

Ugh, yep!

Though in this case I guess there’s the benefit of engraved numbers providing accessibility.

Seems cool!

Does it handle sharing a task list between people? Or syncing between multiple clients / handling concurrent edits?

I see the manual says keyboard commands are the main way to control it. Does it work in mobile?

Looks like you’re putting lots of work into it, thanks for sharing.

Is there a self hosted OpenTelemetry consumer?

Company started on Asana, individual teams jumped to Jira, company eventually followed. I was always accidentally creating blank tickets in Asana.

Yeah, if you don’t want the next dev (or your future self) to accidentally undo that corner case you fixed, better put a unit test on it.

Just being forced to talk about how it’s going and what’s blocking can be helpful, so I’m glad you’re questioning for to be more useful, not doing a little rubber-ducking isn’t all bad.

Where does the NYPD keep getting these expensive but apparently useless robots?

Right. I care less about 60% less power, and more about will it randomly connect my phone to my car as my partner drives away instead to the speakers I was already using on the desk next to me.

There’s still a huge racial disparity in tech work forces. For one example, at Google according to their diversity report (page 66), their tech workforce is 4% Black versus 43% White and 50% Asian. Over the past 9 years (since 2014), that’s an increase from 1.5% to 4% for Black tech workers at Google.

There’s also plenty of news and research illuminating bias in trained models, from commercial facial recognition sets trained with >80% White faces to Timnit Gebru being fired from Google’s AI Ethics group for insisting on admitting bias and many more.

I also think it overlooks serious aspects of racial bias to say it’s hard. Certainly, photographic representation of a Black face is going to provide less contrast within the face than for lighter skin. But that’s also ingrained bias. The thing is people (including software engineers) solve tough problems constantly, have to choose which details to focus on, rely on our experiences, and our experience is centered around outselves. Of course racist outcomes and stereotypes are natural, but we can identify the likely harmful outcomes and work to counter them.