Everything Runs on My Dev Box Now, and That’s Fine

It’s hard to believe it’s already November. It’s that magical time of year when I still have a mountain of time off to burn, so I’ve been spending it on side projects, both new ones and cleaning up old ones.

Feedhouse

Feedhouse has become one of my favorite side projects. It fills the hole I used to fill by mindlessly scrolling Reddit. I’m not a stunning conversationalist, so I was mostly just trawling subreddits anyway, and it turns out you don’t have to wait for people to post things when you go straight to the source.

The original plan was to add a subscription tier with some extra features, partly to help pay for the hardware. Maybe one day it’ll get there. Today is not that day. As the site grew, so did the hardware requirements, and it got hard to justify paying $75/mo in hosting just to hopefully make a few dollars back.

That sent me looking for other hosting options. After researching Cloudflare Tunnels and a healthy amount of trial and error, I’ve moved all my hosting to Docker containers running on my development machine. There are trade-offs, of course, but if the site goes down for a few minutes while I reboot, it’s not the end of the world. It turns out the sites run a lot better when the database instance isn’t starving for memory.

DismalThreads

This site has given me years of enjoyment just hacking away on it. It started life as renegade-forums, a ColdFusion forum modeled after Reddit and named after the RenegadeBBS software I ran back before the internet was a thing. Somewhere along the way I lost the database and schema, so I rebuilt it from memory and it became DismalThreads.

Then I rewrote it in BoxLang and ColdBox using CBWIRE. Earlier this year I tried to launch it on Hacker News, but my account was too new to post. I launched it anyway and gave it nine months. The thing about communities is that they need people to thrive. I guess that’s what makes them communities. Mine never got the people.

So naturally I rewrote it again, this time on BoxLang and boxlang-express, and released that as bxThreads. When I launched Feedhouse, I had to decide whether the server was worth paying for every month just so I could post all the interesting links I found (and probably a few not-so-interesting ones). In the end, I decided it was time to shut it down.

Once everything moved to Docker, though, the cost stopped being an issue, so I decided it was time for a facelift.

DismalThreads is back. This time the interface should feel familiar if you’ve used Facebook or LinkedIn, minus the clickbait and memes of Facebook and the LinkedIn-ness of LinkedIn. I like to think of it as Facebook for developers. And by “for developers,” I mean:

• Code that gets reviewed. Comment on a specific line of code in a post. If the post is edited later, the comment is marked outdated, like a real code review.
• Questions with accepted answers. Ask a question, mark the answer that worked, and the person who answered gets reputation for it.
• GitHub everywhere. Sign in with GitHub, pin repos to your profile, and get rich cards for repo, issue and PR links. Groups can follow a repo and have its new releases posted automatically.
• Profiles that are actually useful. Skills that friends can endorse, experience, recommendations, featured links, and an “open to work” flag. That’s the LinkedIn part, without the LinkedIn part.
• Groups. Public or private, with moderators, pinned posts and a moderation log.
• Every kind of post. Polls, events with RSVPs and reminders, job posts that expire on their own, and long-form articles with drafts.
• Live updates. Reactions, comments, notifications and who’s online all update in real time, with push notifications for when you’re away.
• Messaging. Direct messages, plus saved posts, tags and search.

If that sounds like your kind of place, come poke at it at dismalthreads.com. Be warned: if you show up, you’ll be most of the community.