s4 VS Tiny-Tiny-RSS

the idea of map reduce remains a good one.

there are a number of interesting innovations in streaming systems that followed, mostly around reducing latency, reducing batch size, and alternate failure/retry strategies.

even hadoop could be hard to debug when hitting a performance ceiling for challenging workloads. the streaming systems took this even further, spark being notorious for fiddle with knobs and pray the next job doesn’t fail after a few hours, again.

i played around with the thinnest possible map reduce stack a while back[1][2]. i wanted to understand the performance ceiling for different workloads without all the impenetrable layers of data bureaucracy. turns out modern network and cpu are really fast when you stop adding random software layers like lasagna.

i think the future of data, for serious workloads, is gonna be bespoke. the primitives are just too good now.

1. https://github.com/nathants/s4

2. https://github.com/nathants/bsv

pipes are great. is the other process on another cpu or another machine? honestly who cares.

https://github.com/nathants/s4/blob/master/examples/nyc_taxi...

i dragged my feet on go for a long time. i also thought that skipping go and moving to rust was the play. a few years later, i still write python often, but i don’t build systems with it. python i now use like bash, to glue things together and automate random things. it’s a fantastic language and i will never drop it.

the verbosity of go is the biggest hurdle for a pythonista. the thought of giving up context managers, decorators, iterators, comprehensions, exceptions, coroutines, it’s unthinkable. in comparison go is ugly. your aesthetic mind screams in protest.

write go full time. dive in. as months pass, not only will those aesthetic objections fade, your mental model from python cleanly transforms to go. go is what mypy tried to be. the cost was aesthetic changes. the benefit is worth it.

the zen of python says if it’s easy to explain it might be a good idea. this is go, and it is.

i rebuilt a reasonably sized project from python[1] to go[2] over the last few years. i also have a system that i maintained both python[3] and go[4] implementations for, sharing a test suite in python.

go, like python, is fantastic. use both in whatever amount works for you. don’t read about them, build with them. you won’t regret it.

1. https://github.com/nathants/cli-aws/tree/bb78e529e7d1d3f95ac...

2. https://github.com/nathants/libaws

3. https://github.com/nathants/s4/tree/python

4. https://github.com/nathants/s4

I just want to vent here a bit:

Feedly is the only app I ditched because I did not understand the interface. AT ALL. I tried multiple times, like really hard, over the course of 2-3 years, and all it delivered was a feeling of being insanely stupid.

I started my attempts around 2012 (kind of around Google killing Reader). I could not understand if that app even deliver that same functionality as Reader, could not understand if it allows to just add custom RSS url. I was not sure which title-description was an actual pair. I struggled to find article boundaries - I scrolled while reading and it suddenly just closed that and opened another unrelated thing. I struggled to use categories. I struggled to stabilize the layout - every week or so it switched from a list, to two-pane thumbnails, then some other weird view. I tried to set up my custom view but it just toyed with me. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out how to actually browse my feeds by publish time (instead of some random metric app thrown them at me).

Dark theme just made it even harder - I had no idea what I'm looking at. I felt that I have more control over watching commercials on TV, than actually using Feedly.

It made me start hosting TinyTinyRSS [0] app on public internet for me and friends for many years. When I finally turned off tt-rss instance (due to my servers going down permanently) I came back to feedly... to just realize I don't even try to use it any more. A decade old frustration ended up with simply uninstalling.

[0] https://tt-rss.org/

> I want to host my own RSS server though and then maybe use a native reader to view it, like an RSS of RSS feeds.

I've been using Tiny Tiny RSS to do this for years. It works very well. https://tt-rss.org/

Tiny Tiny RSS (TT-RSS) https://tt-rss.org/ is a self-hosted, open-source RSS feed reader that provides a lightweight and customizable solution for managing and reading RSS feeds. It offers a simple web-based interface, allowing users to aggregate, organize, and access their favorite content from various sources in one centralized location. With its extensibility and robust feature set, TT-RSS offers a powerful tool for individuals who prefer to have full control over their RSS reading experience. As a dedicated programmer and avid user of Tiny Tiny RSS (TT-RSS), I can confidently say that it is an exceptional self-hosted, open-source RSS feed reader. With TT-RSS, I have the freedom to personalize and fine-tune my RSS reading experience to perfection. Its lightweight web-based interface offers a seamless way to aggregate, organize, and access all my favorite content from a multitude of sources. TT-RSS has become an indispensable tool in my daily routine, empowering me to stay informed, discover new insights, and effortlessly manage my RSS feeds with ease. If you're a fellow developer seeking a powerful, customizable RSS reader, TT-RSS is an absolute game-changer.

I would recommend Tiny Tiny RSS or FreshRSS as examples but you can use anything you want, there's plenty of them. Why would you want to pay for something like this?

Tiny Tiny RSS

Back when I was using Tiny Tiny RSS I've developed af_feedmod to download the article from the linked webpage so you'd end up with a full feed. This was later forked into FeedIron and seems to be somewhat popular by now.

TinyTinyRSS feed aggregator

Have you seen https://tt-rss.org/