selfhost VS Zulip

I just started using Pyinfra to wrangle a bunch of servers and it is a breath of fresh air compared to Ansible. I moved all of my server OS installs to Fedora CoreOS which doesn't ship with Python in the OS and since Pyinfra doesn't need Python on the host node I can kick off tasks in bulk to do server things. It is great. I cannot wait to see where the Pyinfra project goes.

On a side note, one of the most hacky things I came up with to get Ansible working on Fedora CoreOS was to bind mount a container rootfs that had python 3 and then symlink it into the right spots. You can of course add Python in with rpm-ostree if you want but I wanted to avoid layering packages at the time. I wasn't proud of it. But it worked.

https://github.com/forem/selfhost/blob/main/playbooks/templa...

This is not the suggested way of deployment by the forem team, nevertheless I found it easier and smother than using the deployment selfhost, however I think it's good to know different approaches and use the one suits you the most, if you don't have time to manage a server I think using a pass like Render does the job, and it's cheaper then Heroku at the time of this post.

Forem Self-Host. You should probably know Forem. But in case you don't, just know that DEV is hosted on it.

I only use Podman for my workloads these days. Docker was always a headache for me on Linux. Podman allows me to quickly do whatever I want with containers and I can use systemd or a simple bash script to easily create services on my workstation or in production with Nomad with https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad-driver-podman

I am super thankful for the team of developers that work on Podman. It has really come a long way since 2.0 and they are very responsive to issues in my experiences. If you are using Linux as your daily driver and you use Containers give Podman a try. Here are some examples of the things I have done with Podman.

https://github.com/forem/selfhost

https://github.com/jdoss/ppngx

https://gist.github.com/jdoss/25f9dac0a616e524f8794a89b7989e...

https://gist.github.com/jdoss/ad87375b776178e9031685b71dbe37...

To automatically generate a TOC, you can use an online tool like the GitHub Wiki TOC generator. I used this tool to create the TOC in Forem’s Selfhost project when I was a developer advocate there.

Hi, everyone; I just tried the tutorial for deploying a self-hosted instance of forem (https://github.com/forem/selfhost) on AWS. A step in the tutorial asks for the creation of an AWS user with Programmatic access called forem-selfhost with the following

We (I work for Forem) have an opensource selfhost installer [0] so you can have total control over your data and community too.

[0] https://github.com/forem/selfhost

If you know what Forem you want to build, please follow the instructions and go live — again, the Self-Host instructions are available here!

Zulip — Real-time chat with a unique email-like threading model. The free plan includes 10,000 messages of search history and File storage up to 5 GB. also, it provides a self-hostable open-source version.

(1) Zulip Chat - https://zulip.com/ - seems to be reasonably popular, but more people should know about it

I’ve been using it for over 5 years now [1], and it’s as good as ever. It’s way faster than any other chat app I’ve used. It has a good UI and conversation model. It has a simple and functional API that lets me curl threads and write blog posts based on them.

(only problem is that I Ctrl-+ in my browser to make the font bigger – I think it’s too dense for most people)

(2) re2c regex to state machine compiler - https://re2c.org

A gem from the 90’s, which people have done a great job maintaining and improving (getting Go and Rust target support in the last few years). I started using it in 2016, and used for a new program a few months ago. I came to the conclusion that it should have been built into C, because C has shitty string processing – and Ken Thompson both invented C AND brought regular languages to computing !!

In comparison, treesitter lexers are very low level, fiddly, and error prone. I recently saw dozens of ad hoc fixes to the tree-sitter-bash lexer, which is unsurprising if you look at the structure of the code (manually crawling through backslashes and braces in C).

https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-bash/blob/master/...

These fixes are definitely appreciated, but I think it indicates a problem with the model itself.

(based on https://lobste.rs/s/endspx/software_you_are_thankful_for#c_y...)

[1] https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/04/26.html

A few more truly in the vibe of open source projects not advertising their hosting providers: https://plane.so/ , https://element.io/ , https://www.loomio.com/ , https://zulip.com/ , and it keeps going... Very few open source projects, in the FOSS sense, are advertising their hosting provider.

I was so excited to see this happen!

I'm not a customer of yours, but your blog posts inspired me a lot. Your journey through quitting caffeine is a great and heartening read.

I've got two things to say;

1) Will you consider source-availabling the web portal (app.keygen.sh) too? Some enterprises could use it for easy management/support for custoner's licenses. Although now that I think about it, it could also discourage custom, more suitable implementations for each use-case... I'm torn on this one. I would like to see it available on GitHub too just out of curiosity too. It's very beautiful.

2) For a team + customers' chat, I cannot recommend Zulip enough. It's a joy to use and has the most innovative chat system I've ever seen. https://zulip.com

I hope your business keeps prospering!

Zulip | Senior Flutter Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We're building the next generation of Zulip's mobile apps in Flutter. We're looking for a senior engineer with Flutter experience to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. Our Flutter prototype is just a few months old, so this is a greenfield opportunity to help shape the app's architecture from early on.

For full details, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at [email protected].

Anyways, I'm an internet stranger, not a social media expert. So let me know what you all think. And if we make a discord or zulip or something to make this a reality, let me know and I'd love to help any way I can.