DigitalDilemma

  • 0 Posts
  • 4 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

help-circle
  • Atlassian is shit for forcing us into the expensive cloud for a shit product.

    I feel your pain. Or rather, I felt it once and am now freed!

    We were big into Atalassian when they announced they were going cloud only. We had on-prem versions of Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket

    We pretty quickly said “Fuck that”, mostly because we have an on-prem policy for IP protection.

    I was pretty happy to spend some time searching for replacements, mostly because it was my job to apply upgrades to these steaming, tottering piles of badly written java horseshit. They looked pretty, but the upgrade process was convoluted and quite often failed terminally. I still think that the difficulty of upgrading the hosted versions was a driver towards cloud only, mostly because it exposed how shite the things were and how many complaints they must have got for offering an on-prem product that was so hard to maintain, despite looking pretty.

    I take some pleasure that the Atlassian share price is now half what it was before they did this.

    (If anyone was interested; Confluence and Jira were replaced by Youtrack. Bitbucket by Teamcity. Both by Jetbrains, both much easier to upgrade (Teamcity is web-based one-click), and our licencing costs are about half what we paid to Atlassian)



  • Traccar - a GPS tracker.

    It tracks devices around on a map and records stats about them. Used by fleet managers to monitor thousands of vehicles simultaneous, and also people like me with just two. The interface is a little quirky, but otherwise it’s a very solid and capable program. It shows a web map with live positions of the devices, battery state, speed, direction and other datapoints.

    My wife and I like to know where the other is because we both do dangerous shit solo. (She horseriding, me motorbiking, and we’ve both got health conditions). I get notifications when she enters any number of geofences, and can see where she is at any time - and vice versa. This has eased anxiety for both of us.

    Initially we used Life360 which is a nice and easy app to use. Then we found out that they sell your information to actively work against you. Not just basic stuff for advertising, but your driving habits, speed, style, accelleration rates - to car insurance companies so they can raise your policy costs, or potentially deny your claim entirely. (Just one reference but there’s heaps more)

    So we went self-hosted. Traccar is free and I keep our information private. Install a small app on your phone and register it, and done. Or it integrates with dozens of commercial and open source tracking systems.

    Disclaimer - not involved with the project, just a user and a fan.

    (Just noticed my wife’s left her phone behind when she went off riding… I guess no system’s perfect!)