github: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/
- mickael-kerjeanis there some open source product who can leverage this or this just assume you have to use Microsoft stuff?
- I launched Filestash [1] as my response to the infamous “Dropbox should just be FTP” comment. Once I had a decent FTP experience, I kept going: adding support for pretty much every storage protocol, plugins to expose Dropbox (or anything else) over FTP, SFTP, MCP, or S3, and all the features I wished Dropbox had, with plugins to customize everything.
The base product is open-source and I make money from custom builds, additional plugins, paid support, and the occasional extra feature for companies with specific needs. It's a bit more than noodle profitable but quite under a normal salary.
- The benefit is "Distribution". If your users are there, you want to address them wherever they already are, this is why apple store / play store / amazon store ... are so popular. Becoming a platform / ecosystem is the common playbook to go from being a one product company to an ecosystem / platform worth a lot more
- I had a X250 who died less than a month after the warranty, now got a E14 since ~2 years and it got keyboard issues
- Is this some sort of supabase but with sqlite and without the operational complexity?
- emacs is quite approachable because of its self documenting nature. In practice, if you want to drill down on a particular thing, you need to use some of the describe-* commands. For example want to know how emacs save something?
1) find the command it uses with describe-keybinding, you find the command "save-buffer"
2) "describe-command save-buffer" brings you onto the lisp world where it is defined => "files.el"
3) want to know how a variable is define within files.el? "describe-variable buffer-file-name" and now you are in C territory
4) rinse and repeat with some describe-function when needed
5) get lost onto the beauty of emacs which in my opinion is its interactive / self documenting nature which unfortunatly is not more common in all the software we use
- My first job out of uni was in creating automated tests to validate some set top box. It involved using library of "blocks" to operate a remote control. Some of the people I have been working with spent their whole career in this narrow area, building those libraries of block and using them for customer and I have no doubts a LLM can today produce the same tests without any human intervention
- this is fine indeed if you didn't ask for my time
- In my experience, having MIT and UCI as customers, US universities are much easier to deal with small to no process for simple cheap things. On the other hand, I was contacted by a well known engineering school in France (ENSEEIHT), they wanted support but were laughing at the idea to spend 20$ per month for the privilege, left the impression they wanted to use my time for way under minimum wage, same yesterday with a deutch school who wanted help but not willing to spend a dime, and some other universities who have deployed my software in prod but did not upgrade in the last 5 years. Even in China, I stumbled upon a fork maintained by the university of Shangai, of course they never reached out in the first place to ask for any kind of support, just took the code and went their own way. This kind of behavior haven't happen with US universities which are more likely to reach out and pay for support
- This is not as simple as it sounds. Just yesterday I had a call with the Delft university of technology in Netherland, they want me to add some features on the free version of my FOSS product [1] but they did not want to pay anything. Over the last month, I was in contact with a 800B publicly traded company for a 1.8k per year invoice, once we agreed on the general direction they kept adding expectations, first was to sign tons of paperwork with their security checklist, legal stuff which took a few days but when they start asking for things that would take potentially weeks more, I invite them to do extras on a contracting basis, since them I have never heard back and of course they never paid a dime. I have literally tons of stories like this from governments to F500. In my bubble the paid support plan mostly work with US entities.
- Yesterday I received this message from a random github user: "Seriously. No SSO at all in free version? This is poor. Very very greedy and poor" [1]
If you do not spend a lot of time explaining things at length, people will link back to how much an asshole you are.
[1]: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/issues/661#issu...
- Would love to know more about the underlying tech
- I always found fascinating the power section of valve amp for guitar will always be made of a very basic rectifier circuit to convert AC to DC that requires a expensive transformer and produce power with a terrible efficiency compared to more modern SMPS. Why is it nobody interested in valve amp never go the SMPS path? Is it all because sag is a desirable sound distortion?
- > There is no community around growing its usage
I just added support for perkeep in Filestash last week (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash)
- I once heard one such entrepreneurs (Éric Larchevêque) defining luck as "preparation meeting opportunity"
- I made one such lightweight alternative frontend: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
- I use rxjs day in day out for my oss work (eg: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/master/pub...) It's quite common to see job description where I live (Sydney) with rxjava but reactive libs are a bit of a niche thing mostly because it takes a bit of time to be proficient at it + not many people talk about it but it's not sexy
- > React is a lot more stable than I think you're giving it credit for.
That's until you have to use it in a real project, for a long time the go to solution was the facebook maintained CRA which is now deprecated. I have spent a lot more time than I'd like to admit migrating webpack versions when it was considered best practises to use class component with decorator but decorator never was standardised in the browser and was never able to get a clean project where running npm install would not give scary warning our project had high vulnerability that was dependencies of dependencies in CRA to the point that it got me wondered that even if the creator of react facebook can't get their shit together, the whole ecosystem is doomed. I have been outside the ecosystem for a year and looking at the shit show that is nextjs it seems things are even worse than before.
- The frontend of my main OSS work was made is plain es6: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
The frameworky code is under 100 lines of code, heavily inspired by what I think is a good idea from React: "components are pure function", the simplest example of the about page beeing visible here: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/master/pub...
Since the whole project was migrated over from React, I was able to improve performance to a degree that would have been impossible using React, it's a breadth of fresh air to open the performance and memory tab and to be able to optimise things from there to get 60FPS no matter what whilst preventing massive ram usage because those frameworks runs all sort of code that is out of your control. Also because there is no build system, I was able to introduce plugins to be able to patch frontend code via patch applied dynamically by the server to create features like the recall button to recall data stored on glacier when using S3, dynamic patching of the icons to apply branding and many other things that I would have had to fork entirely before
Anyway, I hope our industry would go more often the vanilla route, es6 is ready for prime time and solve all the pain point we had while internet explorer was still a thing
- I am playing at creating a FTP interface for all file transfer protocols (including the Dropbox API) so we can settle the argument of the infamous top comment of the Dropbox launch: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash