My current distraction is that I have found a local government surplus auction and I keep buying toys. This is my current distraction setup.

Throughout the years I have completed many projects successfully. Some projects really stood out and were awesome to do. This is not about these projects. It is however about one of my very first projects for my first real software development client many years ago, somewhere around the year 2000.

I was working for some years at TNO, a well known Dutch organization, and the lady at the reception asked me if I could help her husband out because he was strugling to get some web app developed. So I said sure, I can talk to him and see what I can do.

So I went to their house and talked to her husband. They were living in a huge villa and turns out her husband owns an international flower export business for which he needed some web app for. So we had a nice talk and he showed me some software designs he got from a couple of different big companies. He asked me my opinion about these designs. I remember answering something like that it looks very fancy but for me it didn't make much sense.

He replied that it didn't make sense for him as well and was disappointed that these companies didn't seem to understand him properly. It took about 3 months to get these designs which he thought were useless. So, I asked him to explain me what he was looking for.

Actually a pretty simple thing. He was using paper forms to have his clients order the flowers they need. Think of them as Excelsheets with 3 columns with a list of flower names and besides each column a column for the amount required. He would go to the flower auction at 4 in the morning to collect all these filled in forms, manually aggregate them on new forms, and then go to buy the flowers ordered.

This man had many clients and truck drivers. Some of them only worked or ordered at specific days. It was also important that one could easily indicate which flowers were really important to get.

Then comes this 20 year old guy (me) who delivered a working prototype in 24 hours. You can imagine how happy this man was. He said: if you built this for me I will pay you 10K. In the meanwhile for fun you can borrow one of my sports cars if you want.

I took the deal, drove a big fat sports car for about 1.5 months, I delivered and the man payed me as promised.

The web app I developed is today still being used every day. I don't think there is any other project out there, at least not that I'm aware of, that I have worked on and is still being used today in its form as it was originally developed.

We had a blind auction at work. Selling off 'redundant hardware'

Most of it was old crap but a bit a couple of bids in for shits and giggles. Also, I'm a desktop man but we have rolling blackouts so an older laptop for the simple sake of having something bigger than my phone to browse definitely has some appeal.

So there was an old HP Elitebook 8540W. A chonky boi if ever I did see one.

Spec sheet as listed
4GB DDR3
i7 M 640 @ 2.80 Ghz
128GB SSD
Win 10 Pro
"not booting up/ power button flashing"

So bid R100. Now for context, a petrol is R22 a liter. A Big Mac is R43, a Big Mac meal is R90

So basically I big so I could harvest the SSD. And I won.

Much to my surprise, I simply attached the correct charger and it boots fine. The drive was empty though but that's fine cause I was gonna chuck Ubuntu on it anyway. Also found it was in fact 8GB of RAM. It also has a blu ray drive

So in summary, for the price of 1.1 Big Macs I got:
Full 1080p 15.6"
128GB Samsung SSD
8GB ram
First gen i7
Blu ray player

I'm most not sad about the 900x that I bid on as well. It was a cute little thing, my plan was to steal the ram and ssd out of this thing and put it in that, then boom ultra portable little machine for R400. Oh I also got an old monitor with a feint line down the screen for a grand total of R1

We're getting done with SidTheITGuy's bachelor party where we auctioned him off.

Before it was through, the lucky winner who snagged him at the bachelor-auction had already sold him to another, gotham's most mysterious tech heiress, looking to do a mezzanine funding round on her relationship status:

Meet, Ms. Planky Le Planche, the new fiance of SidTheITGuy:

The graphic cards supply is completely madness. Even after the crypto crash it is not possible to buy RTX cards at price any close to MSRP.
But today my jaw drop when I saw auction on popular online portal where some guy was selling a place in a queue in another store. The title was "Rights to buy RTX 3080" and for 400$ you could potentially buy a GPU for the price close to MSRP. I think this was too much and after a few hour the advert was took down.

Waiting till 2 hours after midnight to make sure I get <firstname>.dev in the auction.

Luckily I have wine and Youtube

Anyone else currently in an auction for a .dev domain? If so, how much would you be willing to spend on it? And how much do you want it?

I'm currently in a closed auction for <firstname>.dev and there seem to be 2 bidders including me, the price is still $15

Zoom free tier calls end after 40 minutes.

Idea: pwyw conference software where the call ends after 40 minutes if the host isn't paying €5 more monthly than everyone else in the call. There is no way to discover whether this is a limited call until the 40 minute mark, and there's no way to discover who outbid the host at all except by getting everyone to show their bank statement.

Did I ever tell you guys about that time I got a whole monitor for 1 Zar?

Probably but I shall again.

"twas the same auction at work where I got the R100 laptop. There was an LG Flatron W2243S listed with no reserve price. It had description "Faint line down middle of screen"

Figured what the hell, bid R1, mostly to see kif anyone else would. I won it. Literally just swapped out the vga cable and did a factory reset. All happy now. Only downside is that it's vga only but hey, what else are you gonna do with R1?

So that laptop I got for R100 can do 4k... like wow..

For those who missed the first rant, we had an auction at work and I bought and old HP Elitebook for R100 which about the same as what a Big Mac meal costs...

This is a part rant-part question.
So a little backstory first:
I work in a small company (5 including me) which is mostly into consultation (we have many tech partners where we either resell their products or if there is a requirement from one of our clients, we get our partners to develop it for them and fulfill the client requirements) so as you can see there is a lot of external dependencies. I act as a one-hat-fits-all tech guy, handling the company websites, social media channels, technical documentation, tech support, quicks POCs (so anything to do with anything technical, I handle them). I am a bit fed up now, since the CEO expects me to do some absurd shit (and sometimes micro manages me, like WTF I am the only one who works there with 100% commitment) and expects me to deliver them by yesterday.

So anyway long story short, our CEO finally had the brains to understand that we should start having our own product (which i had been subtly suggesting him to do for a while now!).

Now he came up with a fairly workable concept that would have good market reach (i atleast give him credits for that) and he wanted me to suggest the best way to move forward (from a both business and technical point of view). The concept is to have an auction-based platform for users to buy everyday products.

I suggested we build a web app as opposed to a mobile one (which is obvious, since i didnt want to develop a seperate website and a mobile app, and anyway just because we can doesnt mean we have to make a mobile app for everything), and recommended the Node/react based JS tech stack to build it.

At first he wanted me to single handedly build the whole platform within a month, I almost flipped (but me being me) then somehow calmed down and finally was able to explain him how complicated it was to single-handedly build a platform of such complexity (especially given my limited experience; did I mention that this is my first job and I am still in college, yeah!!) and convinced him to get an experienced back-end dev and another dev to help me with it.

Now comes the problem, I was to prepare a scope document outlining all the business and technical requirements of the project along with a tentative cost, which was fairly straightforward. I am currently stuck at deciding the server requirements and the system architecture for the proposed solution (I am thinking of either going with AWS - which looks a bit complicated to setup - or go with either Digital Ocean or Heroku):

I have assumed that at peak times we would have around 500-1000 users concurrently

And a daily userbase of 1000 users (atleast for the first few months of the platform running)

What would be the best way forward guys?

I did some extensive (i mean i read through some medium blogs! and aws documentation) research and put together the following specs (if we are going through AWS):

One AWS t3.medium ec2 instance for the node server (two if we want High Availability by coupling with the AWS load balancer and Elastic Beanstalk)

The db.t3.small postgres database

The S3 Storage bucket (100gb) for the React Front end hosting

AWS SNS for email/sms OTP and notification

And AWS CloudMonitor for logging amd monitoring.

Am I speculating the requirements properly, where have I missed??

Can u guys suggest what is the best specification for such a requirement (how do you guys decide what plan to go with)?

Any suggestions, corrections, advices are welcome

On a business trip. I brought my work laptop and my personal laptop with me. Because I am smart. But a lot of my coworkers only bring their work laptops. So I guess I am basically wondering how much porn has tainted the work laptops. Especially since they will auction them off around once a year. To be clear I am not wondering about the software taint.

Need to build an auction website with PHP or any other language. Anyone available to help me? Would really appreciate it.

Can someone translate a japanese auction sheet for me?

Working on a project (auction website) with a group, one of them described himself as an experienced web developer (both front and back end). Two weeks into the project, he won't shut up about using Bootstrap and how great it is (even tho we decided on not using it); fucks up even the simplest queries and doesn't know any OOPHP. Needless to say, he got kicked pretty soon and after making some nonsensical threats to the group members we never heard of him again. Or so we hope.