I’ve had a great experience with the TrueNAS Mini-X system I bought. ZFS has great raid options, and TrueNAS makes managing a system really easy. You can get a box built & configured by them, with 16 GB ECC RAM and five (empty) drive bays, for about $1150 at the most affordable end. https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/

One thing to be careful about: you can’t add drives to a ZFS vdev once it’s been created, but you can add new vdevs to an existing pool. So, you can start with two mirrored drives, then add another two mirrored drives to that pool later.

(A vdev is a sub-unit of a ZFS storage pool, and you have to choose your RAID topology for each vdev and then compose those into a storage pool)

Borderlands 2 is my favorite in the franchise, for sure.

The common wisdom about backups is the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which recommends:

• 3 total copies of your data, including your original or “production” data
• 2 different forms of media
• 1 off-site copy

Proton Drive can be a decent off-site backup, but it would be a good idea to make a separate backup of your data on a different form of media like an external hard drive, just in case Proton Drive goes down, or the data there gets corrupted and you need to restore a known good version.

Check out gamemode if you’re gaming, it should improve performance a little bit

There are a bunch of message broker services out there, and having a consistent set of common keys along with a documented process for transforming events to/from different systems means that this kind of data can move through different systems without getting mangled. It does have a spec for JSON, so it can be considered just a standardized JSON blob with transformation rules. But it also has a protobuf spec, specs for MQTT, NATS, HTTP, Avro, etc. It’s a common language for all these systems.

I’m really into CloudEvents because I love event-driven systems, and since events can come from, or be consumed by, so many different services, having a robust spec is super duper useful.

Warframe’s The War Within was better.

(Probably. I’m never touching WoW, I was an EverQuest 2 kid and I’ll remain such until the day I die)

Then they put on the socks and become girls

Fair

It’s kind of amazing how relevant this still is, 28 years later.

Learning new programming languages is an awesome way to expand your programming brain. If you want to stay in the same scientific computation niche, you can check out Julia or Mathematica. If you’re just looking to broaden your horizons, the world is your oyster. For me, learning Clojure really cooked my noodle but made me a much better programmer since it taught me functional programming.

Also, just read other peoples code! You can learn the conventions that way. Though for you it would best to find other products within your niche, because I’m not sure if general web dev code would be super helpful.

There are techniques that are broader than any single language’s conventions, and I think learning those are how you can improve. That’s hard to teach, though, and it comes from experience with a few different languages, in my opinion.

And honestly, I can totally respect the “conventions be damned” attitude, because at the end of the day, you’re trying to make something that works, and if nobody else is reading that code, you’ve made the right trade-off.

I’ll suggest Elixir. It’s a language that runs on the same virtual machine as Erlang, which has proven to be great for ultra-reliable and excellent at managing many, MANY concurrent processes.

Elixir itself builds upon this great foundation with a syntax similar to Ruby, but entirely functional. It’s a delightful language to read and write.

One of the all-time classics! I think all devs should read this.

If you’re interested in setting up another program, you can use Overseerr to feed requests to Sonarr. Other people who have access your plex library can also use it to request stuff from you, but even if you’re a solo user, it’s a nice interface to search and add content with.

Oh you’re so right, I never use those so I completely forgot :X

In Elixir & Erlang, they don’t even have a for-loop construct. You have to use recursion. And I think that’s beautiful. I also think tail-call optimization is beautiful.

Dead Space, my favorite game of all time. All HUD elements are holographic projections from your suit and weapons, integrated into the game world and moving with the camera. Your health meter is a series of light segments going up your spine, and the meter for one of your abilities is a pie-chart style light on the back of your right shoulder. Even the objective markers are a trail of light projected from your hand when you press down on the control stick.

ixSystems sells pre-built machines running TrueNAS. They’re a little pricier than building on from scratch of course, but they have ECC ram and have everything set up out of the box. Funds also support the development of TrueNAS. I got one earlier this year and I love it. Fussing around in the web UI requires some technical know-how, but if you get it set up for them, I expect it to run like a dream.

I was using Fedora for about a year and it was great. Nice and stable, almost everything worked out of the box. Then I goofed up an update and had to install something new, and I chose Arch. Arch is working mostly fine, of course I had to learn a thing or two about how some subsystems worked but the Arch wiki is a wonderful resource. We’ll see how long this install lasts, it’s been smooth sailing for about a month now.

Other posters have described what Radar and Sonarr do, I just want to say having all the apps set up along with Overseerr is a game-changer, even if your setup is only for your own consumption and you’re not sharing your plex library with anyone. Overseerr lets you log in with Plex and request content, and it’ll add the content to *arr, which will automatically search torrent sites (I use Prowlarr for that), download the content, then move them to your media library and update Plex.

If you do share your plex library with friends, and can put Overseerr somewhere they can access it, then your friends can request to add content to your library, and you just have to click “Approve” to start the search & download process.

It takes a little time to set up, but once it’s up and running, it’s lovely.