It's not particularly secure but in a pinch I just use the python standard lib server to start an http server in a folder then open up the port with ngrok temporarily to share the file. Security through obscurity for a very discreet time period works.
Sounds like your team/company needs to establish SLAs. When it comes to troubleshooting the important timelines to commit to are communication timelines. First response with X hours. Updates every Y hours/days depending on severity/priority. You'll also want a clear process for establishing the criteria for diagnosing priority and what escalation paths should be when there are roadblocks.
How does this compare to Dokku?[1] I've been using that for a few years now with minimal lift/maintenance. I'm wondering what the trade-offs are of something like this?
If you're running small projects, Dokku is a cheaper option compared to running a k8s cluster. Porter helps you leverage all the benefits of k8s like scalability, scalability, configurability, and is great for multi-cloud environments due to interoperability - these are all useful when you're dealing with projects at a larger scale.
I haven't. That looks super promising! I find AWS/Azure almost intentionally obtuse in their pricing and setup/configuration. This looks like they focus on the opposite!
In the context of AWS Free Tier, the non-obtuse option is you do the EC2 t3.micro with Linux on it, maybe also the RDS t3.micro, and you ignore all that make-things-harder-so-consultants-can-charge-more nonsense. Install your own nginx, install your own node or python or whatever, ignore all their obtuse crap.
That's also my understanding. Heroku, on the other hand, has no time-limit on their free tier, but it's always kinda broken (startup times). AWS's free tier is the real deal. That's a trade-off.
But that's orthogonal to the point I was making, and the comment I was replying to. If someone likes Heroku because of it's pricing clarity and its ease of setup... well, the pricing simplicity of an EC2 instance is just as good, and the ease of setup is even better.
More broadly, if you're evaluating them against each other....
Heroku isn't the easiest to set up, nor is it the simplest. It's not the easiest because you have to learn a bunch of Heroku-specific things, that you'll just have to reinvent/relearn/etc if you ever want to switch providers. To call it "vendor lock-in" might be a bit of a stretch, but it has aspects of that. With EC2, it's just server management, same as it ever was, same as it'd be on some other cloud.
(Note that many OTHER AWS services are far worse than Heroku in this respect. And/or better, depending on your goals.)
Heroku aims to be a sweet spot. A few hours (or days, maybe) invested in learning to use it properly, and you get a pretty reasonable bundle of tools and support and so on. But if you want to dive deep, Heroku's probably a waste of time. And and the other extreme, if you don't want to learn anything about an individual provider's proprietary crap, then Heroku also will not work out that well for you. Saying "this is our sweet spot" is a respectable position, even if you don't like the sweet spot.
(Personally, I'm still boycotting Heroku over their years of misrepresenting their "dynamic mesh routing", which was always fiction and which they lied about for years, and charged customers for something that they knew full well they weren't delivering. Don't get into bed with sociopaths, even if you like their sweet spot.)
> Heroku-specific things, that you'll just have to reinvent/relearn/etc if you ever want to switch providers. To call it "vendor lock-in" might be a bit of a stretch
It’s an understatement, not a stretch.
Heroku has always seemed really interesting/cool/clever to me. The tradeoff has never been worth the investment when I’ve considered using them, personally or professionally. Their operating model is far too different than every other cloud provider’s.
While I was doing the "free 30 days + 12 months of free stuff", a certain level of MSSQL was listed as free, but hidden under that is creating the storage for MSSQL which is a separate and additional cost that you cannot avoid. (At least, not that I could figure out.)
By the end of my 30 days, I found the bare minimum performing low volume .NET + SQL on Azure was going to be $30+/month even for just a prototype/development site, and I can pay less elsewhere for higher performance (though perhaps less control). And when I say "performing", I just mean the VM not being too slow to actually use as a UI, and throwing low memory errors constantly. The free tiers for Windows Server are, in my opinion, unusable at all.
I run a hobby .net core website on a $5 digital ocean instance and it runs fast as hell. You definitively don't need to spend $30. I'm using a PG database but it looks like maybe it would even be possible to run SQL server on a 2GB instance.
You do get some free storage with the free tier database, but it is only a paltry 32MB. Additional storage is only $0.221/GB/m though. The paid cheapest SQL database (B0) is only $5/m, which comes with 2GB of storage. In practise, this is absolutely fine for light usage.
By .NET + SQL, I assume you mean you were using an App Service? They come with a lot of convenience, but I definitely agree that they are too expensive, especially when considering the level of compute you get. I raised this with someone from Microsoft before, and they said they were confident the value offered was worth it.
There is a free tier for App Service though. It's a shared compute model - I tried it a while back, and the performance was totally fine for light usage.
I wouldn't try to run Windows Server on a B1S, as they only have 1GB of RAM :) You might just about get away with it for Server Nano, but I've never actually used it. Best stick with Linux or BSD for these tiny VMs.
I use aliases, too. But an alias for every possible "bookmarked" directory seems excessive. Like this guy [1] in the current thread, I tend to just say x=`pwd` (no need to always `export`). Agreed there is probably a way to set up a shell function `a() {...}` that establishes an alias (or even a shell function) almost as simply, but another problem that remains is that aliases and variables are separate namespaces. So, if you do it the variable way like Zsh then you don't have to worry about clobbering some existing alias or shell function. You do have to keep these separated namespaces in your head, but the updating of the prompt to the variable name is a pretty good reinforcement cue (at least for me, in practice). Also, the variable lets you use it in composed paths like `$x/bin/foo` while an alias/function would only change your directory.
TL;DR - Yuck = namespace squishing in this application only, but then again one man's "collapse of namespaces being yucky" is another's "yay, I do not have to remember 3..4 namespaces!".
EDIT: for what it's worth, I never intended my 9..11 items to be "in order of importance or persuasiveness". Mostly in order of personally driving me batty when I use Bash and just meant to actually be things Zsh could do that (present)Bash could not, to my knowledge due to @deadbunny's complaint. I do try to keep a side Bash config that is as close as possible to my Zsh config, because it's not always worth my time to compile/install Zsh on a system. But when I do that and start using Bash, I notice all these missing things. { That's why I would genuinely appreciate anyone who knows how to replicate them in Bash saying how. I'm not just "daring the Bash apologists to a challenge" or whatever. :-) }
As someone that works in K-12 technology (and has for 15 years), the real monopolies aren't the tech giants, they're the Pearsons and Houghton Mifflins of the world that buy out competitors and lock school districts into platforms they can't escape without substantial migration costs.
And don't even get me started on the way they have kept education hostage to high stakes tests.
Alternatively: Education actually has plenty of money, but too much of it is leeched out by low value vendors charging high premiums for easily replaced commodities, low value administrative staff performing easily automated tasks, and public-sector unions filling their coffers and the coffers of friendly politicians, long before teachers receive a penny, many of which then have to shell out for materials out of their own pockets, materials which ought to be provided for by their employers.
I went to public schools which were thick with staff, and for the life of me I could never figure out why there was any more staff than the faculty, the principal, the vice principal, a secretary and maybe a janitor and lunch lady. Even the libraries, IT tasks and sports equipment were maintained by faculty. Janitorial tasks and catering could be good exercises for the kids if you wanted to cut some staff because frankly a good number of kids, myself included, could have used the extra discipline growing up.
Meanwhile there were too many unused classrooms, too many kids per class, too few seats and tables and too few lockers. Teachers were paying for printouts and unreturned textbooks (that the students didn’t return to the teacher) but the administration sure had a thick wad of newsletters, handbooks, forms, reports (not all to do with the students, mostly administrative crap) and all manner of garbage for us to take home every single week.
I think a lot of the question here is in the Administrator/Faculty divide. Is a special education teacher faculty? What about learning center, where students who need extra help in a specific subject go while the rest of the class continues regular learning? What about specialists who teach computer, science, garden, art, music? (And who give the teachers a break during the school day.)
As for administrators, the ones I see at schools are usually needed: a nurse or medical aide, a psychologist, a librarian, two front desk people (both so you have backup if someone is sick, and so you aren't without someone if a student/parent needs assistance out of the office), custodians are important (you need two, one for daytime, and one for nighttime. Yes, students can do cleanup at some point, but not K-3 at least), etc.
> Alternatively: Education actually has plenty of money
It doesn't--even if you get rid of the "administrative staff".
The Gates Foundation went through and analyzed this for younger students (early middle school and younger). It takes roughly $15K per student do what you need: two fully qualified adults in a classroom of 15 with sufficient resources. This allows you to bring your poor performers up to average in 3 years.
Not good--just average. Every single one of those initiatives were cancelled because of money.
People claim they want better education systems--until they have to actually pay for it.
What were the overhead costs associated with educating each student and why two adults?
For a class of 15, 1 teacher is sufficient, and even if you reduce class sizes to 10, that's one teacher per 10 rather than 1 per 7.5. The school district I grew up in spent about $13K per pupil in the school year following my graduation (easiest year to find quick and dirty data for), and still had all of the problems I outlined. I assure you, it wasn't going to high teacher salaries when I was in school.
So how about we do trim off some of that fat, give the teachers a raise, and then evaluate whether we need the additional spend?
No, it's not. And we have LOTS of research on that.
Some young child always has a problem. When that happens, the attention of a teacher is completely tied up. You need two so that the class can keep going.
>Almost all high-quality early learning programs, including all of the programs featured in this paper with outcomes that stick, have teacher- child ratios of 2:20 or better.
I think the elephant in the room, however, is the enormous wealth transfer needed to provide the necessary home environment for a child to succeed at a similar level to children who do have homes conducive to academic education.
Thank you, I’m on the clock but first impressions from the first few pages: this does not appear to be a document detailing the cost of a basic education, this appears to cover supplementary programs.
Fine if that’s what you want to discuss, but not pertinent to the high cost and low quality of a basic K-12 education provided by public schools. These types of programs are more suited for a social services budget.
So here is what I have been looking at all these years: my State’s K12 budget[1] and student body[2].
You don’t need a Gates Foundation report to see this information, it’s all public, and searchable, and has been for a very long time.
Per pupil spending[3] includes capital, materials, labor and any other operating costs including public debt. School districts, at least in my State, tend to finance their buildings through bonds and own them outright, so they’re not paying rent but they are making regular debt payments on at least some of their facilities.
So when you look at what is allocated in the State budget which includes non-State sources, the Cal Department of Education was allocated about $91B and change divided across a State student body of about 6M and change, 6.7M if you include charter school students, for per-pupil spend of about $13K and change, ~7Kish from the State. The non-State sources are mostly Federal from my recollection, I’m typing this on the fly and don’t have time to double check hence my liberal use of rounding, but not necessarily so.
This does not include funds raised by the school districts themselves (see [2] for how many of those there are) nor contributions from local governments which sometimes but not necessarily so contribute to the district funds.
If you want to do some back of the envelope math yourself, I’ve given you the basics, you can find the equivalents for your own State of choice on your own, and figure out if there isn’t a better way to effectively allocate what already exists. Chromebooks didn’t exist the first time I did this exercise, but the existence of very cheap laptops has brought this figure down over time. It’s both fun and depressing!
I might be okay with this if powerschool wasn't a total effing mess of a platform, but I'm not because it is absolutely a total piece of shit.
While I appreciate that there is some complexity to what the platform needs to accommodate, navigating the user interface usually involves more work than completing an assignment.
I was reminded of this resource as well since it is likewise what I use in training folks to use git. This OPs post seems to be a condensed version of Chris's advice.
