My children Jouri and Hamza sit in front of an empty plate, waiting for food that I cannot provide. 💔 I am their mother, and there is nothing more painful than seeing your children hungry and being unable to feed them.
We are exhausted from hunger and struggling to survive. Please help us put food on this empty plate. A donation or a share could make a difference in our lives. 😭🇵🇸https://chuffed.org/project/help-hadeel-look-after-family-in-gaza
@djoerd
Search
905 results for “project_comfort”
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@gaza_verified_campaigns/117506898187004044
We are hungry, and I don’t know where tomorrow’s meal will come from. The flour is beyond our reach, donations have stopped, and my family is paying the price. I’m tired of saying “we need help” while my parents suffer beside me. Please, help us put food on the table. 💔
#GazaStarving #Gaza #Palestine #Fediforgaza
https://chuffed.org/project/please-help-islam-survive-in-gaza
@Pine_Affinity @kathimmel @gvenema @chielk @noiseician @apenkop @amber @lowqualityfacts @bifouba @matus_chochlik @robertbarton @mbletmathe @franciswashere -
💔😭 These empty pots are breaking my heart. My children, Jouri and Hamza, are hungry, and I have nothing to put on their plates. What kind of mother must watch her babies suffer from hunger, unable to help them?
🆘 Please, don’t let their cries go unheard. Help us find bread before another night of hunger. Even sharing this post could save us. 🇵🇸💔
@kathimmel
@arendleejessurun https://chuffed.org/project/help-hadeel-look-after-family-in-gaza -
I ordered a hardware random number generator from the US (I'd have preferred the UK or EU but couldn't find the right product).
So far the only thing random about it is the delivery path. It's going all over the US and just sitting in depots.
Americans pride themselves on their commerce abilities but they don't seem able to ship much outside their country.
Three weeks so far. I have a project launch waiting on this.
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RE: https://uddannelse.social/@mosgaard/117507735027190464
That was fast, unit sold! So long Apollo 8P, you have been a good friend for a long time but now Linux is more fun.
I will especially remember you for the dance project in the woods (recorded in November, it was pretty cold): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-9biRJYzJU
Recorded by my friend Uffe Birk, mixed by yours truly and mastered by Nathan Moody at Obsidian Sound. Those were the days.
I'm also the vocalist on the recording for the curious.
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Hey #believeinfilm friends,
In today's Analog.Cafe Podcast episode, Daren and I talk to Mia Glanz about her new book, Becky's Purse, being a published author, art, photography, and addiction:
Listen & watch links + episode description — https://www.analog.cafe/comments/udtp
Mia is an artist and photographer with deep roots in Vancouver. She recently published a unique, thought-provoking book about her childhood friend, a painter who had succumbed to addiction. Daren and I sit down with Mia on my warm, flowery balcony to chat about how she approached her project and the story behind it.
#filmphotography #analogphotography #art #addiction #books #bookstodon #podcast #photography
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My parents are starving, and I’m watching helplessly. My mother is helpless, my father is elderly, and I can’t provide even the most basic necessities. Please don’t scroll past us. We desperately need your support to get food and medicine. Even a small donation could change our day. 🙏
#Gaza #Palestine #HelpGaza #Fediforgaza
https://chuffed.org/project/please-help-islam-survive-in-gaza -
How long can a family survive like this?
Every day brings another expense, another worry, another night wondering how we will manage tomorrow. My husband and I are struggling to survive while my helpless mother and elderly father depend on help we can barely find. Please don’t scroll past our suffering. Your donation could help us put food on the table and cover essential needs.
#Fediforgaza
https://chuffed.org/project/please-help-islam-survive-in-gaza -
🥹🥹🥹💔To every kind heart, I a mother, and my family of six is living on the streets. Our tent is torn apart and offers no protection from the freezing winter. Insects have made our lives unbearable, especially for my children.
Please don’t scroll past my childrenIf you can, please donate even €1. Every small donation helps my children. If you cannot donate, please boost this post so it can reach someone who can.
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💔 These empty pots tell the story of my children, Jouri and Hamza, who go hungry while I stand helpless, unable to provide them with bread. 😭
🆘 Please, help me feed my children. Every donation and every share could bring us hope. 🇵🇸💔
https://chuffed.org/project/help-hadeel-look-after-family-in-gaza
#Gaza #Palestine #FreePalestine #GazaFundraiser #Donate #HelpGaza #MutualAid #HumanitarianAid #PleaseDonate #GazaChildren #fediforgaza -
💔 Look at these pots lined up in Gaza… Each one belongs to a family waiting for food, a mother praying to fill her children’s stomachs, and children who cannot understand why they must go hungry. 😭
My Jouri and Hamza are among those waiting. I am their mother, and it breaks me to face their hunger when I have nothing to give them. How long must our children wait for a meal?
https://chuffed.org/project/help-hadeel-look-after-family-in-gaza
@Pine_Affinity -
“That’s the number one problem that the Democrats face now and in the future. It’s not an individual policy disagreement that they have with the voters. It’s that most voters think Democrats are feckless and don’t mean what they say. And so, a major project at the Democratic Party over the next two years has to be to revitalize its brand; prove [to] the voters that when you elect us, change happens.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/216864/no-kings-movement-election-2028
I recommend folks print, highlight, and mail this piece to their local limp Democratic reps.
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📷 & words by Naeema:
“I bought these tomatoes for $4
We cook over fire; we don’t have gas.
The distributor sent us the gas; we must hand over the cylinder so that it can be filled.
But we don’t have enough money.
It costs $33”Please help Naeema’s family ❤️
https://chuffed.org/project/183929[Rapha]
#PhotoMonday #Fotomontag #LundiPhoto #Gaza #Palestine #Photooftheday #photography #food #GazaVerified
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💔 I still haven’t raised enough money to pay the rent for the land where our tent stands.
I urgently need €200 to secure shelter for my children and me in North Gaza as winter approaches. 😢
🙏 Please don’t leave us alone. Every donation, even €5, brings us closer to our goal. Please help us before it’s too late. ❤️
#fadiforgaz @webhat #Gaza #Palestine #MutualAid #HelpGaza #FediForGaza @jesper 😔💔 @Pine_Affinity
@evan @chielk -
#FreeCORE is What Your #TrueNASCORE Box Should Have
This independent fork carries #FreeBSD, #OpenZFS, and jails forward for users who never wanted Linux.
iXsystems put #TrueNASCORE into what it called a sustaining engineering phase in 2024. Under this, #opensource #NAS operating system would only receive security and stability fixes, with new features going to the Linux-based SCALE
https://itsfoss.com/freecore-truenas-core-fork/Nice to see this open source project carrying on! I remember where it started.. #FreeNAS
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My brother Wissam grows weaker every day, and it breaks my heart to see him suffer. 😭💔 He desperately needs food and medicine. Even $5 could help him. Please, donate if you can. 🙏💔 Here is his donation link.
https://chuffed.org/project/majdi
#Gaza #Palestine #GazaVerified
#Donation #FediHelp #FediForGaza
@Pine_Affinity -
RE: https://mastodon.social/@eessll_123/117506193184167033
À quelle âme ce message ira,
Mon amie Eslam réunit actuellement des fonds pour pouvoir quitter l'enclave. 🇵🇸 🕊️ Mais il lui manque encore beaucoup.
Beaucoup de dons sont alloués à la survie, entre nourriture et médicaments, et la location du terrain pour leur tente de fortune.
Elle survient seule aux besoins de ses petits... et fatigue, énormément.
S'il vous plaît, si vous pouvez, faites un don à mon amie 🙏 ❤️ ou au moins, partagez mon message afin qu'il atteigne les bonnes personnes :boost_request: 🕊️
Merci !
https://chuffed.org/project/161617
#Gaza #MutualAid #MutualAidRequest #FediForGaza #HelpChildren #Children #SaveChildren #SaveGaza #FreeGaza
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Tokens Over Hires
In the middle of September I ran ccusage against every Claude Code session on my laptop since May. It walks the local logs, counts the tokens, and prices them at what the API would have charged. I expected a big number. What came back was about twenty billion tokens and just under fourteen thousand dollars, across every project I’d touched in four months, with most of it going to Pepper, which is now open for signups, so go check it out. Nineteen billion of those tokens were cached reads.
I sat with that for a minute. Fourteen thousand dollars is real money. At my current pace it works out to roughly thirty thousand a year. I could triple it and spend a hundred thousand dollars a year on tokens, and that still isn’t one engineer. In exchange, Chris and I have shipped more code than I’ve shipped in any stretch of my career. I wrote in September that the two of us merged 657 pull requests in our first thirty days with a budget instead of a platform team. When I put the ccusage number in those terms on a panel, it came to about a dollar fifty a pull request.
That number is what my laptop would have cost at API prices, and it isn’t what we actually pay. Here’s the whole bill for both of us. Two Codex subscriptions, one each, are $200 a month. Anthropic is $550 a month: a Max plan for me and Chris, plus two Vycari team seats, one for Chris and one that runs our automation. I have an Ollama subscription at $200 a year. Greptile is about $1,500 a month. All in, that’s a little under $2,300 a month, or about $28,000 a year, for both founders and every pipeline we run. It still isn’t one engineer.
The obvious conclusion is the one a friend reached when he heard the figure: if code is that cheap, just get more tokens. I thought so too, for about a day. Then I looked at what was actually slowing us down, and the token budget wasn’t on the list.
The Constraint Is Attention
Every agent I run needs things from me that tokens can’t buy. It needs a plan approved before it starts. It needs its pull request read when it finishes. When it hits something it can’t decide, it escalates, and somebody has to be there to answer. None of those steps is expensive on its own. The problem is what happens when I run enough agents that the steps overlap.
When I run too many agents, the cost goes up a little and the risk goes up a lot. The biggest thing that’s slipped past us so far was how we managed database connections. It got out of hand, a little at a time, while my attention was on other pull requests, and eventually it caused an outage. Chris had to roll forward while I was out of town, and I spent the following week building a proper database abstraction layer. He put it more bluntly than I would have: the thing that kills us is splitting our attention. That’s when stuff slips through.
When people ask how we decide what to spend, I give them the order. Optimize for human time, because that’s the scarcest thing we have. Then money, because that’s the second scarcest. Then everything around agent time. “I can waste agent time all day. I don’t care.”
So the number that limits us is how many agents one person can supervise well at the same time. I don’t have a precise figure for that ceiling. I know I’ve been over it, because I can feel the difference between a day when every pull request got a real read and a day when I was skimming to keep up.
Another friend told me recently about engineers at his company running up bills in the thousands to build simple internal copies of SaaS tools. His reluctant guess was that they just aren’t as good at using agents yet, and that it’s a skill people have to develop. I don’t know what they’re doing differently. It doesn’t sound like token maxxing, which I’ve never really understood either. I’d love to sit with engineers who run up giant bills and just watch. My guess is they’re using the agents inefficiently, and that what’s missing is supervision, which a bigger budget won’t fix.
Building for More Agents per Person
Almost everything I’ve built since the summer has been an attempt to raise that ceiling, and almost none of it has been about spending less.
The pipeline I described in The Agent That Never Merges is the first piece. Agents open pull requests continuously and never merge them, which means the supervision cost per pull request is bounded at one careful read. The pipeline absorbs the rest: triage, planning, the first round of review comments, the retries. I only see the work once it’s in a state worth my attention.
The second piece is where the work lives. I wrote about pulling Pepper apart into small, bounded repositories to keep CI fast and give agents less to load. It mattered just as much for my attention. An agent working in a repository with one job produces a pull request I can evaluate in one sitting.
We’re up to fourteen repositories now. Last week I moved our iOS app out of the monorepo into its own. That was 150,000 lines of code, and nobody noticed except Chris, who had to wait a day to land his next batch of iOS changes. Agents make refactors that size easy. Having the CLI and the iOS client in their own repositories also forces us to keep good API definitions between the server and its clients.
The third piece is delegation inside the agent layer itself. I run two Claude Opus 5.5 orchestrators on medium effort. One is the UTL, for uber tech lead, and its job is to spawn subagents that build features. The other is what I call the focused worker, and its job is working with me. It catches the manual tasks that come out of the UTL’s pull requests and keeps them in a ledger. Then we work through them together: systems changes, bringing up new platforms, migrating data, anything that needs my level of access and oversight. Everything else goes to a subagent under the UTL, Opus for design docs and code reviews, Sonnet for implementing a feature from a design doc. Every one of these agents can consult a model a tier above it as an advisor, and they all share a wiki for notes.
Anthropic is now advertising much the same pattern with Claude Projects, and I’m happy to see others arriving at the same answer. Chris has been building a loop that babysits open pull requests through review until they score well enough to be worth a human’s time. Each layer like that turns a job I used to do by hand into something I check. The ceiling goes up one delegated task at a time.
The Token Budget Was the Easy Problem
There was a week in September when the meter really was the constraint. We ran through our free credits and paid about $120 in overage. Then AutoDev ate the whole Vycari quota, and I did server cleanup by hand because I couldn’t do anything else.
Most of that was self-inflicted. I’d started with Fable as the orchestrator, with no cap on context, and burned a week’s quota in three days. The setup above fixed it. The orchestrators run on medium effort, and the cheaper model does the implementing. Opus answers the reviews because Sonnet is too literal about them, and a literal reading turns two review cycles into twelve. Every agent auto-compacts at 200K tokens, because Anthropic charges more for context past that point. With that setup, and the work spread across parallel sessions, I find it hard to spend all of my quota. My goal now is to hit 99% of it every week just before it resets. I keep a list of research projects, and if I have quota left 24 hours before the reset, I spin one up. That isn’t the same as maxing out tokens. I’m not trying to use as many as possible. I’m trying to use all the ones I’ve already paid for.
There’s also a second account on the same machine. Claude Code reads a
CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIRenvironment variable, so two shells with two config directories give you two accounts side by side. The second one runs the AutoDev and code review pipelines, and those use up its quota every week, so it isn’t a fallback for my own sessions. When I do run short, I supplement with other labs’ plans. Every one of those fixes took an afternoon or less. None of the supervision problems above has had an afternoon fix.Where the Money Actually Goes
While I had the numbers in front of me, I looked at where development spend actually lands, because it isn’t where I expected either.
Development tokens currently run about ten times what the product itself consumes, even with real people using it. Building the thing costs more than running it. That won’t last. The feedback from our private beta has been really good, and we now open Pepper to a limited number of new signups every day, so product usage is rising quickly.
Most of what we actually pay goes to code review. Subscriptions are the cheap way to buy tokens if you’re willing to hit limits, so they’re the smaller line. Greptile reviews every pull request we open, and at about $1,500 a month it’s our biggest single expense. We both think it’s worth it, because it’s the layer that lets the never-merge pipeline run without me reading every first draft.
In October I tested that. I spent a few days building a cheaper reviewer to replace it. I came out the other side saying, “I think we should just pay for it because I can’t do it cheaper.” What I could change was how often we call it. The agents kept asking for a re-review before they’d fixed anything. Because every repository shares a common dev environment, the fix went in once: our pull-request skill now has agents run
/simplifyand then/code-reviewbefore they’re allowed to open a pull request. On many of our repositories, our own reviewer also does the first round and only then calls Greptile. My goal is a pipeline where Greptile’s reviews come back with nothing to say. We’re not there yet, but we get a little better every week.I’d rather pay for review than have a second person do it, and the reason isn’t salary. The person would need supervising too, because review is a job I’d have to check, not one I can hand off.
What a Hire Is For Now
Five years ago, if I’d been getting a product like this ready for market, I’d have been hiring twenty to fifty engineers. The work would have needed that many hands, and most of what they’d have done was write code. Today the code is the cheap part. If I bring someone in to write code, I’ve added a person who needs plans approved and pull requests read, which is the exact resource I’m short on. A hire whose job is output adds coordination faster than it adds capacity.
I said on a podcast that came out last week that the code I’ve written would have cost about fifteen thousand dollars at API prices, and that I couldn’t hire engineers for that money. That’s true. The engineers I’d still want are a different kind from the ones I hired at Google. We need a few more people who can herd agents, not fifty.
The engineering hire that adds capacity is a different shape. It’s someone who can own a bounded service whole. Here’s the interface, here’s everything it needs to do, let me know when it’s done. That person brings their own supervision. They run their own agents, read their own pull requests, and answer their own escalations, and the only thing that crosses the boundary between us is the contract. Supervision divides along the interface instead of piling up on one person. That’s a tech lead’s job, and it’s the only kind of engineering hire I can see that raises the ceiling instead of lengthening the queue.
That raises a fair question about how anyone grows into that job now, which I tried to answer in The Questions Are the Job. The other advice I give is to work on open source. I’ve met people who showed they could work really efficiently with agents through open source projects, Gemini CLI in particular, and some of them ended up being hired onto my teams. Open source has its own problems right now. But if you show up as a thoughtful engineer with features or bug fixes that are well reviewed, well tested, and bring value to the project, I think you’ll be welcome. That’s one of the reasons I decided to open source the Pepper CLI.
The first hire probably isn’t an engineer at all. I’ve said this a few times now, including on stage at a panel in September. Neither Chris nor I are go-to-market people, and I may hire one before I hire another engineer. I can create piles and piles of code, even relatively good code. What I can’t do is agentically acquire customers. (Did I mention that Pepper is open for signups now?) Someone in marketing came up after the panel and told me I’d validated her existence.
The Third Trend
I’ve watched this happen twice before. Open source developer tooling made it so a small team didn’t need to buy or build its own compilers, databases, and frameworks. Cloud infrastructure made it so that team didn’t need to own hardware or a data center. Each time, the number of people you needed to start something real dropped, and the skills that mattered shifted toward the people who understood systems well enough to compose what was suddenly free.
Agentic tools are the third one. Anyone with a good idea can now get from concept to production on a budget that would have been a rounding error in a Google planning cycle. But the constraint didn’t vanish. It moved, the same way it did the last two times, toward the people who understand systems design well enough to drive the agents and notice when something has slipped through. I wrote a year ago that management skills were going to carry over to working with agents. I didn’t expect to be proving it with a two-person org chart and fourteen thousand dollars of tokens.
This isn’t only a small-company problem. At Google it was hard to get more than a few changes in a day, because each one waited on code review. I’ve talked to engineers there who now do all their work in experimental directories that don’t require review, then port it back to their team’s repository at a pace the review process can keep up with. That’s what happens when you don’t manage for human attention. Productive people spend their cycles waiting on the process.
When other companies ask me what to change, my answer has become: drive until human attention is the scarce resource, then build for that. If you’re reading your own ccusage number and wondering whether the answer is more tokens, look at where your attention went first. For us the answer has been more interfaces. Those are the places where one person’s supervision ends and another’s begins, or where an agent takes over a job one of us used to do by hand.
#Agents #AI #Developer #Startups -
#AcademicJob | #PhDStudentship
PhD: Creative Communities, Identity, and Mental Health
📍University of Huddersfield, UK / onlineThree-year PhD with a tuition fee waiver, evaluating an arts-based intervention supporting trans people’s wellbeing, belonging and social connection. Interdisciplinary project involving creative practice, community-engaged research and #MentalHealth equity.
Deadline: 13/11/2026
https://www.hud.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/research-scholarships/cemh-fee-waiver-scholarships/
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🎉 4,000+ followers on LinkedIn! 🚀
A huge THANK YOU to our amazing community, end-users, contributors, and supporters.
What started as a mission to make API mocking and contract testing simple, reliable, and cloud-native has grown into a vibrant global ecosystem, and it’s all thanks to you. Every star, pull request, download, and conversation drives this project forward.
Not following along yet? Hit that Follow button and join the Microcks journey.
👉 https://www.linkedin.com/company/microcks/ -
Flathub has set their Discourse forum to read-only due to lack of participation. "Realistically, it never took off, becoming another issue tracker to keep an eye on. A forum where people post and wait for an answer that never comes is worse than no forum at all."
Seems like the right decision. It's a shame there's not a good catch-all discussion forum for Linux users, or maybe there is and I don't follow it... but it's not entirely sustainable for every project to have to maintain their own forum.
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I use all three BSDs. I got into it because I was looking for something more unixy, and I was aggravated by the constant, pointless churn of things in Linux: systemd taking over all of userspace, things I'd used for decades becoming deprecated either because someone didn't feel like maintaining it anymore, or because someone else felt like reinventing the wheel was more fun, the absolute dearth of documentation (becuase it's such a moving target), etc.
I still use Linux on about half of my machines, and the three major BSDs on one each of the rest.
#OpenBSD is probably the best starting point for learning #BSD (and #unix), although #FreeBSD (which I'm running on this laptop here) has the most features and is the most Linux-ish. #NetBSD is probably the most pure, unix-wise, and has the advantage of being a fairly anti-AI OS project.
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Our children deserve to live in peace and freedom, but they suffer every day carrying water. They have no education; they need knowledge, and I haven't been able to provide them with school supplies. I hope that kind people will help me.
https://chuffed.org/project/019db77e-ea97-7a1d-a034-1e08652b84f8
• #Charity
• #Donate
• #Donation
• #HelpSpreadingTheWord
• #Support
• #MakeADifference
• #Humanity
@sparkshocker. @holl2000@VeroniqueB99 @milo @audubonballroon @rogue_corq @afewbugs @toddbuddy @thickurt -
urgently need $200 to buy flour and food for my little ones. Please, don’t let us face this hunger alone. Every donation matters, and every share could bring help to our door. 🙏🇵🇸
May God bless everyone who stands with us. ❤️
https://chuffed.org/project/help-hadeel-look-after-family-in-gaza
#Gaza #Palestine #FreePalestine #GazaVerified #FediForGaza@[email protected] @Agx04gtetra -
Look at this endless line of empty pots in Gaza. Behind every pot is a hungry child, and behind every mother is a heart breaking because she cannot feed her children. My Jouri and Hamza deserve food, not another day of hunger. 😭🇵🇸
🙏 Please, don’t scroll past us. Any donation, no matter how small, could help feed my children. If you can’t donate, please share and boost our voices. 💔
https://chuffed.org/project/help-hadeel-look-after-family-in-gaza -
morluto/rea pulled +6,085 stars today, reaching 384.4k total — because it lets agents reverse engineer anything, from app behavior to native binaries. That velocity at that size is rare. See why it's compounding.
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A few years ago, I checked a dependency’s license once, at install time, and never again. That habit is getting expensive.
License changes aren’t new, but they’re happening often enough that “it’s open source” is no longer a permanent property of a project. It’s a status that can change between releases.
The pattern is almost always the same.
The shift nearly always runs one way: from an OSI-approved permissive or copyleft license toward a “source-available” license the Open Source Initiative doesn’t recognize as open source.The Business Source License (BSL) is the most common destination. It’s a “delayed open source” license: the vendor sets restrictions up front, and each version converts to a true open-source license after a change date, typically four years out.
It’s not just the famous cases anymore. A few from this year alone:
- Loki Mode moved from the MIT License to BSL 1.1 effective March 19, 2026.
- Unleash announced in June 2026 that its core repository is moving from Apache 2.0 to AGPLv3. AGPL is OSI-approved, so this one is a different kind of change, but it still affects anyone embedding the code.
- MiniMax moved its M2.7 AI model from MIT to a non-commercial license, which drew immediate backlash.
Who it actually hurts
- 1. Small teams and agencies building on top: If your product depends on a library that relicenses, you now have three options: pay, migrate, or fork. Big companies have legal teams for that. A five-person shop usually doesn’t.
- 2. Contributors: People gave their time to a project under one set of terms. When the company controlling it changes the rules, the community’s work becomes part of a product they no longer fully share in.
- 3. Downstream projects: Plugins, integrations, and tutorials built around a tool inherit the uncertainty when its license shifts.
The fair counterargument
I don’t think vendors are simply villains here. Many of these changes were a response to cloud providers selling managed versions of a project without funding it. Maintainers need a sustainable model, and “be open and hope for donations” has a poor track record.It’s also not always one-way. Redis is back under a recognized open-source license for those who choose it, while Valkey continues to be actively developed. Competition between the original and the fork may have pushed both toward better outcomes. Broader data also suggests permissive licensing has been rising, so this isn’t a total collapse of open source.
What I do now
- Check who controls the project A single company controlling a project can relicense future versions at any time, while a project run by a neutral foundation with many contributing companies is much harder to change.
- Read the license on every major upgrade, not just at install.
- Pin versions so a surprise change doesn’t land in your next deploy.
- Know your exit. Is there a credible fork? A foundation-backed alternative?
- Set up license-change alerts for your critical dependencies.
So, is open source still open?
My honest answer: the code is still often open. The guarantee isn’t. Open source has always depended on trust, and trust now needs a little due diligence.Over to you: Has a license change ever forced your team to migrate? Do you think relicensing is a fair business move, or a betrayal of the community that built the project? Tell me in the comments.#opensource #webdev #discuss #devdiscuss #software #coding #development #engineering #inclusive #community
Is Open Source Still Open? A Look at Recent License Changes and Who They Hurt -
6 days left. There are three ways to take part in SciPy India 2026:
Workshops: hands-on sessions on Saturday 19th December, at the Department of Physics, IIT Madras.
Talks: on Sunday 20th December, the main conference day.
Posters: a way to present your project or research to everyone attending.Proposals close 1st November, 23:59 IST.
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As Sydney gets a brand new airport, will Perth's ever be upgraded?
By Nicolas PerpitchPerth Airport's chief executive has warned passengers the facility is set for major upheaval as it moves to consolidate its four terminals, with construction work meaning people will have to allow for delays.
#AirTransportIndustry #UrbanDevelopmentandPlanning #StateandTerritoryGovernment #BusinessEconomicsandFinance #GovernmentandPolitics #NicolasPerpitch
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Short answer: find people through work you can already click on, judge them by five specific pages instead of the homepage, and use the first call to ask what is not included. Those three habits filter out most of the bad options before money comes up.
Where to look
Start with sites you already use in your own industry. Scroll to the footer and look for a "site by" credit. If there isn't one, ask the owner who built it. A referral from someone whose site you can open and poke at is worth more than any directory listing.Other places that work:
- Industry associations, trade-show exhibitor lists, supplier newsletters — the people who serve the same kind of business you run tend to know each other.
- Freelance marketplaces and portfolio sites. Use them to collect names, not to decide. A platform rating is not evidence about your project.
- Your accountant, your chamber of commerce, a co-working space. Useful mainly when you want someone in your own timezone for calls.
What not to use as a filter: the lowest price, the longest list of services, and any promise about search rankings.
The five pages to open on every portfolio site
Their homepage is the page they spent the most time on. It is the least informative page they have.1. The busiest page. Find the page with the most repeated elements — a product listing, a services index, a team page. Ask yourself: does the layout hold with three items? With thirty? Does a long paragraph still read, or does the text run into the next block? This is the page that resembles your actual site.
2. The contact or enquiry page. Submit a test enquiry with your real email address. Did you get a confirmation? Did the form tell you clearly when you submitted it empty? A broken form on a developer's own site is the single most useful signal you will get, and it costs you two minutes.
3. The mobile version, on your phone, on mobile data. Not on their office wifi and not in a device simulator. Time how long until you can read the headline, tap the menu open, and try to fill the form with one thumb.
4. The second language, if you need one. Do not check whether the words are translated — check whether the pages are. Click three links from the translated homepage. Do they stay in that language, or dump you back into the default one? Does the product list show the same products?
5. The footer pages. Privacy policy, terms, cookie notice. If they build for customers in Europe or the United States and their own site has none of these, that tells you what will be missing from yours.
Two more checks, thirty seconds each:
- Open an address on their site that does not exist — add a few random letters to the end of a page address. A bare server error page means nobody is minding the details.
- Read one portfolio entry properly. Does it say what the client needed, what was built, and roughly how long it took? If every entry is a screenshot with no context, you cannot tell what they did and what was already there before they arrived.
One more thing worth doing: portfolios often include sites the person only partly worked on, or maintained rather than built. That is not dishonest, but it is worth asking directly — "what was your part on this one?" A straight answer is a good sign.
The first call: eleven questions
Ask these before you talk about price. The point is not to catch anyone out; it is to find out whether they have done this enough times to have opinions.1. Who actually does the work? A good answer names the person and says whether any part is subcontracted. A warning sign is "our team" with no names, or a salesperson who will not be involved after signing.
2. What do you need from me, and what happens if it arrives late? A good answer is a written list — logo files, company text, product photos, product data, hosting login — plus an explicit statement that the clock starts when the materials arrive, not when you pay. A warning sign is "just send whatever you have."
3. What will I see first, and when? A good answer is a live preview address with a date attached. A warning sign is "we'll send you screenshots."
4. How many rounds of changes are included, and what counts as a change? A good answer gives a number and a definition: text swaps and colour changes are one thing, a new page or a new feature is another. A warning sign is "unlimited changes" — that is not a policy, it is the absence of one.
5. What is not included? A good answer is a list: domain, hosting, business email, copywriting, photography, translation, ongoing updates. A warning sign is silence, or "everything is included."
6. Whose name is the domain and hosting in? A good answer is yours, from day one, and you get the login. A warning sign is theirs, "for management purposes." This is the most expensive mistake on the list — recovering a domain from someone who stops answering is slow and sometimes impossible.
7. Will I have admin access to the site when it's finished, and can I export the content? A good answer is yes, plus a plain explanation of what you will be able to change yourself. A warning sign is "you don't need access, we handle updates."
8. What happens after launch — what's covered, for how long, and what's billed extra? A good answer defines a window for fixing defects and a rate for everything after it. A warning sign is "free support forever", or no answer at all.
9. What is the timeline measured from? A good answer is a number of working days counted from the date your materials are complete. A warning sign is a confident "two weeks" said before they have seen your content.
10. What would make you turn this project down? A good answer names something real — a deadline they cannot hit, a platform that does not fit, a budget that does not match the scope. A warning sign is "nothing, we can do anything." Anyone who has done this for a while has walked away from something.
11. Can I speak to the client whose site you just showed me? A good answer is "I'll ask them" or "they've agreed to be a reference." A warning sign is every single project being off-limits.
Red flags and green flags
Red flags, in roughly the order they should worry you:- No written scope, or a scope that is one paragraph long.
- The domain and hosting stay in their name.
- A price far below everyone else, with no explanation of what was cut.
- Pressure to decide today.
- No preview address — screenshots only.
- Guarantees about search ranking, traffic, or sales.
- A portfolio where every site looks identical, and none of them is in your industry.
- They ask for the full amount up front.
- They cannot tell you what happens after launch.
Green flags:
- They ask about your business before they ask about colours.
- They can show you a site they built that is still running.
- They push back on something you asked for, and explain why.
- The exclusions are in writing before you ask twice.
- They name the person who will do the work.
Payment and paperwork
Two rules that solve most disputes before they start.Do not pay the full amount up front. Split it against things you can see: a deposit to start, a payment when the preview is up, the rest at launch. Milestones tied to deliverables beat milestones tied to calendar dates.
Get the scope in writing, including the number of pages, who writes the text, who supplies the photos, and what happens if you add a page later. If the document does not mention something, assume it is not included.
Before you contact anyone: thirty minutes of prep
Write these down and the conversation becomes much shorter:- One paragraph on what the business does, who buys, and the single action a visitor should take.
- Three sites you like, and one specific thing about each. Not "it looks nice" — "the product table fits forty items on one screen without scrolling sideways."
- The materials you can supply today, and the ones you cannot.
- A budget range, and a date you genuinely need it by.
- Two developers to get quotes from, not five. Comparing five quotes against a one-page brief teaches you nothing.
The quotes you get will only be as good as the brief you send. And a developer who asks you good questions is telling you they have been burned before — that is usually the one worth a second call.#career #freelance #webdev #software #coding #development #engineering #inclusive #community
How to vet a web developer before you pay: which pages to open, which questions to ask