iDemonix

I have various pieces of open source software that people have offered to donate or give me some money as a thank you for, but I usually just say the thank you is enough purely because I don't have a convenient way to accept them.

I don't use PayPal due to historic issues with them, so I'm keen to hear what others use to accept donations other than that.

I have 2 months of furlough, and I'd like to improve my Python (and other) skills and, for once, start and finish a project. For once I've decided to pick a project which will actually both interest and benefit myself.

I wrote a simple chat bot to manage xp/levels/roles, amongst various other things, in a Discord server for a popular community. I've since used the same bot in other communities, but it just runs as a clone of a Python repo for each bot, using supervisord on a Digital Ocean VPS. Each bot also has its own developer 'app' within the Discord environment and associated tokens, which is getting cumbersome to manage.

As I've got time to focus on it, I'd like to create a singular bot, with a web UI to manage it, with a very long term end goal of maybe competing with other services like Mee6, but a shorter term goal of making it easy for me to easily add the bot to new communities and configure it - without config + manual steps over SSH.

It's quite niche, but if anyone has any similar experience, I'd be eager to hear any opinions. For example: My first instinct based upon my work experience was a Docker container per bot, but from testing, as far as I can see I need a single instance which handles all servers if I want to use one developer 'app' like Mee6 or Dyno.

Any hints/links or similar welcome.

I've got a 2015 MBP, and unfortunately after constant use every day for the last 5 years, the screen has started to flicker, and I've finally had to admit that I need more RAM for things like Docker/Vagrant. Although the amount of spec you get for your money has always been a bit of an insult from Apple, the latest 13" line-up (not a fan of bigger sizes) seems insane.

My current laptop cost around £1200 new (5 years ago), and came with a 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM. The current cheapest 13" MBP costs £1300 and sports a tiny 128GB SSD and still 8GB RAM.

If I select the 3rd (of 4) most expensive laptop, which has a reasonable CPU (albeit 8th gen), then bump the RAM to a realistic 16GB, and the SSD to 512GB, the price is £2179, which is insane. From Dell I can get the same spec, with a 10th gen CPU, for about £500 less.

I've used Mac for the last 18 or so years and would consider myself a Pro user, but it feels like madness to spend over £2000 on a machine that's on an older spec CPU than most competitors, for a lot more price.

If anyone from Apple is reading this, screw you for making the emoji bar mandatory and not giving the 13" MBP a physical escape key.

I'm almost 30, and since I was 15 I've on/off wrote blog posts and written tutorials (some on my personal site, some paid articles + paid series a long time ago). One of the few things I enjoy doing at work (DevOps engineer) is teaching/training other people. I run a few small online side projects for beer money, but I'm not that interested in most of them, whereas making money from creating courses would be a dream for me.

For the last few years I've been using Python to build internal REST APIs and so on, and I'm also fairly well versed in PHP/Laravel. I'm not actually a SW Developer by trade, but feel I know more than enough to write/record courses for something like Udemy.

My issue is searching Udemy for any phrase such as 'Python rest', 'Python flask', 'Python web scraping' yields thousands upon thousands of results. Is it too late to start creating content for subjects like these? I'm not really a software developer, and I have more passion for monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana, Graphite, Icinga2, Statsd...) but these kind of topics don't seem worth approaching as anyone with an interest is likely already technical enough to get by, whereas learning to code has a much larger audience.

Interested to hear if I'm just being pessimistic, or whether others think the ship may have already sailed on a majority of topics.

I use OneNote for most of my projects/notes, but having code in it is a nightmare, and I prefer to write in Markdown, or at least a much less 'rich'/minomal editor.

There's a few buyable options, but no trustable reviews or trials.

Any recommendations?