Hacker News: juangacovas

New comment by juangacovas in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

juangacovas — Mon, 11 May 2026 20:01:13 +0000

Working on this: https://www.prisonlegacy.com - Twenty-six years ago, a small Spanish studio shipped the most unusual PC MMO ever made: a maximum-security prison where every player is an inmate. La Prisión ran on community loyalty until its servers finally went dark in 2018. And we're bringing it back...

New comment by juangacovas in "YouTube Removes Windows 11 Bypass Tutorials, Claims 'Risk of Physical Harm'"

juangacovas — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 19:02:26 +0000

And you know it because you're forced to use windows somewhere?

New comment by juangacovas in "What the hell have you built"

juangacovas — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 13:30:16 +0000

Love the downvotes ;P

New comment by juangacovas in "What the hell have you built"

juangacovas — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 09:33:16 +0000

Nah, postgres is overhyped, MariaDB is enough and recently: <https://mariadb.org/mariadb-vs-postgresql-understanding-the-...>

New comment by juangacovas in "The hardest program I've ever written (2015)"

juangacovas — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 07:46:21 +0000

IMAP email parser for a ticket-like program. Even with abstractions and libraries, email can be such a pita...

New comment by juangacovas in "CLI to manage your SQL database schemas and migrations"

juangacovas — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 07:36:06 +0000

I like when projects like this mention other projects. "Phinx" (PHP) has been a breeze to work with for database migrations for years now, and handles more than my team needs. Meanwhile, some time ago a colleague in other job was raging they didn't have migrations but a chaos of DBs in their environments.

New comment by juangacovas in "The State of SSL Stacks"

juangacovas — Sun, 11 May 2025 08:08:33 +0000

Indeed, made some preliminary tests under RHEL 9 (Rocky, etc) for example and if you're used to compile HAProxy from sources to use specific OpenSSL versions, testing "aws-lc" is fairly straightforward. Their BUILD instructions and INSTALL file from HAProxy also help.

New comment by juangacovas in "You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)"

juangacovas — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 13:52:18 +0000

Agree. But you need confidence on being able to debug / log / fix / revert, so having a strong knowledge of some of the parts is mandatory (i.e. server if it's web-dev, etc).

New comment by juangacovas in "PHP 8.4.4 Released"

juangacovas — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 08:22:52 +0000

My experience: coming from programming in C, then doing web-scripting with Perl, then PHP 4 through 5, 7 and 8 versions, it's been delightful. Big improvements in speed, ecosystem, very nice backwards compatibility in general (which is hard to do), and keeps being a flexible, multi-paradigm language. About frameworks, you can do things now like-ruby-on-rails with Laravel, like-java with Symfony, or just use any custom solution you see to fit better for team/yourself. Mantra: you can do shit code with any language, and PHP is flexible enough to let you organize projects the right way.

New comment by juangacovas in "PHP 8.4.4 Released"

juangacovas — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 08:11:42 +0000

Sorry but your example shows that you know Python better than PHP.

New comment by juangacovas in "Thoughts on having SSH allow password authentication from the Internet"

juangacovas — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 18:55:19 +0000

Same here, PasswordAuthentication is globally No, but I always hold an special username for emergencies which is the only user allowed to login via password (easy at sshd_config file, Match User xxxx then "PasswordAuthentication yes"). Besides emergencies, also works wonders when some sysadmins insist to login via bare metal terminal and cannot use a key...

New comment by juangacovas in "Gource: Software Version Control Visualization"

juangacovas — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 09:58:14 +0000

Same here, gource did help to visualize a complete revamp / refactor of a software, from the current mess by that time, to the final, pratically complete rewrite it was (through a process, since keep it working was mandatory). Really interesting to see the "mess" mutating into a more organized file struct, etc.

New comment by juangacovas in "Functional PHP (2015)"

juangacovas — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 18:08:07 +0000

Well, in my particular experience with juniors, it's astonishing the so many ways they have to make any code run slower than it has to be (besides the network and database queries), just by thinking 'nah, this is a computer and it can do millions of ops by second'. And that's why I always take the "premature optimization" dogma with a grain of salt while my life's miserable enough having to accelerate some other's stuff.

New comment by juangacovas in "Why the ISO format has to die"

juangacovas — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 09:36:23 +0000

I don't think that tools like ReaR (Relax and Recover) would agree with retiring ISOs..

New comment by juangacovas in "Ask HN: What do you use to backup your VMs?"

juangacovas — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 07:32:48 +0000

Same here on using lsyncd and restic. Curious about the LVM+rsync method for nightly? My two cents: ReaR (Relax and Recover) for Linux for raw moving servers has saved me a couple of times.

New comment by juangacovas in "A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago"

juangacovas — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 03:37:10 +0000

>Skip low level and go as high as you can. Ditch C, assembly, hardware. Take python, ruby, js. Never touched C++ cause it’s awful? Good.

In my personal experience, I think that having to work on different high AND more low level programming languages over time is what sets me apart from people/coworkers with low basic knowledge of computer foundations (the order in my case being Basic, Pascal, C, Perl, C/C++, PHP, JS, etc). Also it depends on the projects, but just my two cents.

New comment by juangacovas in "Engineering for Slow Internet"

juangacovas — Fri, 31 May 2024 15:20:52 +0000

Come to Spain. We haven't everything, but our optic fibers and internet plans are top notch ;P

New comment by juangacovas in "I run a software book club"

juangacovas — Fri, 31 May 2024 13:39:06 +0000

Those comments are nice to read. I tried, but my coworkers are too "young" or from other generation, I guess. The response [about simply buying a book] was "Oh, another person said it wasn't needed [to buy a book about that] since it will always be behind newer versions coming"...

New comment by juangacovas in "Take a look at Traefik, even if you don't use containers"

juangacovas — Tue, 07 May 2024 06:55:06 +0000

Same here, we've been using HAProxy for years now and only gets to improve

New comment by juangacovas in "How I keep myself alive using Golang"

juangacovas — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 05:06:27 +0000

At my office I'm one of the more valuable employees, being diabetic type 1 or not, and my managers know that :)