Cyno

I don't have access to my router and my ISP charges for port forwarding (I think they might have a CGNAT setup?).

I'm trying to work around that since I want to start hosting some apps and game servers from my PC. I'm seeing a lot of talk about tailscale as a possible solution to this but honestly I'm a bit confused with all the options and whether this is actually the proper tool for the job.

Assuming it is, do I go the route of setting up a "tailscale funnel" or a "subnet"? Will other people have to install tailscale too if they want to join my servers? People also mention Netmaker or Cloudflared Tunnel, although it also seems like cloudflare doesn't want their tunnels used for game and media traffic?

The more expensive option I guess would be just paying for protonvp premium since it offers port forwarding in that case, but I'm not sure about performance and whether it's worth it, at that point I might just rent a server instead.

Hoping you folks at self-hosted have more ideas on how can I, well... self host instead of throwing money at the problem.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/6513133

Short explanation of the title: imagine you have a legacy mudball codebase in which most service methods are usually querying the database (through EF), modifying some data and then saving it in at the end of the method.

This code is hard to debug, impossible to write unit tests for and generally performs badly because developers often make unoptimized or redundant db hits in these methods.

What I've started doing is to often make all the data loads before the method call, put it in a generic cache class (it's mostly dictionaries internally), and then use that as a parameter or a member variable for the method - everything in the method then gets or saves the data to that cache, its not allowed to do db hits on its own anymore.

I can now also unit test this code as long as I manually fill the cache with test data beforehand. I just need to make sure that i actually preload everything in advance (which is not always possible) so I have it ready when I need it in the method.

Is this good practice? Is there a name for it, whether it's a pattern or an anti-pattern? I'm tempted to say that this is just a janky repository pattern but it seems different since it's more about how you time and cache data loads for that method individually, rather than overall implementation of data access across the app.

In either case, I'd like to learn either how to improve it, or how to replace it.

Short explanation of the title: imagine you have a legacy mudball codebase in which most service methods are usually querying the database (through EF), modifying some data and then saving it in at the end of the method.

This code is hard to debug, impossible to write unit tests for and generally performs badly because developers often make unoptimized or redundant db hits in these methods.

What I've started doing is to often make all the data loads before the method call, put it in a generic cache class (it's mostly dictionaries internally), and then use that as a parameter or a member variable for the method - everything in the method then gets or saves the data to that cache, its not allowed to do db hits on its own anymore.

I can now also unit test this code as long as I manually fill the cache with test data beforehand. I just need to make sure that i actually preload everything in advance (which is not always possible) so I have it ready when I need it in the method.

Is this good practice? Is there a name for it, whether it's a pattern or an anti-pattern? I'm tempted to say that this is just a janky repository pattern but it seems different since it's more about how you time and cache data loads for that method individually, rather than overall implementation of data access across the app.

In either case, I'd like to learn either how to improve it, or how to replace it.

Was just wondering what's popular nowadays, maybe I find something new and better - what kind of tools are you using to access and manage databases?

I'm personally using Dbeaver a lot but honestly it feels increasingly more buggy and unreliable as time passes, every installation and update has had (unique) issues so far and there's little support. However the ease of use and some powerful, convenient, utilities in it make it preferable to others.

It is a common sentiment that managing dependencies is always a big issue in software development and the reason why so many apps come pre-bundled with all the requirements so it reliably works on every machine.

However, I don't actually understand why is that an issue and why people generally bash npm and the way it's done there. Isn't it the simplest and most practical solution to a problem - you have a file which defines which other libraries you need, which version, and then with one command you can install them and run the program?

Furthermore, those libraries and their specific versions can be stored elsewhere and shared across all apps on a system so you can easily reuse them instead of having to redownload for each program individually.

I must be missing something since if it were that easy, people would have solved it years ago and agreed on a standardized best way, so I'm wondering what is the actual issue and a cause of so many headaches.

I see this often with both new and old developers, they have one way of doing a thing and when presented with a new problem they will fall back to what they are used to even if it's not the optimal solution. It will probably work if you bruteforce it into your usual patterns but sometimes, a different approach is much easier to implement and maintain as long as you are willing to learn it, and more importantly - know it exists in the first place.

On a less abstract level, I guess my question is - how would I go around learning about different design patterns and approaches to problem solving if I don't know about their existence in the first place? Is it just a matter of proactive learning and I should know all of them in advance, as well as their uses?

Let's for example say I need to create a system for inserting a large amount of data from files into the db, or you need to create some service with many scheduled tasks, or an user authentication system. Before you sit down and start developing those the way you usually do, what kind of steps could you take to learn a potentially better way of doing it?