matsdis

Telemetry is in Server -> General -> Allow Anonymous Usage Collection. When you opt-out, it also send a final message to the server that you’ve opted out. The the telemetry itself looks reasonable, I don’t mind sending it. It’s really just the dark pattern of opt-out vs of opt-in that bothers me.

The donate button is the heart in the bottom left menu (not visible in the settings). It’s unobtrusive. I wouldn’t bother to remove it, except the tooltip says that I have to pay to remove it - now it has to go. Asking for donations is fine, but asking for money to remove a button is disgusting.

I’ve set up Kavita for my e-books. Nice UI, looks promising, and I’ve added some books. I haven’t really used it yet, because half of this was just an excuse to try podman (instead of docker). I wanted to set it up to run as unprivileged user, without the docker daemon running as root. That wasn’t too hard, but it was definitely a few extra steps.

But something about Kavita didn’t sit well with me. Maybe I don’t self-host enough stuff to know what’s normal, but there is a donate button, which I don’t mind, but its tooltip says: “You can remove this button by subscribing to Kavita+.”

I’m donating to a few software projects already, and I have developed a substantial amount of free software myself. There is nothing wrong with asking for money. But what I cannot stand is when software running on my own device is intentionally acting against my interests. And this tooltip was very clear about not letting me do something that I might want to do.

So I checked the source code for more. I found another anti-pattern: telemetry is opt-out instead of opt-in. But that seems to be it, I didn’t find anything worse than that. So… fair I guess, if the author wants it that way. It’s still free software. It looks like I could delete all the Kavita+ stuff myself and re-build. Which I’m going to do if I keep using it. But this is now an extra step that prevents me from just using it, because I need to feel in control of what I run. Kind of self-inflicted, I guess…

More silly fun with types: (4min video) https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
(It starts with Ruby, but hang on.)

Protip: (kinda half rant too) Join a general software consulting company. You will then have the opposite problem, you will be seen as ANYTHING dev. Whatever combination of os, language, framework and domain you have the least experience with, you will be picked for that project because you’re available. The dice will be re-rolled every 6 months. Until then you’ll be the Angular dev. Oh wait you didn’t mention Angular. Tough luck. This is the protip, not the amateurtip.

Amateurtip: (kinda half joking) You don’t need a job to be Vue or Svelte developer…

And when the opportunity comes to select the tech stack, or switch teams/jobs, having any hands-on experience (even if it was just the tutorial) will be a huge plus, compared to nothing. You will know better what you’re talking about, and it proves that you are seriously motivated. (Of course, you can also mention your side-project to your colleagues once or twice.)