Hi I’m Phil 👋, I’m a software engineer, and I maintain an open source push notification tool called ntfy. I’m also German 🇩🇪, and a big fan of 🇬🇧 & 🇺🇸, and a dad of two 👦👧
Thanks. I don’t work on it full time, no. It’s a side gig project I’ve been doing for a year and a half. I recently added paid plans to get a little side income, but it’s not really taken off. Likely because the free tier is too generous hehe.
Use ntfy.sh. It’s open source and has a free server.
Disclaimer: I made it ;-)
Awesome. Thanks for sharing 🙏
That’s a good move IMHO. Honestly I don’t want my UI to randomly shift down when new messages come in from syncing with another instance.
The right move would be to make a page that renders once and then only updates when you refresh the page. And then use web push for message notifications.
Thank you for the insight. Fascinating. Also insane that ever upvote causes a flood of messages being distributed…
I maintain and host ntfy.sh, an open source push notification service. I have a constant 9-12k WebSocket and HTTP stream connections going, and I host it on a two core machine with an average load average of less than 1. So I can happily tell you that it’s not WebSockets. Hehe.
My money would be on the federation. Having to blast/copy every single comment to every single connected instance seems like a lot.
I know you specifically asked for books, videos and podcasts, but I have actually personally never found any books, videos or podcasts I tried super inspiring or helpful. The only thing I have done on occasion is to use Pluralsight courses to learn a particular language or platform really fast (Android development, React, …).
What I can really recommend though is to just read Hacker News and get inspired by what other people do. I find only about 10% or so actually interesting, but there’s always something fascinating.
Aside from that, I learned most of my programming knowledge (not necessarily engineering knowledge) from side projects. For about a year now I have worked on a push notification service called ntfy that truly fulfills me, and that forces me to constantly learn new things.
I do cover the costs yes, through donations and the paid plans.
It’s definitely fun to do some things, but others are daunting indeed. I do, however, learn a lot. I have learned a lot that I was able to reuse elsewhere. All that is priceless.