At my current job, I’m the only one doing any sort of programming work. I basically am the “tech solutions” guy and although we do have an IT department. The work we do is bastly different.
So this is a great oportunity for me to present open source software and, while my current company is a deeply entrenched windows user, I have been able to convince colleages and my boss that sometimes straying from it has lots of benefits (specially in the wallet department).
Without further ado, here are the open source projects I managed to implement onto my fully windows company:
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A ubuntu LTS web server: One of the bigger projects I was tasked with was making an internal utilities website. As linux is king in the web world it was fairly easy to get this setup approbed and as an added bonus I got to implement a fairly similar ‘0 downtime’ setup I saw showcased on youtube. Using industry standard tools like docker or git and some good ol’ bash. Here we use pgAdmin to connect to the Postgress server and do basic maintenance tasks.
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Headwind’s mobile device management service: This one I’m fairly proud of, my IT department has 500+ phones to setup each year and all of these were done manually, as they didnt find any provider that didn’t offer a cost-effective solution. With Headwinds model I was able to setup another small test server and showcase it. While the solution aint perfect, I managed to convince my manager that this is something we should go forward with. To be honest, I’m just proud that I saved hours of work for whichever poor interns would have been tasked with manually doing half a thousand phones.
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Mozilla Thunderbird: This one’s one of those quick and easy fixes. New reports only came in through mail, so I setup a client that downloads these to files the other departments use. Here I am sure I can find a way better solution, specially one that doesnt require a different instance per target folder.
While this is an overall short list, progress is progress and I am constanly on the look for replacements for tools I feel forced to use.
For example, Power Automate. I am looking for a solution that lets me export to an exe and has the strong selector tools it’s using. AutoHotKey seems to be a great replacement but it’s still just relying on screen position which doesnt have the portability I need. Pywinauto has great promise but I havent gotten the downtime to re-implement something working on it.
To be honest, open source and documentation (plus, chatGPT correct answers) are way more coupled in some open sorce projects than Windows and all their magic tricks, error codes, and so on. The fact that there is some sort of commercial support that is bigger or better with proprietary software (generally speaking) is true and partially because of network effect. I do agree with you. But I think it depends on what are we comparing… e.g. Windows SQL server vs. Docker PostgreSQL. I rather stay with Postgres, since it runs all over the world.
Right until your PostgreSQL server goes down and you can’t call your IT department and have to start hunting for a contractor, find a budget, get it signed off by management and HR, then on-board the new staff member, that is, after you advertised the position, did job interviews, after first filtering through the 700 … or two, applications, each plausibly generated by a ChatGPT session. Give it something like six months in a big organisation, less in a nimble one.
Does an “entrenched” anything sound “nimble” to you?
I thought I was agreeing with you for naïve comparisons between software products. But since you got into my example… I will have to say: from the problems you describe (like getting a signature by both management and HR), I barely see anything related to documentation of PostgreSQL (which was my point). And I struggle to see, for any of the issues you mentioned, how Windows SQL server is any easier. Plus, almost all organizations (Big and small) are using postgreSQL and not Windows SQL server.
Last but not the least, I can’t understand what you’re asking at the end: Does an “entrenched” anything sound “nimble” to you?
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