Your version is better than OP

I’ve seen many a terrible containerized monolithic app.

I’ve seen plenty of self-hosters complain when an app needs multiple containers, to the point where people make unofficial containers containing everything. I used to get downvoted a LOT on Reddit when I commented saying that separating individual systems/daemons into separate containers is the best practice with Docker.

Docker is still useful even for apps that compile to a single executable, as the app may still depend on a particular environment setup, particular libraries being available, etc.

Are there better alternatives for newbs who just wanna self host stuff?

Docker is great for a beginner, and even for an expert too. I’ve been self-hosting for 20 years and love Docker.

Back in “the old days”, we’d use Linux-VServer to containerize stuff. It was a bit like LXC is today. You get a container that shares the same kernel, and have to install an OS inside it. The Docker approach of having an immutable container and all data stored in separate volumes was a game changer. It makes upgrades so much simpler since it can just throw away the container and build a new one.

The main alternative to Docker is Podman. Podman uses the same images/containers as Docker - technically they’re “OCI containers” and both Docker and Podman implement the OCI spec.

Podman’s architecture is different. The main difference with Podman is that it never runs as root, so it’s better for security. With Docker, you can either run it as root or in rootless mode, but the default is running it as root.

You can use WebAssembly today, but you still need some JS interop for a bunch of browser features (like DOM manipulation). Your core logic can be in WebAssembly though. C# has Blazor, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some Rust WebAssembly projects. I seem to recall that there’s a reimplementation of Flash player that’s built in Rust and compiles to WebAssembly.

Python supports type hints, but you need to use a type checker like Pyre or Pyright to actually check them. Python itself doesn’t do anything with the type hints.

Most libraries have TypeScript types these days, either bundled directly with the library (common with newer libraries), or as part of the DefinitelyTyped project.

On Linux, input-remapper usually works pretty well to remap the extra buttons. I wonder if it’d work on this AI button.

Use TypeScript, and nonsensical things like adding arrays to objects will be compile-time errors.

I’m starting to like the htmx model a lot. Server-rendered app that uses HTML attributes to configure the dynamic bits (e.g. which URL to hit and which DOM element to insert the response into). Don’t have to write much JS (or any in some cases).

you literally can’t hyperlink to any of the data

I thought most React-powered frameworks use a URL router out-of-the-box these days? The developer does need to have a rough idea what they’re doing, though.

I remember WS_FTP LE leaving log files everywhere. What a pain to clean up.

deleted by creator

For some of my sites, I still build on my PC and rsync the build directory across. I’ve been meaning to set up Gitlab or something similar and configure automated deployments.

That was one nice thing about Java. You could bundle the entire app in one .jar or .war file (a .war is essentially the same as a .jar but it’s designed to run within a Servlet container like Tomcat).

PHP also became popular in the PHP 4.x era because it had a large standard library (you could easily create a PHP site with no third-party libraries), and deployment was simply copying the files to the server. Classic ASP was popular before it, but it had a very small standard library and relied heavily on COM components which had to be manually installed on the server.

FTP isn’t really used much any more. SFTP (file transfers over SSH) mostly took over, and people that want to sync a whole directory to the server usually use rsync these days.

No, because there’s use cases for systems that aren’t connected to the internet. Also, public IPs can be dynamic, so you might not want to rely on them internally.

Note that Android doesn’t support DHCPv6, just in case you have Android devices and ever have to debug IPv6 on them.

Yeah I’m not using NAT, sorry for the confusion.

My router doesn’t support RAs for a ULA range though, so I’m running radvd on my home server.

your external IPs might change, such as when moving between ISPs

This is true

You would NAT a hosts external address to its internal address.

This is usually not true.

If you’re worried about your external IP changing (like if you’re hosting a server on it), you’d solve it the same way you solve it with IPv4: Using dynamic DNS. The main difference is that you run the DDNS client on the computer rather than the router. If there’s multiple systems you want to be able to access externally, you’d habe multiple DDNS hostnames.

Having a large range has a number of benefits though. Companies that have dozens of IPv4 ranges may be fine with a single IPv6 range, which simplifies routing rules.

A lot of features in IPv6 take advantage of the fact that networks have at least a /64 range (at least if they’re built correctly according to RFC4291 and newer specs). SLAAC is a major one: Devices can auto-configure IP addresses without having to use something like a stateful DHCP server.