barefootcoder

There are two things that almost every website does that just drive me nuts, and I don’t understand the reasoning that would lead to these designs.

1) Login link for existing users is tiny and hidden

Why?!? I get it, you want new users, but your existing users need to log in too!

2) auto play of video previews.

Netflix, YouTube, Etc… they all do it. I don’t want the movie to start because I clicked to read the full description, or worse on the main screen just because I stop navigating for a second to read the blurb. I don’t want videos in my suggested feed on YouTube to play silently and then start 20 or 30 seconds into the video once I do click them. Does ANYBODY find these useful? Why are they the default behaviors? Who do they benefit? Don’t they just end up costing unnecessary bandwidth? I know that I can usually turn them off, but having to search for the setting is frustrating.

…and don’t even get me started on form validators that are overly strict when they could just strip the unwanted delimiters or white space themselves, or password fields that cannot be pasted, or password rules that make it impossible to generate a random password.

I've been doing software consulting/contracting for a while now and one of the biggest challenges I have faced is figuring out how to best isolate client data, particularly ensuring that I don't accidentally display/leave behind source code/databases/etc from one client at the site of another. It's possible that I'm overly paranoid about this, but it's something that I feel is important, so I'm looking for tips from others who deal with the same issues.

So far my approach has been to run two different laptops and a VM, but juggling the IT overhead is getting tiresome, and VMs have certain drawbacks as well (e.g. some client products are too demanding for VMs). Switching between client tasks is also a pain as I have to maintain two workspaces at my home office, and one isn't as nice as the other.

I've considered external drives (all of my drives are encrypted), but that's cumbersome as well, and doesn't protect against things that cannot be installed on the external drives, nor swap files, temp files, etc.

So... has anybody come up with a system that works for them? My dream would be for my laptops to all have easily swapped drive bays, but that's not currently an option, and doesn't solve the IT overhead issue -- backups are a pain as it is! Multi-boot would be similar, but requires larger drives, increases the risk of losing everything at once, still has the same IT burden, and doesn't always go smoothly. (and is a pain with UEFI!)

So, I ask you HN: What are your best tips for juggling multiple clients' installations?