julesie

We would like to set up some displays in our office to constantly display some performance dashboards. The dashboards are custom built but accessible via the web.

We'd like to set up about 6 of these devices and want to keep them as low maintenance as possible.

It feels like overkill to setup a laptop for each screen just for this purpose but we weren't sure in 2022 what the best approach from a cost and reliability perspective would be.

Some routes we have considered:

  - Use 'Smart TVs' and rely on the built-in browser (can be janky to use)
  - Use a Raspberry Pi connected to a monitor (hard to source new Pi's at the moment)
  - Use an Amazon Fire Stick (they have an auto-sleep that can't seem to be disabled)
  - Use an no-name Raspberry Pi-esque mini USB-C PC (dubious quality)

Do any of those seem like the obvious choice or are we missing something even more straightforward?

I'm suddenly getting SSL errors from unrelated services we use. For example status.algolia.com, Pingdom and others.

What is the current go to data strategy if you are too big for Dropbox but not yet enterprise level?

We are a fast growing architectural design studio. We’re currently about 60 designers mainly co-located but with some remote workers and people often work from home.

The designers are mainly working with CAD and increasingly Point Cloud files. Often with multiple people accessing the same files in short periods of time.

Up until now we have been using Dropbox but it is driving the team insane. Sync speed, lack of file locking, clunkiness of selective sync and conflicted copies being the biggest challenges.

We have a web dev engineering team but no one with deep data storage knowledge.

This feels like a common situation for small to medium sized business. How has your company handled it?

- Stick with Dropbox? - Set up your own data center? - Outsource it to a local data specialist? - Use enterprise cloud vendor? - Something else entirely?

We are willing to spend money on the right solution but just currently unsure what that is.

http://yiannopoulos.net/2013/03/06/how-it-feels-to-fail/

What environment would you give a front end designer/developer with no knowledge of Ruby on Rails?

This is assuming that their work will need to be integrated into an existing RoR app.

Would you?

a) set them up with a rails environment and let them write static html in the view files

b) no rails environment but access to git repo, let them right static pages in public folder calling relevant assets

c) completely separate folder with just their html/css/js/img files

d) something else entirely