Octabrain

Thanks for creating this. However, I was a bit puzzled when I found a packages.json and then saw that all the heavy lifting is done from bash. I don't understand the need for having to install Yarn for just running a bunch of bash scripts. IMHO, after seeing the size and the amount of logic within the scripts, I think you could have made it more ergonomic by just building a bash script that takes parameters and that's it.

Yes, at least conceptually. However, CDK is more opinionated, uses Cloudformation and depends on its own CLI.

I'm working on a side project which is a Python library that provides of an abstraction layer to manage infrastructure in cloud providers by interacting with their APIs. This is something I've been developing every now and then for the last months after years of working with Terraform and getting tired of the limitations of it's DSL (yeah, Pullumi is better but I just simply want a generic library with classes representing services in the cloud I can call natively in Python without having to deal with a 3rd party application like Pullumi is!).

I can relate to this. I used to be on call for many years and honestly, it destroyed my mental health. In the last company I did it, it felt like falling in a meat grinder for a week. I remember once spending a whole weekend giving support on an bug that was introduced by a recent release. 72 hours of working non stop. Because of that among others, I got a severe burnt out that took me to the deepest dark place I've ever been.

To this day, I simply refuse to do on call. There's no enough money you can pay me that would make me to suffer that again.

PS: Fuck you, Rackspace.

I hate flying with passion and get extremely scared when flying through turbulences but, there was a journalist in my country, that also had experience as a pilot and said once on TV that during turbulences, is one of the safest moments in a plane. I don't remember the reasons but is there anybody in here with knowledge in the field that could confirm/deny this?

Same thing happened to me when I moved to the UK: I went to the supermarket, bought one jar or Marmite, went back home, had a toast with it expecting to have some sweet-close-to-chocolate flavour and then I was shocked. I have to admit that I actually liked although I don't eat it regularly these days because that wild amount of salt cannot be healthy in any manner.

I don't get your point. I just use two ways:

1. With mouse -> Up left corner (a.k.a hot corner) -> Click on the window I want.

2. With keyboard -> Alt + Tab -> Select the window I want.

I find that quite straight forward. Again, it's a personal thing.

It's just a personal thing. I try to stick to using tools that provide me the best defaults + being open source. I don't want to spend time customizing my desktop or getting overwhelmed by the amount of different choices I have available. Don't get me wrong, KDE is a beautiful and great project, it's just that, a very personal thing.

I like its simplicity and the straight forward workflow it provides. Years ago, I used to use KDE and enjoyed it but these days, I want something that is functional while being vanilla and standard as possible and personally, that's what GNOME gives me.

My conclusion is that this "chaotic scenario" happens when humans work in big groups. It's extremely hard/pretty much impossible to coordinate big group of humans and made them to work efficiently. In fact, this is one of the reasons by which nowadays, I personally prefer to work on a small start up environment instead of a big corporation.

Where I work, we use Confluence and Backstage. Confluence sucks and Backstage, although I conceptually consider it appealing, sucks too.

Would be this something that can be avoided by setting up BitLocker with the encryption password to be provided at boot time by the user? Because that's the way I've always configured it when I've used Windows in the past, due to me being paranoid and suspicious about the default "key saved on TPM" approach.

I've never used it although I've been aware of its existence for a long time. It's great to see a tool actively developed that uses a boring-yet-great-and-well-known framework (Django + Templates). Ironically, it's refreshing to see that stack in a world of JS frameworks, microservices and what not.

I've been using Firefox on the PC and phone for years now. I had the temptation a couple of years ago to use Chrome due to some issues I had on Linux (I don't remember what exactly) but then I concluded the obvious: using a browser made by a company that profits mainly on abusing user's privacy? Nah, I think I'm gonna pass.

Devs have no business doing it.

Agree but, I have to say that, as a DevOps, it was infuriating to me to have to deal with developers without any care for the quality of what they were delivering. Sometimes for pressure from someone higher in the chain, other times, for pure laziness and/or incompetence. I remember coming in the morning after a hell of a night on the on-call, reporting the issues to the Devs in charge and being answered something along the lines of "fixing that is not the priority right now" and my replying on anger with "If it was your damn phone the one ringing during the whole night I'm pretty sure you would make it a priority".

On call sucks so badly. At this point of my life, I firmly believe that there's not enough amount of money that can compensate the mental suffering it implies. Even more if the company you work for has this mentality of "deal with it" without making improvements, which was my case in the last period I did on call and what made the camel's back to break for me. Nowadays I simply refuse it. For those who are still on the trenches, stay strong, never resígnate yourself to just "deal with it" and thank you.

Yes. I've been a long time Linux PC user (Thinkpads and Dell mostly) so without any shame, I have to admit that the quality of Apple devices is miles ahead anything else I've tried. Also yes, I simply cannot stand MacOS. I can recognise its virtues (and its limitations) but it's just not for me.

I don't have an M[1-3]{1} right now but as soon as hear that Linux is usable on it I'm gonna purchase one right away.

IMHO and I might be entirely wrong but placing and coupling all that logic into the database seems like a bad idea and it's not a question of speed, it's a question of separating responsibilities. Also, for the case shown in the article, it seems all right for a "hello world" kind of thing. For something complex or prone to deep changes (like most of software projects I've been involved with), this seems like a true nightmare.

"To fight terrorism" usually is the second.

IMHO, I haven't tried Windows 11 yet but having to disable system updates for being able to preserve user configuration says all I need to know about the quality and moral behind that OS. Also, with the due respect, unless you have other measures in place for covering security, I think disabiling system updates is a terrible choice from a user perspective.

I have to admit that I would chose Kustomize any day of the week. I personally find it easier to debug, version, grasp what is going on behind the scenes and simpler to maintain and operate. Also, to be fair, I have to admit that I've had a few negative experiences with Helm that made me to develop a negative bias against it. The main one being, to make the story short: I, as a DevOps guy, had the unpleasant experience of having to take care of the deployment process of a HeLLm chart(s) pile of crap that a very opinionated yet not very knowledgeable (on DevOps practices) team of developers created in a company I worked for in the past. It was composed by a myriad of obscure charts, jammed together as a house of cards. If that wasn't enough, the main chart was being called from a bash script that called Ansible and it pulled some data from a repo and rendered values coming from a repo into the values.yaml. The process of deploying that thing implied, apart from a couple of good hours of your time, to also have to perform some debugging sorcery with kubectl (removing this, modifying that etc) in a meeting while screen sharing your terminal with the proud parents of that monster. Absolute nightmare that still giving me sweaty hand palms to this day.

Anyways, I want to take the opportunity to ask other DevOps in the room something: What workflow do you use for performing CD for a bunch of Helm charts? I mean, I guess you version a bunch of values.yaml files in a repo but how do you manage the installation of the repository from the CD runner and so on? I'm curious because from the top of my head, Helm implies the runner (the actor who calls Helm to install a chart) to install a repository and then install the package from that repository passing to it the path to the values.yaml file, but on a CD pipeline, this actor is usually a disposable container. Do you install during one of the steps of the CD pipeline the repositories from an in-house created script perhaps every time the pipeline runs? Are you hopefully using a GitOps approach instead?

Thanks in advance for any answer.

I usually take it with just water on a empty stomach and never had any issue.

Thanks for this recommendation. I'll search for information about this.

I really appreciate the time you took for writing this and I'll definitely have a look to this Podcast you mentioned!

I totally relate to this and it's one of the reasons I try to force myself to go out every day (e.g the office). I don't want to let the anxiety tyrant to grow. Also, being in my mid thirties, I've realised that I've been drinking alcohol since my early twenties (nothing crazy, just a few pints of beer every now and then) not because I like the feeling of being drunk, but because I hate the feeling of being anxious and alcohol, at least for me, acts as a solid anti-anxiety drug. Anxiety sucks because it affects critical aspects of my life (social life, sex, perceptions about life itself etc)

It's a complex and annoying problem, because if I go to the GP, I might end up taking pills and I really don't want that. The alternative is to go to a phycologist but, as with restaurants, it's better to get a recommended one and I haven't got any where I live.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Your story reminded me of a case I personally know of a guy who was a very disciplined poker player for a period of time and one day won a sweet €90000 prize in an online tournament after a lot of effort. Apart from poker, his life was a mess (living with his mother, no even a driving licence, no serious job). He spent the whole amount on partying, hotels and cocaine. He never got again any substantial money from poker and his life is still a mess last time I knew.

For me, bash and jq are, literally, the opposite of riding a bicycle. It doesn't matter the amount of time I spend on a given week working with them, a month later, I am gonna have to skim through my bookmarks and Kagi results (and now also chatGPT) for knowing how to do stuff I was easily doing a month ago.

You know, I've been saying something similar to what you wrote for a long time: if I have a coffee at 7am I struggle to sleep and everyone around me has been always looking at me like I'm crazy. It's a relief to know that there are more people having the same issue. It's a shame, because I do love the taste of coffee but I cannot cope with this specific side effect.

In my personal experience, I can't handle weed. It makes me paranoid. I tried a weekish ago to smoke a bit with some friends and while being high I remembered why I stopped years ago. My mind simply doesn't manage it very well. It makes me feel anxious and can't control negative thoughts (guilt, shame, mistakes etc not related with the action of consumption itself). I think we should avoid to fall into the "it's just a natural plant" fallacy I've personally heard many times.

Edit: Why the downvotes? I just mentioned a explicitly stated personal take related to the topic...