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New engineers are always green in some aspect. It sounds like you’re combining a number of different engineers from different programs and drawing conclusions.

Courses teach a lot, but they also miss out on tons of topics as well. There’s limited reinforcement between classes, so even if your professor covers your topic of choice, the next course may not.

Unit tests for instance are generally used by students for checking their homework assignment as they go, but it’s the (incomplete) grading rubric. I didn’t actually write many unit tests in college until my software design class which was in Smalltalk.

I didn’t use version control until I worked on a few projects with a fellow student who self hosted SVN.

I used 6-8 different programming languages in school, each for a semester at a time. There’s simply no place for repetition and mastery until you get a job, either as an intern or permanent position—and then you’re the engineer you talk about.

Every new engineer is different, depending on their program and interests, even within the same school’s degree program. They’ll all need mentoring to grow. No one is ever going to graduate and be a mid to senior level purely from school.

Yes it’s called a tithe. Typically voluntary these days but people do it out of feelings of obligation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithe

I believe this only applies to a few sections—soda, chips, and magazines(?). Your produce and canned food aisles are stocked by the store employees, though the planograms for the shelving layout comes from corporate, sized for the store’s footprint. There may be some distributor input into those, such as cereal, but I’ve never seen those processes, only the resulting stock plan.

I read Elements of Programming Interviews rather than do LC questions online. That book has a few flavors for popular languages—-just level up on the language you know best, don’t try to learn a new one.

I spent about a month covering the book, and then grokking the systems design.

It’s not so much the knowledge as the familiarity with the interview format and expectations (ask clarifying questions, explain your reasoning). The company I ended up joining had an opportunity for a mock phone screen interview, which I took advantage of. It was roughly a LC easy but covered the format and gave me some feedback on how I conducted myself.

The mix packs of blades works best while you figure out which is best for your skin and hair. I personally find Feather too aggressive, Astra and Dorco Prime Platinums worked best for me. You should know after the first shave whether the blade is okay enough to use for day 2, otherwise toss and move on.

Soaps are also quite variable in lather and feel—affecting the shave. Tallow, glycerine, and oil based soaps all coat differently. Get a good brush and it’s a nice way to get ready in the morning.

For traveling I use a disposable 3 blade and aerosol shaving cream because you’re not supposed to take the safety razor blades through security.

My top result is a blog format recipe — recipe at end of page, though this one has a “jump to” button.

https://joyfoodsunshine.com/the-most-amazing-chocolate-chip-...

The second recipe result is Betty Crocker and as you’d expect — recipe at top, steps with photos after.

I personally find more of the former than the latter when looking for specific recipes (Red wine chocolate cake was my most recent search)

There are a set of “listed” parts that must be designed by the constructor team. There was a bit of a controversy this year because Racing Point used last year’s Mercedes brake duct design. The part was not listed last year, meaning it was ok then, but it became a listed part in 2020 season. Racing Point was penalized a few points in the standings as a result, but allowed to use the design since they couldn’t unlearn how Mercedes designed the brake duct.

The standard Coppertone sunscreen says

Directions: Apply liberally 15 minutes before sun exposure. Reapply: after 80 minutes of swimming or sweating; immediately after towel drying; at least every 2 hours

I’ve always heard this as time to absorb to become waterproof, but I’m not sure if it’s actual skin absorption or the liquid used to convey the sun blocking compounds to dry or evaporate. Either way, apply and then wait.

I have the first gen Surface Book for home after replacing an old Macbook and I like it. The pen feature, battery life, and the OS are all great, with the following caveats

- It’s the only device I’ve ever cracked a screen on. There’s a vertical crack from the bottom of the screen to the top, which I attribute to some kind of weight on the laptop in my bag since there’s a gap between the keyboard and screen when closed.

- My WiFi chipset required me to disable an advanced TCP setting (offload? Can’t recall, found in a forum) in the registry to not crash my WiFi router or slow it down to 3Mbps

- Periodically my laptop will crash while sleeping (maybe it’s going to hibernation? Haven’t dug too hard) and prompt me with Bitlocker recovery every time.

It’s on the official site, I’m not sure of 3rd party app support. To view your bookmarks, https://mobile.twitter.com/i/bookmarks

There’s actually a “bookmark this tweet” option under the more options menu for the tweet.

Replaced our Dyson upright with a Miele canister -- it's considerably easier to use, and picks up dog hair better. It uses more consumables but the combo pack of a filter + 4 bags they sell will cover about a year of use. Overall I'm much happier with the Miele.

If you prefer the video format over a book, Grand Designs (BBC, select seasons available on Netflix) is a series covering the build from nothing to completion of complex or unconventional building designs. Most of the time the episode covers how the build goes wrong.

There are certain themes across the variety of site locations and designs and backgrounds of the individuals building:

1) It costs more than expected

2) It takes longer than expected

3) Project managing it yourself is extremely difficult

4) Building it yourself is even more difficult

In Slack's case, yes they're proactive. But this is not the norm when enterprises violate their SLA.

If a service outage is particularly bad, some providers will be proactive and reach out with credits. This is rare.

In most other cases, the company relies on you to contact them and claim that they were out of SLA, at which point they'll investigate and give you back a pittance of what you paid that month.

The claims is normally a fun go-around process of pointing fingers.

See for instance the Amazon EC2 SLA - https://aws.amazon.com/compute/sla/. In order to even begin to claim it, you need to be running in 2 AZs. You must provide evidence in a ticket. Your service credit will be either 10% (99.0 - 99.9) or 30% (< 99.0). Whether you were down for 1 day or 14 days, it's the same SLA credit. The credit is applied to future service, may be applied as a refund to the current bill at their discretion.

This is why the theaters are transitioning into more of an Alamo Drafthouse style setup with a kitchen and alcohol. While the theaters have to be reconfigured and actually lose seat count, the type of customer drawn in by food, booze, and reserved larger reclining seats will net more per showing than a cramped theater full of buckets of popcorn.

Source: I know a manager at a theater chain whose location underwent the conversion -- his store's profits went up. But the location at the mall stuck with the higher seat density because it had more foot traffic and removing seats would decrease profits

Maybe sometimes. Purchasing cards sometimes have limits per line item, and you want to be able to slide under it as strictly less than comparison.

500 limit? $499

1000 limit? $995

While this could sound sketchy, business absolutely love it. If that monthly charge is $1000 or $1001, now I need another level of approval and signatures.

We switched our large breed from Blue to Fromm’s after the chicken byproduct reports and subsequent lawsuit. From research it seemed similar quality to what I thought Blue was, and is commonly stocked online (Jet.com, Chewy.com) and available at local boutique pet shops if I need to run and pick up a bag.

This looks similar in terms of total spending to what I was doing on my own in a medium COL city out of college, but I'd strongly suggest you categorize things better so you can figure out where you spend your money. For example, you have Whole Foods, Aldi, Sprouts, Costco, HMart. Is that all grocery/pantry? What about Target, they also sell grocery, but could also be clothes along with JCPenny. You've got Tmobile and Republic wireless -- add that together for just Cell Phone. It's impossible to tell what your vacation costs were. I see some expedia, six flags citypass, and whatnot, but no direct hotel charges. Just drop that all into vacation and/or entertainment.

It's also hard to see if we're not familiar with what things are, like DCU? Is that a Credit Union for your savings account? Is that paying off student loans? What about STASH? Is that your drug budget?

Some things jump out at me though

State Farm = renter's insurance? That's fine. Your AAA is concerning though for Auto, $854 every 6 months. You can probably get that lower without cutting coverage unless $2K was paying off the balance of a brand new car and/or you're under 26. See about bundling the renters and auto and shop around for rates. Is that $750 car service plan really saving you more than $750 per year? If the 2K was a super cheap car lease, $750/yr maintenance should not be required.

You have a car but significant expenses on Uber/Lyft. Are those related to vacation travel? Or are they to get around while your car is in the shop? Or are they a designated driver for when you go out?

Where did the $800 in ATM withdraws go? That's over 2% of the spending.

So overall I'd suggest updating your spreadsheet to get some higher level categories. From there, see what jumps out at you to drill in to as something you can possibly cut. So long as you're happy with your savings rate you can actually spend money on things you want. If that's food, clothes, hobbies, toys whatever. It's your life so make sure you enjoy it.

Reasons for not taking the fellowship:

If you want to work at a particular company, interning there is a good way to get in the door before graduation.

If you want to develop tech skills, you may develop them somewhat in the internships (I can't see the internships making you a manager, that'd be post graduation), but looking 5+ years after college it may not be to the degree you're seeking.

Pay freezes are a thing in government. You may go a few years without a pay raise if there's another recession.

Reasons for taking the fellowship:

You'll learn tons about dealing with people and their priorities. You'll have to coordinate with different departments and agencies. Hugely underrated skill.

Your work schedule will be 40 hours a week.

You mentioned middle-manager for IT initiatives. I can guess that the systems targeted for those initiatives are 10-15 years old at least, and you'll be responsible for maintaining the legacy whatever while transitioning to new technologies. Great experience combination.

If you can obtain a security clearance as a part of your government work, doors open in the private sector (Boeing, Lockheed, Harris, etc). Active TS/SCI clearances are worth pretty good money because you can be productive immediately and not have to do desk work for a year while you're cleared. If you hate the pay/benefits you can always jump ship to a contractor. This should still be true in 5 years.

Good list, I'd also say permissions. The number of problems I fix by understanding users/groups and assigning the appropriate permission (not `chmod 777 *`) is huge. It shows up in a variety of "Cannot access file" type messages or "File does not exist" application errors and people sometimes freak out because the file is there.

Without knowing you or your workplace exactly, there's two buckets this falls into. The first is nefarious, where your manager took advantage of you to provide output and will replace you with someone else eager. In this case the only solution is leave and try to determine the red flags that led you to this point to avoid joining another role with the same demands.

The second possibility is that there's a missing communication gap here. As you've discovered, effort alone is not the key to success. Effort may get you between basic levels, e.g. Programmer 1 to Programmer 2, but not necessarily from Programmer to Team Lead where there's more expectations beyond technical skills like mentoring, working between organizations, etc

Some questions to ask yourself and possibly discuss further with manager:

1. Why did the 70+ hours go on for a year? Was this coming down from top level or self imposed? Where was the communication about sustainability, or outcomes upon completion?

2. Where was the 1:1s and check-ins during this project that you got to the end before knowing the outcome? You own your 1:1s, use them to discuss your career goals, advancement, and blockers, not just as a status update. Schedule them if your manager isn't.

3. Was your manager previously aware of your desire to get promoted? Remember, not everyone wants to get promoted. Have you previously discussed goals, measures, and skills to obtain this?

4. If you previously discussed the goals and measures, why did this 70+hr/wk project not align with these goals? This in particular is a failure of management. "Crunch time" is a given in industry at times, but this seems into Death March territory if it was top-down.

4(b). If the previously discussed goals did align with this project, what else is missing that didn't get met? If everything did get met, argue to that positioning and discussion rather than "I worked really hard and made a thing."

5. How was your communication of the work you were performing and completing? Sell benefits, not features. Did others perhaps think that you worked long hours because of your lack of skill, thus requiring more hours to make it up?

So let's consider the hypothetical future where you hand a dockerfile to a container service.

Where is this container service? Maybe it's in the cloud, you're paying Amazon for it. That's a possibility, and there's nothing for you to do there, but maybe you're a F500 company (or Amazon) who runs everything in-house.

How do you provision the container cluster host? Maybe you PXE boot, but you still need a configuration to join the cluster.

Maybe you don't configure via confs, and instead try to auto-detect nodes via multicast. Sure, but now you're constrained to a single broadcast domain on your network. Can't make that too large or you'll have a very chatty network.

How do you provision the switches? They need configurations still.

You'll also want security enforced on the hosts, to ensure certain container ports aren't exposed to the world (oops MySQL is now public due to a debug container instance getting rolled into production).

You still need backups of your data. What, where, when are the backups? I doubt tape robots connect into containers, but I could be wrong.

So there's definitely ops work to be done, and configuration management is a part of it. Maybe you outsource this, but it has to be done.

Let's go back to the what goes into the container. You're going to be running an application, and depending on the language you may need to compile it, and your production containers are going to be slim so you strip the build tools. So you need some other kind of build container or host to manage this.

In most (all?) cases you're going to want to test your code. This means a CI system, and probably a CD system since you want containers to be built automatically with the latest code so it's easier to deploy. What manages the CI/CD system? More importantly, who? DevOps, in the conceptual sense, even if the title changes.

A few months ago I booked a hotel for a trip. I checked the 3rd parties, found a hotel and then tried to go direct. HHonors claims the best prices online if you're logged in--it was the same as the booking third party (Groupon Getaways via Expedia), except Groupon gave 10% back in Groupon Bucks.

I arrived at the hotel, they noted my HHonors basic membership and mentioned I wasn't receiving points due to booking with third party. I said I got the room for 10% less than their best online rate and their response was that I should have called bookings to talk to them. So now there's even more hoops to jump through to book direct? No thanks.

A friend of mine successfully started a routine of waking up at 5am to go to the gym before work. His success was largely around setting an alarm to get ready for bed. He'd set an alarm to start getting ready for bed, and then another alarm when it was time to turn off the lights. The last 30 min or so before he went to bed was time to read -- no screens since he'd get distracted browsing websites and find it harder to fall asleep.

While he was starting off he kept the schedule fairly strictly, with weekends and meetups included. After he got into a routine he started getting a bit more lax, but I'm pretty sure he still has an alert on his phone some 2 years later after starting this habit.

The IT point of view is going to be that a a standard package load out reduces testing requirements for applications, patches and drivers, provides for a spare parts inventory, and allows for volume pricing to reduce total cost of ownership. It also allows for standardized documentation that can be handed down to lower level technicians. Ultimately IT is a cost center in many organizations and have continually constricted budgets so things increasing ongoing costs are seen as a no-go.

When you open up a BYO program you now have to provide for a variety of configurations, customizations, and drivers that will require debugging. I ran into an issue where my Microsoft Surfacebook conflicted with my 5GHz wifi, causing reduced speeds. I fixed it with a registry edit changing driver settings, but this is now asking your local IT team to figure this out and fix it x2000 employee configurations It increases the time to repair on all systems. If a part breaks, how do you repair it? Does the employee handle the repair process or the company? What security do you enforce on the BYO configurations to manage your data requirements? Now the IT team isn't the only team involved, it also needs Security, and probably 3 or 4 levels of management.

Suppose you take a step back from a full BYO program and just offer an expanded selection. Instead of the 15" Dell Laptop, you can now get any Dell business laptop, and have a choice of Win 7 or Win 10. This is more manageable, will still allow for volume discounts. However, it increases the testing and documentation demands, in particular with in-house applications. Some of this is done anyway as a part of full scale operating system upgrades, but why do this early? There's other projects and things going on, and the operating system team on IT has their own timeline for testing and vetting internal applications. If you have 2000 developers you probably have just as many sales, marketing, accounting, and other support positions, each with their own applications. If you don't do a full rollout company-wide, a question that might be asked is why are developers special enough to justify this treatment when it's good enough for 2000 people? No other complaints have been heard.

Opening up to even more operating systems, like OSX implement additional cost and complexity. Adding Linux involves an entirely new skillset that generally costs more than experienced Windows administrators. You also need to feed those skills and documentation back down to level 1 & 2 who are going to be doing the hands-on repairs and issues like connecting to projectors and wifi.

Changing an IT process like this is going to involve multiple levels of management to justify the budget for increased support and changes in process. It's not something you can ask even the first line managers for, so I hope you're prepared for the bureaucracy this will entail going through. It is doable, IT as an industry is being more accepting of mobile devices and multiple device configurations. It requires alignment between internal app developers and IT to support these applications, as well as migrating off old apps that may require specific combinations, and then diligence with testing and deployment.

I didn't explicitly test that, though I expect it's usable as the docs suggest that after you resize a live root partition you should reboot the box after modifying the filesystem extents (resize2fs). I was modifying a scratch partition -- nothing blew up while the resize happened.

I had a volume that needed resizing, so went ahead and tried moving from a 50GB gp2 to a 100GB gp2 disk online. It took 1 hour 40 minutes to do the resize. It's not a quick operation, and from looking at the docs you're limited to 1 modification per 6 hours on any given volume.

It's been a while since I took German in high school, but I remember there being a distinction between Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium. The opportunities offered to students of each school were different (vocational or University), and you had a test to determine which one you went to.

That sounds similar to the proposal in the article. Is there any data from this system that would support the premise of a separate gifted school being a better way of teaching advanced students?

Generally dead systems don't hurt the datacenter in terms of infrastructure utilization, as they don't use power and they don't use cooling, but they could prevent you from bringing in new compute capacity. So you have to figure out whether you can run both the old and slightly broken systems at the same time as the new and faster systems.

Capacity could mean physical space, since if floor tiles are occupied by a rack you'll have to put it somewhere else. But even if you have physical space to put another rack somewhere, that needs connected to power and cooling.

Depending on your cooling layout (hot boxing, cold boxing, vented floors, etc) you may not have appropriate cooling for a new rack, especially a newer, higher density rack. Or you have sufficient cooling overall, but not for that density in that location because all your high density stuff was planned to go in a designated area.

Same thing with power -- you may not have enough power cables for the power distribution units within a rack (you'd typically have 2 so the redundant power supplies don't share a PDU as a point of failure), the cabling may not reach, the electrical panel could be maxed out on amperage or breaker slots, or you'd throw the load on each of the electrical phases too far out of balance (A previous manager of mine was an electrical engineer, I'm not too sure about the real-world technicalities of this other than he tried to keep everything balanced).

Networking could also be a limiting factor. You could run out of switch ports or SFPs because you only planned for N connections per racks on however many racks, and now you want to keep hardware around longer.

Yes, when you're buying enough hardware you treat the rack or row as a purchase unit. A rack is typically hardware plus switching for that rack, so just a few network and power cables are needed to connect a rack to the rest of the infrastructure.

If these companies replace a whole rack when a percentage of machines fail that's a business decision based on cost of hardware versus repair costs. Where I worked we had warranties, so the hardware would get fixed (or die in place for things past warranty) and the entire rack would get rolled out at one time, since we bought in rack increments of capacity and thus they all had the same warranty dates. Letting things die in place obviously depends on how much spare capacity you have in your DC, which could be site-specific within large companies.