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hullsean

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I'm an Amazon Solutions Architect, advisor, author & speaker. I build & automate infrastructure for startups to scale. I blog weekly & publish a monthly newsletter on innovation.

www.iheavy.com/blog/

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www.iheavy.com 13y ago

Opportunity a day - career risk at bay

hullsean
1pts0
www.iheavy.com 14y ago

Migrating MySQL to Oracle

hullsean
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www.iheavy.com 14y ago

Sometimes, let things break a little bit

hullsean
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www.iheavy.com 14y ago

5 ways to boost mysql scalability

hullsean
2pts0
www.iheavy.com 14y ago

Oracle DBAs - You know you want MySQL

hullsean
1pts0
www.iheavy.com 14y ago

Questions to ask an AWS expert

hullsean
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www.iheavy.com 14y ago

Where's my 80 million?

hullsean
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www.iheavy.com 14y ago

Things Toxic to Scalability

hullsean
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www.iheavy.com 14y ago

You're too young to be my boss

hullsean
2pts0
www.iheavy.com 14y ago

3 MySQL Migration Surprises

hullsean
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www.iheavy.com 14y ago

Why I Wrote The Book

hullsean
3pts0
www.iheavy.com 14y ago

Deploying MySQL on EC2 - 8 Best Practices

hullsean
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www.iheavy.com 14y ago

These Applications Work in the Cloud

hullsean
1pts0
www.iheavy.com 14y ago

A CTO Must Never Do This...

hullsean
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eepurl.com 14y ago

Why the Android Platform is Failing

hullsean
1pts3
www.iheavy.com 14y ago

How to Hire an Oracle DBA

hullsean
1pts0
www.iheavy.com 14y ago

Social Scoring with Klout, Kred & PeerIndex

hullsean
2pts0
www.iheavy.com 14y ago

Cloud Haters - A little history lesson

hullsean
1pts0
www.iheavy.com 14y ago

Accidental DBA's Guide to MySQL Management

hullsean
8pts0
www.iheavy.com 14y ago

The Oracle to MySQL divide, more open source thorns

hullsean
2pts0
www.iheavy.com 14y ago

Myth of 5 Nines - Why HA is overrated

hullsean
2pts0
www.iheavy.com 14y ago

The Art of Not Doing in Web Operations

hullsean
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www.iheavy.com 14y ago

Backup & Recovery in EC2 - 5 point checklist

hullsean
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www.iheavy.com 14y ago

What exactly do consultants do?

hullsean
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www.iheavy.com 14y ago

How to freelance for tech startups

hullsean
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www.iheavy.com 14y ago

4 letter word dividing dev & ops

hullsean
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www.iheavy.com 14y ago

War Stories - Inflight hacking has arrived

hullsean
1pts0
www.iheavy.com 14y ago

How to hire a developer that doesn't suck

hullsean
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www.iheavy.com 14y ago

Tech Freelancing for Beginners

hullsean
1pts0
www.inc.com 14y ago

How to Sell: Responding to 'It Costs Too Much'

hullsean
2pts0

I’ve been doing the above as a consultant for a couple of decades. Here’s what I see:

o As others have said it’s a lot. That said it sounds like management trusts uou. More than hiring someone off the street to take the reigns. This means there is room to breathe and room to fail a little bit.

o Talk to all biz units to learn what services they rely on. Thus will not be 1:1 with servers and applications as you see them. But it’s an important starting point.

o Inventory all the systems that you can see/find.

o identify backups, DR and put together a list of your concerns. Document this and share with management. This will give you cover.

o develop your own priority list. Be prepared for management to give you a different set of priorities. You will need to learn skills of push back and compromise.

o learn to reach “good enough” in the short term. If you try to fix everything elegantly and perfectly other problems will wait longer.

Slack is a huge time waster. It is a constant distraction. As as it becomes standardized it’s assumed you will be on it all the tome. Through the workday and even after. The only time can get work done without distractions is after hours.

With slack the world becomes one big long meeting. Lol

Also as a consultant it is a problem. With email I have paper trails of conversations. But with slack when engagement is ending I lose all that discussion & history. It forces me to double up my note taking (more lost time) and try to hack a backup of some of that stuff as an engagement ends.

Yes I get the advantages but those have long since been buried by all it’s problems

Your mileage may vary of course. But i’ve been independent consulting now for 25yrs. Started doing primarily dba/unix work in the 90’s and now of course cloud heavy. Devops is in extremely high demand. i do docker, ecs, terraform, kubernetes, aws, gcp. Python. postgresql, mysql, redshift. athena. it goes on & on.

yes as others have mentioned you have to be willing to learn. to be also excited to learn. that’s key.

i’m also much more mature now. so i can work well with anyone and see perspectives others miss.

opportunities abound !

im in new york. been freelancing for 23 years. demand has never been greater.

differentiate. brand yourself. and learn to tell your story aka “sell” yourself.

how can you help? what problem can you solve?

as long as there are consulting services companies there will forever be work.

keep learning!

I've written quite a bit about this topic (www.iheavy.com)

Yes getting "out of the building" is important, and going out & meeting people is key. All the time. Also don't hard sell people. Instead introduce one person to another person. At first you are simply giving your connections. But soon people see you as a go-to person, and will bring things to you. Also people don't forget gifts of introductions & business you bring.

Another thing. Don't go to "peer" events with other engineers. These events are useful to build your knowledge, but not work building your business. Stronger leads come from business owners, managers & CTOs. Start going to events outside your subject area of expertise. Go to pitch events, vc events, startup events, entrepreneur events.

You will be surprised how valuable you will be in a non-tech business event. This will also teach you to communicate better with non-tech folks. And share what you know. Also ask people, "what events do you recommend?" Then go to those events. And so on!

any language older than 5yrs is a failed language. perl, ruby are recent memories.

i’m starting to realize the only industry more fashion conscious than software is... well fashion!

Ada?! ahahahaah

correlation does not equal causation.

the article does not seem to consider open relationships and the many other non-traditional arrangements that are becoming more common & widespread.

capitalism is a rough game. sometimes people fight dirty.

the caution i would add is, you could try to play nice & the employer gets pissed anyway and say “you know what, you can leave today!”. one must prepare contingency plans on both sides.

if you want someone who will never quit, hire an independent consultant.

this is another reason weekly billing works in everyone’s favor. in the former ex, the customer would not lose with hourly billing. with weekly billing they become very motivated to resolve hurdles to your success