mjayhn

Green tea (maybe others) has l-theanine which takes away the jittery feeling/anxiety of caffeine. Might be why. I really like caffeine + ltheanine pills.

I'm burning through something like 10-20 usbc cords a year. It's outrageous. I'm buying Ankers and "good" brands too. My car has ubsc to usbc and android auto and it used to be a pain (usba to usbc slowed it down) so I'm diligent about fast/good cables.

I have no working usbc-usbc cables right now. It's wild how quickly mine go bad and most of the time they're just plugged into a phone once a day (driving), if that.

I just have a drawer full of dead cables with some sort of usbc end..

I mean this is literally all stuff you could have done prior to 2020 and I guarantee you would have had a more enjoyable time doing all of this in 2019.

Since you're new to CO I hope you'll also contribute to the local issues. Today we're helping unhoused Coloradans have water to drink at Benedict Fountain Park. We do this every Sunday.

https://twitter.com/believeEan/status/1327988637468827649

As someone who has dealt with depression their entire life it's really something to start to see people who have never, ever dealt with it begin to try to compartmentalize their lives from their depression and look for every other option before declaring it depression. Like it's some horrible disease you'd never want to catch, like any of us have the option.

I really hate that it took this but I've had my feelings/depression talked down so much by people who don't understand depression, don't believe it's a real thing, etc.

I've had so many conversations with friends this year that go like this; "I've lost my entire personality, I can't motivate myself to get out of bed.. whats wrong with me, is this depression?"

Yes, yes it is. Maybe it's temporary, maybe it's acute or chronic, but that is depression. You never know how long it will last, what it will take from you or how quickly you can overcome it.

Be kind to people.

edit: Reading this again I can't shake that some of you are just so far removed from actually understanding your own feelings and emotions that you can't even recognize that you're depressed. It's absolutely fascinating. "What are depressive symptoms?"

I'll say that one positive of this struggle throughout my life is that I've learned which emotions and feelings I can trust or let guide me. I often don't get it right and focus on the negative but I'm very glad I'm cognizant and it's a bright burning fire of "Yeah I'm depressed this week oh boy let's work on this, I need to make some changes."

This is what an SRE actually is to me, but not to G. Google seems to think they need to create SREs out of SWEs. It took me far, far longer to learn distsys, network engineering, storage and everything else that goes into a platform than it did for me to learn to write grpc endpoints in golang.

I've been in ops for 10+ years building platforms. I'd love to be able to spend 6 hours a day coding but when I'm jugging 10-20 different products that have 1-10+ different languages involved (go, python, nodejs, javascript, ruby, ansible, terraform, puppet, chef) you really have a hard time getting super good at one thing. So most of us have to get good at one language just to pass the code tests, then it languishes because when launching a product I then spend 1-3 months writing something completely different out of biz necessity.

The most important skill to me for an SRE/Ops is curiosity and pattern recognition, and #1 humility/empathy.

I mean Google could stop being completely elitist with SREs needing to come from SWE backgrounds and hire the thousands of SRE/Sysadmin/Ops types who do know systems very well but have a lot/bit less SWE background and let their SWEs contribute to mentoring them on SWE stuff.

Pipe dream of mine, for sure.

There's been at least 3 G SREs that have posted in here about what they do day to day and it's literally no different from any other non-FAANG SRE/Ops role any of us do at various scales except for the gatekeeping.

In my experience, Alice moves on to a cool new project to greenfield while Betsy gets stuck supporting Alices creation until they eventually get on-call burnout and quit. Alice checks in only when there's enough noise made either by angry customers, cto or angry SREs.

That's my 10yrs+ ops experience, at least, and this is hugely exacerbated if Alice is put on such a high pedestal that they don't even have to be on-call with Betty at any point of the lifecycle.

Yes! Thank you, I haven’t been lucky enough to try it. Always slack nowadays..

Purely anecdotal but I think it’s from irc/aim users (a lot of millennials/genx including myself) since long form communication wasn’t really a thing on there. I see some people write paragraphs as messages on discord servers and iirc that wasn’t technically even possible on irc and I feel like it’s even strange to see in the middle of lighter chatter.

Also slack threads are awful, imo. I can appreciate them in certain contexts like asking what tool everyone likes or where to grab dinner, but if your slack has become a place where complicated tech answers wind up in threads it makes searching so frustrating just due to the UX. Also they’re limited, or were, on features (code blocks never looked right, etc). I HATED when outages wound up in a slack thread and not a room which was too frequent at my last employer.

That #tagging/#threading feature available on the other slack/discord/teams competitor I can’t think of right now is something I really want.

I have to pay attention to not treating slack like irc quite a bit.

You still get those questions because you’re a shitty developer interviewing at shitty development shops. That’s it. Nobody gives one fuck that you’re a boomer, you just act like one.

Stick to your namesake, the “doesn’t talk” part. We don’t want or need your input, bud.

Oh of course you did, my point was more that you got those questions but also a lot of your peers continued asking those stupid questions. I remember when I was hired after getting a manhole question; the genx managers (i was probably 19) used it as an inside joke, "gotcha" just to see how candidates responded. I always thought it was gross.

So I don't ask those questions to people that I interview, because I remember how stupid they made me feel and how unrelated to the job they are.

It's the genx'ers that were asking me that, probably asked by boomers. I don't know why you'd continue to repeat those biased systems.

Genx isn't exactly well known for standing up for itself as opposed to continuing to normalize trash systems, that's the entire problem.

Be better than those before you, that's it. Make things better for those coming up or going out. There's no reason work should suck.

It’s important to the schools to generate income and whatever weird rivalry keeps people going. If you aren’t in a rural town sports players are probably a tiny, tiny percentage of your class and I think it’s better today but they weren’t exactly the most inclusive group of people when I was in school in the late 90s/2000s.

This is very far off from my millennial experience

1; I’m a 34yo millennial, 2; my siblings are ~40ish yo gen-xers, 3; my parents are 65yo boomers.

My genx siblings all bought massive houses around 2008 when I was starting my career which in 2008 meant being lucky to make $40k as a sysadmin. Obama subsidies all over the place if you had 5-10 years to put together a downpayment, though. I don’t think my paycheck became NOT hand-to-face until I was in my mid-late 20s and making well into 6 figures. And I’m not eating avocado toast or buying starbucks.

This is my 2nd recession since I started my career. In the first I was a “JR” and couldn’t get a job. Now I’m a SR and overqualified at most places. I barely know any millenial colleagues of mine that are home owners. And once again, I’m in my mid 30s.

And no, I don’t have children along with half of my mid-30s friends because we can’t afford them along with the 70k+ Of college debt and $600k starter houses.

The truly sad part though, millennials actually remember and know what life was like starting out around ~2008. We’re very open to mentoring and hiring gen-z. Social media wasn’t what it was back in 2008, of course, but I don’t remember any genxers going out of their way to get us millennials hired, go over our resumes, refer us, etc. I luckily landed my first engineering job from another millennial over IRC. This goes into the culture of the company, interviewing, everything. The people bitching about having to describe how to throw a rock or explain why manholes are round? They’re millennials who got those stupid questions when we were JRs because of a horrible job market that Boomers/Genx allowed to continue as the status quo. Not all, of course, but there’s a lot.

Instead of working to make things better for those coming up behind you, you’re acting like the victim. We can all come up with reasons that things suck. Let’s try to improve things.

I'm late but can't edit, if anyones curious I just found a great article on it; https://itnext.io/getting-started-with-pulumi-sdk-22dc0b7ab8...

Well there's a decent chance you're going to be working for millennial and gen-X'ers nowadays. We're the ones who were hiding all our online lives (still) from our parents. I'm glad my Myspace was deleted to my teenage angst.

Point being a lot of us I think are really respective of privacy and the fact that people (even teachers and nurses!) have lives that don't revolve around work.

This is neat.

I really want to make some sort of sre/distsys/ops training ground to go through a mixture of systems design and operational skills (troubleshooting, observability, firedrills) but the interfaces and integrations of the moocs I've tried are so ill-fitting for the task and the good options (which I can't think of right now, there's one that'll integrate into aws/gcp and give you "playgrounds") are too expensive for a lone dev- they're full on corporate training grounds (are they any good? never used one).

There are "k8s/cluster playgrounds" and what not but they're so not operationally-forward in most cases, just extremely basic and not really relative to a day in the life of a cluster/systems operator at all.

I like how you've set this up, I actually want to go through the lessons, great work.

You might really like pulumi. I'm kind of on the opposite end, ops>swe so tons of IAC and i'm using pulumi now as I'm more swe focused https://www.pulumi.com/ (ive no relation to them)

You people

Us citizens?

Don't forget to send often marginalized people through as well!

I'm adhd and bp2 and while I can tell some of my symptoms apart a bunch of them seem so similar (reading texts and comprehending nothing for weeks, executive function issues, racing thoughts, emotional outbursts) I'm constantly trying to pry them apart to know which one I'm experiencing.

And now adhd seems to be going more the executive function disorder route so when I read through /r/adhd I wonder if a lot of the people I'm reading about are bp or if I'm not even bp2 but I'm just adhd. I guess in the end it doesn't matter if I find a way to manage the symptoms instead of focusing on labeling them.

I'm glad for posts like this because I had the same issue where I refused to believe my dx because my bp mom is far more serious and media/tv portray it so far from what I have, what seems to be a fairly mild case. It wasn't until I started reading bp-in-tech/etc stories on here where I realized the spectrum range is so broad.

I think there's a plugin for it but workspaces would be much more valuable to me if they weren't a file you saved. The idea, I assume, is something like "these 10 repos with these 15 plugins are how I deploy this project."

In the end due to its UX I think it's pretty useless. I do use it on BIG projects because sometimes vscode will update or barf and forget what I had open.

I mostly just do "open folders in workspace" then hope it never goes away.

I'm in ops and this is a huge, huge headache for those of us on our end at companies where we're not given Google SRE powers to control release trajectory based on failure budgets of some sort.

I've worked at too many places that had no SWEs on-call for the on-call alerts that I get, which the vast majority of the time involves throwing a bandaid (as in redirecting traffic, etc) in front of an internal bug that I hope eventually gets fixed once the RFO/etc has been submitted before it hits my NEXT on-call rotation or my poor coworkers.

Without SWEs on my rotation they don't understand the immediacy. They aren't the ones getting their Christmas week interrupted every 4 hours while ops keeps the house running. In Ops having your entire day ruined by various on-call alerts usually feels like you're working without any breaks and nobody even cares.

Anyone want a bad golang developer, wannabe ex-ops person who knows a lot about platform reliability and o11y and wants to focus on the golang end finally? I'll make your teams automation and o11y purr no matter where it is (bm, cloud, global pops, serverless..)..

I love Graham Hancock as "ALIENS?!" smut but come on.

Yeah I just type the zip in to each ISP I find in that area (another fun search).. it sucks. You eventually get rate limited and it will make you constantly change addresses, so just incognito mode it. Some of the ISPs will have the distribution maps but when you're looking at something not in a suburb you're kind of at the behest of the city or a recent neighbor having built out the infra in my experience (which is mostly south/texas/pnw). SOMETIMES theres a local WIFI provider.. I haven't gone that route I'm not sure the investment or quality there. I have done a lot of satellite, BGAN internet etc. I think now everybody is just giving up and waiting on 5G.

This is the muni fiber map https://muninetworks.org/communitymap

I really wish Trulia or one of them had some way to tie into ISPs and tell us whats there.

This improved my house search a LOT; Get the Clickup (no relation) extension and create a space to send your zillow/trulia/mls links to directly, there is a template for apartment searches [1] you can edit it and put in your own fields - it basically grabs a snapshot of different keys and you can add columns and rows and start to quickly grab house listings then filter with your own database. It's stupid simple, like airtable, you can probably use that too. I added ISP sections, stars, comments.. All the real estate apps are terrible for critiquing en masse.

I never got around to checking if the ISPs have apis you can interface with..

I'm going to NEXT year try the mountain thing again.

[1] https://clickup.com/teams/personal

edit: Wow this link is looking positive, I didnt realize there were so many 500Mbps+ connections https://broadbandnow.com/fastest-cities

edit2: Oh, another stupid ISP tip, the business ends will usually be WAY more lenient if you open your wallet. If you cant get X cable, try to get X cable biz they'll happily run a line down a pole for a new $200/mo customer, I've done it in desperation. You don't need to be an actual biz, just tell them youre hackernewsman LLC and they'll sign you up if they can.

I didn't know it was a big thing in MA. But thanks for letting me know, I'll check it out. I hope to go back to the NE/E in the next few years (Maine/VT/MA).

I tried to move to a small town this year, one that was woodsy and if possible in the mountains, AK, CO, WA, OR. My requirement was 100mb+ internet that didn't require me paying Spectrum $25k to cable another road. Honestly I would've been fine with DSL at a bunch of these places but they were almost all satellite only. I looked for about 3 months before I eventually just went to the city. But the market is insane right now, I did find some that were gone quickly.

There are 3 "towns" in CO that you can possibly get fiber at but without MLS/Trulia having that as a filter I spent a bunch of time checking zip codes for service and being let down.

You're not wrong, I forget the Gov calls 100Mbps broadband (thankfully up from 10Mbps). I wasn't specific enough. I personally, and I do move every few years to new States/Cities (and recently trying to move to smaller mountain/woodsy towns) and wfh and have to actually have 100Mbps+ internet or I think I'll melt. Most of the towns I looked were vdsl/DSL only except for a few who had gone the muni route or had an executive from Xfinity living there.

300mb+ is still pretty hard to get outside of cities.

I've actually spent ~$20k before to get Spectrum to cable an old house in the middle of a huge city.

They almost never have decent internet if you're someone trying to wfh. Most of them are POTS lines only. The ones that have muni fiber would be a possible option but you're making definite trade offs elsewhere. Pubtrans, bike lanes, food options, travel optins, etc.

Oh totally in team slacks, I'm talking more about the "do this as soon as you wake up" DM you types, usually the "Hey.."'ers.

I'm vehemently disagreeing about using email as a communications means in 2020 when omnichannels, slack, ticket-systems, etc exist. I don't want a mail client pinging me with mostly trash throughout the day between All Hand emails, tech emails, out of band sales people, etc.

That's really my point, some of us work completely differently. Ask your engineers how they can perform best..

Yeah I've finally gotten enough experience to feel like I've run the gamut of management styles and the best advice I can give is that managers need to explicitly ask questions to some people and genuinely work to improve their performance. Some people (especially new or those who think they're under-performing) won't want to rock the boat at all and will hold their frustrations with things like I mentioned in forever.

I used to be very bad at that. Now I'm pretty firebrand for employees to be treated right as I've finally been to companies that I felt did so (then back to companies that don't) so I recognize what I consider abusive places/mgmt pretty quickly.