HN user

rdeboo

474 karma
Posts5
Comments61
View on HN

I work as a Data Engineer and in my country Azure is pretty big, and as a consequence their Data Factory service has become a common choice for enterprises. It's a GUI based ETL tool, architects prefer it since it is a managed cloud service and supposedly is easy to use.

In practice you lose all the benefits of abstraction, unit testing, proper CI/CD, etc. I haven't met an engineer that likes the service. Some projects have resorted to writing code generation tools, so that they can take config files and programmatically generate the JSON serialization of the pipelines that you're supposed to develop by clicking and dragging.

I've had this experience in Germany and it turned out that the waitress gets a cut of the turnover, at least for drinks. So they have an incentive to keep the glasses full. I'm not sure if this is common in Germany.

Outboard motors for boats work like this. If you hit a rock with the propellor, a piece of plastic in the drive train breaks. This prevents the propellor or some other part of the motor from serious damage.

I don't have data but my gut feeling says that the numbers of Bank Tellers has peaked. In my country (Netherlands) a lot of small branches of banks have closed. The general trend is towards self-service / online.

Anecdotically, I went to the bank across the street 2 years ago to ask some question about insurance. I was told to go to the website and look up the information there. The branch is now closed.

This absolutely happens. Fisher boats will turn off AIS routinely. The nonprofit Global Fishing Watch is doing research to analyse AIS signals, and determine if illegal fishing happens in protected areas. See http://globalfishingwatch.org/fishing-vessel-behavior/signal...

If you browse their site, there's also stories about other illegal activities, such as laundering fish (it's being mixed with fish caught in legal areas on sea). Also some boats are staffed with people that are essentially slaves. They typically stay on sea permanently, and are fueled on sea. (http://oceana.org/blog/how-global-fishing-watch-can-combat-s...)

I subscribed at https://acloud.guru/ for the solution architect course.

Price is quite low (I think 20-30 euro) for which you get 20 hours of excellent video material. After each section there is a practice where you build something (using your own AWS account billed against your own credit card).

My circumstances required me to; I worked as a software engineer for a startup without system administrators. So I just solved any issue I encountered while deploying / running production.

Ansible is great; easy to learn and powerful. I recommend the book "Ansible Up & Running".

Learn Linux thoroughly. I recommend the book "How Linux works". You want to know how you can do basic administration such as managing users, setting up syslog, registering system services (systemd/init.d) etc. Also, learn how ssh works, how you use keys, how ssh config file works, agent forwarding, etc. One of the last chapters/appendixes in the Ansible book goes into detail.

Learn about monitoring, for example using the book "The art of monitoring". Graphite + Grafana works great for me. There are many choices, don't get into the rabbit hole of trying to compare them all. Just set up end to end monitoring and alerting. We use Seyren for alerting which is simple and nice.

I also like the book "Site Reliability Engineering" by some Google engineers. Though this is more advanced stuff, for mature organizations that have the basics covered.

I set myself a goal to read 20 books; I succeeded. Here's the ones I recommend most:

Kim Zetter - Countdown to Zero (on Stuxnet virus and how it was smuggled into the nuclear facility; very interesting)

Gary Kasparov - Winter is Coming (we should consider Russia a dictatorship by now; though until recently, western politicians treated it as a democratic partner country)

Mark Goodman - Future crimes (wide spanning book on crime in the age of the internet)

Philip E. Tetlock - Superforecasting (how amateurs can consistently beat domain professionals in forecasting all kind of stuff)

Venkat Subramaniam - Programming Concurrency on the JVM (good overview of your options (diy with locking / akka / clojure & STM))

SEEKING WORK

Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rolanddeboo

The last 3 years I have worked for startups. This means I've worn all kind of hats, being team lead, backend engineer, frontend developer, architect, sysadmin, release manager, etc etc. :) I prefer to work on the backend but can work on the full stack. I'll learn anything if necessary to get the job done. I have build platforms for IoT solutions, analyzing sensor data in real time. I also like to work on security aspects of a system; I've done a lot of that recently.

Looking for interesting projects, preferably related to sensor networks / machine learning.

Language: Java (well familiar with the ecosystem; Jersey, Jackson, Joda, Guava, Dropwizard, Mvn, etc)

Databases: MySQL, Redis, Cassandra.

Sysadmin: Linux, bash, configuration management with Ansible, clouds (AWS, Digital Ocean, Google)

CI: Jenkins

Frontend: Javascript, HTML, Angular (1)

Other: nginx, rabbitmq, messaging in general.

So I guess it is going to take years.

Generally, open source software benefits from more users. But having a huge amount of users makes it more difficult to improve and cleanup because you can't just deprecate stuff easily. (like SSL2/3).

Also, having 100% of the internet using openssl makes the impact of a vulnerability in that library huge. Some diversity is probably a good thing.

I appreciate the time and effort that you are putting into it, good luck.

I used to think that; but I'm following Dan Boneh's crypto course on Coursera at the moment, and he specifically notes that you should not even try to implement known algorithms yourself (for production; you could do it ofcourse for the learning experience).

The reason is that there are subtle attacks on the implementation, such as timing attacks, which can leak information.

One of the cliches about crypto is that you should not implement your own crypto. Not to suggest that the authors don't know what they are doing, but they mention 'alpha' quality themselves on the site. I wonder, how long does it take until a new library is deemed secure? What does the process look like? Trial and error? Or do they compare notes with vulnerabilities found in e.g. openssl?

It seems to me that many big companies are asking for Java + Angular skills these days; and that many new projects are build using that stack. This has the effect that it is still very worthwhile to learn Angular 1. I don't think it is going anywhere soon, plenty of companies are invested in it.