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tbronchain

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thibault <at> bronchain <dot> me

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I build infrastructures for small/medium size projects in a reproductible, code based, extensive and scalable way - usually cloud based. Businesses I work with need a quick and efficient solution to serve what they build, do not want to/cannot dedicate full time internal resources to it but require production ready setup that their developers are not qualified to build. Sometimes, they just require some guidance or validation. They like to call me DevOps.

DevOps, SysOps, Sysadmin, Infrastructure engineer, Cloud engineer... The title doesn't matter so much, but what I like in the term DevOps is how it links the dev side to the infra side, as the infra itself ends up being already built in a cloud environment.

I also believe there was a time when we needed to make a difference between traditional "Sysadmin" and developers who specialized in building cloud infra, but not anymore.

A lot better.

A couple of years ago I could see volumes on Linstor getting completely stuck and unrecoverable whenever the network was getting busy or unstable. Nodes reboot were a nightmare too.

Have a setup now with their Piraeus operator[1], Kubernetes >= 1.20, rancher and calico, and it seems to be very stable. XFS have been giving better results too. Still, better not to try too many reboot loops on the nodes.

1: https://github.com/piraeusdatastore/piraeus-operator/

Had something like this running before, with an extra tunnel to a VPS, so when I was connecting to this VPS on a specific port, it was eventually connecting to my home VPN - useful with dynamic IPs.

I can't remember the tool I used for the tunnel. SSH was quite slow and I remember using something else at the TCP level. Any idea? Bonus for any solution that works with UDP.

I have worked mainly on ops/infra professionally the past few years and will strongly with the idea to avoid any complicated tool - i.e Kubernetes nowadays.

I create my small/bootstrap projects the following way:

1- create a free tier AWS account - can work with any VPS/server really, but with AWS you can get it 100% free :)

2- create some Ansible provision/setup/deploy scripts

3- create some bash scripts to wrap this all

Create the Ansible scripts:

1- Provision script, consisting of 1 EC2 instance, 1 RDS and the security groups. Store the IPs/adresses of the newly created instances.

2- Setup script, basic instance config, packages, app/project repo, you name it

3- Deploy script, to run every time I want to update the app, mainly just doing a git pull on the instance and some database backup/migrations (although on RDS backups aren't always necessary)

I get these Ansible scripts wrapped into basic bash scripts, provide my AWS credentials via the AWS cli to keep it safe, few extra creds with Ansible vaults, SSH keys, publish in a Github [private] repo and I'm all set.

It took me a couple of days to get fully operational and I was learning Ansible at the same time so it can really be done with basic features. Now it's done, I can reuse the same skeleton for every new project in a couple of hours!

I find this solution extremely resilient. That's basically free hosting for personal projects. Every year, just need to run the script again when free-tier expire, and can change hosting provider anytime or upgrade the instance type if I decide to get a project publicly released. A small extra Ansible task to write for migrating the data and that's it!

Really nice to see a bit of competition in here!

Slightly unrelated but also, from the same company, Rancher (their main product) has been really good to deploy bare meal Kubernetes setup [almost] 100% container based.

You mentioned defamation. According to which country you live in there should be a way to sue around that and at least get a record that you have been a victim of cyber bullying, not necessarily the person you appear to be.

I strongly encourage you to do so if you can. I really hate people having such practice and thinking they can get away with it.

Otherwise/in the meantime the contracting idea works. Could be through a platform - i.e Upwork or Toptal - and/or behind a company name, etc. I'd also look into foreign opportunities.

This all sucks and I don't know what happened but look forward, some people don't want to give meaning to these things and would give you a chance. Good luck and take care!

Binance API (i.e https://api.binance.com/api/v3/ticker/price) does it when there are too many requests from one IP (I assume that's the reason). They could have used something else like 429 but for some obscur reasons they're using 418 (if anyone knows the actual reason...).

It will happen often if you try to make a call to their API through Google sheet scripts.

I am surprised to have not read this in other comments, but I would strongly recommend to pick a field or product you feel very passionate with and contact with [small/medium] companies showing a "job" page on their website (or even just contact).

As a fresh graduate, no one with common sense could expect you to have some experience, but if I had to recruit a junior team member, passion and eager to learn is what I would hunt for.

Oh and, don't worry about rejections or being ignored, it happened to most of us!

Good luck.

Thank you for some valuable advices.

I just saw your reply and really appreciate you took the time to write it.

This, really.

I'm most likely less experiment than some people here but after 10+ years of writing code, I came to the conclusion that the best code is the most readable code.

If all developers could write code that is easily readable for them (even after a few months break in the project), the software engineering world would be a lot better :)

Of course it makes sense to avoid anti-patterns and bottlenecks, but no much more really.

Plenty of places you can do with $1k/month really. Of course YMMV but if you just want to focus on your game, I would definitely recommend checking out nomadlist.com and see what inspires you.

If you can accept some underdeveloped [some parts may actually positively surprise you] countries, take a look at Georgia, it can be really affordable and give a fairly good quality of life.

"Eastern Europe" (i.e Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Bulgaria) can be a little more expensive but plenty to do with $1k. Also, it is actually a lot more developed than you may think. Oh and it's really safe!

As a rule of thumbs if you keep your expenses low, if you can find a place on Airbnb for $500/month, you could easily go with the other $500 for monthly expenses. Even maybe save some money or have some fun!

I felt very strongly with this story - and thank you for sharing.

My mother passed away at 59. She was healthy, and thought she had decades to live. Then she got sick, and thought she had years. Few months later, we had a call on our way to the hospital, she was dead.

I didn't have the greatest relationship with my mother and the disease didn't allow us to do more than scratch the surface. She wasn't an open person but I know her mind was rich. She left with it and nobody will ever be able to get the full picture. Maybe that's what she wanted, but almost a year later I know something will still be missing inside me.

A lot of people here are entrepreneurs and I think a common goal is to leave our trace in this world, and make our temporary stay less temporary. We tend to forget that everything is temporary and always think we have time, but really, we don't.

This feeling first created within me a constant feeling of rush and stress, still present, but is evolving in a urge to focus on what is truly essential to me.

I, for some strange/personal reasons struggle to write what's in my head. My thoughts are very disorganized and always feel what's on the paper doesn't reflect the original idea. If you have felt in a similar way, I am very interested in hearing stories on how you overcame this.

I believe we all have a treasure to share, maybe not to the world, but to a few people to who we matter.

Wondering something, if you are using cryptomator and a VPS - so you don't own your data and use a higher level encryption - why not using the cloud storage services (i.e Dropbox, icloud etc.) ?

I haven't dug very much into it (in fact mainly because I couldn't find much detailed/technical information) but Windows 10 has this "core isolation" feature, which I believe tries to achieve a system/apps isolation by virtualizing everything.

It used to be a little buggy, but I now have it enabled all the time and don't necessarily feel any performance issue - on a powerful laptop with reasonable usage.

If anyone has more technical information about the feature I'd be very interested to see more about it and what it exactly does - is it really effective or just a lure?

History of Techno 5 years ago

Techno finds its roots in tribal music. Its repetitive patterns allow deep self-reflection and strong connection to inner feelings.

disclaimer: I love techno

Thanks, this is exactly the point of this post!

My personal developer stack is getting slightly dated as my main focus over the past few years has been onto dev/sysops, seeing tons of new exotic tech being used now and then.

I am really open on learning something new today if it can help me be more efficient in building my ideas in the future!

Seems to read different opinions on the node stack here.

I am getting to a similar conclusion to you though, where other tools were good for prototyping and the node stack really better for the real projects (post-prototyping).