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Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

I think just the typical evaluation of someone with expertise in doing something, it's easy if you're a real devops kind, then just put together a bunch of things, do some config files, write a make or two, take two or three hours to do something that the rest of use take a week to do. in the same way that I might set up a service to scrape XML files and fill up my ElasticSearch search instance, and take a couple hours to set up a working service that I can keep expanding and other people might be like - easy, is that a joke?

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"Easy" is probably because it boils down to, install X, Y, Z, edit config for X, Y, Z, start daemons X, Y, Z. There's no complex math or thinking involved, just plugging stuff in.

sure but you have to spend lots of time reading documentation and know stuff to figure out you need to put these things together.

But once you have, it feels "easy" (and might even look easy to someone who doesn't know the work that was put into learning it)

which is exactly my point? He calls it easy because he can do that in a couple hours, and if problems arise later he can always just fix them with a quick 10-20 minutes. It's easy.

On a side note this is actually a problem, in my experience, if I find something easy I might not cover every edge case - I can cover those if and when they come up - but given enough potential inputs and users the edge cases always come up. And then what happens if I am unavailable at that moment, the edge cases need to be handled by people who will find the easy solution I built up incredibly hard and daunting.

Rebuilding a transmission is easy in the same way, undo some bolts, replace some parts, press in some seals, and screw some bolts back in!

It takes practice. I just started making smoothies in a blender, and there are a bunch of little things to know to make it a little easier on yourself. It’s not just “throw all your shit in a blender and push button”, at least not with the cheap blender I have access to.

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