bespoke_engnr

I've just updated and it seems really nice so far. Best of all, the "Tree Style Tab" extension works again, and it's glorious.

I've had good experiences with Vultr as well. I'm surprised they're not more popular.

Aw thanks, I hope you get something useful out of it! Feel free to message me with feedback; I read all of it.

As I've started trying to be more professional about it, the time it takes to produce content has grown quite a bit.

20 minutes of me talking into the camera takes 2-4 hours to plan, outline, film, and edit.

30 minutes of screencast takes about 8 hours to script and film, and edit. The planning/research phase before that takes really long, because I try REALLY hard to avoid dependencies on jargon and specialized knowledge, to make the material accessible.

I'm actually about to experiment with a series targeted at more experienced sysadmins, where I can just improvise and work on a practical project without much planning or gradual explanation of the fundamentals. I'm hoping those videos will be much faster to create.

I spend a LOT of time thinking up and planning material, though -- not really sure how to count that.

I have a Linux/Programming/Tech Career YouTube channel ( https://youtube.com/c/tutorialinux ) that just hit 50k subscribers (yay!), and it makes around $450/month in ad revenue.

I also made a poorly targeted and marketed practical system administration Udemy course last year, which does about $500/month.

These projects, along with a few other small things, are on track to make around $15k this year. That's after about 3 years of putting lots of time, effort, and love into creating content on YouTube.

Unfortunately that 'passive' income just barely approaches 10% of what I make at my full-time job (Sysadmin/Ops/Automation/DevOps? stuff), so the idea of working on my 'passive/hobby' projects full-time is not an attractive proposition yet.

I like building, running, and automating large distributed systems, so I'm not really itching to quit my full-time work and "just" be a teacher. The ideal situation would be 'regular' IT work 3 days a week, and working on YouTube, my own web apps, and additional tech courses the rest of the time.

Heh, maybe you'll get a kick out of http://nand2tetris.org/ (if you haven't come across it already). I finally finished part 1 of the course (implementing the Hack machine) and it was one of the best and most challenging learning experiences I've ever had. My plan is to do part 2 (VM, high level language, OS) with Lisp instead of the language they implement. That's been the plan for the last 6 months, anyway...

I just saw this come up in an arpilisp discussion thread (https://github.com/marcpaq/arpilisp).

ChrysaLisp is an Assembler/C-Script/Lisp 64 bit OS. MIMD, multi CPU, multi threaded, multi core, multi user, and will build from source in ~2 seconds on most OS X or x64 Linux desktops.

Maybe this will let me live vicariously through someone who has actually built the project I always dream of creating in my free time.

At the moment, I don't actively promote videos except by notifying subscribers on YT, twitter, and occasionally facebook.

Others in this comment thread have convinced me to start actively promoting via e.g. Adwords, though. I'll start looking at that over the next few weeks.

Yeah, I'm not sure why I haven't started running AdWords campaigns yet, but I need to get on that. I'll try that; thanks for the kick in the pants!

My engineering instinct says, "I could build a simple little video-course platform in a weekend or two," but I know where that kind of thinking leads :-D.

More practically, I'm thinking about using something like Teachable for the next course.

OTOH at this point I've got content in a bunch of different places (YouTube, soundcloud, a website, udemy, packt/safaribooksonline), which makes leveraging all of these different platforms' features and supporting students there time-consuming.

Aside from work, hobbies, side projects, relationships, and other pesky human endeavors, I only have between 5-8 hours a week to work on tutoriaLinux. Adding another platform, with its own learning curve and features, seems like it might waste time that I could be investing into content.

I've actually spent a fair amount of time doing AdWords campaigns in the past, but I haven't done that for tutoriaLinux or the Udemy course yet. Maybe I should -- thanks!

Sorry, rambling.

Just an average Udemy creator here, but maybe what I've learned is useful.

I started doing Linux tutorials on YouTube a few years ago ( http://youtube.com/c/tutorialinux ) and then created a course on Udemy about a year ago. Affiliates make a decent percentage there (75%) but I suspect they have the same frustration that I do: Udemy has sales EVERY FEW DAYS.

Every few days there are sales that offer 90% off all courses, $10 courses, etc. etc. So a course with a $200 price tag will have an average sale price of $10-15, which leaves everyone (including affiliates) with pretty slim margins.

The simple problem is that they have the power to re-price courses as they see fit, and an incentive to do so (Udemy gets 50% of the revenue, possibly more from their promotions).

As it is, I make about the same amount of money from YouTube revenue (40k subscribers) as I do with one of the highest-rated Linux courses on Udemy (a few hundred dollars a month). It's really just a blip next to my salary; I can't see it replacing full-time tech work anytime soon.

I see some people arguing that "you should use a dev/staging environment with a public IP" instead of having ngrok tunneling traffic directly to your local dev box.

When you're editing HTML/CSS, you don't have to run a deploy script before checking how your markup renders. Ngrok gives people writing web services the same convenience when dealing with requests from a 3rd party on the Net.

It is the equivalent of saving your HTML/CSS source files and instantly seeing the changes when you reload your browser.

I just wrote a little proof-of-concept Alexa app that crawls HumbleBundle ('Bundled Goods', very much beta quality at the moment) and ngrok was invaluable for developing it quickly.

Is it safe to have that apiKey parameter in your 'book' links? That just jumped out at me. It looks like a cool project; good luck!

Unfortunately Comcast is one of the two companies (along with Verizon) that have monopolized the ISP market in the US. Together they own most of the market, and have agreements to stay out of each others' territories. This affects something like 40% of home Internet customers in the US :(.

Don't worry too much about it. I had the same feeling, since I read HN a lot. Now I'm going through the interview process with several companies and have had a great experience with all of them. Not at all what I expected, based on HN interview threads.

I don't have a CS degree and don't have a clue when it comes to the "rebalance a red-black tree" stuff. In all of my interviews, this hasn't been an issue -- I can think intelligently about problems and solve them, ask questions, and show correct, well-documented, maintainable code that I've written in the past. I'm good with people and with translating between biz problems and tech solutions.

Even in a large tech city (Boston) with lots of well-funded tech companies, my experience has been FAR from the hell you'd imagine from reading HN. I think a lot of this just comes from the SV bubble overrepresented here. And maybe from the huge crowd of people here who, for various reasons, desperately want to get into one of the big 4.

Those few enormous advertising companies (G, F, A, etc.) represent such a small fraction of the actual work out there, and make so much of the noise, that it's hard to keep an accurate perspective.

Anyway, don't worry about it. It sounds like you'll have an easier time than me, and I've had it surprisingly easy during this whole process.

I'm assuming that this was originally sarcastic, but bare metal can actually turn out really well in some situations. If you're big enough to save just $50k/month by moving from AWS to physical machines, that's several System Engineers you can hire to do your day-to-day ops work and maintenance on your Ansible/whatever scripts.

The thing that's more difficult to do on physical hardware, obviously, is scaling down every day if your peak load is some insane multiple of your base load for a 24h cycle. That's where AWS makes a lot of sense.

I don't think there's an obvious 'best' answer -- it depends on what you need.

It just bugs me that the current state of Ops/Infrastructure sometimes looks so much like the worst parts of the Javascript ecosystem.

Just spent a bit of time working around some problems to get Dwarf Fortress and the Lazy Newb Pack installed on Ubuntu 16.04.

It's a bit more complicated than running it on Windows, but still works just fine: https://tutorialinux.com/install-dwarf-fortress-ubuntu-16-04...

Enjoy!

If I had a nickel for every time I've said that...

I don't understand the appeal of Docker on FreeBSD. The native jails on FreeBSD basically do the same thing by default (spin up a jail, execute a command, exit) unless you explicitly tell them to persist (at that point, they behave more like LXC than Docker).

Except FreeBSD jails are way easier to manage in terms of storage and networking.

Although I disagree with the need for Docker on FreeBSD, I actually agree with your statement -- Docker is such a popular thing right now that not supporting it will probably keep some people from trying FreeBSD.

On the other hand, the BSDs in general are communities where the Eternal September seems to be quieter than elsewhere. They're rock-solid and technically brilliant, but they're just not 'mainstream,' and not really trying to be. It bugs me sometimes, too, but I just don't think that getting more popular is what most people in that community are interested in.

I don't know what's happening with this now, but I remember the Pond ( https://www.imperialviolet.org/2013/11/10/pond.html ) project working on something like this. I believe they were trying to do this with encrypted data as opposed to plaintext, but their work might still be interesting. IIRC a big part of it was batching transmissions and introducing a delay, sending 'dummy' data when there was no 'real' data, at regular intervals (to prevent timing/traffic correlation attacks).

It kind of reminded me of the old Asynchronous Transfer Mode protocol, with its cells.

Perhaps the middle part of the argument is missing? People who care about privacy == people who use encryption. People who use encryption already have all of their communications flagged and stored, if the rumors are true.

Ahh, thanks for the explanation (and the link). Much appreciated.

I'm an American living in Europe. I report my income to the IRS every year, like you. Reading your comment gave me a scare -- what exactly would trigger the $20,000-80,000 fine or asset seizure?

Is it a failure to report income taxes at all? Or do you make so much more than $100k/year that the double taxation is killing you?

I'm just trying to figure out what, other than their already-reported income being audited, has got all of your expat friends so spooked...

I love HN as much as the next person but suggesting that the people who hang out here are somehow representative of anything except for the most lucky, wealthy, and privileged members of our society seems a bit strange.

The point you're making about tech startup costs is true, of course, although it looks like statistically speaking the chances of hitting it big are only slightly better than 'will become a famous singer' or 'will play for the NBA.'

But even if we assume that an average human with a laptop and AWS can now make it big, it seems like in the meantime so much of the other things that working-class people had going for them in the 1960s -- being able to support a family on construction wages, for example -- are gone.

Aside from the "needs many gigs of RAM, even without deduplication turned on" angle, the lack of ECC memory would prevent me from using ZFS on raspi.

Sooner or later you will trash your data unless you're using ECC memory (which the Raspberry Pi RAM chips are not): http://louwrentius.com/please-use-zfs-with-ecc-memory.html

For the record, I also think it's cool to get this compiled and running on RasPi; just wanted to add the ECC info for anyone now thinking of doing something with this in production :-D.

Actually, I take it back -- you are probably wiser than me, pre-empting the systemd battles that always ensue :-D.

Why is this downvoted? It is interesting (and worth pointing out), since not using systemd is different from every "enterprise" Linux distro out there.

I like this. It makes a lot of sense to use something like Alpine Linux for Docker images. If you're going to build a 'process container' like Docker -- something that does not encourage the same mindset as a traditional container or VM -- it makes sense to start with a stripped-down operating system and then build it up to be exactly what you need.

Perhaps loud suggestions like these are necessary due to a bias in the group that uses Docker. 20% people that really know what they're doing and have chosen Docker for a specific reason, and the hangers-on who try to emulate them by using the same tools.

Docker is an interesting, useful, and extremely overhyped tool. I may be wrong, but I feel like its popularity has caused a bunch of people who don't really need Docker to use it. Besides popularity, they can't really explain why they are using it over something like LXC or FreeBSD jails.

I imagine (again, no data to back this up) that this same large percentage of people are also the ones that just keep using the default Ubuntu image once they finish the "Get Started" tutorial.

I'm glad to see suggestions like this gaining popularity. If you're going to make the most of Docker, I think there's value to be found in really committing to the mindset of a 'purpose-built, no-frills environment for running a single process.'

From what I can tell right now, a huge number of people are using Docker "sort of like a VM but you need more of them, and Git is integrated and you have to tell it to do something or it stops running".

I actually did this in an app a few years ago, and completely forgot about it for a while. I only remembered when another dev sent a surprised e-mail. Ya gotta make time for fun...

I see your point, but I think the counterpoint is that there is a huge difference between

1. getting a warrant and running down to the book shop to ask them about what a single suspect bought, and

2. Having enormous amounts of data collected about hundreds of millions of people, processed and interpreted, essentially sitting in one place. Whether Google voluntarily gives it up or not is almost irrelevant (as we saw, the NSA is happy to tap Google's private fiber without their knowledge even when Google is cooperating on other fronts).

Of course the government will find ways to be evil if it wants (and I think that we're generally lucky because it doesn't seem to want to with any particular intensity). But that's not really the point here.

It's the difference between having many small, complicated little targets that each yield very little information, versus one conveniently enormous target that yields information on everyone.

PRISM doesn't ring a bell for you?