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If you need to run stateful applications take a look at Service Fabric. It has it quirks but we are running it in production and we are pretty happy with it so far.

I am struggling to find what an average person with a bit of excess money that goes into saving can do when we are faced with higher than normal inflation. I was a kid when hyperinflation happened to my country in Eastern Europe and it was devastating for my family. Hopefully something like this won't happen, but then what should we do if in the next few years we are hit with inflation at the ranges of 10% to 15%? Maybe I should just accept that it is out my control and focus on my work and personal development so I can find a job in any market condition.

The “Two-And-Done” Rule resonates so much with me. When I was younger I was very passionate to argue for things to go my way when I believed that I was right. This almost cost my first job and I got a serious warning from my manager. Now I explain why I disagree with something, lay out my arguments but eventually I commit to the group decision, made by the whole team. Even though many times things don't go my way, people often come to me to listen to my controversial opinions and often times I see that they take them in consideration, which is nice.

Interesting points but I would like to add my takeout at how I see Devops and how we use Devops engineers in our organization. My previous boss came up with the definition that most closely describes Devops for me and it is the following: Devops are set of practices that increase the team velocity. And in fact Devops engineers wear many hats. The team needs to get faster their code from developer workstations to production - a Devops engineer could help set up ci/cd pipeline. We need more quality checks and gates before releasing to production - a Devops engineer could help. We need the service to handle spikes in traffic, database backups and failover operations - a Devops engineer could help. We need our infrastructure to be scripted as code, automated, immutable and easy to replicate - a Devops engineer job. Developers have a hard time localizing an issue in production - again Devops engineer could help setting up better logging and monitoring. Also it is not a job in isolation. Devops engineers work closely with the team to transfer knowledge about the tools they built and also observe what is blocking the devs from doing their job in terms of tooling. It seems like asking a lot from a single person in that role but for small teams people often do various tasks by themselves. In bigger organizations people could specialize in different roles like release engineers and SRE but I do believe that there is always a need for someone to be in the Devops role to keep track of the bigger picture and bridge the gaps between devs and operations.

Bulgaria here. I don't know if the comparison is even relevant as we don't have normal mobile data plans anymore. Most of the plans are providing 5-10 GB of data to all networks and websites and some GBs to specific websites like social media and popular ones. So for example I can have a data plan with 20 GB but after the first 10 GB I have fast internet just for facebook and whatsapp. The rest of the internet is almost not accessible as it takes ages to load.

I don't have experience with meditation so I can't comment on that but personally I have been though some very tough periods in my life, battling with depression and anxiety and what has helped me a lot during those periods is physical exercise and eating healthy food. Even better if I manage to join a group sport or activity. It is sometimes hard to find the motivation to do it, doesn't provide immediate gratification and relaxation but if I keep doing it is much more rewarding to my mental health compared to all other stuff I have tried.

We are currently working on IoT solution where we deploy many distributed computing units with leaf devices and SQLite works flawlessly to keep local state on the remote devices. There may be other solutions but this was a no-brainer for us and so far we haven't had any major issues with it.

Specific tests doesn't exactly mean "Simple" tests. It is hard to balance between the two but from my experience when people try want to write specific tests they just start writing extremely simple tests.

Another point I want to mention is that Japan was never invaded on its own territory by a foreign power and it wasn't ruled or politically influenced by outsiders for many centuries. This helps a lot to build and preserve a business.

On the contrary if you take the Balkans in Europe every few centuries the ruling power changed. First was the Roman Empire, then the Byzantine Empire, Bulgarian Empire, many other nations come to power for different periods, then the Ottomans, the Soviet Union and in the present day most of the companies and corporations in the Balkans are very proud if they have a history of 20-30 years (after the collapse of the Soviet Union)

Sadly it always includes songs that I have already liked in every radio that I make and it forces me to listen the same song over and over again until I hate it. I would like radio to suggest music that I haven't liked already...

As a person in Eastern Europe I also kind of envy this but then I remember that the cost of living here is way lower and I am leading pretty good life with the money that I make so it ain't that bad. It is better to just enjoy life instead of being constantly worried if you make enough.

I doubt there are books that could teach you critical thinking. It requires to spend lots of time observing and learning stuff, trying out possible solutions and getting meaningful feedback.

Also from my experience it helps when you stop judging people and stuff, labeling things as good or bad, black or white. Just try to understand different points of view and outcomes as they are.

I am using Azure Devops for the past couple of years and they have kind of nailed it. You have builds that do most of the CI and Releases which can be fine tuned to do complex deployments and complete the CD story. Then you can set them as a requirement for the pull request approval to the main and branch it helps to guarantee healthy trunk.

I don't agree that CI is a team problem and CD is an engineering problem. If you are following infrastructure as code principles it is everyone's problem because if you don't add how your new feature should be deployed it will break the CI and CD pipelines and you won't be able to merge it.

This article has 5 ads on it, from the top and then every 3 paragraphs. The irony...

I have a few friends that moved to that role and basically it is like creating a personal brand.

Start sharing knowledge on your personal website, blog, linkedin, twitter and other social media and also make sure to make it clear that you are open for conversation and could help other people/businesses. Attend local events and conferences, even become a speaker. Talk to a lot of people, see what problems they have and discuss how you could help. Get engaged with them, give an advice or do some small work for free. This would give you better impression of the project and the people that you would be working with and then tell them that you would be happy to consult them and offer them your rates.

When you have completed a project, ask if you could use them for future reference. On your blog/twitter write about your experience with this project and how you helped that company (without sharing any sensitive or business critical information) - this will show future clients that you are trustworthy. Rinse and repeat.

I am in the same boat. Got my current job just by reference by people that know me and I didn't have an interview at all.

On regular basis I am faced with challenging technical problems related to things that I haven't done before and then with careful research, planning and execution I solve them and our product is going forward and the company is growing so I assume we are doing the correct things most of the time.

And then when I hear from friends stories from their interviews I really get scared that if I apply today I would fail...

Can't speak for all southern countries in EU but here are my impressions.

* At least from the people I know during the summer productivity drops because everyone is on a vacation to the seaside.

* People here seem to much more enjoy live. It is much more common to see young people just hanging around and socializing than doing anything productive.

* Tourism is usually the priority for those counties, not IT. This leads to high number of seasonal workers. Lots of people don't want to work in factories and offices. They just work a few months during the summer in the tourism and during the rest of the time they enjoy life and do nothing.

* EU allows everyone to work everywhere and smart people want to be part of the technological hubs of Europe which just happen not be here. It is the same as in USA. I haven't heard about any startup from Kansas, but plenty from Silicon Valley.

My two cents for the situation. EU has poured lots of money to these regions but very few productive things have come out. People just learned how to manipulate the system to get more funds. They are not thinking how to solve real problems and make people lives better, everyone is just trying to get money, spend them and then asks for more. The funds should be restructured to allow entrepreneurship grow. You cannot make inefficient system better by just giving it more money, you need to change the system.

If you visit the Balkans make sure to try it. There are many variations of the börek and all them are great.

For the last 10 years I've been working mostly on CI and CD automation for a few projects that as part of their offering tried to automate the deployment for their clients.

In general when you try to simplify a process you increase the level of abstraction which leads to additional complexity in terms of customization and integration with third party systems and tools. Then you decide that it is a good idea to offer integration with the third party systems and tools and you increase the abstraction even more which increases the complexity even more. Also in the end you wonder if you are in the CD tools business or you are offering your core product.

It is much more productive to develop the product in mind with the tools for deployment that are already available. Unless you want to have a product and a "Services" division that configures and operates your product for the clients...

My personal favorite is this instagram profile making fun of influencers taking photos and videos in the famous Rue Crémieux street in Paris.

https://www.instagram.com/clubcremieux/

I gave up on productivity long ago. It depends on the type of work that you do. If I am let's say on the assembly line and everything is already thought of and I have to follow well written guides, then I could try to be productive, avoid distractions and so on.

On my job I have to research complex problems, that you can't simply google them and find an answer. It takes time to design a possible solution, trial and error, a lot of thinking and observing and in the end you feel that you have hit a wall. In such cases I simply need a break and to think for something else for a while. It is also very hard to put an estimate and set a deadline for a such thing, so productivity is the least of my problems.

When someone works really hard, goes through lots of hard moments and eventually succeeds the general public or not so close friends see the end result but don't see all the struggle. Then they try to explain how this happened and when they fail to connect the dots it all looks like magic to them and all they can say is that luck was involved.

The hard truth is that everyone comes by opportunities in life (call it luck) but very few people have the knowledge and experience to achieve something meaningful out of those opportunities.

I went from being very poor to above average thanks to the tech industry and at first it really seems that money solve all problems and bring happiness. Now I like to think about it as money make you live comfortable, healthy life but these things have nothing to do with happiness. They are important but you can be very comfortable and still unhappy. What makes you happy are good relationships with people and family, and achieving your goals (which might not be related to building wealth but more like helping your community or discovering the purpose of the universe...)