caw

- How often do you think about your career development?

At least quarterly.

- How much time do you spend thinking about your career?

A days passively thinking about it. Maybe an hour or two actively sitting down and writing notes.

- How do you plan what you want to develop for yourself? Is it based on trends or a specific goal?

It's based on trends but also what I'm interested in. For example, a trend is cloud computing, and I do sysadmin so that's obviously a skill I have to learn

- How do you keep track of all the skills and experiences you've gained through your career?

Haven't needed to yet, so I guess mentally, and keeping my resume semi up-to-date.

- How do you get feedback on your skills and strengths? What do you do with the feedback?

Coworker feedback, manager feedback. I have an "attaboy" or "good job" folder in my inbox that I collect feedback in.

- Who do you talk with the most about your career development?

Manager, significant other. Obviously not the same conversation with both. Manager is more skills based development plan, SO is the "5 yr, 10 yr life plans".

That's probably right. In which case it's comparison between "small SUV" and "crossover". I think the Lexus RX may be the former, unless they changed the platform from her 1st gen RX.

I'm also in the process of buying a home for the first time, and did some search on Trulia/Zillow. It was OK, but the data gets really stale. One home was sold already before it was taken down. I did find out that Houston has a really nice site, har.com that lets you do basically everything Trulia & Zillow does. Realtors have other interface(s) into the same data, which lets them do different things like N sided polygons instead of just squares for map searches.

Tours vs images is definitely an issue. Some people are just bad photographers, some only have 6 images (Houston MLS requires 6 images for a posting). Some are good photographers, that make things look bigger than in person.

Experience is hugely variable though. I called 2 agent offices, and got stuck with their most inexperienced Buyer's Agent. The more experienced people are doing sales of homes or commercial, and getting a cut of the commissions of the people under them. Some Googling led me to roughly a 60/40 split between agent & office, along with the agent paying a desk fee (~$50/monthly). Since the principal is still getting paid, you can involve them if needed for second opinions or more nuanced explanations. Agents are getting roughly 3% of the sales price.

Still read all your documents. I've caught things that slipped past my realtor, and also brought up questions for her to answer.

Inspections are a mixed bag. They have a preferred list, and should also provide you a legal document stating their incentives for any recommended providers (including home warranty companies). I ended up going with one of my realtor's preferred inspectors, but only after calling all 5 on their list, and several more listed on Yelp.

Knowledge goes back to experience. My agent was basically bowled over by 2 of the new home builders in the area. It was so bad I considered buying the Realtor's Residential Construction Certification program (1 day course, ~$300, they'll sell to anyone) and going through it myself if I went with new construction.

Another point about knowledge is that even with experience, you can come up with stuff they don't know. Neither my agent or the broker (my agent's boss) had worked with anyone that negotiated their lender origination fees. I got $500 off one lender and $1000 off another.

Whether it's a crossover based on a truck or car platform makes a difference. My girlfriend's crossover is on a truck platform, and handles like one. We recently test drove a newer crossover built on a sedan platform, and it drives more like a sedan.

I'm assuming that's a paid CDN with clients like CloudFlare or Akamai, not you distributing your website to multiple datacenters in order to serve more clients faster. If you happen to use CDN like DNS features to route the client to the closest Digital Ocean datacenter, you're probably in the clear.

There's a project called CakeBrew (https://www.cakebrew.com/) that was featured on HN a while back. It adds a GUI to homebrew.

My first C class had Gameboy programming. There were no libraries to include, and most of the data manipulation was around scores and drawing pixels.

My second C class went into mutexes and things (producers & consumers of some data)

My third class that used C had kernel modules. Our kernel module project was to write a model of a parking lot. There was some user code that called our module saying whether it was a normal vehicle, a handicap vehicle, or an emergency vehicle. The parking lot also had 2 states, emergency or normal. In an emergency, only emergency vehicles could come in, everything else was rejected. The code ran with M floors and N parking spaces per floor, and returned the lowest floor in which you could park.

We also wrote an identical piece of userspace code, and compared how fast each performed.

Your biggest costs are in heating and cooling, followed by appliances.

Some electric companies offer programs to cycle your air conditioning during peak hours. They'll cut the compressor but leave the fan running, and then turn it back on.

Example program: http://www.jacksonemc.com/home-save-energy-money/energy-savi...

A Flying V formation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mighty_Ducks_(film_series) )

More seriously, what equipment do you have? How many vehicles, what type, and how long of a stretch of highway? Can you damage the cars in any way (say tailgating and then sudden obstacle avoidance...would anyone be mad if the cars didn't avoid as intended)?

Transistors may not need to be 100% working on 100% of the die to be shipped. If the fault is contained within a subsection, the manufacturer can set fuses to disable portions of the chip. This is generally used to distinguish features between product lines. Processor A could have VT-D failed in manufacturing, so it's fused off and sold as a cheap processor. Processor B could be fully working, but Intel needs to sell more cheap processors, so they intentionally disable VT-D on B. Sony did something similar with shipping Playstation 3s since they couldn't get the yields high enough initially. They disabled 1 SPU of each processor since they could reliably get 7 working ones in manufacturing. Those 8 SPUs are more interchangeable though, they're more like graphics chips in that regard than general x86 CPUs.

It was my interpretation that "binning" is because of the manufacturing and imperfections in the etching or underlaying wafer cause certain chips to not perform up to spec. It's not because there's 1.7 Billion of something, but rather because you're drawing at 22nm. The way a processor does math is identical in every single processor, but processor A may result in more heat discharge or higher voltages required than processor B at the same clock rate.

Where you get into "it may not compute identically" is the revisions. At Intel at least, going from A0 to B0 means the transistor layout on the wafer changed. Going from B1 to B2 means the wiring layout changed (though the underlaying metal layer remained the same). Again that's a "technically", whether that's followed to a T is something I'm not sure about. Sometimes features are added going between metal revisions.

I'd just like to point out that this

> But that's kind of a chicken/egg situation for new grads without networks.

Is fundamentally false since you are in school. There's a lot of alumni and classmates. Your peers have internships, potentially with companies they like. They may not want to join on full-time afterwards for any number of reasons, but those companies may still be hiring for graduation. Those companies may also be hiring more than one person. The Alumni network can also help in identifying positions available with good companies.

You may also have peers that recently graduated, and have internship positions. It's your last year so this probably isn't applicable to you, but they're also a good source of info and jobs. Don't restrict yourself to your graduating class.

I agree with the slacks + button up for men unless you're going for a senior management position, then go suit.

FWIW, when I interviewed at Intel and wore a suit, the security guard commented when I walked in that I was overdressed.

My interpretation is that the business model is used for at least having some idea of how you will reach your customers and earn money. It may not work, so you may need to pivot or change your strategy, but you could have multiple channels for the same idea that you validated.

I found this link off Steve Blank's site - http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas

That's the canvas in his book and you can use that to generate some ideas. It's not the formal paper model. You and your partner could be thinking of a "business plan" in two different ways. A formal business plan is much too stuffy, but you want at least some list of ideas on paper. That way when you get stuck and you're stressed out, you can go back and re-visit something you made when cooler heads prevailed.

You can also self-sign for internal machines, and leave your public ones one wildcard deep.

I used DRBD before it was cool (before it was added into the kernel), and it works great for highly available directories like home dirs, which was my use case. Even then it was pretty solid, and it's very similar to using a high end NAS product like NetApp or EMC with automatic failover, except you don't have to shell out $100K+++ for it.

If you used it for a database then everything committed to disk is immediately available on the partner, which you can spin up instantly with some scripts. And look, your transaction log is exactly where you left it! With a database and built-in replication you could go either way, but there are some applications with persistency that you need to make highly available, and that's another area DRBD would shine.

US uses it as well, but only for academia.

I went through Georgia Tech, and there is never any formal introduction to version control. If you're exposed to it, it's from a job or a friend (who in turn got it from a friend or their job). If you don't know it exists, you'll never seek out and learn it.

Testing was used in some courses. We had a software development class that involved UML, TDD, and everything "proper". Testing is also provided as a way of pre-checking your homework by some TAs. They might give you a basic set of tests for your linked list homework (adding, removing, etc), but then their grading script will check off by 1s, etc. It's not necessarily taught how to write said tests in those classes.

Continuous deployment is never touched. If you co-op/intern you might be exposed to it.

No one that I knew of learned anything related to "ops", unless they happened to take an interest in it.

I think you're going to have to look for either large companies, companies that specialize in any of these things, or the stereotype "hard problems" startups that actually really do systems hacking. In some of these places you'll be considered a developer, and in others it's an operational thing.

Just some suggestions, you should also include all their competitors

kernel hacking: VMWare, Citrix and other virtualization providers. Maybe Google and Intel (think hyper-optimization companies and brand new hardware that needs drivers)

Databases: Oracle, MongoDB, etc

Networking: Cisco, Juniper, possibly finance & wall street companies

Distributed systems: Oak Ridge National Labs, research/academia, biotech

You should really talk to someone from a particular company you're interested in to find out their requirements. LinkedIn and your alumni network help with this.

General stuff would be good grades, evidence of leadership/positions of responsibility/working in teams, projects (academic is fine). Work experience in programming would be a good thing to have. If you have a masters they'll expect deeper tech skills--preferably in their specific vertical. You probably need to know at least 1 scripting language and 1 programming language, in this case probably C/C++, but they may accept other languages like Java.

The Kinder eggs are considered an adulterated foodstuff and are banned from import into the US, so you do have to be careful about exports.

HVM gives the best performance because you can take advantage of certain hardware features through the hypervisor. It's basically more direct access to the hardware, which makes it faster as you don't have as much hypervisor overhead. Amazon's "enhanced" networking and SSDs need HVM to get a good chunk of performance.

Yes you'd have to build new AMIs with HVM. It'd be easiest if you had some kind of configuration management so you didn't need as many AMIs baked. When I build machines I use a script to handle the creation and mounting any extra volumes on a machine that I have as "nonstandard". I have only 2 custom AMIs - one for PV and the other for HVM. You'll need to have at least both, because if you wanted to use certain instances (t1.micro, m1.small come to mind) you can only use PV.

Loans are also bad because you start with a 100% full credit (e.g. $1000 outstanding on $1000 loan) and pay it down. Part of the credit rating is your balance to credit ratio, so 5% looks much better than 95%. I've heard that the ideal is <30%

That's because the manufacturers tie so much stuff into them. It's been 3 years since I looked into it, but it was my understanding that if I upgraded my stereo I'd lose the nice display just below the windshield line. I think I'd also lose either the steering wheel music controls, or the bluetooth controls for my phone.

Some companies have a limit on the number of times you can work for them, in order to prevent people from hopping and coming back for more money. I think a previous company I worked at had a limit of 2 employment periods, which they instituted (supposedly) after a large number of people took voluntary separation and then came back later after the company started growing more. The next time a voluntary separation came up the policy was implemented to prevent another round of that happening.

I'd almost assume the company owns all the equipment. You'll be expected to ship it back with them covering cost of shipping unless your reach some kind of agreement. Maybe they won't want to pay for freight shipping on a desk and chair and tell you to just keep it if you leave on good terms. But you shouldn't expect it to be yours. While probably not a good negotiation topic (there's more pressing ones like pay and vacation), it's something you could inquire about or negotiate in the discussions.

From a more technical basis (being a devops, and having worked in least privilege environments), the big thing you need is centralized logging, and from there you can do what you need. Whether it's syslog or logstash or something else, if you get the logs in one place you can then filter over them for instances that you'd need to alert via email or chatbot.

That works great and all until you realize only "sudo" is logged and not root terminal actions, and even then root could delete any logs of its actions. That's why something immediately shipping off logs is nice. I like "rootsh" (available on SourceForge) for forcing any sudo users to either use "sudo" or "sudo rootsh" to get a root terminal. You're not preventing anyone from doing their jobs, you just have an audit trail. Someone asked me why you need an audit trail unless it's to fire people for doing something wrong -- no it's for root cause and preventing certain operator errors from happening again, and in case of maliciousness from either an employee or someone impersonating an employee.

The one other big thing to do is get rid of any shared accounts that can access data. If it's AWS, gen up some keys for each user/application or use IAM roles for the hosts. If it's Linux accounts, separate out the accounts. If you must have a singular account for something, only allow sudo access to switch to them. Going back to the previous paragraph, you'll at least get a log of who switched to the shared account.

If you want to chat more about this, my email is in my profile.

I don't smoke, but one thing I noticed from being around people who smoke and have tried to quit is it doesn't work to hang out with smokers. I've seen 2 people take it back up after quitting, and another who has been trying to quit but he interacts with a group of 6-8 guys who all smoke. While they're cool with him trying to quit, it's probably very hard for him to actually keep from lighting up when all of them are standing around talking, and almost all of them are actively smoking.

Actual chip design needs FPGAs for hardware emulation prior to fabrication. Yes you'll change the logic out on a weekly, daily, or even hourly basis.

I used to sysadmin for a place doing high performance computing. They were working on a different problem domain than neurology, but still required loads of computational power.

The tech they used:

* GPGPU programming (CUDA, etc)

* Fortran (old code base dated back to the 80s)

* C/C++

* Matlab

* MPI & OpenMP

There was a little bit python but mostly from the newer grad students.

Scientific Linux (https://www.scientificlinux.org/) provides a pretty good base OS though not everyone uses it. Some places use RHEL or CentOS instead. For the GPGPU things the developers used Ubuntu because at the time it was the easiest way to get CUDA running. I have no idea if that's changed.

There are legitimate reasons to purchase a new car, but it really comes down to doing the numbers for yourself.

I bought a new car right after college. My intent was to do the "responsible" thing and buy a lease return or some slightly used vehicle. However, with the price difference, the warranty on that versus a new car, the APR I could get on a new vehicle (0%) versus a used one (2.75%), and how long I intended to keep the vehicle swung me to buying new. The warranty in particular was a key selling point because I was moving to a new city with no social net to help if I suddenly had to have massive car repairs. Been there, done that, it's not fun.

There was some other intangibles. I have full service records for my car, there's no risk of "hidden" damage, I didn't have to bother with taking it to a mechanic to get checked out.

Bottom line is run the numbers before blatantly assuming it's "money to burn". It's a cost effectiveness scenario. Obviously more expensive cars potentially have more expensive depreciation cycles.

Leasing is similarly a good idea in certain cases. There's tons of articles around that illustrate in what scenarios it actually is a plausible option of obtaining a vehicle.