jacurtis

Out of curiosity, why are you looking for "articles" as opposed to more generally "resources"?

The reason I say this is that articles are usually 800-3,000 words, with a median around 1,200 words. I'd ask if you can really gain much depth or promote deep change in yourself based on a bunch of short pieces?

Meanwhile there are numerous private courses, conferences, research papers, and books that dive into these topics in much more greater depth which is likely to have a more lasting impact on your life.

I'd venture a guess that you want articles because they are easier and faster to read. They don't require much time or effort to go through and you can get a few quick hits of dopamine that make you artificially feel like you impacted your career. Leadership isn't something you're going to be able to learn with a couple listacles and blog posts. It's going to take a lot more time and dedication to get good at.

As others have mentioned. Management is easy. Leadership is hard.

I have a highly optimized LinkedIn, yet I don't really spend a ton of time on there. I log in once or twice a month, answer messages, and do a few things. Maybe make a post once every 2 months or so. Nothing crazy, yet my profile is very well optimized.

And this is why: Everyone looks at it. Far more people then you would expect.

I can't tell you how many meetings I have gone into where I walk in and see that everyone at the conference table has my LinkedIn profile up on their laptops. They knew they were meeting with me, had no idea who I was, so they looked me up on LinkedIn right before. Its my introduction and sets the tone for a meeting or presentation. This experience is not only in the professional world either. I recently (in my mid-30s) decided to go back to academia to get a PhD and now I am encountering people in academics who use my LinkedIn to learn about me when I reach out for academic or research assistance. When applying for stuff, presenting at conferences, all of it uses LinkedIn as the central way to communicate your identity. Having a nice profile helps me set a positive first impression that helps me gain more responses.

Also, I can't fail to mention that recruiters use LinkedIn as a search tool. Not every recruiter is worth your time, but the right ones certainly are worth it and LinkedIn helps connect you with more of them. THey also use your LinkedIn when communicating with their clients. Almost every job interview you do, you can assume the hiring manager and interviewers have looked at your LinkedIn profile before meeting you. Most have probably looked more closely at your LinkedIn profile than your resume.

Curating a LinkedIn profile is not that much work. Maybe 30-60 mins per month is all it takes if you have a lot happening and maybe 1 hour per quarter for everyone else. Its not a huge commitment, and yet the gains in my opinion are far greater than the small amount of time spent on it.

I don't care if people want to hate on LinkedIn and say its stupid. If anything that benefits me, because it helps optimized profiles stand out. Maybe theres a few people (like the parent comment) who have an aversion to LinkedIn for some reason and will look down on someone with an optimized profile. But I truly believe it offers far more value than it detracts. The people that look down on it are usually people that are not in any position of power anyway or they are a micro-minority.

I'm not sure they just launched anything. OpsGenie has been an Atlassian product for 5 or more years now. I've been using it for 3-4 myself and its been integrated with Jira the whole time.

In fact, OpsGenie has mostly been on Auto-pilot for a few years now.

> Datadog makes it far too easy to misconfigure things and blow up costs

I'll give you a fun example. It's fresh in my mind because i just got reamed out about it this week.

In our last contract with DataDog, they convinced us to try out the CloudSIEM product, we put in a small $600/mo committment to it to try it out. Well, we never really set it up and it sat on autopilot for many months. We fell under our contract rate for it for almost a year.

Then last month we had some crazy stuff happen and we were spamming logs into DataDog for a variety of reasons. I knew I didn't want to pay for these billions of logs to be indexed, so I made an exclusion filter to keep them out of our log indexes so we didn't have a crazy bill for log indexing.

So our rep emailed me last week and said "Hey just a heads up you have $6,500 in on-demand costs for CloudSIEM, I hope that was expected". No, it was NOT expected. Turns out excluding logs from indexing does not exclude them from CloudSIEM. Fun fact, you will not find any documented way to exclude logs from CloudSIEM ingestion. It is technically possible, but only through their API and it isn't documented. Anyway, I didn't do or know this, so now i had $6,500 of on-demand costs plus $400-500 misc on-demand costs that I had to explain to the CTO.

I should mention my annual review/pay raise is also next week (I report to the CTO), so this will now be fresh in their mind for that experience.

I mostly agreed with OP's article, but you basically nailed all of the points of disagreement I did have.

Jira: Its overhyped and overpriced. Most HATE jira. I guess I don't care enough. I've never met a ticket system that I loved. Jira is fine. Its overly complex sure. But once you set it up, you don't need to change it very often. I don't love it, I don't hate it. No one ever got fired for choosing Jira, so it gets chosen. Welcome to the tech industry.

Terraform Cloud: The gains for Terraform Cloud are minimal. We just use Gitlab for running Terraform pipelines and have a super nice custom solution that we enjoy. It wasn't that hard to do either. We maintain state files remotely in S3 with versioning for the rare cases when we need to restore a foobar'd statefile. Honestly I like having Terraform pipelines in the same place as the code and pipelines for other things.

GitHub Actions: Yeah switch to GitLab. I used to like Github Actions until I moved to a company with Gitlab and it is best in class, full stop. I could rave about Gitlab for hours. I will evangelize for Gitlab anywhere I go that is using anything else.

DataDog: As mentioned, DataDog is the best monitoring and observability solution out there. The only reason NOT to use it is the cost. It is absurdly expensive. Yes, truly expensive. I really hate how expensive it is. But luckily I work somewhere that lets us have it and its amazing.

Pagerduty: Agree, switch to OpsGenie. Opsgenie is considerably cheaper and does all the pager stuff of Pager duty. All the stuff that PagerDuty tries to tack on top to justify its cost is stuff you don't need. OpsGenie does all the stuff you need. Its fine. Similar to Jira, its not something anyone wants anyway. No ones going to love it, no one loves being on call. So just save money with OpsGenie. If you're going to fight for the "brand name" of something, fight for DataDog instead, not a cooler pager system.

I've been running ECS for about 5 years now. It has come a long way from a "lightweight" orchestration tool into something thats actually pretty impressive. The recent new changes to the GUI are also helpful for people that don't have a ton of experience with orchestration.

We have moved off of it though, you can eventually need more features than it provides. Of course that journey always ends up in Kubernetes land, so you eventually will find your way back there.

Logging to Cloudwatch from kubernetes is good for one thing... audit logs. Cloudwatch in general is a shit product compared to even open source alternatives. For logging you really need to look at Fluentd or Kibana or DataDog or something along those lines. Trying to use Cloudwatch for logs is only going to end in sadness and pain.

Discount rates are actually much better too on the bigger instances. Therefore the "sticker price" that people compare on the public site is no where close to a fair comparison.

We technically aren't supposed to talk about pricing publically, but I'm just going to say that we run a few 8XL and 12Xl RDS instances and we pay ~40% off the sticker price.

If you switch to Aurora engine the pricing is absurdly complex (its basically impossible to determine without a simulation calculator) but AWS is even more aggressive with discounting on Aurora, not to mention there are some legit amazing feature benefits by switching.

I'm still in agreeance that you could do it cheaper yourself at a Data Center. But there are some serious tradeoffs made by doing it that way. One is complexity and it certainly requires several new hiring decisions. Those have their own tangible costs, but there are a huge amount of intangible costs as well like pure inconvenience, more people management, more hiring, split expertise, complexity to network systems, reduce elasticity of decisions, longer commitments, etc.. It's harder to put a price on that.

When you account for the discounts at this scale, I think the cost gap between the two solutions is much smaller and these inconveniences and complexities by rolling it yourself are sometimes worth bridging that smaller gap in cost in order to gain those efficiencies.

I run paperless on an Unraid server at home and it works really well. It has "machine learning" (based on a model that you host yourself that grows as you use it). It has good search, impressive OCR, and generally works really well.

My only complaint is that it lacks a good organization workflow. I have a shared network folder and any file (image, pdf, etc) that you put on that folder gets immediately consumed into Paperless. This happens almost immediately. I have a printer/scanner that allows me to scan to a SMB network drive. So I configured any scans from it to go to that shared folder, which makes integration really nice. I also use GeniusScan on my phone to scan to the same network drive (which requires pro, which is ~$16 a year I think). Genius Scan can save locally to your phone and upload later when you get home, which makes for a good workflow. The problem is that once it gets into Paperless, there's not a good workflow for reviewing and labeling the file. I have been meaning to sit down and provide a contribution to the open source project to improve this, but haven't found the time to do it yet. This is the biggest weakness of the project imo.

For those that have never used paperless. The naming may confuse you. It started off as an open source project named paperless. Then it got abandoned and a team picked it up to update it and make it more modern, and they renamed it paperless-ng (for angular I assume, the new frontend). Then that project lost momentum, so it was forked again and is now paperless-ngx which is the current iteration of it. It currently has a very strong community and gets good updates.

They make the mistake of spelling it correctly, lol. Silly programmers.

A company with 450 employees doesn’t need 2 CEOs.

Happy to see that they plan to maintain their sponsorship for Tour de France avec Femmes.

Sad to hear about the discontinuation of the new hub trainer hardware. The Zwift cog was pretty awesome, especially for the price point. Since it’s made by Wahoo, hopefully we see this available directly through wahoo now since the R&D has already been done and they were the ones making and designing it anyway.

> This is obviously different from "typing things out on a computer".

People tend to get wrapped up in the idea that writing stuff down is better than typing stuff out in terms of memory retention. But this is not the full story.

The reason that studies repeatedly conclude that writing notes is more effective than typing notes is that writing is a conscious effort. You are usually falling behind when writing compared to what is being spoken and therefore as a subconscious product, your mind is actually summarizing and filtering information from the speaker as they speak. You can't write every word they say, so you have to actually listen to the speaker and determine what is worth writing. Then as you write, it takes a conscious stream of effort to write out the words and it is a slower process, which allows your brain to focus on and digest the information another handful of seconds before moving on. The feedback loop that writing naturally requires is what makes it more applicable to memory retention, not the physical act of writing itself.

By comparison, most people can type around the speed of a speaker talking at a moderate cadence. This allows you to often type exactly what a speaker is saying, essentially as a stream of words coming in the ears and transferring directly into your motor control that allows for typing. This skips a processing stage (or introduces a very vague one) and so typed notes often become just streams of data collection as opposed to writing which tends to require elaborate data processing. It is the data processing that makes memory retention effective, not the writing of letters itself.

What OP is doing is creating the same feedback loop, potentially to an even stronger degree than writing allows for, because you have to consume the information, figure out how to translate that to LaTeX and determine a method for displaying that information. LaTeX often requires an understanding of the full function when creating it. This requires more processing, and then a secondary process of consideration in developing a written or image function into a LaTeX format.

Therefore, you get the same effect that writing provides, which is the data processing and translation components. This is what makes writing effective, not the movement of pen on paper. I would argue that what OP does is at least as effective as writing (maybe more, but that is conjecture).

> I don't even know what a "love-letter to C" is

Oh come on, you've never done something just for the passion of it? Not trying to earn money or get famous, you just do something because you personally enjoy it with no other motivation than that.

Even if you haven't, a lot of people do stuff purely for their own personal satisfaction. That's what a "love letter to x" is. You just do it for the love.

We are going into a weekend, I challenge you to do something just for the love of it.

I googled and found this:

> Over the 23 year history of mod_blog, I've given up on the notion of anyone other than me using it. There was only one other person who used it for just a few months before deciding blogging wasn't for him and that was way back in 2002. So it was completely by surprise that I recently received a bug report on it.

That was written a year ago.

Source: https://boston.conman.org/2023/01/19.1

I don't think this is positioned to replace Wordpress, Astro, Hugo, etc by any means.

It is just a barebones framework written as a love letter to the language of C.

If its a loveletter to a language than telling you the language is important because that's its sole reason for existing. Someone probably just took this on as a challenge for fun. It's not designed to be in the next YC cohort.

And for that reason, I enjoyed reading through the code and marveling at the simplicity and power of C. It made me warm and fuzzy. But I'm not going to use it. I might fork it and play with it for fun though.

Well by definition 'complete' means to "the greatest extent or degree". So a complete SWE would need systems knowledge. But is anyone really a complete SWE? Even people that are experts in systems probably aren't complete because they don't know AI.

So we aim for well-rounded. That's the best we can maintain.

C syntax is limited and therefore "simple". Building advanced data structures and programs with your limited toolset does require some out-of-the-box thinking.

This is partially why C is a common teaching language. Because you have to build a lot of tools that are easy to take for granted in other languages. Take a Map or Dictionary for example. C doesn't technically speaking provide one, so you learn to implement them pretty quickly and often. Technically speaking C doesn't even have a primative string type, you just create an array of chars, which by the way has to be a pointer. While this is super easy to do once you've seen it once or twice, it teaches you how strings work in almost every other language.

The reason you can trivially loop through a string in python, is because it works the same way, they have just abstracted it a tiny bit from you.

Now to the author's point... does that really make you a better developer to know that? Therefore is it really needed? No probably not needed. But these exercises and experience does help solidify more complex topics later on. So you don't need C, but I still think there's benefit in learning it.

I'm not sure that abstraction is even in the OS. I think its on the memory controller itself. The OS reads from the memory controller.

> People preferred Google Search the most — even more than meeting friends in person — followed by YouTube and Google Maps. Twitter and Snapchat were the least preferred services, while Facebook was somewhere in the middle. The researchers used their findings on how much money people would accept to stop using Facebook to extrapolate the dollar value of other products. The study was conducted in partnership with Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp; the company had no veto over published results.

People would rather have Google Search than meeting friends in person? Well we are marching towards a sad dystopian future if thats the case.

Its also interesting that Meta partnered for the survey. We have heard rumors of Facebook wanting to offer some sort of premium or paid version of Facebook which sounds like it could still be something on their radar.

Network chuck covers the basics. The only thing I would warn is that he only covers the extreme basics. Like the top 1% of networking. But he makes it sound like when you are done with his videos that you are ready to go make $250k as a network engineer.

So yes he's entertaining, but I only look at it as entertainment. The learning materials are barely more advanced than you can get from skimming an introductory blog post on networking.

K8s was a generational iteration of Borg, but it was a full re-write with an emphasis on making it more universally usable and pluggable.

> We've incorporated the best ideas from Borg in Kubernetes, and have tried to address some pain points that users identified with Borg over the years.

Borg was written in C++, but only contained container scheduling, resource allocation and some service discovery. Many other features of what is now Kubernetes were built later and essentially "shimmed" onto Borg.

Kubernetes was a re-write of Borg to rebuild many of its original features from the ground up using the lessons they had learned since originally building Borg. By this time, Go had been developed and was being actively used for many of these shims and supporting services surrounding Borg. Since the same team(s) were rebuilding Borg that had developed and maintained these other services, and because many of these shims and supporting services (which are already in Go) were being incorporated into Kubernetes, they decided to build the new version (which became Kubernetes) in Go.

Sources:

- https://kubernetes.io/blog/2015/04/borg-predecessor-to-kuber...

- https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-research2023-media/pubto...

I was going to say the same thing. This is why I like Fantasy and Science Fiction genres. They both stretch your mind with new ideas by combining what is known and possible today with what could be possible or might just be fun conceptually to explore.

I find that good fiction stretches the mind to explore new ideas that non fiction can’t do since it is rooted in reality and known facts.

I find that i try to juggle one fiction book and one non-fiction book at a time. There are times when my mind wants to be rooted in reality, fact, and true history. But then sometimes (even within the same reading session) I may switch to fiction to let my mind wander in new ways which sometimes results in ideas and conceptualization in my real life brought by the fiction exploration.

This plane rolled off the factory floor in October. It’s brand new.

sorry, but this one’s on Boeing.

Honestly this might lead to another 737 Max grounding, which will shoot up the cost of airfare.

At this point, the 737 Max seems cursed.

Not everything has to be a VC-funded startup.

Some people just make stuff for fun, to learn a new skill, or to scratch a personal pain point.

Was anyone else shocked to be reminded that a few of these top stories happened in 2023 and not years earlier?

I thought the Silicon Valley Bank failure was 2022. It feels like so long ago. Crazy how long 2023 felt like (at least for me).

Also interesting is that the number of Twitter posts were cut almost in half this year. Despite what a certain CEO claims, all indicators seem to affirm that the popularity of that platform has decreased significantly in 2023.

There is a blackmarket of repurposed Amazon Product Pages. This is a problem that Amazon knows about and does nothing to resolve.

So the way it works is that some company makes a page for a stuffed animal for example. They name the product page appropriately and start selling their toys. They push hard and gets lots of reviews and build up the aSEO (amazon search Optimization) for that page. They build up 1,000 positive reviews for their stuffed animal averaging 4.8 stars. Cool.

Now they decide to stop selling that toy and instead start selling fidget spinners. Why start from scratch and go through the work of building up all those reviews again and the aSEO that took years on the stuffed animal product. Instead they just go in and change the title, the URL slug and the images to represent the new Fidget Spinner. They publish the changes and now, within seconds of posting their new Fidget Spinner is one of the best reviewed fidget spinners on Amazon and starts immediately getting sales because the page has strong aSEO and high reviews which makes it present well in search results. Visitors of the page see the high reviews and buy the product. They start selling thousands of Fidget Spinners overnight and build up to 2,000 positive reviews.

Now that company sells fidget spinners and then gets sued for using toxic glue in the building of their fidget spinners. No problem. THey change their name from SpinnyAltodaWidgetCorpIncUnlimitedPlus to ShenzenSpinnyWidgetToyPlusUnlimitedCorp. New company, now you can't sue them. Then they change the name on the product page and keep selling the same product with a different name and same reviews, building it up to 3,000.

Now the company goes under. But they have all these high performing amazon pages. Here is where the fun begins, they literally go up for auction. Companies will page hundreds of thousands for a top performing amazon page. They sell the page to the highest bidder. Now a new company ShenzenShitzuSuperCorpPlusMegaChargerMorePlusPlus buys the page and starts selling Fish Oil supplements. They just change the name, images, URL, and company information, but it is technically the same amazon page. Then they start selling Fish Oil supplements with 5,000 reviews averaging 4.8 stars. They immediately shoot to the top of the search results and start selling thousands of bottles overnight because people are overwhelmed by the positive reviews of this product and its age and legacy on Amazon tells Amazon to push it to the top of search results.

This is the black market of Amazon pages. These pages change hands often many times a year. Amazon could easily prevent product changes above a certain threshold or even across categories to prevent or eliminate this, but they don't want to. They are complicit in these behaviors by turning a blind eye to what they know is happening.

Here is a detailed article about Hijacked Reviews from Consumer Reports: https://www.consumerreports.org/customer-reviews-ratings/hij...

For example, in one review they find a phone charging cable that has reviews for zip ties, hand soap, shaving cream, and gaming headsets all in the reviews for a phone charging cable. This page has been hijacked several times by entirely different product types.

As someone who worked at a startup that grew to a significant size in the "Nutraceuticals" industry (the fancy name for supplements), I can tell you that the FDA has nearly zero regulation or monitoring of supplements.

I'll omit brand names here, but I can tell you some sketchy stuff happens in supplement manufacturing all the time. During the ~6 years I worked there, only one letter came from the FDA after a whistleblower at a competitor's company came forward. The FDA sent a warning letter out to several of the large competitors in the industry to "don't do it or else" and never followed up again. The company that got in trouble got a few hundred thousand dollar fine for using mislabeled and toxic ingredients. They had one follow up inspection about 6 months after the warning and that was the end of it. For comparison that company was making ~$600M a year at the time of the fine and is now making $1B+. We carried on and never heard from the FDA again despite being equally guilty in our own company.

The guilt is what eventually led me away from the cash cow, where I went on an 18 month sabbatical to get away from any corporate greed for a little bit. I legitimately had nightmares that I would be complicity guilty of several crimes if I stayed there long enough.

I promise you, there is no oversight in supplements. There are a handful of posted guidelines. If a whistleblower comes forward the FDA might react to that single case, but they are so understaffed; the team that manages nutriceuticals is marked in the "tens" of people, not the thousands dedicated to proper medical equipment and medicines.

I'm not sure how its possible to get a PhD in the modern era without learning LaTex. It is the required markup and publishing tool for any respected research publication. Since PhDs require (at least mine did) multiple published works in respected journals and conferences, I feel like LaTex is table-stakes for doctoral research and degrees.

Furthermore, outside of my dissertation work, the classes I took often required you to produce other research works which also had to be created with LaTex. Overleaf (a SaaS platform for Latex collaboration and sharing) was essentially the operating system of my PhD. I spent 75% of my time in there.

I feel like it would be impossible to get a Doctoral degree without LaTex knowledge. Maybe it depends on the university?

I both agree and disagree with you.

In theory, I agree. Tend your garden, do small upgrades often instead of major upgrades less often.

In a homelab this is easy to implement. In a small organization it is too.

But in the facetious "real world", things are a lot more complicated. I work as an SRE Manager and my team is basically ALWAYS upgrading Kubernetes. New releases drop about as fast as we can upgrade the last ones.

When you work on a large cluster, doing an upgrade isn't a simple process. It requires a ton of testing, several steps, and being very slow and methodical to make sure it is all done properly. Where I currently work, we have 2 week sprints and infrastructure changes must align with sprint cycles. So to promote an upgrade at the fastest possible schedule it requires:

- Week 0: Upgrade Dev environment

- Week 2: Upgrade QA Environment

- Week 4: Upgrade Sandbox Environment

- Week 6: Upgrade Prod Environment

That is the fastest possible schedule. That assumes we do a cluster upgrade every sprint, which is 2 weeks. It also ignores other clusters for other business units. We have 4 primary product lines, so multiply all that work times 4. Plus we have supporting products (like self-hosted gitlab, codescene, and custom tools running in k8s clusters).

I say fastest possible schedule because, we can't keep up with this schedule, but even if we could it is the fastest we could go and still maintain our deployment and infrastructure promotion policies.

With new releases every 3-4 months (12-16 weeks), we are essentially in a constant state of always upgrading kubernetes. Right now my team is 2 versions behind. Skipping versions doesn't make sense because you can't guarantee a safe upgrade when skipping versions.

This is why LTS releases are nice. When you run systems at large scale, it is impractical to upgrade that often. I'd prefer to limit upgrades to no more than twice a year and personally I find annual upgrade cycles to be the best balance between "tending the garden" and "not drowning in upgrade work". LTS releases are usually tests to skip upgrades so that companies can go from LTS release to LTS release, without the need to worry about upgrading every minor version in sync.

Remember, upgrading K8s clusters isn't what my bosses want to hear my team spends our time. They want to know that observability is improving, devs are getting infrastructure support, we are building out new systems, deploying hardware for the product team, running our resiliency tests, etc.. Sure upgrading is part of the job, but i can't be ALWAYS upgrading. I have a lot of other responsibilities.

> There are strict limits on what repairs you can do yourself without involving a licensed A&P mechanic.

Sure, you're right that this plane was clearly violating a myriad of maintenance violations. But maintenance violations aren't going to get you thrown in jail. They might get your license taken away and would definitely yield some fines, but not thrown in jail.

I am assuming of course this is on a personal GA plane (like the youtuber was using to fly himself). Skipping maintenance and/or doing it himself would have gotten him a few relatively small fines. He probably wouldn't have lost his license and certainly wouldn't have been thrown in jail for these.

Of course the rules would change significantly if this was a charter plane like Part 135, then things are more serious. He would have lost his license then, and maybe gotten some jailtime. Skipping or fraudulent maintenance on a part 121 (scheduled commercial airlines like United or Delta) would certainly yield jailtime.