Platform Engineer, husband to the best nurse in the U.S., father of three smart and successful kids, Ivy's Pop-Pop (best gig ever) and tinkerer in the cloud. Living and working in the greater NYC area. Professionally interested in kubernetes, distributed systems, machine learning, python.
Agree with you about loud pipes, but I am not sure why you had to throw high-vis clothing in there, unless the point is simply not to rely on any one advantage and to assume every driver is going to try to kill you. I do and heartily encourage every other rider to do as well. There is data to argue in favor of high vis clothing, and honestly given that the only downside to it is a perception of personal style I don't get why every rider isn't wearing it.
We're almost exactly 10 miles north of the epicenter near Oldwick, NJ. We experienced several sharp jolts that sent some items tumbling off shelves and shook my ember full of coffee off its charging coaster (or I spilled it in reacting to the jolt, idk really), followed by a gentle shaking that lasted 30 seconds or more. This is the first one I can recall feeling since we moved here in 1995.
>> It's worth reading, perhaps unless you're going to be flying on a Boeing plane anytime soon.
Just returned from Miami yesterday aboard a B757-200. I was intrigued because it has been so long since I've flown on one. The trip down was a 737-Max8 (or 9 I'm not sure). So I wondered if this was a plane that they had dragged out of retirement. Not like Newark-Miami is a backwater route.
I way pre-date the web, so I guess I'm older than the author. I typed my first line of code into a teletype terminal connected to an HP3000 mainframe at my high school in 197... something... 6 I think.
Also I kind of think we old people should shut up about the whole "blink of an eye" thing. I've been guilty of it myself. Of course time didn't go by in the blink of an eye: it went by 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour. And of course you can't remember it all so looking back it seems like the years flew by, which they didn't. So we go around trying to make younger people feel a sense of urgency that they don't really need. What we should be saying is: slow down, take your time, enjoy, think it through, there's plenty of time. Oh, and ignore that old guy in the corner checking the time every 30 seconds.
I'm proud to have published a few pieces in DDJ back in the day, when Jon Erickson was at the helm. It was sad to see it fade away over the years. It definitely felt special to have your name appear in those pages, and writing for DDJ gave my young career a great boost.
Being ready to retire at 50 would be a good thing, but getting laid off in your 40's is not a death sentence. I'm 63 now, still working as an engineer, and I was laid off in my 40's, twice. In addition to the emergency fund, another great way to build some security is to keep learning new stuff. In my experience the older engineers who get into trouble are the ones who try to rest on what they know and inhabit a niche they've built for themselves. In our business knowledge evaporates and niches crumble.
Eh, I grant your point but it's probably higher than you might think. I was an early and devoted (and thus usually broke) Compuserve user, and visited the now-preserved building back in the mid-90s. The CIS user base skewed, I would say, heavily nerd, and heavily enthusiast, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn somehow that a large percentage of the people who used the service, at least in the early days, knew where it was headquartered. Certainly would not have been true after the AOL acquisition.
Years ago, mid-90's, I visited Compuserve in Ohio. The web was just getting going and one of the engineers I met there showed off a music store he was building by returning html from SQL stored procedures :).
The model is base yaml with patches applied to it results in final yaml that get sent to the api, so the typical structure for us is to have the base yaml live with the service source, be maintained by the service owners and include all environment-agnostic properties. We then have one folder per targeted environment for that service which includes any patches and the kustomization.yaml manifest. Basically in line with what other replies have mentioned.
Over seven years of using a variety of deployment tooling including helm (2 and 3), kustomize and our own scripting we concluded that helm's strength is as a package manager, akin to dpkg. Writing good packages is complex, but the tool is quite powerful if you take the time to do that. For our own deployments what we typically want to to do is: build, test and push an image, plug some context specific things into yaml, send the yaml to the control plane and maybe monitor the result for pod readiness. We have some custom tooling that does this in gitlab pipelines, relying on kustomize for the yaml-spattering bits. We still do use a lot of our own and third-party helm charts but for us there's a clear distinction between installing packages (which tend to be longer-term stable infra things) and rapidly iterating on deployments of our own stuff.
Thumbs up for gron. Been using it for a couple of years to get the jsonpath to a property I need. It's super handy with kubectl and other ctls of the sort.
What's your personal experience with it? We've been on the platform for almost eight years. Three clusters, hundreds of compute VMs, four or five public and private DNS zones, 10+ cloud sql dbs, about the same number of memorystore and firebase instances. We just don't see these issues as related in the OP, and when we do have problems support has been fast and helpful. Not to gainsay their experience, since it was obviously frustrating, but truthfully you can find similar stories about all compute providers.
I don't know if anyone can prescribe "ideal" hip/knee/lean angles for you. In general you can lay bike ergonomics out on a spectrum from sport bikes on the one end, with aggressive, crouched, forward leaning rider positioning, to cruisers on the other, with laid-back, feet-forward ergonomics that relax the hips and knees but, I would argue, make for a less active riding position. In the middle you have "naked bikes," "sport tourers," "adventure tourers," "adventure bikes" and "touring bikes" all of which feature more or less upright seating positions (or at least more upright than sport bikes and less laid back than cruisers. I prefer a sporty, active riding posture but at my age I cannot sit a sport bike for very long, so I ride a Suzuki v-strom 650 which is relaxed enough that my knees and hips can take it for a couple of hours straight.
Yeah this is me. I've been using Windows since version 3, and was a windows dev for many years before focusing on linux and open source. Now Windows is basically for steam games, media consumption and displaying my work laptop using NoMachine (VNC on steroids, since windows is in control of my two Dell 27" displays and a nice keyboard and mouse).
I did a recent full playthrough of Morrowind and all the expansions on OpenMW, using one of the available curated mod lists as a starting point. It was rock solid throughout, looked much better than the original, and was at least as much fun as I remembered it was. Highly recommended for TES fans.
This is awesome :). On page 8 I found the "Peronal Computer Toolkit" that my daughter gave me many years ago, and that I still have sitting in my desk drawer (minus about half the tools).
Came here to say this. My Dad also built our stereo, as well as our first color television, from Heathkit kits. He built some other stuff too... an aircraft radio receiver I think. He was a mechanical engineer (now retired). I remember hanging out in his workshop as he pieced the projects together. It was my first exposure to real electronics and componentry.
I wrote a ton of C++ back in the early 90's. Should I dust off my chops and spend the last few years of my career consulting like the Cobol and Fortran people?
Up in Vermont over the weekend a local gardener I met at a bar told me over the last couple of decades all his planting has moved up a month. Later that night I read an article by a ski industry analyst that revealed that the ski season is generally considered by those in the business to be 34 days shorter than in 1982.
>> I can totally see a post-code development experience that mirrors how programs work
I can't, because how programs work is a projection of how computers work and how computers work is by doing math. The whole reason why we have been clawing our way up the ladder of abstraction for so many decades is that it's really hard to express "Which aircrew do I need in Seattle tomorrow morning" in terms of adding 1 to a value in a register. We invented these cool little machines that do math really fast and then made them so cheap and affordable that of course we started simulating everything that could be represented mathematically. I've been programming since 1975 and when I think back I can recall dozens of these conversations over the years. How do we free programming from code? Personally, I don't think we can. The code is all that programming and computing is. Just because we have managed to do so many things with our ultrafast calculators doesn't mean they can somehow be elevated beyond what they fundamentally are. It's like we want to somehow lift them up to be like us, and on just a little reflection that seems absurd doesn't it? You might as well expect it from a toaster or a crescent wrench.
Sure. I was 32 and freshly married, working as a field sales rep for an optical inspection equipment oem and programming for fun in my off time. Hated the day job, loved the hobby, and when the oem was acquired I took the opportunity to bail out and look for a full time software gig. It was a month or so before Christmas, 1992, and my wife was pregnant with our first child, and when I told her I wanted to leave the sales position and write software for a living she said yes instantly. It was a very good snap decision on her part :).
Programming requires deep thought and concentration. Are you sure the issue isn't simple distraction? I'm 62 and I feel like the major thing that has changed in 35 years for me is the crazy amount of unrelated things (youtube, HN, phone notifications, you name it) constantly competing for my attention. When I was in my 20's I would literally sit in near-silence working for 10-12 hours at a time. Nothing would interrupt or distract me. Of course the Internet has also tremendously empowered engineers by putting a wealth of information at our fingertips, so it's a prototypical dual-edged bladed weapon.
I'm already paying a little more than that per year for 100GB of Drive storage. It gives me a highly durable backup that's accessible from anywhere. I would happily pay a similar amount for gmail.
Probably everyone with a job they like better than the actual work of caring for a child has felt the same way. I've been an engineer for 30 years and a parent of three daughters for the same period, so those are my bona fides in this discussion :).
The work of tending to a child or three does not make your life more magical and fun and fit for transcription onto a greeting card. If it did we wouldn't so often think of it in terms of sacrifice. And you are sacrificing: your time, freedom, sometimes your peace of mind.
As parents we don't engage in this labor because it suddenly makes our vacations ring with poetry and glow with the golden light of an autumn afternoon. I think we mostly do it because we've brought a new small human into the world, and if you have an ounce of empathy and affection for this little person that cannot fend for itself then you want to protect it, nurture it, ensure its survival. These are powerful instincts. They are also important responsibilities.
If you follow through on them, do the work, and you're lucky to live long enough then one day you'll know your child as an adult who will be a friend rather than a dependent. You'll spend time together as equals. You'll be able to take vacations and enjoy them without disruption. You'll be able to sleep later, even though your body won't want to. You'll definitely take naps and will probably have hobbies. And then grandkids may come along :).
But in between there's the work. It's only about a quarter century's worth. It's definitely not always fun. It's sometimes memorable, and often heartwarming in a way that intensifies with memory and retelling. Ultimately it's just the stuff that needs doing when we create new humans. Best of luck with it! Every parent can use a little of that.
I rarely have to return things, but when I do have to return something purchased on Amazon it's basically: couple of clicks, get a QR in email, walk into the local UPS store with the item and hand it over, quick scan of the QR and done. Yeah it would be nice if they just sent someone to the house to get the item, but it doesn't surprise me that the economics of that don't work out.
I wrote my first code in BASIC on an HP3000 in 1975. There were a couple of CRTs in the computing room but they were hotly competed for by Star Trek players so for the most part we worked on teletypes and stored our code on paper tape.
When I started professionally 15 years later I worked at a desk in an office cubicle. I wore a shirt and tie and kept regular "office hours." Our team worked in C++ on Windows as part of a vanguard effort to adopt object-oriented techniques at the bank. The design processes and project management techniques however were still very waterfall. We had lots of meetings with stakeholders and project managers. We made and revised lots of estimates and the PM used lots of complicated charts and timelines to keep track of it all. The Internet and the web were still a couple of years off and all our work was "client/server" which mostly meant thick clients talking to SQL Server, manipulating the data and then writing it back. Feature requests, code and db schemas tended to balloon and estimates were never met unless they were for very small and discrete changes.
I'm still working in the business today, though now I do cloud infrastructure and systems engineering and use linux. Obviously so much has changed that it's difficult to wrap it up narratively but if I had to pick one dramatic thing it would be access to information. It's hard for me to imagine myself back in those pre-web days even though I lived through them. I am fairly certain I could not do my job today without Google search and other online assets, and yet somehow we made do 30 years ago with actual printed manuals that you had to buy. I paid almost $150 for an IBM manual describing the VGA adapter port/IRQ mapping so I could write some mode X effects. :). I still have it somewhere down in the basement. When Microsoft first launched MSDN and made info available on CDs it was a revolution for me professionally. I suspect engineers who have grown up with all the technical info in the world at their fingertips would definitely feel like 1990 was the dark ages.