renaudg

SEEKING WORK | London, UK | REMOTE * Senior DevOps / Site Reliability Engineer. Architecture, scalability, tech due diligence, part-time CTO support.

* 20 years of experience including Facebook, large ISPs & many startups.

* Linux, AWS, Google Cloud, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Packer, Terraform, CircleCI, Datadog, Python...

I help startups solve their DevOps, site reliability, cloud infrastructure, architecture and scalability challenges.

I'm a senior engineer & technical leader with 20 years of experience building and operating online services, including at Facebook, large ISPs and many startups. My core technical skillset is in DevOps / SRE, Linux, cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP), infrastructure as code, and cloud native tech (Kubernetes)

Beyond infrastructure, I'm a "T-shaped" engineer who can support CTOs with technology vision, systems design, backend architecture, 12Factor best practices, technical operations, mentoring and general engineering wisdom. I excel at understanding short vs long-term trade-offs, tackling performance bottlenecks & technical debt, and quickly learning and assessing new pieces of technology. I also have keen awareness of product & business matters.

Available as a freelancer for up to 3-4 days/week (or full time for short-term projects). I may also consider employment in a principal or co-founding role for the right company.

LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaudguerin

CV : https://renaudguerin.net/cv.pdf

Email: jobs@renaudguerin.net

I didn't ignore it, I specifically added "while most indie devs get to work and release steady updates over the summer"

Each year between June-September, I see release notes for indie software like CleanMyMac, Gemini, Hazel... with fixes and improvements for the upcoming macOS. They seem to welcome new stuff with a sense of excitement and eagerness.

In the audio world, there is an attitude of conservatism and an untold expectation that users are always several versions behind, that I haven't seen in any other field I care about.

20 years ago maybe.

I don't know if you've noticed, but there's hardly any music that isn't electronic these days.

It's a direct Lightroom competitor.

> cannot turn around updates at the drop of a dime when Apple decides to give them little notice

Which audio software developers are you talking about ?

The ones that are given a chance in June each year to preview the latest OS like all other devs, but decide to turn a blind eye while most indie devs get to work and release steady updates over the summer ?

And then, when asked in September if they're gonna be ready on day 1, reply "you know, there's not even a release date for this new OS thing yet". And then, when the new OS drops in October like clockwork, e-mail their entire user base with "OMG DON'T UPGRADE ! THEY DROPPED THIS BOMB ON US, WOW, TOTALLY UNEXPECTED, HONESTLY ! We'll check this out and let you know maybe, in the meantime DON'T UPGRADE !! APPLE BROKE STUFF AGAIN, DAMN APPLE!". And then, in December or January if you're lucky (or never), finally release a compatible version. Rinse & repeat for year n+1.

Or, maybe you're talking about those audio software developers that were given "only" 2 years notice that, ELEVEN years after macOS 10.6 introduced 64-bit support, it was finally becoming mandatory in Catalina. But they still decided to wait until it was released to believe it, like rabbits in headlights. Tough...

Seriously, audio software developers are the worst. They only get away with this behavior each year because musicians are some the most conservative and risk-averse userbase you can have. If you go to forums like Gearslutz.com, you'll find people asking you in 2020 if it's now safe to upgrade to macOS Sierra, or how to downgrade a brand new MBP to 10.13 because they don't "trust" the new stuff. It's utterly depressing.

>Anyway, anything that gets people playing guitar is, in my opinion, a great thing. We live in a golden age of guitar equipment. I don't think it can honestly get much better than it is right now. It's an amazing time to be a guitar player and incredible options are available at amazing prices.

It sure is a great time for guitar equipment, as the digital revolution has made its way there too.

But being a guitar player is also increasingly lonely : https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/lifestyle/the-s...

And it's arguably an opportunity cost for a kid to be pouring so much effort today learning the iconic (but tired) instrument of the boomer generation, when they could be breaking new musical ground instead, mastering Ableton's Push for instance. But to each their own, of course.

> Developers like simple sites like Hacker News. Nobody else does.

One word : Craigslist.

Are you making fun of the C64's embarrassing lack of a proper red (or any bright colour for that matter) ?

Fair point, but also quite bold for a ZX Spectrum fan to say something about graphics ;)

Of the three main 8-bit machines, the Amstrad CPC wins that round hands down : https://imgur.com/a/D7Ocd

This is a strawman argument, but I will assume you made it in good faith given how widely Damore's claims have been misrepresented.

From what I recall in the memo, I'm pretty sure he never said that women were less effective at their tech jobs (fortunately, because there isn't any evidence remotely suggesting that !)

What he did is that, when Google asked for feedback on their mandatory diversity training, he challenged the prevailing view being taught in these classes about why less women get into tech than men (basically: not because of inherent lack of interest but because of societal pressure)

He pointed out that the latest science on "interesting in things vs people" disagrees, and he supported his argument with citations.

In a company that prides itself on making data-based decisions, starting a discussion in this way with a reasonable argument (even if later refuted) ideally shouldn't be a firing offense.

Now, was it politically, humanly, emotionally smart for him to say things in this way without consideration for their impact on coworkers ?

Of course not. But still, I can't help feeling somewhat sympathetic to someone with child-like naiveté who spoke the uncomfortable scientific truth (or at least, a very reasonable theory) that adults don't want to hear.

  Location: London
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Summary : Senior DevOps / SRE. Ex-Facebook. Freelance or permanent, open to short-term or 2-4 days/week.
  Technologies: Linux, AWS, Google Cloud, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Packer, Terraform, CircleCI, Datadog, Python...
  LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaudguerin
  Résumé/CV: https://renaudguerin.net/cv.pdf
  Email: jobs@renaudguerin.net

I'm a senior engineer & technical leader with 20 years of experience building and operating online services, including at Facebook, large ISPs and many startups. My core technical skillset is in DevOps / Site Reliability Engineering, Linux, cloud infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud), infrastructure as code, and cloud native tech (Kubernetes)

Beyond infrastructure, I'm a "T-shaped" engineer who can help with technology vision, systems design, backend architecture, 12Factor best practices, technical operations, mentoring and general engineering wisdom. I excel at understanding short vs long-term trade-offs, tackling performance bottlenecks & technical debt, and quickly learning and assessing new pieces of technology. I also have keen awareness of product & business matters.

Available mainly as a freelancer for up to 3-4 days/week (or full time for short-term projects). I may also consider employment in a principal or co-founding role for the right company.

SEEKING WORK | London, UK | REMOTE

* Senior DevOps / SRE. Backend architecture, scalability, tech due diligence, part-time CTO support.

* 20 years of experience including Facebook, large ISPs & many startups.

* Technologies : Linux, AWS, Google Cloud, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Packer, Terraform, CircleCI, Datadog, Python...

I help startups solve their DevOps, site reliability, cloud infrastructure, architecture and scalability challenges.

I'm a senior engineer & technical leader with 20 years of experience building and operating online services, including at Facebook, large ISPs and many startups. My core technical skillset is in DevOps / SRE, Linux, cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP), infrastructure as code, and cloud native tech (Kubernetes)

Beyond infrastructure, I'm a "T-shaped" engineer who can support CTOs with technology vision, systems design, backend architecture, 12Factor best practices, technical operations, mentoring and general engineering wisdom. I excel at understanding short vs long-term trade-offs, tackling performance bottlenecks & technical debt, and quickly learning and assessing new pieces of technology. I also have keen awareness of product & business matters.

Available as a freelancer for up to 3-4 days/week (or full time for short-term projects). I may also consider employment in a principal or co-founding role for the right company.

LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaudguerin

CV : https://renaudguerin.net/cv.pdf

Email: jobs@renaudguerin.net

Google has an interesting "inactive account manager" feature, which is basically a dead man's switch : https://myaccount.google.com/inactive

Unfortunately, it's not available for GSuite accounts. I suppose the rationale is that organizations don't have the same requirements as individuals, but that's not the only use case for GSuite : any individual (like me) who set up legacy GSuite to use GMail with a custom domain is out of luck.

@ is also unshifted on the French keyboard.

Here's another input filtering bad practice that most US front-end devs don't seem to know about (but really should when they build global websites)

Don't assume a specific keyboard layout when you're trying to filter out non-numeric values in a text field

I use a French keyboard, and numbers on the top keyboard row are accessed with Shift. A unmodified keypress in this row is for various accented characters, quotes, parentheses and a few others. In other words, it's the opposite of a US/UK keyboard.

Almost every week I come across a website (including a large US stock broker) whose numeric fields seem to block out modifier keys. I have to switch my Macbook to US layout just to type those in (because conveniently, they also disable pasting in those fields of course)

This is very widespread (is that part of a popular front-end framework maybe ?) and difficult to report, because most devs in English-speaking countries never experience the issue first-hand.

You do have a blind spot. It's not just about progress, "better pop" or "better music".

The 20th century has seen 3 true revolutions in music technology that have changed the nature of music itself (photography went through similar paradigm shifts)

1. Recorded music (straight to wax then vynil records) was the first one (before that there were only live performances) : it made music ubiquitous, created a new industry and business model.

2. Multitrack recording to tape was the second, as you could now edit, tweak, refine after recording. Skilled instrumentists still mattered, but less so. A crucial new artistic role was invented : music producer.

3. Digital music production is the 3rd and largest one : for the first time in history, music is not limited by a human's ability to play an instrument, or even by the law of physics governing the sounds a physical instrument is able to make.

Anything an algorithm or AI can output as series of 16/24bit values going through a digital/analog converter around 44100 times per second and ending up in speakers : that can now be music, or at least an instrument.

Electronic musicians can still record and assemble familiar sounds from physical (acoustic or electronic) instruments if they choose to, but they can now also be their own luthiers and introduce one or 100 of their own never-heard-before instruments in a single song.

They can still play music live, they can do so through new human-machine interfaces driving software, they can assemble sounds in a UI, or through code, and they can code the sounds themselves, or do a combination of all that.

There is now absolute freedom to produce anything the ear can hear, only limited by one's imagination and ability to procure (or code) software instruments and effects. Of course, this has had a massive impact on the art of music itself, much like CGI has enabled telling stories in movies that could never be told before.

Virtually all "interesting" new music being released (i.e. not country music, not rock :) ) takes advantage of this new normal.

SEEKING WORK | Remote (London based) | Senior DevOps / Site Reliability Engineer, tech lead.

20 years experience building and operating online services, including at Facebook, major ISPs and many startups.

My core skillset is in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Linux, AWS, GCP and Kubernetes, but over time I've been involved in most aspects of architecting, building, running and scaling online services. Keen interest in the business / product areas as well.

I was one of the first Facebook SRE hires in Europe (2010-2011), have experience at many startups and before that in larger orgs in the ISP/hosting world.

Happy to provide hands-on DevOps expertise to solve your infrastructure / performance / cost / reliability challenges. I can also be relied on for technology vision, systems design, technical operations, mentoring and general engineering wisdom. I excel at understanding short vs long-term trade-offs, identifying performance bottlenecks & future technical debt, quickly learning and assessing new pieces of technology.

Available for freelance assignments (part-time / short-term projects welcome), but I'll also consider full-time for principal roles (head of infrastructure, DevOps lead, tech co-founder) at startups.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaudguerin (PDF available upon request)

Email: jobs at renaudguerin.net

  Location: London
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Summary : Senior DevOps / Site Reliability Engineer. Ex-Facebook. Freelance or permanent, open to short term gigs or 2-4 days/week.
  Technologies: AWS, GCP, Kubernetes / Cloud Native tools, GitOps, Ansible, Linux, Python, Bash ...
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaudguerin
  Email: jobs at renaudguerin.net

20 years experience building and operating online services, including at Facebook, major ISPs and many startups. My core skillset is in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Linux, AWS, GCP and Kubernetes, but over time I've been involved in most aspects of architecting, building, running and scaling online services. Keen interest in the business / product areas as well.

I was one of the first Facebook SRE hires in Europe (2010-2011), have experience at many startups and before that in larger orgs in the ISP/hosting world.

Happy to provide hands-on DevOps expertise to solve your infrastructure / performance / cost / reliability challenges. I can also be relied on for technology vision, systems design, technical operations, mentoring and general engineering wisdom. I excel at understanding short vs long-term trade-offs, identifying performance bottlenecks & future technical debt, quickly learning and assessing new pieces of technology.

Available for freelance assignments (part-time / short-term projects welcome), but I'll also consider employment for principal roles (head of infrastructure, DevOps lead, tech co-founder) at startups.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaudguerin (PDF available upon request)

Email: jobs at renaudguerin.net

Looks like 2020 is still not the "year of Linux on the desktop"

(from a desktop Linux user years 1996-2004)

  Location: London
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Summary : Senior DevOps / Site Reliability Engineer. Ex-Facebook. Freelance or permanent, open to short term gigs or 2-4 days/week.
  Technologies: AWS, GCP, Kubernetes / Cloud Native tools, GitOps, Ansible, Linux, Python, Bash ...
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaudguerin
  Email: jobs at renaudguerin.net

20 years experience building and operating online services, including at Facebook, major ISPs and many startups. My core skillset is in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Linux, AWS, GCP and Kubernetes, but over time I've been involved in most aspects of architecting, building, running and scaling online services. Keen interest in the business / product areas as well.

I was one of the first 6-7 Facebook SRE hires in Europe (2010-2011), have experience at many startups and before that in larger orgs in the ISP/hosting world.

Happy to provide hands-on DevOps expertise to solve your infrastructure / performance / cost / reliability challenges. I can also be relied on for technology vision, systems design, technical operations, mentoring and general engineering wisdom. I excel at understanding short vs long-term trade-offs, identifying performance bottlenecks & future technical debt, quickly learning and assessing new pieces of technology.

Available for freelance assignments (part-time / short-term projects welcome), but I'll also consider employment for principal roles (head of infrastructure, DevOps lead, co-founder / CTO / VP Eng ) at startups.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaudguerin (PDF available upon request)

Email: jobs at renaudguerin.net

2 years younger than you and the author, and I too have had a front row seat to many of these developments : home computers in the 80s, the Internet from 1994, Linux from 1996, Google in 1999, blogging in the early 2000s, podcasts in 2005, Bitcoin in 2011...

On the positive side, my BS radar is well tuned, I'm pretty good at putting tech trends in perspective and identifying the ones that have a good chance to be game changers. This is useful wisdom in my career as an engineer.

But I haven't really managed so far to switch from being a spectator into acting decisively & quickly to convert those insights into something valuable : the ROHMO (regret of having missed out) gets heavier the more of these trains I've seen come and go !

Bitcoin is the obvious (and trivial) one : I read the Satoshi paper a few weeks after its release, spent a few evenings understanding blockchain, downloaded a miner.. but never bothered leaving it running for a few days, for fear my computers would run hot for something intellectually interesting but of questionable monetary value :)

Any of you old timers want to share how they have turned "having seen things" into a valuable career or entrepreunarial edge ?

> The 1970's gave us band after band, performer after performer who are still revered today. Who is the 1980's example of, say, Led Zeppelin? Or the Mahavishnu Orchestra?

I think the hint is in the examples you're giving : the 1970s were the heyday of progressive and what is now called "classic" rock, and that particular genre seems to be your frame of reference.

Whereas for us Euro synth folks, the 70s was the age of early pioneers like Kraftwerk, Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre (I suppose that's where rock music was in the 50s)

And the 80s are THE golden age of synthpop explosion that put us on the map, with legends like : New Order, Yazoo, Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, Bronski Beats, Eurythmics, Jean-Michel Jarre, a-ha, Tears for Fears. Our 80s are rock music's 60s (think Beatles & Rolling Stones).

The 80s are so revered that for the past 5-10 years there's been a whole music genre ("Synthwave") dedicated to reproducing its aesthetics with a contemporary twist. It's even been preempted by mainstream pop recently with The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights" single.

Our own Led Zeppelins are 90s kids Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, the Prodigy, Fatboy Slim.

In the 2000s, we took over for good and mostly killed any remnants of rock music's mindshare in Europe, and the US followed in the 2010s with the "EDM" mainstream pop flavor of our stuff.

In other words, it's all a matter of which bubble you're living in !

  Location: London
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Summary : Senior DevOps / SRE, tech lead. Ex-Facebook. Freelance or permanent, ideally 3-4 days/week.
  Technologies: AWS, GCP, Kubernetes / Cloud Native, GitOps, Ansible, Linux/Unix, Python, Bash ...
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaudguerin
  Email: jobs at renaudguerin.net

20 years experience building and operating online services, including at Facebook, major ISPs and many startups.

My core skillset is in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Linux, AWS, GCP and Kubernetes, but over time I've been involved in most aspects of architecting, building, running and scaling online services. Keen interest in the business / product areas as well.

I was one of the first 6-7 Facebook SRE hires in Europe (2010-2011), have experience at many startups and before that in larger orgs in the ISP/hosting world.

Happy to provide hands-on DevOps expertise to solve your infrastructure / performance / cost / reliability challenges. I can also be relied on for technology vision, systems design, technical operations, mentoring and general engineering wisdom. I excel at understanding short vs long-term trade-offs, identifying performance bottlenecks & future technical debt, quickly learning and assessing new pieces of technology.

Available for freelance assignments (part-time / short-term projects welcome), but I'll also consider employment for principal roles (head of infrastructure, DevOps lead, co-founder / CTO / VP Eng ) at startups.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaudguerin (PDF available upon request)

Email: jobs at renaudguerin.net

SEEKING WORK | London or remote | Senior DevOps / Site Reliability Engineer, tech lead.

20 years experience building and operating online services, including at Facebook, major ISPs and many startups.

My core skillset is in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Linux, AWS, GCP and Kubernetes, but over time I've been involved in most aspects of architecting, building, running and scaling online services. Keen interest in the business / product areas as well.

I was one of the first 6-7 Facebook SRE hires in Europe (2010-2011), have experience at many startups and before that in larger orgs in the ISP/hosting world.

Happy to provide hands-on DevOps expertise to solve your infrastructure / performance / cost / reliability challenges. I can also be relied on for technology vision, systems design, technical operations, mentoring and general engineering wisdom. I excel at understanding short vs long-term trade-offs, identifying performance bottlenecks & future technical debt, quickly learning and assessing new pieces of technology.

Available for freelance assignments (part-time / short-term projects welcome), but I'll also consider full-time for principal roles (head of infrastructure, DevOps lead, co-founder / CTO / VP Eng ) at startups.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaudguerin (PDF available upon request)

Email: jobs at renaudguerin.net

The article says "easy sources of clean energy" : that doesn't actually fully equate to "renewable energy".

Assuming that "clean" really means "low carbon", then only majority nuclear/hydro/geothermal electricity grids can currently achieve that. Wind/solar on the other hand are intermittent, and always need to be complemented with "dispatchable" energy sources to handle the base load.

That can either be hydro/geothermal if you were blessed with the right geography (like Iceland or Sweden), nuclear if you weren't but are pragmatic about it (like France), or coal/gas if you got scared of nuclear but still have a large country to power (like Germany).

I'm stressing the latter because, even as Germany is rightfully praised as a renewables champion that invested billions to be 70% wind/solar powered on a very good day, that's all in vain when it comes to climate change : coal/gas is so bad that their average carbon intensity of electricity production is still mediocre (see http://electricitymap.org/)

So, renewables doesn't always mean low carbon. If that's the primary concern for the location, France is probably their best bet (nearly as low carbon intensity as Iceland, and much closer to the UK)

I've been an SRE / DevOps for nearly 20 years (well, the role has changed quite a bit since it was called "sysadmin") and wanted to thank you for this excellent description.

I often wonder whether I should start pivoting to full-stack or at least back-end development, in order to better position myself for technical cofounder / startup CTO opportunities (DevOps expertise isn't the most valuable skillset in the first few months. Ability to quickly whip a product prototype together at a hackathon is.)

But you've just reminded me why I love my job so much !

Other similar annoyances in US-centric front-end JS code :

- Numeric text fields filtering out all characters except figures + ".", even when the locale is set to something that should allow commas.

- Numeric text fields that expect a specific keyboard layout, for example numbers as the lower characters of the top keyboard row, filtering out anything else. In some layouts (like French), that's not the case : numbers on the top row are accessed with Shift, direct access is for symbols / punctuation. If the text field also disallows pasting, that makes it impossible to fill unless you switch layouts in the OS.

Why is it worse ?

Three’s 5G has actually been running since last summer : I should know, I was in one of the pilot areas in London and signed up for their home broadband offering on day one.

No complaints, 100-300Mbps on average. They seem to have done great at the 5G spectrum auctions, they’re the only UK carrier with 100+ Mhz.

I’m also using them for mobile 4G and yes that’s often awful, as others are reporting. I should probably switch to giffgaff (safer to use different providers anyway in case Three has a catastrophic outage), but Three’s "Feel at home" free roaming in many countries beyond the EU (including the US) is super handy and has no equivalent that I know of.

Scheduling tasks as calendar events with duration is indeed critical to actually getting them done for many people (including those with ADHD)

That (and scheduling suggestions) used to be the main feature of Timeful, an app started by behavioral psychologist Dan Ariely. It actually got acquired by Google and shut down. Sadly, Google Tasks still pales in comparison.

The only todo app I’ve found which allows you to do this and has desktop/mobile versions is TickTick. I used to be a fan of Things which is nearly perfect, but the authors stubbornly refuse to implement this, so I’m gradually migrating away from it.

  Location: London
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Summary : Senior DevOps / SRE, tech lead. Ex-Facebook. Contracts or permanent, part-time welcome.
  Technologies: AWS, GCP, Kubernetes / Cloud Native, GitOps, Ansible, Linux/Unix, Python, Bash ...
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaudguerin
  Email: jobs at renaudguerin.net

I'm a senior engineer with 20 years experience building and operating online products, including at Facebook, major ISPs and many startups.

My core technical skillset is in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Linux, AWS, GCP and Kubernetes, but over time I've been involved in most aspects of architecting, building, running and scaling online services. Keen interest in the business / product areas as well.

I was one of the first 6-7 Facebook SRE hires in Europe (2010-2011), have experience at numerous startups and before that in larger orgs in the ISP/hosting world.

Happy to provide hands-on DevOps expertise to solve your infrastructure / performance / cost / reliability challenges. I can also be relied on for technology vision, systems design, technical operations, mentoring and general engineering wisdom. I excel at understanding short vs long-term trade-offs, identifying performance bottlenecks & future technical debt, quickly learning and assessing new pieces of technology.

Available preferably as a contractor (part time or short term projects welcome), but I'll also consider full time involvement for principal roles (Head of Infrastructure, Lead DevOps, co-founder / CTO / VP Eng ) at startups.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaudguerin (PDF available)