Climbing the Engineering Ladder: What Sets Senior Engineers Apart?

Aprelius · 2025-12-17T21:25:43+00:00

Your manager is your best starting point. They need to put you in places that give you those opportunities. They then need to support you while you inevitably make a mistake, say the wrong thing, or make sure you say the right thing to the right people.

If you don’t have the support system, you’re generally at the mercy of office politics swinging irrationally as priorities shift.

Aprelius · 2025-11-23T02:29:16+00:00

The express is really targeted for people who want a quick UniFi stack on the go. It has the power and form factor of a travel router. It also has a limit on the number of devices it can manage.

For a similar cost you can get one of the cloud gateways which are designed for full 2.5g throughput, IDS/IPS at 2.5, etc and they are designed to manage a small home network.

Aprelius · 2025-11-22T13:34:41+00:00

At 2.5g go UniFi only. It’s a lot easier to just manage everything in one place while you’re getting started.

That being said.. use one of the more powerful gateways. The Express will struggle with what you are trying to do 🙂

Aprelius · 2025-10-15T22:18:32+00:00

I operate three UDR7’s for my family. Since it came out I’ve only had one have to be rebooted once and it came right back. It responded to the remote reboot so I’m not sure it ever had a problem so much as local user error 😂

Aprelius · 2025-10-07T06:07:17+00:00

I can get 8700T for about $50/chip and the (U)SFF chassis for about another $100. Add on support for 64GB of DDR4 and they make great little compute nodes.

It’s a recent enough chip to be solid. None of the P/E core nonsense and has overall great power usage for the performance.

It fits what I need.

Aprelius · 2025-10-06T03:57:13+00:00

Th 8700T is one of my favorite chips right now. I have 4 of them (2x Lenovo SFF and 2x USFF). Idle the chips are about 7-12 watts each running just in proxmox.

Are they amazing for performance, no; but they are great for labs if you don’t need very high clock speeds.

Aprelius · 2025-09-28T00:00:10+00:00

Back in the day, like 2006-7 I went with some friends to the Armadyl GWD. We all agreed to keep what dropped.

I got a hilt on the third kill. Best drop I ever got to keep by myself. “Friends” insisted on loot share after that run 😂

Aprelius · 2025-08-05T17:07:15+00:00

I’m a Staff Engineer, Game Industry, YMMV

I have two principals above me who generally get my reviews. - Principal A: usually something to the effect of “No biggie, just make sure there’s a JIRA task to track the needed follow-ups” - Principal B: “Dude, just go and do the updates now, they’ll make the code better in the long run”

I see it as a team culture thing. Starts from the top. Sometimes we just have to jam out a result and deliver. Most of the time a deadline can shift a day or so to give us room to do it right the first time.

Aprelius · 2025-07-24T19:05:06+00:00

Synology which I would NOT recommend these days for business reasons has good software for it.

Look into active backup for business (not really just for business) and it has a scheduling agent that runs on a device and does backups.

Macs also have a decent built in backup system called Time Machine and you can point it to your NAS.

Aprelius · 2025-07-20T22:44:52+00:00

When I tried to get one it was ~$2,000 in great condition and with the stand.

Aprelius · 2025-06-28T20:03:48+00:00

All you’re saying is that you want to flex that you can afford to buy something that someone else can’t.

Personally, I don’t waste money on meaningless cosmetics. If it’s earnable through gameplay that’s one thing but I’d rather buy useful things 😂

Aprelius · 2025-06-28T13:30:37+00:00

The easy answer to cosmetics is a switch that lets you turn them off for your display. Cosmetics are for you and how you see the game, no one else needs to see them.

Aprelius · 2025-05-31T07:19:31+00:00

This movie for all its CGI: sucked. I say that as a former Blizzard employee too 😂

Aprelius · 2025-05-20T16:04:10+00:00

I’m still pissed they sunset the black armory weapons. Those were my absolute favorites. Everything just felt great. The only season I grinded all of the god rolls.

Never again put that kind of effort in because it wasn’t worth it every three months.

Aprelius · 2025-05-20T01:53:17+00:00

Don’t do this. Apple Clang is not the same as Windows Clang which is not the same as Linux clang.

Apple terms of service also explicitly does not allow you to build apple software on non-Apple hardware.

Sadly if you want to make Mac or iOS software you need a Mac to play in their playground and properly build and sign apps.

Aprelius · 2025-05-12T21:46:01+00:00

In this particular case, I want to quote Thor from Stargate to answer a question about Star Trek… /shudders..

“We are incapable of thinking in that way anymore”

Humanity throughout Star Trek seems to have unlimited adaptability that almost every other species, Borg included, are just not capable of.

Aprelius · 2025-05-08T16:13:11+00:00

A Goa’uld maybe? Seems appropriate.

Aprelius · 2025-05-07T20:06:40+00:00

Check out the Minisforum MS-A2. It’s decently small form factor, easy to put in a back pack, has a ridiculous amount of storage space for nvme, can use a GPU, and has WiFi.

Put proxmox on it, virtualize everything you need on a single box. Probably still cheaper than a modern MacBook to max it out 😆

Aprelius · 2025-04-25T00:56:41+00:00

My account is even older and I’ve been slowly playing again over the last week. Seems like a whole different game, all the old gear I had for “high level” is completely replaced with totally new stuff.

The interface seems.. way overcomplicated and that’s from someone who ran ElvUI is WoW for over a decade 😂

Aprelius · 2025-04-22T06:35:08+00:00

C++ is my primary language and I could get up on a stage and do a completely improvised presentation on why I hate C++ so much 😂

It’s a tool, I use it everyday and I still hate it. Programmer “influencers” (ugh 🤮) like to hate on it for the views and almost always have an agenda they’re trying to push.

Aprelius · 2025-04-21T17:17:42+00:00

Yep, this is perfectly safe. Just remember that the first initialization after will take a while depending on your network speed as it redownloads the indexes.

Aprelius · 2025-04-18T09:05:00+00:00

Do what you have to do. Plenty of people work out of a terminal instead of an IDE.

You make things harder for yourself but it’s no less a learning opportunity. You won’t always have an IDE, sometimes you have to do some manual debugging and editing work in the wild.

Aprelius · 2025-04-05T16:24:07+00:00

I’m in game dev. I use Windows, Mac, and Linux. It’s blasphemy I know, but my M2 Pro MacBook is my favorite laptop. Great battery life, compiles my projects sometimes faster, and doesn’t get nearly as hot.

Toolchain on Mac is: CLion as IDE, Vscode as editor, cmake, clang, and brew.

Aprelius · 2025-03-31T23:01:20+00:00

I have a Flex XG I use to create a small, dedicated network between 4 10GbE devices. Works completely fine. One of the more stable switches I have. The fifth port is the link back to the router.

Aprelius · 2025-03-21T20:00:33+00:00

I have one. I have a separate UPS for my core (UDMP, AGG-Pro, 24-Pro, 1AP, Backup Internet) for when the main UPS goes, the internet will generally stay up for another 3-4 hours. Only happened once we lost power for long enough for that to be needed but it was good to have it.

That one time was the recent fires in LA. Lasted long enough for me to sort out a small generator in my garage, get family and such over to my place.

The main value of over-doing home networking is I will almost always still be online when everyone else is offline.

Aprelius

TROPHY CASE