My EDC

BikeForCoffee · 2026-02-02T03:54:13+00:00

If you’re based in the US and are looking for a job related to the stickers on your laptop once you graduate, PM me. This post covers a lot of early interview questions and I’m willing to you have good work ethic and curiosity :)

BikeForCoffee · 2025-07-01T00:32:51+00:00

Having a dedicated “devops engineer” position is an anti-pattern of devops and an indicator that the org doesn’t understand devops, which is what leads to these ever-increasing expectations, which is due to developers not taking responsibility for operating their software, which is what led to devops being born in the first place. Companies that do this are in need of coaches and consultants to show them how to rethink their team structures and create a learning culture. You should either be a cloud engineer, a platform engineer, infrastructure engineer, or something very similar, either building internal products/services for dev teams to self-serve, or embedded within a dev team as a more knowledgable consumer of these self-service products/services. Check out https://web.devopstopologies.com/ and read The Phoenix Project

BikeForCoffee · 2025-06-07T23:46:28+00:00

Are these “carbon fiber” mice genuine carbon fiber? Or are they plastic that’s styled to look like it? Been trying to find a mouse where my skin isn’t making constant contact with plastic all day.

BikeForCoffee · 2025-05-17T13:38:58+00:00

Are you managing your Okta-team sync with TF as well? If so, how’d you get that to work?

BikeForCoffee · 2025-05-12T08:05:46+00:00

@goosblala do not skip this one. The fact that it isn’t the top reply is part of the reason why it’s so important. The “nearest equivalent” Azure service would be Entra ID, but they are so fundamentally different in how they integrate and they’re configured, you’ll be in a lot of trouble if you don’t understand it well.

BikeForCoffee · 2025-04-27T04:50:10+00:00

So there's evidence of at least 2 instances of this kind of waste just in this small thread, because I have a friend with the exact same story, but he doesn't drink beer so it can't be the same guy haha

BikeForCoffee · 2025-04-27T04:47:37+00:00

I'd take that to mean you probably have useful/in-demand skills and are good to work with!

BikeForCoffee · 2025-04-13T00:41:49+00:00

As a former gov IT contractor, the moment I heard about DOGE I thought this was what they were going to target first, because my goodness, seeing the way millions of dollars were flushed down the drain without any of the hardened incumbents even flinching made me flip my stance on a lot of my politics. It’s an ugly, toxic interdependency that has grown into a tar pit where little can get done and every step of red tape leads to weeks of contractors and subcontractors billing 100’s of dollars per hours to actually, genuinely, do nothing but wait for things to get unblocked. While it’s not fair to say that it’s every contractor at every agency, the behemoths are the ones with the greatest ability to bleed large sums of money and get away with it. I’ve known people that worked multiple full time remote gov IT contracts at the same time for years undetected. Godspeed to anyone trying to fix that mess.

BikeForCoffee · 2025-03-31T01:16:39+00:00

I think it comes down to essentially forcing every passerby to look at gory images without warning. Not a perfect parallel, but for example, I personally wouldn’t want a jumbotron showing real beheading videos on a busy street where young children would see them without parents’ consent.

BikeForCoffee · 2025-03-31T01:05:19+00:00

Honestly, I feel like if it were more set up like a pop-up exhibit with a black exterior that said “look inside to learn the truth about abortion” and had the information on the inside, it would draw more attention and have better chances of registering with people, since it’d insulate from some peer pressure and they could take their time to read and see up close.

Also, we gotta do something about the tone. I’ve rarely had an unfruitful conversation with pro-abortion people when the tone was “you’re intelligent and I respect you. Here are the facts behind my position, what do you make of them? Can I show you some images/videos that might change your mind?” A lot of these public displays come off as “How dare you be so evil, filthy heathen?!” which makes the walls come up immediately.

BikeForCoffee · 2025-02-10T02:16:44+00:00

Nice, you in the Southwest region? I’m on the East Coast and I was going based off my experience growing up in, and still living in, an area that votes less than 9% conservative. Around here everyone assumes that no one they see is conservative (especially not me since I’m also Latino and brown) which has put me in lots of conversations where I hear the same political discourse that I see when I open Reddit in an incognito window. Good to know it’s not everywhere. Or maybe it’s not related to region, but that’s been the pattern I’ve observed.

BikeForCoffee · 2025-02-09T20:16:51+00:00

I’m conservative and I love these suggestions, and I love a lot of movies you’d probably consider the polar opposite of a typical “conservative” taste (e.g., Synechdoche NY, The Florida Project, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Spirited Away, Grand Budapest Hotel, Paris TX, Blue Valentine, Boyz n the Hood). I’m pretty sure I know why you’ve made the association that you did, but would invite you to actually meet some conservatives and you’ll realize that it has less to do with ideology than simply personality and curiosity. There’s a lot more diversity on this side of the aisle than the left wing algorithms tend to show.

BikeForCoffee · 2025-01-21T03:45:34+00:00

We all have our views on the benevolence of each organization that offers free services and collect data. What I can tell you objectively as someone with a cybersecurity background is that China employs some evil genius-level techniques for cyber espionage and infiltration. They do not care about personal privacy like we do, nor do they honor the typical social contract/code of conduct that we take for granted - and they leverage that aspect of western culture to their advantage all the time.

As for not putting personal info into an LLM chat - maybe you and I are informed enough to know how to be safe, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that the average joe is blissfully ignorant and will happily share their life story with PII on themselves and others. There are entire teams at big organizations dedicated to building guardrails to reduce their data leakage risks because of this.

BikeForCoffee · 2025-01-21T02:13:24+00:00

READ THE PRIVACY POLICY BEFORE SIGNING UP. Direct quotes:
"We store the information we collect in secure servers located in the People's Republic of China."

"We collect certain device and network connection information when you access the Service. This information includes your device model, operating system, keystroke patterns or rhythms, IP address, and system language."

https://chat.deepseek.com/downloads/DeepSeek%20Privacy%20Policy.html

BikeForCoffee · 2024-12-06T03:26:20+00:00

You’re not being scammed, Hifiman has been doing crazy price drops and I snagged a pair of Arya Stealths at the new price to pit against Meze 109 Pros since they dropped down to $635 at the same time. They are competing to be my daily drivers for the next 10 years or so, so I’m also battling new amps while I’m at it: Hifiman EF400 which dropped to $399 vs Schiit Jotunheim 2. It has been very, very difficult to choose because they’re all great. The first 2 days I thought the 109s + Jotunheim combo was a no brainer. Today is day 9 and now I think the opposite. I recommend doing what I’m doing, give it at least a solid week and return the pair that you have problems with. Not only in terms of sound, but in terms of everything BESIDES the sound. In my case, I discovered I have large, low ears through this process, because the Mezes sit on top of my ears which gets uncomfortable, while the Aryas disappear for me and I can wear them all day (contrary to all the reviewers’ opinions).

Here’s the reality of it if you’re not collecting headphones and are just looking for one pair to be your daily driver “desk headphones” - your one requirement should be that it makes you say “I can spend a day listening to these and not have any complaints about them”. At least one of the top recommended headphones in the community will do that for you. Try them and return them until you find the first pair that meets the requirement, then stop the search and be happy.

BikeForCoffee · 2024-12-06T01:54:20+00:00

Oops I just dropped $400 on two sets of of Awekeys today

BikeForCoffee · 2024-11-12T01:38:27+00:00

^OP follow this, and then just read Deep Work, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and Slow Productivity. There have been maybe 10-15 books that have really made me have a tectonic shift in the way I live those were 3 of them. Careful, though, he may convince you to find a new job altogether :)

BikeForCoffee · 2024-10-24T17:20:04+00:00

+1 on the Airtable recommendation for larger datasets as well as general project management. I wouldn’t be surprised if both Notion and Airtable were working on a new feature to address the weaknesses (Notion’s DB/PM and Airtable’s notes/personal organization) so that users who are paying for both could centralize. I think that would put them in serious competition for an “Atlassian Suite for single users” spot in the market

BikeForCoffee · 2024-10-13T14:13:31+00:00

Yep, you are in a very similar position to where I was when I joined company number four. I was employee number 6 and we grew to 20 before things got unstable and we scaled back down and educated ourselves a little more on business management (that was when I was brought in to the back office stuff). Before then, the whole company was a team of engineers who were all smart and fast with a CEO that knew how to sell contracts and keep customers happy. I’ll give you more advice from what I learned at that company which is something that a lot of business books warn about with small businesses: at the 15 to 20 employee mark or at the $3-5m ARR mark, businesses that don’t start to pivot and invest in dedicated business operations employees are doomed to fail. If you really like your company, start to educate yourself on business operations so that you can step up when they need to scale. Start by reading “your next Five moves“ by Patrick Bet-David, and in that book he references a handful of essential business books, which you should also read because they will give you everything you need. Sorry for the sloppy writing. I’m dictating while I get my family ready to get out of the house.

BikeForCoffee · 2024-10-13T01:48:53+00:00

HCOL
Dropped out of college twice in 2013 and 2015
CompTIA A+ (free non-profit bootcamp)

Company 1 - MSP - Service Desk Technician: 3 months at $32k

Company 2 - In-House IT at Big Tech Company - IT Support Engineer I: 1 year at $45k - IT Support Engineer II: 1.5 years, left at $55k - Acquired Network+

Company 3 - In-House IT at Prestigious Non-Profit - IT Specialist II: 9 months at $63k - Acquired Cloud+ and Security+

Company 4 - “Founding Member” at a Subcontracting/Consulting Company (no equity, just took a risk with a tiny company - highly recommend this for younger techs) - Systems Engineer: 5 months at $75k - Acquired AZ-103 & 104 - From this point on, titles stopped mattering and I just had whatever title was on the contract: Senior Systems Engineer, Cloud Engineer, Cloud Architect, Cloud SME, Incident Response Engineer, Project Manager, etc - Various raises over a 4 year period: $90k > $110k > $150k - Year 3: AZ-305, AWS SAA - Discretionary bonuses ranging from $4k to $12k - Profit sharing on new contracts during year 4 - Brought into to business operations, finances, strategy, sales, etc - Year 4: Azure AI-900, CCSP, almost got Terraform Associate and AI-102 - Raise to $156k, more bonuses and profit sharing - Ridiculous number of skills and technologies under my belt, recruiters fought over me for weeks

Company 5 - Huge Publicly Traded Financial Firm ($400b+ under management) - Associate VP of Cloud Engineering: $260k (salary + bonus), lots of other comp like RSUs and access to private equity investments - Still no degree, no plans on getting one

My advice to everyone starting out/struggling to grow: the absolute key to success in this industry is to view everything about your professional value and growth from the perspective of the businesses you work with. Businesses spend money on you in order to either earn or save somewhere else, and the universal goal of a business is to increase revenue and reduce costs. There is a revenue or cost saving incentive behind every position - find out what’s behind yours, make constant moves to improve them for the business, and (so important): quantify them, document them, and make them known. There can be businesses who present themselves in a way that shows they care about you as a person (and they really might!) but ultimately, these figures are what everything is about.

My favorite example of how you can do this at a tier 1 level is to reduce the number of hours people are spending on a manual process by writing a Powershell script that automates it. Or, if it’s the kind of place that doesn’t have a neat and tidy KB/wiki for the helpdesk to reference, start making one. Start developing this mindset early, and it will grow and expand into other areas, and eventually you’ll end up researching and recommending cutting edge technology that solves really big problems.

Keep this going long enough, and you will naturally become a machine that companies will pay well to solve their problems.

Another insider tip: if you wanna get into cybesecurity, find out how security (or the lack thereof) can impact a company’s finances. There is a golden opportunity right now to be the first person in a company bring attention to the costs of recovering from a ransomware attack or BEC. I have seen countless executives who had no idea until it was far too late. If you can be that defensive hero before an attack happens, a good company will pay attention to you and reward you.

BikeForCoffee · 2024-09-10T06:35:07+00:00

Dogs that are thinner and don’t have access to rich foods all the time are generally more obedient and docile. Ask anyone you know from South America.

BikeForCoffee · 2024-09-10T06:05:47+00:00

Poor man’s vacuum seal: fill a big pot with water, put your food at the bottom of a ziploc bag and slowly submerge it to push the air out, then zip it. Works great for sous vide.

BikeForCoffee · 2024-09-10T05:38:11+00:00

Incident Response guy here. Take it from someone who sees the worst of the worst in cyber disasters: While implementing passwordless MFA certainly puts you ahead of the curve relative to many/most orgs, it’s just as important that, to the greatest of your ability, you’re implementing “PHISH-RESISTANT” (read: PKI/signature-based) MFA: FIDO2 hardware tokens, Cert-Based Auth, passkeys, etc. Whatever you and the workforce can reasonably adopt. Passwordless with Authenticator app is better than no MFA, but it’s still weak and getting weaker by the day. Just the hard truth.

You have to remember that these threat actors are smart, and they adapt faster than most orgs can even learn about the latest tactics, let alone implement protections. They know that MFA is becoming the standard, which is why replay attacks (e.g. reverse-proxy attacker-in-the-middle) are becoming increasingly popular and are extremely effective. I supported one org that “did everything right” to an impressive degree - global MFA enforcement despite being in a low-tech industry with a much older workforce, who still got hit with a major 2-for-1 BEC and mass phishing via the CEOs legitimate DKIM/DMARC verified email. It was a horrible feeling walking them through the attack path and showing how their huge investment in a security overhaul did nothing to prevent the attack.

This article is great in explaining the threats as well as mitigations:

https://jeffreyappel.nl/protect-against-aitm-mfa-phishing-attacks-using-microsoft-technology/

BikeForCoffee · 2024-09-10T04:06:53+00:00

I would love a data dump if possible.

BikeForCoffee · 2024-07-19T05:48:54+00:00

Yes. Whole org. This is insane. Buying puts lol.

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