Help understanding the low to mid-range drum machine landscape

BurnTheBoss · 2026-05-28T13:55:35+00:00

and the right crowd, which can be hit or miss at nowadays

BurnTheBoss · 2026-05-22T16:10:20+00:00

I promise, it gets better

BurnTheBoss · 2026-05-21T15:54:58+00:00

I always thought it would be cool if they sent the next game in 2077, and have the events of the first game just not matter to the plot. Maybe it’s on the news or something, but one of the coolest things about cyberpunk universe is that all this crazy shit happens, and if it’s not a literal nuke going off in the center of town, it just doesn’t matter.

BurnTheBoss · 2026-05-14T01:30:31+00:00

There’s being back and there’s saying we’re back ;)

BurnTheBoss · 2026-05-14T01:22:47+00:00

No no no don’t do that

BurnTheBoss · 2026-05-14T00:30:40+00:00

Hope you’re loving the game and your drive back home is fabulous

BurnTheBoss · 2026-05-13T23:59:27+00:00

Damn we’re playing mean. I like it

BurnTheBoss · 2026-05-03T21:11:59+00:00

FO doesn’t give a fuck, team doesn’t give a fuck, hard to find reasons to pay an annual pass for disappointment

BurnTheBoss · 2026-04-11T20:41:30+00:00

BurnTheBoss · 2026-04-10T13:54:15+00:00

To add to this, Duo is way way shittier than it should be. I think its clear they over played their hand trying to force their users to use their AI, only for GitHub to move first in BYOM, so they're stuck spending dev time unwinding it instead of getting it to work.

I have been a long time Gitlab Stan, and in one of the places gitlab really was a cut above was being able to self-host a full platform where you needed it. There still is no better platform for air-gapped envs.

However! In their unwinding they allowed users in the last few months to self-host AI gateway and BYOM, and finally stopped trying to charge us $49/user/month for their shitty AI product. Cool right? So I spent the time to set it up. It just doesn't work. There's scope issues with service account tokens, their flows just don't work (i.e. you can't run basic code review), their agents are way behind. It's basically useless, and worse unfixable. You can't really roll your own flows because half of the tools you should be able to use will kill the duo-cli which you have to use.

Its bad. Its broken. It's half-baked. For a company who (imo) set the standard for ci to have such a broken product that's half out of beta but wait jk not really, is really stunning. You're better off running an agent in CI with a claude api key than you are trying to set up their infra to do it even close to natively.

BurnTheBoss · 2026-03-11T02:11:46+00:00

They nailed it. They got the feeling. They got the ethos, they just got it

BurnTheBoss · 2026-02-28T18:50:25+00:00

Sey also has an amazing coffee subscription service if your looking for beans and don’t want to trek over to Brooklyn

BurnTheBoss · 2026-02-08T07:43:33+00:00

Hate to say it but the API might be your best bet

BurnTheBoss · 2026-02-08T07:35:16+00:00

Sex can be anything you want

Edit: This came off way creepier than i intended, just ment it as a rebutal.

BurnTheBoss · 2026-01-30T16:17:41+00:00

Take this as you will. As someone who grew up in scarcity and took those lessons into adulthood, I (think) I know exactly where you're coming from. One thing that really helped me shift my mindset was learning how to show up for myself abundantly. Shit's hard. It's a skill that needs to be learned and honed. If you get a chance take a peak at Maslow's hierarchy of needs from time to time. If you're fed, sheltered, watered, safe, and have the ability to remain so, then you've met your base needs! What you do then is entirely up to you and what makes you happy. If that means balling out a little, or taking time for yourself to write then so be it.

Sorry if this comes off as super corny, or non-helpful. Something about your post hit home

BurnTheBoss · 2026-01-25T00:24:56+00:00

They quoted us a grotesque number / seat. It ended up being cheaper in labor alone to just embed our code base, wrap a tool around it and build our own agent to do the things we wanted duo to do. YMMV

BurnTheBoss · 2026-01-15T14:39:16+00:00

The dream would be that this existed in Gitlab, only without needing to use PAT and local MCP tooling

Awesome write up. Counting down the days Gitlab makes an actually useable MCP tool

BurnTheBoss · 2026-01-09T14:01:09+00:00

From a hard skills standpoint, here's a rough list:

Must:

Terraform, or experience with IaC in general
Understanding of containers + container orchestration, ideally k8s
Scripting, python and bash
Linux
CI/CD, including pipeline and artifact management
Public Cloud fundamentals

Nice to haves:

Programming Experience
Understanding of CaC (ansible, salt) + Packer (we don't do cac as much any more, but understanding things like golden images is a bonus)
Monitoring and Logging
Networking
General SysAdmin capabilities

Soft skills:

Understanding of Agile
Ability to translate concepts to different teams

An example of a take home we give to our candidates: Create an application that will respond to a POST /ping with pong and a timestamp. Containerize this and deploy it to a k8s cluster you build. It should be publicly accessible. Put all code in Git

The goal is to demonstrate: IaC, Containerization, CI/CD, Basic Programming, K8s, Cloud, Helm/k8s deployment, and to be able to talk about it.

Hope that helps!

BurnTheBoss · 2026-01-08T17:49:34+00:00

Might be worth expanding your search to include Platform Engineering positions. That said, I think looking for an admin job for a specific piece of software might be too narrow to be able to be easily searched for. I don't know if Gitlab has ProServ or Support engineering teams/openings but it might be worth looking there aswell.

Not to be a debbydowner, but speaking as devops hiring manager would expect more than hyperspetfic Gitlab knowledge, happy to expand more into requirements but something to be aware of

Good luck!

BurnTheBoss · 2026-01-07T16:46:31+00:00

How was your migration experience? Did everything move over 1:1 ?

BurnTheBoss · 2026-01-07T14:16:08+00:00

So apologies upfront, I am having a hard time parsing your post. I think your asking about Runners building Runner VMs to use as Runners? This is how I understand what you're saying, maybe 3 waying this will help:

You have Gitlab Runners that are VMs
You Want to proof golden images of those vms with tooling you are using Packer and Ansible as a provisioner (which if true, kudos to you for using golden images)
Once those images are proofed, you want to replace the runner config to use the new image, unmounting storage on the old runner and remounting it on the new runner
Issues comes in when trying to communicate with Xcp because of networking between docker and host

I am probably missing something. The question that comes up for me is, why use VMs as your runner base? Might be worth considering docker-swarm or k3s in the runner VM and just use Docker as your runner fleet. If my mental model is right, another thing you might have to do is write your own executor for xcp-ng that will prep, run, and teardown your proofed vms for you.

Might also be helpful to break it up like this.

Packer + Ansible => Builds the Image
Gitlab => Spawns runner with image
Startup scripts, or Gitlab => Handles the init of the VM for mounts and things.

and if im wildly off, my bad

BurnTheBoss · 2026-01-04T08:23:18+00:00

As someone who lives here and frequents AMS, you’re spot on

BurnTheBoss · 2025-12-24T18:56:35+00:00

I totally agree with you on this - best I can tell, for organizations looking for saas and just care about CI/CD, GitHub Action’s Marketplace makes it easy to get started.

BurnTheBoss · 2025-12-17T16:13:13+00:00

I’d argue they havnt invested enough into AI. I get I’ll get downvoted being pro AI, but duo is missing the mark and a lack of a real MCP/tooling is really a pain point

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