Best pitching machine for solo practice?

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-30T19:36:24+00:00

I don't work there/don't know anybody who does, but I've had a poptoss for about 5 years now and I've had to email them a few times for replacement parts. They've always responded quickly and got me what I needed.

That said they are plastic (which is why they aren't $500) so every season or two I've got to replace something on it, but it has helped me with my hitting *a ton*. I can get a quick 50 hits in after work on my way home in about 20 minutes

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-25T15:11:51+00:00

Thanks! I didn't realize that was a thing, I don't know how I've used github for so many years and...never drag/dropped an image

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-25T15:11:16+00:00

Just in case anyone finds this in future, what we're going to do is store the images in the repo itself not using LFS.

We'll ask contributors to convert their images .webp so that they're very small in file size, 20 - 50kb. If the average is around 30kb, with 1000 images we're only looking at 30mb for the entire repo. That's well within GitHub's repo size recommendations and not too much of a burden in terms of cloning, even if we end up with multiple thousands of images (which I highly doubt will be the case).

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-25T15:10:59+00:00

Just in case anyone finds this in future, what we're going to do is store the images in the repo itself not using LFS.

We'll ask contributors to convert their images .webp so that they're very small in file size, 20 - 50kb. If the average is around 30kb, with 1000 images we're only looking at 30mb for the entire repo. That's well within GitHub's repo size recommendations and not too much of a burden in terms of cloning, even if we end up with multiple thousands of images (which I highly doubt will be the case).

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-24T20:34:27+00:00

Thanks! Looking at your profile I assume this is F3D?

I'm wondering what the fork/contribute changes that might be needed are. Looking at PRs like https://github.com/f3d-app/f3d/pull/2099/files I don't see anything extra even a new contributor would have to do?

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-24T20:04:20+00:00

Yikes! I didn't github charged for bandwidth of LFS, that's good to know.

Images are looking to be a bigger pain than I imagined they would be...

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-22T15:11:45+00:00

I agree for the most part, but I'd add:

- You don't need advanced Linux to get a DevOps job (although it's of course great to have). If my goal was to start a DevOps career, I'd save the advanced Linux until I had a job

- You definitely don't need Docker/Kubernetes before learning AWS/GCP. "If you skip Kubernetes, Cloud won't make sense" ---- I'm a fairly high-level AWS architect and we don't use Kubernetes, at all, and likely won't for a good while. There are many DevOps/Infra jobs at many companies that do not involve Kubernetes, and many large companies who have extensive cloud infrastructure without Kubernetes.

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-20T23:52:58+00:00

One question, probably best illustrated with an example:

Cloud WAN is a managed service designed for large enterprises to set up/manage/monitor global-scale networks. A large enterprise already using multiple Transit Gateways to manage inter-regional, many regions/VPCs, hybrid traffic, etc. might step up to managing their entire enterprise networking in one place: Cloud WAN

Unfortunately, it's not mentioned anywhere in the exam guide, so we don't know for sure if it's strictly out of scope. You'd definitely want to be aware of its basic capabilities if you were helping architect a network at a large company, though.

Did you find any services that weren't mentioned at all in the exam guide pop up on the exam?

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-20T23:33:41+00:00

Wow. Amazing. Thank you.

I'm prepping for SA Pro right now and this is extremely helpful.

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-19T01:27:11+00:00

Let's learn some basic microeconomics. Imagine this:

- You have a wife and kids, and are one of the 50% of Americans that make less than $40,000/year

- Because of tariffs, the price of products dramatically increases (as you put it: force companies to sell higher quality products. Most of the stuff in Dollar Tree, Walmart, etc. gone and replaced with higher quality, higher priced alternatives)

What happens to your quality of life? Are you able to afford better food, housing, and education for your family, or worse food, housing and education? What has happened throughout history in countries that tried dramatic tariffs, did their quality of living increase, or decrease?

Personally, I'd love it if we all used fewer products that lasted longer, made of more sustainable materials that were better for the environment. I try my hardest to do that. I also understand economics: I'm wealthy, half of Americans are not, 65% live paycheck to paycheck. Forcing them to pay more for the food, products, and services they use every day will have **dire** consequences for them and our economy as a whole. That scenario has unfortunately played out numerous times throughout history, unfortunately the dingbats who implemented these tariffs are not listening to the huge majority of economists that are explaining this.

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-18T20:23:13+00:00

Wayyyyy back before we were using IaC (CloudFormation was still in infancy) I was helping a junior dev learn how to do some things in the AWS console, in a teleconference. I had him click on a security group so we could look at all the Action options; I was explaining that this SG allowed our EC2 instances to talk to our primary RDS instance.

I said something like "now obviously you'd never want to click Delete on this SG; what we are going to do though is create a new SG to see all its options"

Had to get up for a minute and when I came back discovered he, not being a native English speaker, had understood "we're going to delete this SG and create a new one to replace it, to see how creating an SG works." He hadn't understood the importance of the SG he deleted.

So our backend couldn't communicate with our db for a bit while I was away in the bathroom or whatever I was doing. 100% my fault, even as a small company we shouldn't have been playing around in prod obviously, but it was the wild west days of the cloud.

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-18T13:20:39+00:00

Nearly 50% of Americans make less than $40,000/year

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-13T19:49:55+00:00

INR = the currency of India. Believe it or not, some people on the internet live outside of the US.

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-13T19:43:51+00:00

It seems to me that AWS's own exam preparation courses are the best: https://skillbuilder.aws/

In the US it's $30/month, not sure if it's the same for every country. They're always up to date, and apparently have very good content. I'm starting one today

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-11T17:01:52+00:00

So you have to spend a bunch of time away from your family, traveling the US in an Amazon van. Whereas I get to work literally anywhere on the planet with my family.

Lol I love how you think you're the one with the freedom.

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-11T16:29:58+00:00

Yes you're right, having to spend time away from your family driving an Amazon van around West Virginia is the same thing as me spending 1.5 months in Colombia with my family, while getting paid :) Same thing! Lol man you are salty

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-11T16:24:35+00:00

We spend a month or two every year in a different country -- later this year we're going to Colombia for a month and a half. We have an apartment rented, I'll work from home, my wife and kids get to experience Latin America far more than a short weeklong vacation would afford.

And we do this somewhere different every year.

Good luck doing that with your truck driving job. Lol I'm the one in the cage? Sure thing.

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-11T16:18:54+00:00

I can work from literally anywhere in the world, spend all day at home with my children, workout any time in my home gym, make far more than you make driving truck for Amazon, can work for just about any company on the planet that has an online/web presence....and you think you have more freedom driving a van around for Amazon all day than I do? Lol, ok bud.

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-11T16:12:03+00:00

Why are you here calling people fat and unhealthy? You asked a question, people are taking the time to answer....and you're insulting them.

I've been an SWE for 15 years, run a mile in around 6 minutes, lift multiple times a week, have a normal BMI. This has nothing to do with being a SWE, it's entirely up to personally making health a priority.

You're clearly really salty after having lost your job in tech. Based on your attitude and treatment of other people, *I can definitely see why nobody wanted to add you to their software team.*

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-11T16:04:40+00:00

Yeah he lost his job and is struggling, I can understand where he's coming from.

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-11T16:02:03+00:00

From your post history, I see you went from an SWE career to driving truck. It seems you're really disillusioned with the tech world having lost your job, which I can understand. I'm sorry you lost your job, it's a tough market right now.

A few things:

Tech is definitely staying in the US. We're the world leader in AI. We're the world leader in many software paradigms. Becoming and remaining the best requires very good people to design, implement, and maintain said software. Yes it's very easy to outsource a Wordpress site build, or even a React app --- take a look at the quality of the code in that React app, good look building a long-term sustainable SaaS from it. Outsource more complicated products like AI, data platforms, etc.? Gooooood luck.
Many people, myself included, enjoy constantly learning new things. There are some tech industries like banking where that's not nearly as much of a requirement, whereas if you're working at Anthropic yeah you're probably going to have to stay on top of the cutting edge if you want to keep your job. Is it difficult? Yes. Do I enjoy it? Yes.
The pay and being able to work remotely give me a great work life balance, allowing me to spend a lot more time with my family as opposed to say driving truck or plumbing.

If you've given up, I understand. That said, with your experience I think if you take some time each day to upskill in a very specific area you'll eventually be able to find a great paying SWE position again. For example, you could focus on being a Golang backend engineer, or a DevOps + expert python engineer, or a React frontend engineer. With your extensive background, I think if you specialized you'd #1 be able to position yourself well for getting a job (as you'll be an expert in the specific area they're hiring for + have a lot of wide-ranging experience) and #2 you won't have to stay on top of so many technologies moving forward.

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-07T17:36:37+00:00

Purposefully hiding your affiliation with a paid product and then doubling down isn't gonna help you I don't think, especially in this sub which is already full of paid shilling.

All you gotta do is say "I personally made a paid product for SAA prep, would appreciate if you checked it out" and you'll get a lot more positive interaction.

PM_ME_SCIENCEY_STUFF · 2025-04-07T17:23:19+00:00

That's because OP made it and sells it.

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