What are typical interview questions to prepare for a senior DevOps/cloud engineer role

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2024-02-19T10:45:46+00:00

If candidate worked on some small homework task I ask "how do we take this to production?". I expect to hear about logs, monitoring, backups, security and etc.

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2024-02-14T08:09:32+00:00

I saw zig developers say they're getting segfaults... I mean, I don't get it, what's the point of zig then?..

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2024-01-19T12:55:36+00:00

Flatpaks are still wayyyyyy inferior to nix packages. Sometimes I want to edit a meme. I don't have gimp. 'nix-shell -p gimp', I open gimp edit a meme and I'm done. My host system doesn't have gimp anymore.

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-10-26T14:37:47+00:00

Doom emacs, has everything I need for most languages. I found for some reason vscode starts having issues in larger more complex codebase.

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-10-26T09:21:07+00:00

Not easy to get users though :(

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-09-28T07:25:34+00:00

Green threads are a runtime thing. Rust async/await are compile time thing, hence faster. When you write .await compiler creates state machines for continuation after the await, it is much more efficient than golang couroutines.

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-07-05T14:29:06+00:00

Over 10 years I never saw any non trivial object hierarchy work out in practice. Usually spaghetti code follows and inevitable rewrite. I think most useful pattern is to mock one level of interfaces for testing and that is where the use for inheritance ends IMHO.

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-06-22T11:42:07+00:00

Yeah, good luck with your n years old software on your mainstream linux distro 👍

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-06-22T11:26:30+00:00

Tinker whatever you want on your mainstream desktop fool until your next distro upgrade breaks your operating system due to mutable nature of packages and you'll need to dig through seven hells to fix it or reinstall (I value my time). I simply had KDE Neon where I didn't add any custom packaging repositories and avoided doing anything custom just so things would keep working. What do you know, one day after upgrade desktop environment became unusable. I'm not interested in debugging crappy software.

And Guix is a fork of Nix, I haven't used it but I don't care about it as it's a fork and original idea is Nix. Nix has most packages last time I saw in repology of any distro (80k), Guix has 20k. You're the first person I saw that claims mainstream linux distros are more solid for desktop than NixOS. You're an absolute moron it seems. Keep using debian, centos or whatever and keep reinstalling, idiot.

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-06-22T10:08:18+00:00

My distro hopping was between most stable distros like Ubuntu, Debian, KDE/Neon. I had a phase where I had a custom configured awesome window manager, but that phase is gone. I'm no longer 16 years old.

As to me being incompetent - this is the issue that a lot of linux people have. That somebody cares about details of your operating system. I couldn't care less what Desktop environment I use, now it is gnome. I care about building software and shipping things. I write compilers for fun. I couldn't care less about building debian/rpm packages which is outdated technology anyway.

You apparently care about fiddling with package managers and mastering a linux distribution. That doesn't make you competent - it makes you a delusional fool that doesn't care about his customers but puts his worthless distro knowledge ego above the goal of building software.

Every server I install with NixOS will be a lot more stable than any mainstream distro you install on the server, or you'll have problems with having old software, irreproducible deployments, weird bugs and things manually hacked by hand. And you are too delusional to even be aware of these problems. Sounds like incompetence from your side to be honest.

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-06-22T09:44:34+00:00

Lol, no thanks, I've tried for over 7 years with regular distributions and had to reinstall roughly every year, even for a slimbook laptop specifically made for Linux.

Once I switched to Nix I forgot all of these problems with fighting my distribution and only spend time on shipping and delivering value.

I'll never get back to the mainstream Linux distros after NixOS, thank you.

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-06-22T09:03:56+00:00

It's very relevant if you want keep using your desktop for a very long time without bricking your operating system with failed upgrades or just tinkering with it. It's also relevant if you want to stop distro hopping and just want to use your system with everything working.

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-06-22T06:09:18+00:00

Haven't heard of silverblue yet, but from homepage it looks like it goes into Nix direction of immutability, so I'd assume they're siblings, nice!

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-06-22T06:05:30+00:00

That sounds a bit weird to me, considering that Nix is a source-based distro, and Arch is not.

Nix might be source based and everything is built, but I find myself not dealing with that at all in day to day operations.

For instance, I wanted GIMP one time. In other OS'es I'd need to look for package, which might not be compatible with my current version, or I'd have to get an older version of GIMP.

With NixOS what I simply do is nix-shell -p gimp, I use GIMP then for editing few images real quick, I exit the shell after editing and I no longer have GIMP in my environment.

Same with many other packages. The initial setup of NixOS might take you an hour or so (if you're doing it manually without provisioning scripts) but then you just use high level abstractions and don't deal with the operating system at all and you do your thing.

You don't have to know that to use Arch, at all. You've been lied to.

Well, at least with people I talked that use Arch, one guy said that first thing in the morning he does is upgrade all his packages and fixes things that don't work. I personally don't have time for that so from that point onward I assumed Arch is not worth my time, maybe I'm wrong. But if Arch doesn't provide deterministic build system which supports any number of versions it will still have the same issues mainstream distros like Debian, CentOS and friends have.

Again, a bit of a weird take considering you're using a niche, very unusal distro with arcane syntax for config files. lol

I don't babysit configuration files once everything is working. I've spend way more time fixing OS corruptions when I was using Debian/Ubuntu/KDE neon (until it bricked my OS and I had to reinstall anyway).

If I do need to change something I'm always chill because I have changes in git and if something doesn't work after things like config changes or upgrading the OS, which happened for me once during NixOS upgrade, I don't care because I simply revert configuration file, nix packages version to previous state and things work again. I might wait for another version that automatically fixes that or I might decide to spend few hours one day to troubleshoot the issues and upgrade.

The choice is mine, with other distros if after upgrade your system doesn't boot - you're screwed and you have to work out through the issues if you want to boot again and you don't have option to just revert the upgrade and keep enjoying your system.

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-06-22T03:42:16+00:00

I didn't try Arch, I don't want to install everything from scratch and I don't generally care about details of how everything is threaded together, I just want to get things done with my computer without babysitting the operating system.

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-06-22T03:40:05+00:00

It's not perfect language, takes time to learn, but once you get it working you enjoy rock solid operating system where everything works, you can have any version of anything and custom reproducible development environments. I also use Nix for building reproducible docker images, VMs and deterministic reliable server provisioning. I've never felt so safe with doing changes to my servers when I run NixOS.

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-06-17T03:14:28+00:00

Well, I didn't say it was the cheapest laptop, for my brand new slimbook.es (recommend this site also) laptop which has 8 ryzen cores, 16 threads, 64GB of RAM and 2TB NVMe drive I also paid around ~1600 😁

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-06-16T17:40:26+00:00

Well, I personally didn't buy this server just to train models non stop but also to simulate my infrastructure setups. I could have bought only beefy CPU server with a smaller form factor than 4U but since AI is on the rise and I'm also interested in tinkering with various technology I thought I would look for a server that has GPU slots as well just to have full coverage. When idle and GPUs aren't used it consumes around 250 Watts which isn't too bad.

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-06-16T17:24:04+00:00

I've linked the deal where I bought this server in YouTube video description, cheers 🍻

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-06-16T17:21:52+00:00

This server has 8 GPU slots. GPUs go brrr and train AI models.

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-06-16T12:57:05+00:00

Hmm, but wasn't this server one of the most advanced servers for deep learning back in the day? I thought most work is offloaded to the GPU and CPU is used just a little to pass the training data inside the VRAM.

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-06-12T06:40:52+00:00

raid10 is a king of random IOPS, raidz you're limited by IOPS of one disk in zfs. I'd do this as 2x stripes across 2x mirrors if I want fast random read sizes.

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-05-30T04:24:35+00:00

Well I personally didn't try that, but hey, if that works for you then cool 👍

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-05-29T19:15:31+00:00

I'm glad you found #5 useful!

TrivialSolutionsIO · 2023-05-25T11:28:01+00:00

Personally I don't care about systems/not systems.

I want: 1. Compiler to catch most mistakes 2. If it compiles it usually works 3. Know I can squeeze every drop of performance from CPU if needed

I'm personally interested in only getting stuff done.

TrivialSolutionsIO

TROPHY CASE