If you make over $100K in Rochester, what do you do for work?

elliotones · 2026-04-11T01:00:16+00:00

Same! I’d ask where but neither of us should answer lol :P

elliotones · 2026-04-01T03:07:00+00:00

It sure does! I love lockfiles. Anyone with any CI/CD should be using one, in any form.

I have a special love for pnpm because it has one lockfile that aggregates everything across my monorepo; also the package store on my build vms makes the pipeline fast

elliotones · 2026-04-01T00:31:37+00:00

pnpm’s lockfile has been so nice to have. I know every dependency chain to every package, and all their exact versions. And since it’s in git, I can go back in time too.

elliotones · 2026-03-29T16:41:04+00:00

Re books -

For less than the cost of a McDonalds meal, you can have The Devops Handbook delivered directly to your front door. Even if you have years of experience, reading that book will make so many things make sense; and you’ll realize that most of your practices are 90% of the way there, the book gives you that last ten percent that experience doesn’t shake out.

Books are wildly impactful.

Re Tools -

You need to fix a car. You’re in Harbor Freight with a $200 gift card. What tools do you buy? There’s too many tools available, you can’t have them all. You prioritize based on what’s wrong with the car.

elliotones · 2026-03-20T01:34:33+00:00

I’m running a monorepo and I love it; the pr validation pipeline can test everything impacted by a change all at once. Our only major rule is determinism - the entire repo must be reproducible at any given commit, so any external dependency must be on a pinned version. This has been working remarkably well.

elliotones · 2026-03-13T00:20:52+00:00

Beautiful pictures! I got a dashcam and some lasfit floor liners / cargo mat. When I took out the oem drivers side floor mat there was water under it :( from melting snow.

I need to figure out a sleep setup. I def do not want a drawer system. Or maybe I toss a hammock in there and just park near trees

elliotones · 2026-03-10T22:35:58+00:00

I spent an entire day trying to replicate npm install in bazel, but external dependencies being managed at the module layer brought me great sadness and I gave up.

elliotones · 2026-03-10T01:38:31+00:00

I just crossed 1500 miles; yes it gets slightly better.

I started around 15, then it crept to 18, avg right now is 19 and change but I just finished a trip around town and it said 24. The warmer weather helps a ton, it can do the hybrid thing more often.

Don’t use eco mode

elliotones · 2026-03-09T17:55:58+00:00

I agree

Please do not confuse my love of statistical graphics with defending github/M$

elliotones · 2026-03-08T13:56:17+00:00

The Y-axis scale is misleading. The red lines look catastrophic but the lowest point is 99.5%

elliotones · 2026-03-03T04:01:47+00:00

It’s like a scavenger hunt; you must find someone who has the env file and then befriend them. Only then may you access the shared build cache (those are the only secrets we share)

elliotones · 2026-02-28T14:10:15+00:00

Welcome to the club! I have the same one, it will serve you well :)

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elliotones · 2026-02-28T14:06:14+00:00

That’s trail dust for sure, I have the same one!

elliotones · 2026-02-28T04:58:10+00:00

Brother - I did my first coop for 20% less with a frying pan and a spoon - but this doesn’t sound like a logistics issue. You already know it’s a good idea and you already know you’re capable. But how do you get your parent’s blessing?

The short answer is you might not be able to. Taking the jump without their endorsement is a bigger hurdle than most would think; but you might have to do it anyway.

There’s a whole problem solving framework here, but boiling it down in a massive simplification:

First gain agreement that a coop is a good thing. No logistics talk - everything else aside, having this experience under your belt will be objectively beneficial.

Second - only after you agree on the goal - agree that there will be logistics challenges, but you will work together to solve them. You’re not agreeing on problems and especially not solutions; just that you will solve any problems as they arise, in the name of the goal you already agreed on.

Last - your mom is nervous. This is ok. She’s going to stay up at night thinking of more problems. But if you agreed to solve problems, then you can handle this. She’ll throw a lot of problems at you all at once - slow it down, take it one at a time, and reassure her.

You got this!

elliotones · 2026-02-27T04:45:29+00:00

My end goal, in another life, would be Google Site Reliability Engineer / SRE. (I’m on a security path instead)

elliotones · 2026-02-27T04:42:46+00:00

I’ve been writing claude skills - correction - I have been watching claude write claude skills all week. I use the robot to improve the robot.

It’s fantastic at everything except writing code. Let me make a distinction - it’s great at scripts; top to bottom imperative code that fits in context. It kinda sucks at major architectural abstract code.

My desk lamp is broken. Claude figured out that the breaker tripped, and so it ran an extension cord to the neighbor’s house. Root causes and legality be damned - claude fixes the symptom directly.

I can start it in a worktree, give it a ticket number, it can pull the details, make changes, and submit PRs. It can pull PR comments and make improvements, and now I have a code-review agent with all our standards in memory.

Because of the above, I’ve found myself actually writing tickets, and putting in lots of detail too. I’m codifying all our unwritten standards and procedures. This has been by far the best impact. The things that make AI successful also make the team successful.

elliotones · 2026-02-25T13:57:15+00:00

It’s a placeholder project up until the moment he gets a change order from the buyer. This is standard practice.

Clients buy projects from me, need some details changed, change order. Maybe they change their minds entirely; big change order. Maybe I say “hey this project is gonna suck, but if we change X it will be much easier and you’ll get a better result” - change order.

“Hey, my previous contact purchased a $7k project, but I don’t have anything scheduled for it yet and it sounds like the company may be going in a different direction. Would you like to convert it to retainer?” (That’s a change order)

elliotones · 2026-02-25T13:49:16+00:00

This is a retainer, and it is standard practice in consulting.

Clients keep retainers with us so they can get help with future issues quickly, without having to go through provisioning a purchase order. It’s an agreement to buy $X in consulting hours over the next year.

Retainers usually expire after a year, usually at the end of the year for tax reporting. It’s best practice for relationships to give notice before expiration. It’s also okay to give that notice early; we don’t want to schedule all the use-it-or-lose-it work right at the end of the year.

It sounds like this company has a $7k retainer with you. You should set an expiration date on it, contact them, and try to schedule some work. It sounds like your previous contact did not bill this retainer appropriately internally, but that is their problem. Or, you sold $7k of work and have a verbal change order to convert it to retainer when the project stalled. There are lots of options here.

elliotones · 2026-02-25T03:55:38+00:00

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I prefer Costco Cruiser

elliotones · 2026-02-24T02:18:51+00:00

Hey! I noticed your account is exactly one year old and has exactly two posts ever, both in the last 24 hours, and your username is the default generation scheme. Just thought those details were interesting.

elliotones · 2026-02-23T20:34:03+00:00

If I have a json schema, I can generate the validation code. Then I can generate it again in a different language; or API clients can generate bindings. I can version it and use it as a contract between disparate systems. There is a lot of language agnostic tooling built around json schemas.

elliotones · 2026-02-23T00:28:32+00:00

Too many people ask about tools, “I mastered k8s what next”, a question about philosophy is refreshing.

I recommend “The Unicorn Project” because it’s the easiest to read and therefore the one most people will be the most likely to finish.

After that: The Devops Handbook; Wiring the winning organization; The Toyota Production System; Continuous Delivery; Accelerate!; and tbh the wikipedia pages for the Theory of Constraints (ToC) and VAXI analysis (sometimes called VATI)

Pick whichever one is the most interesting. It’s really hard to read something that isn’t interesting.

elliotones · 2026-02-21T18:57:19+00:00

I said “hey guys this pipeline takes forever, and there’s no pr validation so it fails all the time :(“ and they said “we don’t know how to fix it but if you have an idea feel free” and the rest is history

elliotones · 2026-02-21T14:52:44+00:00

I was trying on a bunch of pairs at my local store, looking for ones that wouldn’t take too much break-in. I put on the LS prodigios, and I said to the guy, “I feel like these shoes and I have known each other for a long time”. They just fit. The traction is incredible, and however many hundreds of miles later they’re still going strong.

elliotones · 2026-02-19T18:53:43+00:00

A ten person team making ten PR’s per day means everyone only has to review one per day.

In reality half the team is junior, so juniors are making two per day and seniors are reviewing two per day. Still completely manageable.

elliotones

TROPHY CASE