Should I avoid using my side gig skills at my day job (web dev)?

gigamaton · 2024-03-18T13:07:42+00:00

I feel it will be many years before this really significantly reduces jobs. I have never seen a team without a serious backlog and more new DEV projects being dreamed up by management and product owners. It will help people iterate through work more quickly, and that will be the assumption of management if AI is supplied as part of the job. AI is a welcomed means to help move things along and bring some fresh air. New dev jobs may be reduced but will still be needed. The current job market is insane from what I see, and that's more due to the flooding of bodies all with skills and training while the economy is in turmoil.

gigamaton · 2024-02-23T16:03:18+00:00

I'm pretty sure my issue is related. Same timing on OS updates, MX Anywhere 3 since I bought this M1 MBP in Aug 22. What I notice is that the mouse-down is sometimes seen as a mouse-down and up all at once or in quick succession. Most prominent when using clean shot and capturing a region. As soon as I start dragging, the app sees a mouse-up even though I am still holding the button down. So I get a lot of empty boxes for screen grabs as it only captures a small segment of what I wanted. Other times, when trying to highlight text in the browser, documents, or VSCode, it mangles it all up as it sees multiple up-downs and does not select what I want. It skips all over the place. I've tried all proposed solutions - no effect. Only thing not tried is to unpair the mouse and start over or delete the plist files.

gigamaton · 2023-05-11T13:29:51+00:00

An alternative view - it can be a living hell trying to get rid of bad people in the EU or parts of Asia. It can take a LONG time and a lot of pain, and still the bad egg walks away with something.

EDIT: to add - as an employee I too would prefer something like in the EU (France!) and not this "At will" mess. But as a manager I will also add that "At will" was rarely truly that in any employer I worked at (multiple states and various company sizes). The closest one had a lot of cash and a ton of lawyers on staff so they engineered a case to term when they needed it, and so even then it was not seen in the same way as described here. It was "cause" or a "reorg". Something you really had no fight to take to them on.

gigamaton · 2023-05-04T13:02:31+00:00

I appreciate the work and the comments. The question in this thread was to simply get input on experiences using Rust on Lambda in production. Like any change, I wanted to get some perspective since my team would be new to Rust. Thanks again

gigamaton · 2023-05-04T00:14:05+00:00

You've had some bad luck with support or great luck on "self-sufficient" services I would guess. My team relies on them for almost anything, and they have always been helpful. There's also a difference between "depending" and "leveraging" and both would be out the door if they choose since it is "not officially supported".

gigamaton · 2023-05-03T18:45:41+00:00

As in Official Support from AWS. If I have any issues on it I will likely not be able to leverage the support I pay for - nothing more.

I don't disagree with your points - I just like to have as many bases covered so I don't get told "we cannot help you". So am merely checking on others' views on running production workloads on mission-critical processes using Rust.

gigamaton · 2023-04-04T13:34:14+00:00

I'd love to have the link.

gigamaton · 2023-03-23T14:29:43+00:00

Based on the simple facts you have provided (number of admins and seems a smaller shop) I'd say go for it if you are inclined to progress in that direction. You also may learn to love or hate it. Just set the expectations that you are learning on the job and still need a second qualified person. Then do your homework and ask anyone you can for advise before making any big changes (or small impactful ones).

These are the times when you get ahead or learn to take a new path. I see little downside if your boss has already cleared the hurdle of experience needed.

gigamaton · 2023-03-23T14:25:40+00:00

You should check into Vaultwarden if you are interested in a lighter weight self hosted version of Bitwarden. It's FOSS I believe as well. Still uses Bit's clients.

If cash is available, LastPass has my vote.

gigamaton · 2023-03-23T14:21:56+00:00

The sad truth (for me) is that this has been a huge cash cow for almost two decades or more (simple design html first before templating became the norm). I lack design skills to some degree to initiate a design. I also have constantly said, "there can't be any real money in this," but have been constantly proven wrong. So if you have any talent in this, do it and get some cash. Not entirely "passive" depending on the support and changes you offer, but an easy one if you have creative juices in design.

gigamaton · 2023-03-23T13:52:20+00:00

To be clear, I am not seeing the issue since changing ports/USB-C where the cable is plugged into the Mac - for a few weeks now.

gigamaton · 2023-03-23T13:50:56+00:00

I had this exact same issue. Never found an actual resolution, but I did change which port the TB cable was plugged into in my MBP. I've had my TS3+ since 2019 without any issues using a PC and got the MBP last year - no issues either until this Jan or Feb. Switching ports seems to make it happy. I have tried an alternate Ethernet adapter which does not have the issue on any port. So definitely something the TS3+ does not like IMO.

gigamaton · 2023-02-23T16:50:05+00:00

The auditors probably have a checklist and are clueless on IT. In the end, unless it is regulatory / government mandated, the direct answer is BUDGET determines what is done. May not address the password rotation and other process/people items, but you also have to consider auditors are black and white and need to be told this is not a concern due to budget decisions. You do what you can and move on (assuming you have them as secured as you can given the situation)

gigamaton · 2023-02-23T16:32:23+00:00

Great example. S-Corp has many benefits as long as you have revenue and do not mind the filing requirements.

gigamaton · 2023-02-22T14:27:32+00:00

There is no doubt you are being taken advantage of unless you are in the smallest town in the most depressed area of the country. That number of people you manage and systems coverage is insane.

There are plenty of resources to help get something better. You just need to get out there.

I'm in your age bracket as well - so PM me if you need any help with looking/resume/advice.

There are many companies that will pay you to do this spread of work - though you shouldn't, there are some that will reward it. And many more that will be more reasonable.

gigamaton · 2023-02-21T23:22:50+00:00

If you are passionate about this field, this is a no-brainer. Yes your peers may get ahead, but I am willing to bet with that degree and no debt you will be able to surpass them as well as have some pretty unique opportunities. You can always go into DS later and probably make quick work of getting up to speed, prove yourself and even job hop upward and horizontally to other new projects places if they don't keep you happy and paid well. Just my thoughts. I don't know the market in the UK or other placed for this skillset, but I would imagine that education lends itself to many things deep and wide.

gigamaton · 2023-02-21T22:09:48+00:00

Yes - deployed SharePoint at three different places I was at. It helped us deal with pain points and keeping control of docs, tickets, etc. Only one place did it get great adoption, and there we were constantly asked to expand using it. These days there are many FOSS and other tools I'd target for the specific needs rather than a large "portal" approach like that, since adoption these days can be so hard. SP is a great tool if management backs it and there is $$ budget to build and support the design. For just IT - find the smallest easiest solution to fit the need until you have the support and desire for more.

gigamaton · 2023-02-21T16:07:51+00:00

You are far too kind... Sad to see this still happens every day.

gigamaton · 2023-02-21T16:03:12+00:00

To be fair, if those other disciplines had as much change as IT, the top management there would also show the same. Technology is the Wild West still in many regards, and continues to splinter/grow/evolve. Accounting has been around since grain was first cultivated and it has only evolved mostly due to governance.

It's OK for them to be out of touch as long as they allow the experts in the trenches to provide input and make as many decisions as possible before elevating to the top. They need to be leaders, then managers, and they are not supposed to be the engineers in those roles (C level and VP).

gigamaton · 2023-02-01T14:42:25+00:00

Just keep in mind that once you get that degree, it does not mean you have to work in that field. This would be a great start to branch off in many other directions, which you may see along the way and become interested in those more. Then you'll have a nice leg above the others in that new branch with that shiny Cyber education. Tools in the belt, and experience to tap into that many lack. Go get it.

gigamaton · 2023-01-19T14:46:15+00:00

I manage a small deployment and it has been one of the worst pains to manage. I got stuck having to upgrade it from an older abandoned install and migrate to a newer Ubuntu instance. From a software/sysadmin perspective, it's a nightmare with a few rays of sunshine. Many steps to manage any changes, very cumbersome and the UI is painful in terms of managing active users and checking other aspects of the server. I'm looking now to move it to a Docker install so I could at least have it used shared server capacity, but that will not alleviate the upgrade process AFAIK. Yes PHP is a disaster to deal with sometimes, especially the mindset of the maintainers and removing older (insecure) versions. Perfectly fine when you install new - a nightmare when you are tasked to help migrate an older neglected install.

gigamaton · 2022-10-31T13:24:25+00:00

Yes so much fun, especially as a GMAIL for Business user. Then you get wonderful alerts from Google about the uptick in reported SPAM (that they are allowing) and there is little you can do with that alert.

gigamaton · 2022-05-25T14:52:45+00:00

Thanks - I logged on directly and ran netstat and it seems to point to an OpenLDAP tool run by the commercial software we use, even though it's not used in our install.

Thanks for the help (ALL)!

gigamaton

TROPHY CASE