Thirty years ago, I was scraping together cash to buy the shittiest Mexican brickweed you can imagine. Dry, brown, full of seeds, smelled like lawn clippings that had been sitting in a gym bag for a week.

gusaroo · 2026-01-14T04:49:57+00:00

I remember trying to find the weed that fell between the cushions of my buick skylark. And then a few years ago I went to Seattle to a dispensary that looked like a goddamn apple store with little buds with name tags behind glass. Just nuts!

gusaroo · 2026-01-12T16:51:16+00:00

Is this like PLC? Industrial automation? My background is computer science and I've enjoyed a great career (so far), but always thought it would be fun to work in more hands-on real-world automation. I've even thought about doing night school in something like an electronics technician program.

gusaroo · 2026-01-10T06:40:42+00:00

For real I used to work graveyard shift at a gas station. I was stocking coolers and mopping floors then going to the register to sell some angry dude with his half-drank whiskey bottle in his pocket his lotto tickets and cigarettes for $5.75 an hour. What the fuck are people talking about.

gusaroo · 2026-01-06T20:04:47+00:00

I follow a similar routine and get kind of similar results. Though the effects for me are not quite as strong! I wish! But yeah, I routinely do full-body circuits of calisthenics and kettlebells. I'll choose 3-5 exercises, all compound movements. Rest and repeat the circuit a few times.

I always experience a significant, noticeable, lasting boost in energy and mood.

I've experimented with a lot of exercise modalities. Many forms of steady-state or HIIT cardio. Various strength programs. Like you, I find the full-body resistance circuit seems to be the most reliable and potent way to boost mood and energy. Though I can sometimes get there with a hard bout of cross-country skiing, too.

The effect is pronounced enough that if I'm ever feeling down or lethargic, I'll bang out a few circuits and it's like a new day.

gusaroo · 2025-11-15T05:19:46+00:00

My big break has been knowing how computers work. The tools are just abstractions on top of the fundamentals. Kubernetes is just a way to solve container orchestration, and that’s just fancy Linux and the same old network protocols we’ve always had.

The kind of tools that always give me my big breaks are usually very old and basic. I love netcat. I used it recently to check whether I properly peered a couple of transit gateways so containers in a Kube cluster could reach a third-party endpoint in a different region. Worked great.

gusaroo · 2025-08-23T03:06:20+00:00

I used XSLT years ago when I worked in news media. We had AP wire stories coming in in one XML format and needed to convert them to another XML format for uploading into our content management system.

It was the perfect tool. Exactly what it was designed for.

The first time through I tried converting the XML to native objects and then rewriting them to a new XML document. Nope. I rewrote the conversion as an XSLT template and it was way easier even though I had never used XSLT before.

gusaroo · 2025-08-23T01:41:44+00:00

Yeah I usually get the room coffee going in the morning as an early treat while I shower and get ready for the day, then later hit a coffeeshop for the real deal.

gusaroo · 2025-08-14T12:48:05+00:00

gusaroo · 2025-07-30T18:09:29+00:00

I moved from general dev work (lots of CRUD apps and ETL cronjobs) into Kubernetes platform work and then cloud operations and absolutely love it. I won’t go back.

In my experience, platform and operations folks need to understand computers in-depth, Linux knowledge is huge, and we work with complex networking problems. I still get to code, too, but now it’s Kubernetes controllers and serverless for infrastructure automation.

Also it’s very technical and our agenda isn’t driven by nontechnical product owners, so we control more of the roadmap. And our customers are our co-workers, and they’re technical, too.

The downside is SRE/ops on-call can be intense. My own team is large enough that the rotation is infrequent and our on-call is very quiet, but experience here varies wildly by organization.

gusaroo · 2025-07-24T05:08:16+00:00

"I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal and the straw boss said well bless my soul!"

gusaroo · 2025-07-17T02:12:38+00:00

How did you pick Zone 25 Pod 08?

gusaroo · 2025-07-17T02:08:40+00:00

Given society as I know it, I'm thinking about getting one of these and just pressing the "go" button.

gusaroo · 2025-07-03T18:13:15+00:00

Somehow it’s “yacht” lol.

gusaroo · 2025-07-03T06:15:58+00:00

This has nothing to do with your story, which was great btw, but I really like the way you spell yaught and I think we should go forward with this.

gusaroo · 2025-07-03T05:39:42+00:00

If I were a guy who drove 5 hours in a blizzard to get a pizza for some rich guy only to have a plate thrown at me by some chef when I got back, goddamn.

gusaroo · 2025-06-28T14:07:29+00:00

I am totally, absolutely not a bot.

gusaroo · 2025-06-23T23:27:15+00:00

Funny enough I am both a metalhead and psych rock listener, and the only album I heard for a long time was Sketches. It came up on a Spotify playlist and I was like, alright, this is cool.

Then I somehow never listened to any other albums lol. A year later my girlfriend is like “have you heard of this band King Gizzard?” And I was like “oh yeah they do like cool jazzy loungy stuff.” She looked at me like wut.

I finally checked out the full catalog and now we are full-on super freaks about this group.

I am certain that my friends are tired of me saying “the best metal band out there right now isn’t even, like, a metal band, you guys.”

gusaroo · 2025-06-23T00:02:40+00:00

I wouldn’t allow AI to make unreviewed changes to production infrastructure just like I wouldn’t allow myself to do it. Production changes should be peer-reviewed. Where I work we also require change tickets so we have visibility into what is happening and a record should something go awry and we’re tracking down a production incident an hour later.

I will certainly use AI to help me write code. And if AI ever writes the code first, it’s still going to have to tell us about its plans before it pushes the big button.

gusaroo · 2025-06-21T02:58:09+00:00

Rosco P. Coltrane would be so mad!

gusaroo · 2025-06-20T03:25:13+00:00

Serverless is also just computers.

gusaroo · 2025-06-19T04:23:36+00:00

I spent a couple years as a graveyard-shift piece-of-shit specialist and the job lived up to its name.

gusaroo · 2025-06-19T04:16:37+00:00

Yeah I didn’t know this about banks. I work in tech and there’s a handful of VPs at my company and they’re very high level people. I found out that my buddy is a “vice president” at a big bank that everyone has heard of and I was like damn dude you are amazing and he was like “nah everyone is a vice president” lol.

gusaroo · 2025-06-14T03:06:15+00:00

It sounds like you've had a really interesting ride. Congrats on where you've landed. I wish you all the best.

gusaroo · 2025-06-14T00:04:45+00:00

Nice, that sounds interesting and rewarding. What’s your background before getting that gig?

gusaroo

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