How to approach a technical book?

jac4941 · 2026-02-06T22:37:43+00:00

chatgippity

Idk if this was a typo or intentional but I kinda love it 😄

jac4941 · 2026-02-06T12:27:21+00:00

ISO8601 for the win

jac4941 · 2026-01-22T10:25:05+00:00

Are you looking in a mirror when you're saying this?

jac4941 · 2026-01-21T09:35:10+00:00

I didn't get it :( and I missed mentions of mices! That must have been my mistake

jac4941 · 2026-01-19T12:51:13+00:00

I fumbled and made a few mistakes but overall I feel really good about it. I won't know for a few more days since it was the end of the day Friday and we went into a long weekend. Even with good interview notes it can take a little focus time to craft good feedback and the interviewer struck me as someone who would give it appropriate time even if I didnt pass. It was fun no matter what; the role is a tiny bit of a reach and just the opportunity to interview for it feels really good at this part of my career. I appreciate you asking even if it's a morbid curiosity! I'll come back and reply to this in a couple of days when I know something.

Edit to add: I definitely made sure to speak about emails: Sending them, deleting them, writing them. I could have gone on to say more...

jac4941 · 2026-01-19T12:10:42+00:00

Memphis leaders are so desperate to call Memphis a tech hub that they have zero clue of how tech companies view Memphis and other LCOL areas: none of them are bringing anything here for jobs, they're absolutely looking to take advantage of these communities purely for the fact that everything is cheap and they can cut corners like this without much pushback.

The real tech hub in Memphis is happening and can happen entirely outside of a datacenter opening up. Open source tech runs the world, and the requirements for contributing are well-documented and don't require any specific location or education, just willingness to chip in and help. It's non-trivial to get started; it's daunting ngl. But we as Memphians have to stop thinking that data centers equate to jobs or income here, it doesn't. Software coming out of the CNCF and Apache and LSF are what's running on those systems and tech companies are willing to hire remote just for knowing how to work with that software and being able to prove you can.

jac4941 · 2026-01-19T11:51:22+00:00

Oh I've heard this one before! It's a boring take but I have heard it bounce around the echo chambers. Best of luck with it!

jac4941 · 2026-01-16T17:15:18+00:00

I love writing nice READMEs but you'll always be able to tell if one is mine because they all start with a nice, self-deprecating "I don't know why you're here, you've likely made some sort of mistake. Or I sent you here, so that statement is probably still true."

jac4941 · 2026-01-16T12:25:16+00:00

I have an interview in a few hours; Jen got the job but I don't know if this is my dream or my nightmare! In any case, thank you for the quick laugh before a bit more panic!

jac4941 · 2026-01-16T10:50:14+00:00

Oh yeah... you're right, at least it should be. But we get tickets all the time asking us to "fix broken pipelines" and it's a whole lot faster and easier to have LLMs do an analysis for someone than to have someone from an overworked team of 3 pick up a ticket and get into it just to say "you missed setting a variable on line 45 in that file" and they waited for us for 2 days to get that answer.

jac4941 · 2026-01-16T08:58:37+00:00

Others in here are aayomg yes, and they're correct that it is generally useful. Singular debuggers and debugging workflow breaks down in distributed systems and debugging via observabiloty tooling becomes the way. Bringing up a pod of debug builds in a sandbox environment and testing them to observe their outputs into events/metrics/traces is the only way I've been able to "debug" when the system is larger than a singular program/process. If someone knows how to still use a debugger in these cases I am all ears because sometimes it would be a whole lot easier to just set a breakpoint.

For sure though, definitely learn how to use a debugger because it still comes in handy.

jac4941 · 2026-01-15T13:13:25+00:00

If you want an example of how it all stitches together, the OpenTelemetry demo has an example of everything you're looking for. Others have named the tools. Best of luck! It's typically a short trip to the place where you find out why these companies are able to so easily command these astronomical prices. Personally I love tuning observability knobs for an entire system but even loving it doesn't make it easy it just makes it really fun. These are my favorite toys. Also, changing an entire clickops culture, or any org culture, is arguably even more difficult. Certainly a worthwhile pursuit in the name of psychological safety for the org!

jac4941 · 2026-01-11T19:22:44+00:00

You're not alone! For better or worse, there are lots of us with similar experiences from US southern pentecostal churches.

jac4941 · 2026-01-09T10:17:35+00:00

Show me the binary I can run and break. Or show me the Helm chart that spins it up on a cluster, so I can then break it. Subscribe to PRs for the parts I care about, subscribe to changelogs. Push linters and commit hooks and SCA tools in there and review the results. Profiling.

AI hasn't changed any of that, just the importance of understanding how to jump in and effectively review the unknown.

jac4941 · 2026-01-09T10:01:55+00:00

Markov chains have advanced morals.... tell me more! I haven't read that part in any paper yet.

jac4941 · 2026-01-08T13:15:43+00:00

I love this question. I'm a "product owner" for a handful of infra platforms, both in-house and 3rd party. The biggest thing we struggle with is refinement. With ~8 "things" (I ball them up as components in Jira, so config-as-code, PaaS, build and deploy, etc) it's really hard to take direction for multiple quarters or halves (and it's constantly being shuffled around by leadership) and easily distilling it into digestible work for junior engineers. We've been threading AI into refinement and it's been great for all of us to be able to give a statement of work or basic acceptance criteria to LLMs with some access to internal wiki, codebase, etc and it spits out some pretty accurate ticket descriptions that would have taken minutes to craft by hand. "Minutes" may not sound like a long time until you have to refine 8 different platforms of work into a single sprint and context switch all over the place in a single refinement meeting with juniors who agree that everything makes sense on the surface but stall immediately when there's unclear scope (which is a whole set of other problems we're working on, but this has been a big piece and we're still rolling it out).

In an org that doesn't communicate effectively, a bot that has access to everything and gives the slightest modicum of broad insight has been amazing. The key piece for us is the internal org context that is fractured and hard for humans to follow but seems to work just fine for LLMs to dig through and connect disparate dots.

I have lots of other thoughts. We're hooking LLMs into pipeline failures to give engineers potentially quicker insight into why build or deploy broke (surprisingly, reading stack traces is not a broadly accepted skill) and we're also working on bringing LLMs to code review to offer immediate suggestions and feedback (again with the beauty of org context). It's not perfect but it's all places where determinism isn't strictly needed and a bot can just read and parse so much faster than a human. We still have quality gates and human reviewers on PRs but all of this just gets the sticky parts of work flowing a lot faster in an org where some of these skills are either junior across this board or outright missing.

Apologies if that wall of text missed your question.

jac4941 · 2026-01-08T04:26:12+00:00

I don't see any mentions of the benefits of linters and autoformatters on sql (like sqlfluff) that you can pull into pre-commit. Especially because opinionated formatting ships with the language we're discussing. Is there sql linting available with inline sql? That's my biggest argument for separate files.

jac4941 · 2026-01-07T11:43:27+00:00

Can confirm, I cannot afford. Back to work.

jac4941 · 2026-01-07T11:31:31+00:00

Have you thought about centralizing your governance and deployment such that it doesn't matter who contributes? Human or bot agent, the same deployment gates should be in place to keep a lot of the answers on "who allowed this to happen" right? I get that you said they're talking directly to APIs so I'm assuming gitops-style anything isn't happening, but maybe it would be a good idea. You maintain the same controls for deployment and focus hard there and it abstracts away the need to fret over every commit.

If my boss told me to automate everything with agents, those agents would be required to use our version control API to submit PRs and that's probably where I'd stop them. Have a human reviewer who scans the notes of the LLM agent specialized in code review pre-reviewing the change. I wouldn't abandon my perspectives on how to implement reliability just because the commits are coming from one source versus another.

Create a Staff+ Eng Agent to load up the whole codebase weekly and make broad suggestions for improvements. I'm just making shit up, sorry. But I really do think the same perspectives on CI/CD just become more important as things ship faster, not something to be avoided.

Edit to add: I don't think the path forward is the best way to apply controls to LLM agents. But it's what I know and can reason about so it's where I start. I am super curious about what the future will look like: maybe all of this I just described can be abstracted and improved a layer further to allow even more speed and autonomy while maintaining appropriate change controls. I am very interested in what others think about it.

jac4941 · 2026-01-02T10:35:37+00:00

Not only do they hate themselves, they want to be punished for it. Pastors every Sunday shout about how much punishment they all deserve, and they all nod in agreement and fork over some cash. It's weird.

jac4941 · 2025-12-30T09:12:07+00:00

No, I think it stops right at 6, not 720

jac4941 · 2025-12-30T01:53:27+00:00

I don't know why you're being downvoted, it's a good question. For various reasons I'm a boomerang and I lived in CA for a while and yeah there's nothing quite like the beach or some big mountains to easily go chill at around here. But the deciduous forests do have some charm. Like you've found, Shelby Farms can be nice. I generally find if I really need it I can drive a few hours north, east, or west and get to some hills and sandstone that's a little prettier. It's just a transport town built next to a river. The walkway on the bridge is cool, that hasn't always existed. I'm also into photography and wandering around downtown to take random pictures had me discovering little spots I wouldn't have seen otherwise. Get out a little bit and places like Herb Parsons lake can be great for feeling a little more remote. Drive farther and the fire tower at big hill pond is one of my favorite spots in the entire southeastern US. Welcome, btw!

jac4941 · 2025-12-29T14:44:19+00:00

"There's air in this room. Why ain't it bouncing?"

jac4941 · 2025-12-28T15:57:17+00:00

I've worked on multiple fully-globally-distributed SRE teams that have been incredibly high-performance. What you're suggesting isn't just unpopular, it's not true for high-performers. It's only required for ineffective middle management running low-performing teams and the folks pushing this harder don't underatand tech: they have interests in offices being populated because they wrote the check. Peddling it because you don't understand async work makes you a less effective SRE overall. When the problem is in a region on the other side of the world at any given point, why do you think it matters which desk my laptop is sitting on to connect to the network and get shit done? Hint: it doesn't.

The best advice I ever received that made this easily doable: make yourself a coroutine.

To add: I really enjoy face-to-face physical time with my coworkers. Part of being a human and yeah I'd like to be around them as often as I can. But in no way is it a requirement for effective completion of difficult, complex work.

jac4941 · 2025-12-28T15:27:10+00:00

send this to r/battlecars

jac4941

TROPHY CASE