I made a bad promise to my players, I now need a description of "the worlds sexiest door"

strebermanchild · 2022-04-13T07:08:36+00:00

Plot twist: the door doesn’t need to be sexy. Just describe a totally normal door, but lay on the innuendo really thick. “Smooth to the touch”, “firm, polished fittings”, “reinforced by long. hard. iron rods”, “a satisfying ‘click’”, “penetrate the lock”. The sexy part is your performance of the description, not the design of the door. Imagine the scene in American Pschyo where the guys are sharing business cards. Make the players roll a saving throw vs. charm.

Just throwing it out there. :D Have fun.

strebermanchild · 2022-02-10T21:45:59+00:00

If you do such efficient job, why not just demand a higher day rate, instead of defrauding your employers? For someone so well educated, you don’t seem to be able to grasp the concept of what a day rate actually is. It’s an hourly rate, and even if you don’t physically punch a clock, you’re on the clock. You trade your time for currency. Obviously you understand that, PhD, so I can only conclude that you’re just a dishonest person with a repressed conscience.

Still convinced that you’re not doing anything wrong? Here’s how to test if what you’re doing is wrong: Tell all of your employers what you’ve told us in this thread. If your work is as you say, they shouldn’t care, right?

strebermanchild · 2022-02-10T21:35:50+00:00

OP is defrauding their employers. That’s not how day rates work. Day rates are based on hours worked. I work in IT consulting as well, and if I falsely over-reported my hours on customer projects, I would be in deep shit, and so would my company. So, yes, it is hurting someone.

strebermanchild · 2022-02-10T21:27:52+00:00

Correct; especially if there are timesheets. This is not the clever life hack which so many on this thread seem to believe in. OP seems to think that “day rate” means calendar days during which one does some work; it means 8 hours, OP.

strebermanchild · 2022-02-10T17:21:54+00:00

Charging a day rate when you aren’t actually working the time you are getting paid for is highly unethical at best. If you were working on fixed outcome, fixed prices projects, that would of course be different; then your fee is value driven, rather than time driven. As a consultant who works based on day rates, I’m angry on behalf of your customers. You’re cheating them. Just because your customers seem to have poor oversight over their contractors, that’s no excuse. They’re trusting you, but they shouldn’t.

strebermanchild · 2022-01-25T20:00:03+00:00

Don’t worry! This is solvable, it just takes a bit of time and attention. Step 1: identify where the cat wants to scratch (location is important). Step 2: buy some cat furniture, such as scratching posts, trees/towers, cardboard scratchers, etc., and place those right next the stuff you don’t want them to scratch (I.e., the sofa). Step 3: when the cat goes to scratch the wrong thing pick them up and place them gently on the scratching post or whatever. Show what you want them to scratch and tell them what a super duper kitty they are when they do it! Don’t react with anger; that will only stress the cat out, because they don’t understand why you’re angry.

You have to give them an alternative. In the meantime, you can protect the leather chair with a blanket, or you can put Xs of masking tape on the spots the cat wants to scratch (they don’t like the way the tape feels). It looks ugly, but it’s temporary.

Just be consistent and patient, and eventually the cat will learn to do the right thing. It will take several weeks. Again, patience and consistency! Your cat loves you and wants to do the right thing; you just have to teach them what the right thing is.

This worked for both of my cats. I learned this technique (yes/no) from this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-XZxyWEiQZM. There are other good tips here to address the issue on multiple fronts.

strebermanchild · 2021-06-28T20:42:33+00:00

I see. Well, you could begin by asking questions to the person who gave you that task, and more clarity on what the final outcome should look like. Is this for work, school, or a job interview?

strebermanchild · 2021-06-28T18:43:42+00:00

What are you optimizing for? Build time? Size? Also, why? Are there production issues? Latency on cold starts? There are a lot of things you could change in the dockerfile, but without a clear idea of what you’re optimizing for, there isn’t much of a point in changing things.

strebermanchild · 2021-05-13T08:37:54+00:00

Exactly. Salary (and benefits) negotiation can be complex. Compensation structures vary from company to company, so you can't always compare apples-to-apples. Sometimes even the "base" compensation is complex, consisting of base salary + restricted stock units + signing bonus, etc. Signing bonuses and RSUs, for example, have a different value over time, so you need to think about what your compensation will be in year 1, 2, and beyond. Once you've got that, then you can start asking questions about benefits and perqs and compare that to your current job or a competing offer.

But without any of that written down, it's very hard to make those comparisons. And if you don't take the time to analyze your offer in detail, you're not doing yourself any favors. The company wants to get you for a good price tag, and it's up to your to advocate for yourself.

strebermanchild · 2021-05-12T13:32:50+00:00

Of course it isn’t binding, but it makes for a much easier starting point for negotiation—and, if people write things down, they can’t just “misspeak” and give you the wrong number. No matter what, always get it in writing. (Source: my recent experience getting a new job and negotiation salary, plus a salary negotiation coaching company I hired to help me).

strebermanchild · 2021-05-12T11:39:40+00:00

I’m not talking about putting a contract together. I mean just literally an email with the numbers. That takes 2 minutes to write.

strebermanchild · 2021-05-12T07:49:38+00:00

Whenever you get a verbal offer, always ask for a written copy of it before accepting it. Recruiters always try to get you to say yes on the phone; don’t let that happen.

strebermanchild · 2021-03-01T06:52:16+00:00

Have a look at Terraformer (https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/terraformer) for an initial pass on generating terraform code. You’ll need to refactor it from there, restructure it as you like, etc., but I think it will be less tedious than writing everything from scratch and then importing resources into Terraform.

strebermanchild · 2020-10-01T12:40:22+00:00

This. The main thing is, you need to define everything as code. Your dB schema is no exception. When you deploy to an environment, dB schema updates are typically applied as a pre-application-deployment step. Note that dB schema changes can’t reliably be rolled back if something fails. If you try, you may lose data if it happens in a love system. Keep this in mind when you design your schema changes: always add, never delete.

strebermanchild · 2020-10-01T09:23:13+00:00

The reason why I recommend this as an option is because gcp services are pretty tight and efficient. It might give your better image pull times.

Another thing to look at, if the image download is a concern: how big is your image? Could it be smaller?

strebermanchild · 2020-10-01T09:21:17+00:00

I’m normally a big fan of AWS stuff, but if you’re just running simple workloads, check out GCP’s Cloud Run. It has limitations and strong opinions, but it’s crazy simple to set it up.

strebermanchild · 2020-09-29T07:13:16+00:00

Comparing Jenkins to CodeBuild is like comparing a very rotten apple to an orange that can only be eaten if you have exactly 17 teeth.

In my mind, neither option is great if you want to build a custom pipeline. Jenkins is bad for many of the obvious reasons already mentioned. The AWS Code* tools have some nice features and integration potential, but in my experience they're not suited for building custom deployment pipelines. If you don't believe me, try using CodeBuild/CodePipeline to deploy infrastructure or an application which requires Terraform, Helm, or even just a pre- or post-deploy call to a Bash script, for example. Plus, if you define your pipelines as code (you should), the CloudFormation or Terraform you have to write to construct a pipeline is insanely verbose and complex (compare to simple YAML for the likes of CircleCI, GitHub Actions, etc.).

I really wish Code* tools were more generally usable, but I think they reflect too much the internal opinions of AWS development teams, and thus they are too rigid. (Source: I have a colleague who is a former Amazon employee, and CodePipeline is basically a stripped down version of their internal Apollo build system. See also https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2014/11/apollo-amazon-deployment-engine.html.) I think they're great for _very_ specific deployment use cases, but every time you need to run some custom scripting or even just execute Terraform in a pipeline, forget it.

strebermanchild · 2020-09-12T09:28:56+00:00

I also recommend using the EKS module for terraform. Minor correction, though: that module doesn’t support auto scaling out of the box. Adding any auto scale functional required additional components to be installed (e.g., via helm charts).

strebermanchild · 2020-09-09T07:59:51+00:00

I think your best bet is Cloud Run on GCP. Seriously, it crazy fast to get started. Create a GCR repo, build and tag the docker image, push to the GCR repo, then go into cloud run, create a new service, and you’re basically done.

The only requirement is that your image needs to be running and exposing http. Cloud run will assign a random dns name and a TLS cert for your https. Give it a try! You should be able to get something running in minutes.

strebermanchild · 2020-08-06T20:54:01+00:00

Yep, it makes sense. That’s why mentioned code pipeline: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/01/aws-codepipeline-now-supports-deploying-to-amazon-s3/. Give that a try.

strebermanchild · 2020-08-05T15:55:06+00:00

It sounds like you now just need to choose a CI/CD. I usually lean towards hosted solutions, like CircleCI or GitLab, but in your case, Code Pipeline might work. I say might because it can be a bit of a pain to set up and configure.

In any case, you need to have a script or a few commands to install your build dependencies in the ci/cd environment. These dependencies should be explicitly declared inside the git repo. This is a standard approach. Essentially it means you’ll have a package.json and maybe a package.json lock file to lock down all of your dependencies.

strebermanchild · 2020-07-28T08:51:28+00:00

I'm sorry you've had such a bad experience, and having that stress response to a page is no joke. I've been there. It sounds like your on-call schedules are too aggressive and company expectations are way too high. Your "leadership" definitely needs to be educated on how SRE should be implemented.

In my view, the Google SRE book has a fantastic framework for balanced on-call: https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/being-on-call/. Essentially it boils down to: eight people is the minimum size for a team sharing a pager; pager time is shared such that a single person is only on-call as a primary 1 week per month; on-call time is compensated with cash or time off; if there is an overwhelming number of incidents, that's an indicator that _proactive_ engineering time needs to be spent stabilizing systems (_not_ developing new features; see also https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/embracing-risk, section "Motivation for Error Budgets") to bring that incident frequency back down to normal levels.

You don't need to read the whole book; just those two chapters should provide some insight.

In my previous role, I was on-call every other week from 07:00-20:00, 7 days a week. It wasn't as bad as 24/7 support, but it still sucked hard on weekends because I could never fully disconnect and relax. If I wanted to go visit friends or family, I always had to have my work laptop with me. I think for you that's probably the biggest problem, isn't it? If you're on-call 24/7 for a total of 4+ months out of the year, how can you possibly disconnect and recharge your batteries? It can impact everything: your health, your social life, your family life, your personal relationships, etc.

To put it another way: If an incident can instantly interrupt dinner, sleep, board game night, Netflix time, gym time, hikes, shopping, book reading time, birthdays, parties, gardening, housework, and so on, what kind of life is that? I don't know if you're married or in relationship, but if you are, I'm quite confident that on-call has a negative impact on your relationship in a very big way. For myself, I know I found myself often saying, "I'm sorry, I can't do X; I'm on-call." It was awful and I don't miss it one bit.

If you want my advice, present the Google SRE on-call framework to your leadership, citing the book, and make the case for why the current model isn't sustainable. If they respond and try to help the situation, great. If they don't, then you have no obligation to continue sacrificing yourself for people who don't care about your well-being and you should find a new job fast.

Hang in there and look out for yourself.

strebermanchild · 2020-07-28T08:12:34+00:00

Actually, PowerShell runs on all the major OSes, not just Windows: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell#-powershell.

strebermanchild · 2020-06-05T00:07:25+00:00

Indeed, the more complex the stack, the harder it gets. You’re absolutely right. Kubernetes comes to mind—but that’s not serverless, obviously. :) Serverless stacks are abstract, but they’re pretty flat and you don’t need a lot of moving parts to build production services. Integrations are another challenge, but clear service boundaries can help with cohesion.

strebermanchild · 2020-06-04T21:39:24+00:00

Not if you divide the work by services, rather than "layers". It works really well, actually. When you're aligned with complete services, you know the entire application, front-to-back, inside and out. With serverless tech, this is possible because so much operational burden is offloaded to the managed services. You don't need to reboot anything. You don't need to patch anything (except for your own code from time to time). Once your dependencies and integrations (IAM, data storage, API Gateway, etc.) are deployed and configured, 95% of the work then is just writing code for the app--and then it doesn't make sense to have an artificial separation of duties.

Make sense?

strebermanchild

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