8 ms·

I found an IT job thanks to this blog

system2 3y ago
Congrats. I have a few questions though. How do you plan to transition from hobby and consumer grade products to business grade products with this setup? With 24/7 operation, those hardware will die within a few months. Do you plan to make a second redundancy box just in case?
Nellyz 3y ago
[dead]
Anya200 3y ago
[flagged]
mottiden 3y ago
Congratulazioni! Well done :) and keep blogging!
- giuliomagnifico 3y ago
  Grazie mille =] I hope to find the time to blogging! I must found it, sharing knowledge is a very important thing to help each others for a (little) better internet.
debarshri 3y ago
I think this is how I imagine hiring to be but it is not scalable. You get hired for doing things you love and have passion for. The fire in the belly comes from passion and love for the craft. Lot of engineers I have interviewed, if feels to me they are trying to hack the interview process. In larger orgs, "cracking" the interview process might lead to long term job. But in a mid tier or start up, that's the beginning.
- MonaroVXR 3y ago
  I love I.T. but I don't have any work, but I do have already experience, but racism makes it worse in my environment.
- giuliomagnifico 3y ago
  Yes, I totally agree with you, this method is good for small/medium sized company but here in Italy the majority of companies are small/medium, so I think that hiring based on the “real knowledge” should become a prevalent strategy to growth up. Instead we -unfortunately- have more recruitments based on the “I’m a friend of a friend” or “this piece of paper says that I’m able to do to xyz, no need to prove it”.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  Professionalism is doing the thing even when you don't feel like doing the thing Because as much as you might love the job, there's always those days and those boring tasks
  - heisenbit 3y ago
    Degrees most certainly prove that one is able to do a significant amount of boring tasks. They also prove a being beyond minimum intelligence and skill level. Safe choice but often not the best.
    - cratermoon 3y ago
      > Degrees most certainly prove that one is able to do a significant amount of boring tasks Not necessarily. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/07/10/education-privilege-laundering-opinion https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/07/10/educ...
- VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  >You get hired for doing things you love and have passion for Ah, if only I could get paid a tech salary for being a father/gardener/artist/beer-drinker/video-game-player.
bapo 3y ago
Congratulations on the new job! I think I’ve seen your blog pop up every couple of years somewhere here or back in the days reddit and always appreciated your blog posts.
- giuliomagnifico 3y ago
  Thanks! Really glad that you read and appreciate my posts, unfortunately I don't have always much time to write but when I can, and I have something to share, I try to write and post useful info.
Sayrus 3y ago
Congratulations. Your articles are always a pleasure to read. Reading about your homelab really changes from the "Here is my 400 cores homelab" that often appear on HN.
- giuliomagnifico 3y ago
  Ahah thanks, yeah if you don’t need 400 cores, why have them? I mean, sometimes you need power but if you don’t need it, is better to have a slightly older hardware, but more reliable and, above all, with less consumptions/environment-bills impact. In example: I’m using at home a RaspberryPI 4B as a Pi-Hole that is a totally waste of power, I’ve installed the same sistem in some companies with 70/80 DNS clients and all is running more than fine …but on a Raspberry PI 3B!
intelVISA 3y ago
Grats :) nice clean blog layout, love it
- giuliomagnifico 3y ago
  Thanks, it's what I wanted to achieve, so I'm glad I've reached it! By the way the blog is powered by Jekyll and theme is 'Jekyll Yat Theme' (https://github.com/jeffreytse/jekyll-theme-yat/ https://github.com/jeffreytse/jekyll-theme-yat/) slightly customized.
  - ayewo 3y ago
    Nice blog! Since Jekyll is a SSG (static site generator) how does commenting work on your blog?
    - giuliomagnifico 3y ago
      Thanks, I’ve included the comments from Fastcomments, a small, nice, cheap and privacy oriented comment form: https://fastcomments.com/ https://fastcomments.com/
rodolphoarruda 3y ago
Congrats on the new job. It's a nice looking blog, very easy to use on a phone and to read.
mcemilg 3y ago
> the employers don’t ask “what you are able to do?”, instead of “what are your credentials/studies”. I believe this issue extends beyond the scope of those without CS degrees; it also affects developers who have spent time working at small startups that haven't significantly scaled. If you haven't had the opportunity to work on large-scale projects, you might lack impressive accomplishments or credentials to showcase. This issue can compound over time, leaving you stuck in positions that are less rewarding than even mediocre jobs, regardless of your true capabilities or the quality of your work. Some people say that you can build open source projects or build products to show what you have. Balancing such efforts with a full-time job can be challenging, as these undertakings can consume most, if not all, of your free time. This creates a vicious cycle where you're continuously overextending yourself just to prove your worth. It's a demanding situation that can impact both your professional and personal life.
- Paul-Craft 3y ago
  Not just that. Engineers get pigeonholed into tech stacks as well. It's almost as if companies (recruiters, really) think a senior engineer can't learn another programming language or something. They come at you with "we're looking for someone with strong golang experience," when there's no way to get "strong golang experience" without working someplace that uses it.
  - szundi 3y ago
    Learning takes time
    - Paul-Craft 3y ago
      And? There's a learning curve any time one starts a new job with a new code base. Do you think a senior engineer can't become productive in a new codebase with a new language in a couple of months? If so, I'm going to guess you've never worked with a good senior engineer.
    - akvadrako 3y ago
      The time it takes to learn a new language, especially a typical one like Go, is insignificant on a project lasting more than a couple weeks.
ksec 3y ago
Congratz, I vaguely remember you used to live in HK ( may be I was wrong ). Keep the Blog post posting.
- usrme 3y ago
  The author lives in Italy. From the first paragraph: This maybe seems to be a weird post, especially for those who don’t live in Italy, because here in Italy there’s the common belief that the abilites of a worker, usually are less considered than the qualifies that it has. Or simply the employers don’t ask “what you are able to do?”, instead of “what are your credentials/studies”.
petercooper 3y ago
It's been over ten years now since I blogged recently, alas, but back in the day blogging got me a book deal and being asked to chair an O'Reilly conference. I recommend everyone blog about what they're into because it's both personally edifying, but it also only takes the right person reading to reach out with an interesting opportunity to be more than worth it.
gbrindisi 3y ago
Congratulazioni Giulio, well deserved! I remember your home setup post dearly, it’s been very inspiring
- giuliomagnifico 3y ago
  Grazie mille =)
despicablelier 3y ago
Congrats on the new job, I’ve read the blog and it is truly well deseeved. Regarding on the difficulties of the italian market, I’d like to dissent though. Fact is, in Italy is waaaaay more simple to cheat your way to the top instead of having to go through the pains of getting a proper degree. I know because I did it and went from a non graduated outbound call center operator to dirigential positions in highly respected fashionable industries in less than 10 years. Point is, and with the exception of research roles o and a fistful of high consultancies, who enforce the control on graduation, most likely than not you will not be asked for proof of your studies if your jobtitle carries enough weight and if your accomplishments a friendship with the right people weights enough. Trick is to change joq with the right frequency in the first years, participate to associations and try to be in the board, blog a lot in the right environments (and specifically there), make a lot of acquaintances and help them solve tricky situations for free, and generally speaking be as visible as possible as a tech savyy and strategist. At the right moment, the reputation you will have accrued will be enough to receive accreditations beyond the first line of HR, and id your sponsor is notable enough no one will ask for your degree. Once you have done that the first time, is the weight of your jobtitle and your name that propels you forward, no one willing to question your perceived authority. Than rinse and repeat until the weight of jobtitle and name combined is unquestionable. If you know how to behave, you will rise fast. And good luck to trying that abroad. On a sidenote, once you earned the jobtitle this way in italy, it is easier (but still tricky) to get it abroad as well. Once I tried to go abroad sometimes I got asked credentials (and subsequently bombed) and sometimes not, wich guaranteed me jobs in Switzerland and France. Steer away from anglosaxon jobs though, they do enforce the control and most likely they’ll carch your bluff. last suggestion: shoot for the highest possible pay and change job often enough to beat inflation several times over in 5 years. Above 150k/years almost no one will ask you for degrees. Only your pay and jobtitle and experience will count. Good luck!
- hcks 3y ago
  «the Italian job market isn’t that bad because you can cheat your way to the top» That surely changes my opinion
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
gbrindisi 3y ago
> the employers don’t ask “what you are able to do?”, instead of “what are your credentials/studies”. I think this is cultural. Italian culture is hierarchical and trust is built upon relationships, you either need the authority of a good cv or a good network to reap opportunities. (This is quite common in southern europe) Northern europeans, americans etc are more egalitarian and have a task based approach to build trust, and value ones worth accordingly. (Of course it’s not always as black and white)
- spydum 3y ago
  I think this is universal. I read the story in a different light: it's all about your social graph and who you know. This is where I see most of the value from college or school, building up your social graph of people in your approximate industry. Want to be successful? Connect in a meaningful way with more people. Your opportunities will multiply. Don't know how to do that? There's an easy shortcut: publish something! Give a talk, write a blog, teach a class. Find those opportunities where you can engage with many folks at once (not just 1:1, that doesn't scale as fast).
  - golergka 3y ago
    It depends on what motivates people from your network to give you an opportunity. If their motivation is “I know that this guy is good for sure, I don't have to take chances with random people who answer the job as”, it is still merit based, and they're acting in the best interest of the company. However, they could also give a job to somebody they know just to have their favor, or to get more people into the company they they could rely on in internal politics. In this case, this is not based on merit, and they're effectively defrauding the company, acting against its interest. Personally, I've mostly encountered first type of networking in USA and Northern Europe and mostly second type elsewhere. Israel is weirdly split between Hi-Tech and everything else, following first and second type respectively.
- kwar13 3y ago
  Having worked in both Canada and USA, I feel it's the same in US "what you are able to do?" and Canada “what are your credentials/studies”.
em-bee 3y ago
Congratulations on the job. I had a similar experience where having a public website with published extensions for the server that my future employer was using helped me get a job there, but, I'd like to point out that in both our cases it wasn't the blog/website alone that helped us get the job, but a personal connection. In your case it was meeting that CEO on a bike, who then made a personal recommendation. In my case it was my general reputation as an active member of a community where the job was posted, that I applied to. What the blog did was to make it easy for the CEO to get to know you without talking to you more. And for me it was my code examples. So that works if you find a job where your ideas fit, but it can also work against you to find any other job that may expect a different mindset. Just recently I had an interview that also came about due to my reputation in the community, after I posted there that I was looking for work. But they desperately wanted to see code too, and the only thing I had to show was almost 15 years old or older, in a language that is not well known, because all my recent work was not public, and I didn't keep code from work on my personal devices. I haven't heard back from them yet.
- swores 3y ago
  Minor feedback that you're welcome to ignore: I found reading your comment a little bit slower & more annoying because of your lack of upper case letters for sentence starts. It's an interesting comment so I still read to the end, and upvoted, but I was close to not bothering to keep going half way through purely because of it all being lower case. I'd suggest changing your habit and starting sentences with upper case letters, not just because it's "normal" but because it's normal for a reason, that reason being that people find it easier to read.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    I appreciate the feedback. This is a habit that I acquired decades ago, on the basis that it doesn't make sense to write words differently just because of their position or their meaning when there is no such difference in the spoken language (but there are pauses between sentences instead, which I didn't consider then). It is actually through reading HN that I started to consider readability of longer paragraphs. I am considering the situation. Don't know where I will end up. I edited the comment, but now I am stuck between leaving the commented with capitalization to improve readability and reverting the edit in order for your response to make sense and to allow others to judge for themselves. (I'll go with keeping the edits. Anyone curious about the readability can go look for older comments of mine)
a1o 3y ago
Hey, about the raspberry pi, I have had a bunch of problems with it eating the micro SD cards, like they fail in six months or an year tops. I had countered this for some little time by using it to boot and relaying to a hdd. How are you handling this? Is there some special micro SD card that doesn't fail as soon?
- FredPret 3y ago
  I noticed the same for certain cards. Are you getting genuine SanDisk? There are lots of counterfeits out there.
  - josegomezgarcia 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - a1o 3y ago
    That's a good thing to check. I honestly don't know if the SanDisk micro SD cards I got are genuine - they look their part and have that plastic square thing that is placed inside the paper thing with SanDisk brand and all the numbers, but maybe the fake ones have caught up in their packaging. I have no idea how to make sure it's genuine though.
    - FredPret 3y ago
      I think it should also have the shiny metallic sticker. There's probably a verification guide online somewhere
- gruez 3y ago
  They make "high endurance " sd cards, typically marketed for dash cam use.
- stkdump 3y ago
  I am running 2 Raspberry Pis 24/7 for many years. Never had a micro SD fail.
- 3y ago
zelphirkalt 3y ago
That title ... Can we get grammar fixes for external titles for better readability?
- SadTrombone 3y ago
  English is not everyone's first language, and the title may not be perfect but it's perfectly coherent.
  - zelphirkalt 3y ago
    Sure. I am asking, whether we could get corrected titles here on HN for such cases. I personally think, that a little due diligence is appropriate for titles of such blog posts, but that is only me and what I would do, if I published a blog post like that.
justsomehnguy 3y ago
Yesterday you are shitting on someone's home networking and today you learn he made it his job. Regarding the credentials... you would always find people who are dumb^W think what the certs are the measure of quality. Sometimes it's actually good, if a person asks for certs first then you know you don't want to work with that person. NB: never send alerts directly to people. Create a group (distribution list, alias, whatever it's called in your mail server), preferably multiple groups foreach client, eg: pasta.zara.alerts.monitoring@giuliomagnifico.com etc That way you would see which instance generated the alert even if you didn't configured the custom alert message, you can filter all these messages (to tag, move to folders or whatever) simply by filtering on *alerts.monitoring@, and if for some reason you depart with the client in not so amicable ways then you can simply kill all the mails from it by a rule with $To:.
rubatuga 3y ago
Regarding the hardware, I would not recommend to use a raspberry pi, not only are they hard to get and expensive but as another comment states the RPi rely on SD cards which are prone to corruption. I think it's better to rely on second hand enterprise hardware if you're looking for something cheap.
- proprietario 3y ago
  this is advice I hear very often, but where do you buy second hand enterprise hardware? I went and bought mine second hand from the internet but ive got no idea where to get enterprise stuff
  - hereonout2 3y ago
    eBay? I don't know where you are in the world you are but in my country it's basically flooded with the stuff.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    If you're in a major city, look for salvage outlets. There are usually operations who recover decommissioned hardware from businesses, and then thrift-store style, sell it to hobbyists.
  - taneq 3y ago
    I got an old Dell PowerEdge 610 server second hand on gumtree.com.au (classified ads page, I guess like craigslist or something?) for $400. The guy selling it had bought it for his home theater without realising that commercial servers are (a) noisy as hell, and (b) useless for graphics. :P It's been running our half-dozen server VMs at work for the past 3 years and it still blows my mind that you can get a server with 12 CPU cores and 96GB of RAM for that price. Edit: 610, not 670, sorry. It basically sits in a corner making a faint whirring sound and apart from occasional apt-get upgrades I tend to forget it exists.
    - aborsy 3y ago
      A mini PC would also give you 64GB and 12 cores. It consumes a lot less power. Other than ECC RAM, any benefit? The mini PC may not be as reliable, but this is not for production use.
loumf 3y ago
I’ve been blogging for almost 20 years. The site isn’t monetized, I don’t have many readers, and I don’t get much Google traffic. But ... - My posts about developing for iOS in 2008 were found by an editor at Manning and I wrote a book for them. This helped me make the transition to full time iOS development. - My posts about extending Fogbugz and Citydesk were part of my application to Fogcreek/Trello — I can’t say it “got” me the job, but I’m sure helped me get an interview. - I’ve been invited to speak at conferences, be a guest on podcasts, and write for Smashing based on people finding my site. It’s not a lot, but raises my profile just a bit. I would do it anyway, but I’ve had a 30+ year career and I think my blog has been a significant factor in it.
- firesteelrain 3y ago
  Link to your blog?
  - loumf 3y ago
    https://loufranco.com https://loufranco.com
- ghaff 3y ago
  I wrote a ton as an industry analyst as well as lots of articles/blogs. Absolutely was probably the factor in my getting a long-time job. Maybe indirectly but it's why I knew people at the company and they knew me.
Daril 3y ago
Well ... I think we have many problems in these modern IT times ... The first is that we are drowning in new IT technologies that are released every day and it is impossible to keep up with them ... Many languages, frameworks, tools ... After 25 years in this field, I am very sceptical when I read a CV on LinkedIn of a person who is an "expert" in 10 or 20 different technologies or languages (it is simply impossible). On the other hand, we have companies looking for "gurus" in several areas with many years of experience... just unrealistic expectations. Apart from a limited minority of true geniuses, all of us mere mortals need time and projects and work and a lot of failures to develop expertise in any field. On the other hand, in the 'real' world of work, it is not enough just to be technically competent. You need a lot of other skills that are equally if not more important: willingness to learn, ability to evaluate technologies based on requirements and constraints, integrity, honesty, self-organisation, curiosity, ingenuity ... logic. At the end of the day, it is a balancing act between technology, resources, money, time constraints and human relations, not just writing code or knowing everything about one or more tools that may become obsolete in a week.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  It's a squeeze on us workers because it's profitable, not because businesses are coordinated on healthy society
- ericmcer 3y ago
  It does feel kinda overwhelming. You really need to run to stay in place, and it is more and more about setting up a brittle chain of config files than having deep knowledge of a single languages best practices.
  - Daril 3y ago
    Well, the worst thing in my opinion is that (often for ideological reasons or egocentric positions) we don't accept or don't want to improve the existing tools or languages, but we create a new one ... so we had C, C++, Object Pascal and now we also have Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, Rust, Nim, Zig, D, Objective C, C#, Java, Kotlin, Haskell, Erlang, Ada, to name a few ... and this is the easy side ... Now there is the bandwagon of javascript frameworks: React, Vue, Svelte, Next, Nuxt and so on. It is impossible to keep up and it is also impossible that all these new technologies will be maintained in the long term. I remember the rise of Java years ago ... Java everywhere: Java applets on the web, Java on the desktop, Java as an application server and how it ended? Java is, in my opinion, one of the most convoluted and impenetrable languages ever created, but when you work alone as a freelancer, as in my case, you don't have the time and the resources to embrace and follow every new technology that is marketed as a revolution and the future, because at the end of the month you have to send the invoices to your clients to earn and live, and you have to have produced some results that work for them in the "real" world. I have used Drupal for a few projects in the past: the main problem? Every major release that broke the API backwards compatibility and this means you have to refactor all your plugins and custom code, many times without any new direct benefit to the end user who, of course, was not available to spend money because some internals change every year and, for him, on the surface nothing changed.
sim7c00 3y ago
i live in a more northen country, but still writing a small blog helped me too to get my first IT job. a friend gave me the tip for me to show i had recent relevant,activities for a job. its a really good tip. even if no one reads it you can put it on your resume just as a proof of your words. best tip i ever had. happy it helped you in this way and thanks for sharing!
simonw 3y ago
I wrote about this a while ago: https://simonwillison.net/2021/Jul/17/standing-out/ https://simonwillison.net/2021/Jul/17/standing-out/ If you have a dusty old blog with just a single technical post on it from 2012 which demonstrates that you know how to code, know how to write and know how to solve a technical problem... that will STILL give you a solid advantage against other candidates, at least in the early stages of the hiring process. When hiring, the very first filter you need to apply is "can this person actually do the work". That's what FizzBuzz is about! A blog post (or a dusty old GitHub repo) is a great way to jump past that filter.
jayonsoftware 3y ago
Where did you find tha 19” rack unit. Never found one with 3 Eithernet ports config.
- giuliomagnifico 3y ago
  The unit is from rs-online ( https://us.rs-online.com/product/nvent-schroff/14826107/70405884/ https://us.rs-online.com/product/nvent-schroff/14826107/7040... ) but it hasn’t the Ethernet ports, we drilled them into the unit manually.
loteck 3y ago
Congrats! I hope everyone can see he actually found a job due to getting out and meeting people (in this case, he met a CEO while they were both cycling), who then became interested in his work due to the relationship he fostered.
404mm 3y ago
I don’t understand how the SYSMI box works. I see power input going into the Mikrotik router, then feeding D-Link USB hub with (according to the Mikrotik specs) up to 5V/500mA DC. The USB hub sends power to both Pi’s and somehow splits the 500mA between RPi 3 (officially needing up to 5V/2.5A) and RPi 4(5V/3A). And it still somehow works? I know all the specs are not set it stone. USB can feed more than 500mA and Pi’s can run on well under their requirement but I’m no stranger to Pi’s and I had experienced power issues due to inadequate supply before. Especially when the CPU is maxed out, like during the boot sequence. Am I missing something here? This looks quite insane.
- giuliomagnifico 3y ago
  I was wondering the same but then I discovered that the Mikrotik is able to power both the Raspberry PIs when in full load for 3 days straight. I did some benchmarks, but I think the power output of the Mikrotik is different, more than the official specs.
- dharmab 3y ago
  The 5V/500ma number is copied from the USB 2.0 spec; the Mikrotik device may be outputting more than specified by coincidence of the hardware used to manufactured it
  - 404mm 3y ago
    The original adapter for mikrotik 750 is 24V/380mA (9.12W). This is not a sufficient way to supply power to 3 devices, no matter how you dice it.
    - giuliomagnifico 3y ago
      I agree but how do you explain that it’s actually working? Also on heavy load for days? We was asking the same, for that I tried to run an heavy benchmark for some days on the RPis. Maybe the spec of the power supply are different?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pknerd 3y ago
I am not surprised. On multiple occasions I was offered a job/project because of my blog and github.
monnow 3y ago
Congrats Giulio! Incredibly, things are changing even in Italy. I find saddening that the majority of the youth is either stuck in dead end jobs or in lowly-paying slightly career-related jobs. I try to push anyone I meet under 30 to just leave the country. The only other option is to embrace entrepreneurship, even though it requires one to grow a thick skin, stomach and an indestructible carapace. I might be wrong trying to de-populate a country of old farts, but everyone has the right to strive for the life they want to lead, or at least get to choose a job/career. One last note of folklore - I find Italian politics amusing: both left and right have been focusing on civil rights debate, without a grand scheme but rather a day-to-day routine of putting out fires as they come along (the motto being 'just kick the can down the road'). We need leaders with a vision, not social media influencers that follow behind whatever is trending on social media this week (aka the flavour of the week). Once again, congratulations! :) Sorry for hijacking the celebrations with a rant.
- giuliomagnifico 3y ago
  Thanks to you for the comment, and no worries about the rant, as an Italian I agree with you. Italian politicians are short sighted, they only care about the next election and not the nex generation.

Congrats. I have a few questions though. How do you plan to transition from hobby and consumer grade products to business grade products with this setup? With 24/7 operation, those hardware will die within a few months. Do you plan to make a second redundancy box just in case?

Nellyz 3y ago

[dead]

Anya200 3y ago

[flagged]

mottiden 3y ago

Congratulazioni! Well done :) and keep blogging!

giuliomagnifico 3y ago
Grazie mille =] I hope to find the time to blogging! I must found it, sharing knowledge is a very important thing to help each others for a (little) better internet.

debarshri 3y ago

I think this is how I imagine hiring to be but it is not scalable. You get hired for doing things you love and have passion for. The fire in the belly comes from passion and love for the craft. Lot of engineers I have interviewed, if feels to me they are trying to hack the interview process. In larger orgs, "cracking" the interview process might lead to long term job. But in a mid tier or start up, that's the beginning.

MonaroVXR 3y ago
I love I.T. but I don't have any work, but I do have already experience, but racism makes it worse in my environment.
giuliomagnifico 3y ago
Yes, I totally agree with you, this method is good for small/medium sized company but here in Italy the majority of companies are small/medium, so I think that hiring based on the “real knowledge” should become a prevalent strategy to growth up. Instead we -unfortunately- have more recruitments based on the “I’m a friend of a friend” or “this piece of paper says that I’m able to do to xyz, no need to prove it”.
raverbashing 3y ago
Professionalism is doing the thing even when you don't feel like doing the thing Because as much as you might love the job, there's always those days and those boring tasks
- heisenbit 3y ago
  Degrees most certainly prove that one is able to do a significant amount of boring tasks. They also prove a being beyond minimum intelligence and skill level. Safe choice but often not the best.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    > Degrees most certainly prove that one is able to do a significant amount of boring tasks Not necessarily. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/07/10/education-privilege-laundering-opinion https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/07/10/educ...
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
>You get hired for doing things you love and have passion for Ah, if only I could get paid a tech salary for being a father/gardener/artist/beer-drinker/video-game-player.

bapo 3y ago

Congratulations on the new job! I think I’ve seen your blog pop up every couple of years somewhere here or back in the days reddit and always appreciated your blog posts.

giuliomagnifico 3y ago
Thanks! Really glad that you read and appreciate my posts, unfortunately I don't have always much time to write but when I can, and I have something to share, I try to write and post useful info.

Sayrus 3y ago

Congratulations. Your articles are always a pleasure to read. Reading about your homelab really changes from the "Here is my 400 cores homelab" that often appear on HN.

giuliomagnifico 3y ago
Ahah thanks, yeah if you don’t need 400 cores, why have them? I mean, sometimes you need power but if you don’t need it, is better to have a slightly older hardware, but more reliable and, above all, with less consumptions/environment-bills impact. In example: I’m using at home a RaspberryPI 4B as a Pi-Hole that is a totally waste of power, I’ve installed the same sistem in some companies with 70/80 DNS clients and all is running more than fine …but on a Raspberry PI 3B!

intelVISA 3y ago

Grats :) nice clean blog layout, love it

giuliomagnifico 3y ago
Thanks, it's what I wanted to achieve, so I'm glad I've reached it! By the way the blog is powered by Jekyll and theme is 'Jekyll Yat Theme' (https://github.com/jeffreytse/jekyll-theme-yat/ https://github.com/jeffreytse/jekyll-theme-yat/) slightly customized.
- ayewo 3y ago
  Nice blog! Since Jekyll is a SSG (static site generator) how does commenting work on your blog?
  - giuliomagnifico 3y ago
    Thanks, I’ve included the comments from Fastcomments, a small, nice, cheap and privacy oriented comment form: https://fastcomments.com/ https://fastcomments.com/

rodolphoarruda 3y ago

Congrats on the new job. It's a nice looking blog, very easy to use on a phone and to read.

mcemilg 3y ago

> the employers don’t ask “what you are able to do?”, instead of “what are your credentials/studies”. I believe this issue extends beyond the scope of those without CS degrees; it also affects developers who have spent time working at small startups that haven't significantly scaled. If you haven't had the opportunity to work on large-scale projects, you might lack impressive accomplishments or credentials to showcase. This issue can compound over time, leaving you stuck in positions that are less rewarding than even mediocre jobs, regardless of your true capabilities or the quality of your work. Some people say that you can build open source projects or build products to show what you have. Balancing such efforts with a full-time job can be challenging, as these undertakings can consume most, if not all, of your free time. This creates a vicious cycle where you're continuously overextending yourself just to prove your worth. It's a demanding situation that can impact both your professional and personal life.

Paul-Craft 3y ago
Not just that. Engineers get pigeonholed into tech stacks as well. It's almost as if companies (recruiters, really) think a senior engineer can't learn another programming language or something. They come at you with "we're looking for someone with strong golang experience," when there's no way to get "strong golang experience" without working someplace that uses it.
- szundi 3y ago
  Learning takes time
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    And? There's a learning curve any time one starts a new job with a new code base. Do you think a senior engineer can't become productive in a new codebase with a new language in a couple of months? If so, I'm going to guess you've never worked with a good senior engineer.
  - akvadrako 3y ago
    The time it takes to learn a new language, especially a typical one like Go, is insignificant on a project lasting more than a couple weeks.

ksec 3y ago

Congratz, I vaguely remember you used to live in HK ( may be I was wrong ). Keep the Blog post posting.

usrme 3y ago
The author lives in Italy. From the first paragraph: This maybe seems to be a weird post, especially for those who don’t live in Italy, because here in Italy there’s the common belief that the abilites of a worker, usually are less considered than the qualifies that it has. Or simply the employers don’t ask “what you are able to do?”, instead of “what are your credentials/studies”.

petercooper 3y ago

It's been over ten years now since I blogged recently, alas, but back in the day blogging got me a book deal and being asked to chair an O'Reilly conference. I recommend everyone blog about what they're into because it's both personally edifying, but it also only takes the right person reading to reach out with an interesting opportunity to be more than worth it.

gbrindisi 3y ago

Congratulazioni Giulio, well deserved! I remember your home setup post dearly, it’s been very inspiring

giuliomagnifico 3y ago
Grazie mille =)

despicablelier 3y ago

Congrats on the new job, I’ve read the blog and it is truly well deseeved. Regarding on the difficulties of the italian market, I’d like to dissent though. Fact is, in Italy is waaaaay more simple to cheat your way to the top instead of having to go through the pains of getting a proper degree. I know because I did it and went from a non graduated outbound call center operator to dirigential positions in highly respected fashionable industries in less than 10 years. Point is, and with the exception of research roles o and a fistful of high consultancies, who enforce the control on graduation, most likely than not you will not be asked for proof of your studies if your jobtitle carries enough weight and if your accomplishments a friendship with the right people weights enough. Trick is to change joq with the right frequency in the first years, participate to associations and try to be in the board, blog a lot in the right environments (and specifically there), make a lot of acquaintances and help them solve tricky situations for free, and generally speaking be as visible as possible as a tech savyy and strategist. At the right moment, the reputation you will have accrued will be enough to receive accreditations beyond the first line of HR, and id your sponsor is notable enough no one will ask for your degree. Once you have done that the first time, is the weight of your jobtitle and your name that propels you forward, no one willing to question your perceived authority. Than rinse and repeat until the weight of jobtitle and name combined is unquestionable. If you know how to behave, you will rise fast. And good luck to trying that abroad. On a sidenote, once you earned the jobtitle this way in italy, it is easier (but still tricky) to get it abroad as well. Once I tried to go abroad sometimes I got asked credentials (and subsequently bombed) and sometimes not, wich guaranteed me jobs in Switzerland and France. Steer away from anglosaxon jobs though, they do enforce the control and most likely they’ll carch your bluff. last suggestion: shoot for the highest possible pay and change job often enough to beat inflation several times over in 5 years. Above 150k/years almost no one will ask you for degrees. Only your pay and jobtitle and experience will count. Good luck!

hcks 3y ago
«the Italian job market isn’t that bad because you can cheat your way to the top» That surely changes my opinion
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

gbrindisi 3y ago

> the employers don’t ask “what you are able to do?”, instead of “what are your credentials/studies”. I think this is cultural. Italian culture is hierarchical and trust is built upon relationships, you either need the authority of a good cv or a good network to reap opportunities. (This is quite common in southern europe) Northern europeans, americans etc are more egalitarian and have a task based approach to build trust, and value ones worth accordingly. (Of course it’s not always as black and white)

spydum 3y ago
I think this is universal. I read the story in a different light: it's all about your social graph and who you know. This is where I see most of the value from college or school, building up your social graph of people in your approximate industry. Want to be successful? Connect in a meaningful way with more people. Your opportunities will multiply. Don't know how to do that? There's an easy shortcut: publish something! Give a talk, write a blog, teach a class. Find those opportunities where you can engage with many folks at once (not just 1:1, that doesn't scale as fast).
- golergka 3y ago
  It depends on what motivates people from your network to give you an opportunity. If their motivation is “I know that this guy is good for sure, I don't have to take chances with random people who answer the job as”, it is still merit based, and they're acting in the best interest of the company. However, they could also give a job to somebody they know just to have their favor, or to get more people into the company they they could rely on in internal politics. In this case, this is not based on merit, and they're effectively defrauding the company, acting against its interest. Personally, I've mostly encountered first type of networking in USA and Northern Europe and mostly second type elsewhere. Israel is weirdly split between Hi-Tech and everything else, following first and second type respectively.
kwar13 3y ago
Having worked in both Canada and USA, I feel it's the same in US "what you are able to do?" and Canada “what are your credentials/studies”.

em-bee 3y ago

Congratulations on the job. I had a similar experience where having a public website with published extensions for the server that my future employer was using helped me get a job there, but, I'd like to point out that in both our cases it wasn't the blog/website alone that helped us get the job, but a personal connection. In your case it was meeting that CEO on a bike, who then made a personal recommendation. In my case it was my general reputation as an active member of a community where the job was posted, that I applied to. What the blog did was to make it easy for the CEO to get to know you without talking to you more. And for me it was my code examples. So that works if you find a job where your ideas fit, but it can also work against you to find any other job that may expect a different mindset. Just recently I had an interview that also came about due to my reputation in the community, after I posted there that I was looking for work. But they desperately wanted to see code too, and the only thing I had to show was almost 15 years old or older, in a language that is not well known, because all my recent work was not public, and I didn't keep code from work on my personal devices. I haven't heard back from them yet.

swores 3y ago
Minor feedback that you're welcome to ignore: I found reading your comment a little bit slower & more annoying because of your lack of upper case letters for sentence starts. It's an interesting comment so I still read to the end, and upvoted, but I was close to not bothering to keep going half way through purely because of it all being lower case. I'd suggest changing your habit and starting sentences with upper case letters, not just because it's "normal" but because it's normal for a reason, that reason being that people find it easier to read.
- em-bee 3y ago
  I appreciate the feedback. This is a habit that I acquired decades ago, on the basis that it doesn't make sense to write words differently just because of their position or their meaning when there is no such difference in the spoken language (but there are pauses between sentences instead, which I didn't consider then). It is actually through reading HN that I started to consider readability of longer paragraphs. I am considering the situation. Don't know where I will end up. I edited the comment, but now I am stuck between leaving the commented with capitalization to improve readability and reverting the edit in order for your response to make sense and to allow others to judge for themselves. (I'll go with keeping the edits. Anyone curious about the readability can go look for older comments of mine)

a1o 3y ago

Hey, about the raspberry pi, I have had a bunch of problems with it eating the micro SD cards, like they fail in six months or an year tops. I had countered this for some little time by using it to boot and relaying to a hdd. How are you handling this? Is there some special micro SD card that doesn't fail as soon?

FredPret 3y ago
I noticed the same for certain cards. Are you getting genuine SanDisk? There are lots of counterfeits out there.
- josegomezgarcia 3y ago
  [flagged]
- a1o 3y ago
  That's a good thing to check. I honestly don't know if the SanDisk micro SD cards I got are genuine - they look their part and have that plastic square thing that is placed inside the paper thing with SanDisk brand and all the numbers, but maybe the fake ones have caught up in their packaging. I have no idea how to make sure it's genuine though.
  - FredPret 3y ago
    I think it should also have the shiny metallic sticker. There's probably a verification guide online somewhere
gruez 3y ago
They make "high endurance " sd cards, typically marketed for dash cam use.
stkdump 3y ago
I am running 2 Raspberry Pis 24/7 for many years. Never had a micro SD fail.
3y ago

zelphirkalt 3y ago

That title ... Can we get grammar fixes for external titles for better readability?

SadTrombone 3y ago
English is not everyone's first language, and the title may not be perfect but it's perfectly coherent.
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  Sure. I am asking, whether we could get corrected titles here on HN for such cases. I personally think, that a little due diligence is appropriate for titles of such blog posts, but that is only me and what I would do, if I published a blog post like that.

justsomehnguy 3y ago

Yesterday you are shitting on someone's home networking and today you learn he made it his job. Regarding the credentials... you would always find people who are dumb^W think what the certs are the measure of quality. Sometimes it's actually good, if a person asks for certs first then you know you don't want to work with that person. NB: never send alerts directly to people. Create a group (distribution list, alias, whatever it's called in your mail server), preferably multiple groups foreach client, eg: pasta.zara.alerts.monitoring@giuliomagnifico.com etc That way you would see which instance generated the alert even if you didn't configured the custom alert message, you can filter all these messages (to tag, move to folders or whatever) simply by filtering on *alerts.monitoring@, and if for some reason you depart with the client in not so amicable ways then you can simply kill all the mails from it by a rule with $To:.

rubatuga 3y ago

Regarding the hardware, I would not recommend to use a raspberry pi, not only are they hard to get and expensive but as another comment states the RPi rely on SD cards which are prone to corruption. I think it's better to rely on second hand enterprise hardware if you're looking for something cheap.

proprietario 3y ago
this is advice I hear very often, but where do you buy second hand enterprise hardware? I went and bought mine second hand from the internet but ive got no idea where to get enterprise stuff
- hereonout2 3y ago
  eBay? I don't know where you are in the world you are but in my country it's basically flooded with the stuff.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  If you're in a major city, look for salvage outlets. There are usually operations who recover decommissioned hardware from businesses, and then thrift-store style, sell it to hobbyists.
- taneq 3y ago
  I got an old Dell PowerEdge 610 server second hand on gumtree.com.au (classified ads page, I guess like craigslist or something?) for $400. The guy selling it had bought it for his home theater without realising that commercial servers are (a) noisy as hell, and (b) useless for graphics. :P It's been running our half-dozen server VMs at work for the past 3 years and it still blows my mind that you can get a server with 12 CPU cores and 96GB of RAM for that price. Edit: 610, not 670, sorry. It basically sits in a corner making a faint whirring sound and apart from occasional apt-get upgrades I tend to forget it exists.
  - aborsy 3y ago
    A mini PC would also give you 64GB and 12 cores. It consumes a lot less power. Other than ECC RAM, any benefit? The mini PC may not be as reliable, but this is not for production use.

loumf 3y ago

I’ve been blogging for almost 20 years. The site isn’t monetized, I don’t have many readers, and I don’t get much Google traffic. But ... - My posts about developing for iOS in 2008 were found by an editor at Manning and I wrote a book for them. This helped me make the transition to full time iOS development. - My posts about extending Fogbugz and Citydesk were part of my application to Fogcreek/Trello — I can’t say it “got” me the job, but I’m sure helped me get an interview. - I’ve been invited to speak at conferences, be a guest on podcasts, and write for Smashing based on people finding my site. It’s not a lot, but raises my profile just a bit. I would do it anyway, but I’ve had a 30+ year career and I think my blog has been a significant factor in it.

firesteelrain 3y ago
Link to your blog?
- loumf 3y ago
  https://loufranco.com https://loufranco.com
ghaff 3y ago
I wrote a ton as an industry analyst as well as lots of articles/blogs. Absolutely was probably the factor in my getting a long-time job. Maybe indirectly but it's why I knew people at the company and they knew me.

Daril 3y ago

Well ... I think we have many problems in these modern IT times ... The first is that we are drowning in new IT technologies that are released every day and it is impossible to keep up with them ... Many languages, frameworks, tools ... After 25 years in this field, I am very sceptical when I read a CV on LinkedIn of a person who is an "expert" in 10 or 20 different technologies or languages (it is simply impossible). On the other hand, we have companies looking for "gurus" in several areas with many years of experience... just unrealistic expectations. Apart from a limited minority of true geniuses, all of us mere mortals need time and projects and work and a lot of failures to develop expertise in any field. On the other hand, in the 'real' world of work, it is not enough just to be technically competent. You need a lot of other skills that are equally if not more important: willingness to learn, ability to evaluate technologies based on requirements and constraints, integrity, honesty, self-organisation, curiosity, ingenuity ... logic. At the end of the day, it is a balancing act between technology, resources, money, time constraints and human relations, not just writing code or knowing everything about one or more tools that may become obsolete in a week.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
It's a squeeze on us workers because it's profitable, not because businesses are coordinated on healthy society
ericmcer 3y ago
It does feel kinda overwhelming. You really need to run to stay in place, and it is more and more about setting up a brittle chain of config files than having deep knowledge of a single languages best practices.
- Daril 3y ago
  Well, the worst thing in my opinion is that (often for ideological reasons or egocentric positions) we don't accept or don't want to improve the existing tools or languages, but we create a new one ... so we had C, C++, Object Pascal and now we also have Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, Rust, Nim, Zig, D, Objective C, C#, Java, Kotlin, Haskell, Erlang, Ada, to name a few ... and this is the easy side ... Now there is the bandwagon of javascript frameworks: React, Vue, Svelte, Next, Nuxt and so on. It is impossible to keep up and it is also impossible that all these new technologies will be maintained in the long term. I remember the rise of Java years ago ... Java everywhere: Java applets on the web, Java on the desktop, Java as an application server and how it ended? Java is, in my opinion, one of the most convoluted and impenetrable languages ever created, but when you work alone as a freelancer, as in my case, you don't have the time and the resources to embrace and follow every new technology that is marketed as a revolution and the future, because at the end of the month you have to send the invoices to your clients to earn and live, and you have to have produced some results that work for them in the "real" world. I have used Drupal for a few projects in the past: the main problem? Every major release that broke the API backwards compatibility and this means you have to refactor all your plugins and custom code, many times without any new direct benefit to the end user who, of course, was not available to spend money because some internals change every year and, for him, on the surface nothing changed.

sim7c00 3y ago

i live in a more northen country, but still writing a small blog helped me too to get my first IT job. a friend gave me the tip for me to show i had recent relevant,activities for a job. its a really good tip. even if no one reads it you can put it on your resume just as a proof of your words. best tip i ever had. happy it helped you in this way and thanks for sharing!

simonw 3y ago

I wrote about this a while ago: https://simonwillison.net/2021/Jul/17/standing-out/ https://simonwillison.net/2021/Jul/17/standing-out/ If you have a dusty old blog with just a single technical post on it from 2012 which demonstrates that you know how to code, know how to write and know how to solve a technical problem... that will STILL give you a solid advantage against other candidates, at least in the early stages of the hiring process. When hiring, the very first filter you need to apply is "can this person actually do the work". That's what FizzBuzz is about! A blog post (or a dusty old GitHub repo) is a great way to jump past that filter.

jayonsoftware 3y ago

Where did you find tha 19” rack unit. Never found one with 3 Eithernet ports config.

giuliomagnifico 3y ago
The unit is from rs-online ( https://us.rs-online.com/product/nvent-schroff/14826107/70405884/ https://us.rs-online.com/product/nvent-schroff/14826107/7040... ) but it hasn’t the Ethernet ports, we drilled them into the unit manually.

loteck 3y ago

Congrats! I hope everyone can see he actually found a job due to getting out and meeting people (in this case, he met a CEO while they were both cycling), who then became interested in his work due to the relationship he fostered.

404mm 3y ago

I don’t understand how the SYSMI box works. I see power input going into the Mikrotik router, then feeding D-Link USB hub with (according to the Mikrotik specs) up to 5V/500mA DC. The USB hub sends power to both Pi’s and somehow splits the 500mA between RPi 3 (officially needing up to 5V/2.5A) and RPi 4(5V/3A). And it still somehow works? I know all the specs are not set it stone. USB can feed more than 500mA and Pi’s can run on well under their requirement but I’m no stranger to Pi’s and I had experienced power issues due to inadequate supply before. Especially when the CPU is maxed out, like during the boot sequence. Am I missing something here? This looks quite insane.

giuliomagnifico 3y ago
I was wondering the same but then I discovered that the Mikrotik is able to power both the Raspberry PIs when in full load for 3 days straight. I did some benchmarks, but I think the power output of the Mikrotik is different, more than the official specs.
dharmab 3y ago
The 5V/500ma number is copied from the USB 2.0 spec; the Mikrotik device may be outputting more than specified by coincidence of the hardware used to manufactured it
- 404mm 3y ago
  The original adapter for mikrotik 750 is 24V/380mA (9.12W). This is not a sufficient way to supply power to 3 devices, no matter how you dice it.
  - giuliomagnifico 3y ago
    I agree but how do you explain that it’s actually working? Also on heavy load for days? We was asking the same, for that I tried to run an heavy benchmark for some days on the RPis. Maybe the spec of the power supply are different?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pknerd 3y ago

I am not surprised. On multiple occasions I was offered a job/project because of my blog and github.

monnow 3y ago

Congrats Giulio! Incredibly, things are changing even in Italy. I find saddening that the majority of the youth is either stuck in dead end jobs or in lowly-paying slightly career-related jobs. I try to push anyone I meet under 30 to just leave the country. The only other option is to embrace entrepreneurship, even though it requires one to grow a thick skin, stomach and an indestructible carapace. I might be wrong trying to de-populate a country of old farts, but everyone has the right to strive for the life they want to lead, or at least get to choose a job/career. One last note of folklore - I find Italian politics amusing: both left and right have been focusing on civil rights debate, without a grand scheme but rather a day-to-day routine of putting out fires as they come along (the motto being 'just kick the can down the road'). We need leaders with a vision, not social media influencers that follow behind whatever is trending on social media this week (aka the flavour of the week). Once again, congratulations! :) Sorry for hijacking the celebrations with a rant.

giuliomagnifico 3y ago
Thanks to you for the comment, and no worries about the rant, as an Italian I agree with you. Italian politicians are short sighted, they only care about the next election and not the nex generation.