8 ms·

The greatest resume I've ever seen

91 points by SenHeng 2y ago

andyferris 2y ago
I always thought a smoke test related to “where there is smoke there is fire”. Like “where there is an API response, there must be a functioning API server”. Is that wrong? I am of course aware you can use smoke to track an air current, but is that the meaning of the phrase?
- 6510 2y ago
  Everyone use to smoke, it was something you didn't need equipment for. If you have no idea behind which wall a pipe terminates or don't know which of 30 pipes runs to [say] the back room you blow some smoke into it (or a lot) One would mostly use it because it is really fast. Non smoking solutions take considerably longer. One might put a pull string in the tube, if you need to wire it anyway that wouldn't take much extra time but ideally you start pushing the spring into the tube on the side closest to the sharp corners. If there are many pipes on that side you would start pushing on the other and might get stuck. If the curves are really smooth the spring could drop out of the tube. You could need an extra set of hands (more expensive). With the smoke test you could push the spring in from the other end. If there are wires in the tubes you can tie them together and use an ohm meter to find the right tube. You might have to walk up the stairs 10 times. Non of it is much like software development.
  - cafard 2y ago
    A local exterminator does smoke tests for the integrity of the plumbing stack: pump smoke in the outside drain, and see whether it all goes out through the roof vents, or some escapes within a house. That's how they found where rats were getting into our basement--a plumber had removed a vent pipe and had not secured the end.
- hiatus 2y ago
  I thought it came from hardware, where an erroneous component placement would lead to releasing the magic smoke.
- linsomniac 2y ago
  From Wikipedia: In Lessons Learned in Software Testing, Cem Kaner, James Bach, and Brett Pettichord provided the origin of the term: "The phrase smoke test comes from electronic hardware testing. You plug in a new board and turn on the power. If you see smoke coming from the board, turn off the power. You don't have to do any more testing." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_testing_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_testing_(software)
  - philk10 2y ago
    The expression probably was first used in plumbing in referring to tests for the detection of cracks, leaks or breaks in closed systems of pipes.[1] Pre-dating the term itself, smoke tests were performed to detect leaks in wooden sailing vessels at least as early as 1836. After making a slow fire in the bottom of the hold, Richard Henry Dana writes, "Wherever smoke was seen coming out we calked and pasted and, so far as we could, make the ship smoke tight." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_testing_(mechanical) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_testing_(mechanical) ( I used to moderate a s/w testing forum and one of the most common questions was "what is the difference between smoke and sanity testing" as this seemed to be used as an interview question...)
- prerok 2y ago
  > In Lessons Learned in Software Testing, Cem Kaner, James Bach, and Brett Pettichord provided the origin of the term: "The phrase smoke test comes from electronic hardware testing. You plug in a new board and turn on the power. If you see smoke coming from the board, turn off the power. You don't have to do any more testing." Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_testing_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_testing_(software)
  - cbsks 2y ago
    As my EE professor used to say, the problem is that once the magic smoke gets released, it’s super difficult to put back in.
    - prerok 2y ago
      Yeah, in EE there is a joke that the devices run on smoke. Once it's released it won't run anymore :)
      - dmoy 2y ago
        I also always liked the joke about "every diode can be a light emitting diode at least once"
        AstralStorm 2y ago
        Or a space heater. That's when the smoke doesn't come out but the device still does not work and is hot.
- bane 2y ago
  The way I've heard it used is thus: In a complex system you are attempting to simplify (or deprecate components of), and where you cannot find an owner or stakeholder over some component system -- unplug the component and wait for errors or user complaints. Thus you will find out who is affected by the component and who likely stakeholders should be. For example, old graybeards like myself will almost all have a story of finding some lost Sun or Irix server sitting under a pile of gear in an old closet, happily turned on with nobody current employed who knows anything about it. What does it do? What's the user/password? How did it get there? all lost to the sands of time. Turning it off will let you know if you can retire it or if somebody emerges with a problem then they can own it.
  - 8organicbits 2y ago
    There are only certain classes of systems this works for. If the system generates infrequent alerts, for example, the stakeholder won't know there's an issue until they independently discover that they missed an alert. That said, I've resorted to this approach before, and it works.
    - AstralStorm 2y ago
      And then you suddenly torpedoed security notifications for the whole company. Nobody noticed for a year that updates were not applied. The rest of the story writes itself.
  - reidjs 2y ago
    At my company, we call this a scream test
  - AstralStorm 2y ago
    And then you accidentally crashed the whole business, for months, also known as a career limiting move. The stuff The Daily WTF published for failed companies. Which is why only independent contractors can safely pull it off, and even then not always. The correct test is targeted error injection. Make the thing a bit flaky see who complains or notices. Fan favorite is explicitly laggy or busted routers in the path for networked hardware. It's still not without risks, crappy old glue or scripts tend to fail catastrophically. So as usual, backups and spares. Documentation before messing with the thing... Generally also found that it is safer to send excess garbage downstream from the putative server than induce outages. Spam gets quick results. Assumes of course you know what it is supposed to send... Or that garbage sent from there will get noticed. The last thing is an actual smoke test.
- dekelpilli 2y ago
  Tangential: at my first company out of uni we worked on software that ran in cars. I had never heard the term "smoke test" during my studies, and for quite a while I thought we were running tests (diagnostics) to check if the car was smoking.
- drewcoo 2y ago
  I got so sick of having to explain what smoke tests were that I just don't use the term anymore. In software, they tend to happen at deploy time, whether to an internal environment or production. I just call them "deploy tests" now.
- snakeyjake 2y ago
  Smoke test is an ancient engineering phrase to describe the first time you turn something on after building/fixing it. If it starts smoking, something is wrong. It's been in the Jargon File since the late 80s and was popular in military/defense contracting prior to that. You actually got me curious about this because it's a term I've been using for 40 years, and the earliest reference I've been able to find is in an internal memo about the development of a computer system, circa 1952: > What all this adds up to is, that if Mike Stobin and Willis Ware who have been dealing with the ventilation engineers can come through with the ventilating equipment in time, it is very likely that we can have a smoke test of the arithmetic unit on the JOHNNIAC main frame in October [of 1952]. >The goal of the test will be to connect the A [accumulator register] and MQ for end-around shifting (7.5 order)15 and let the machine shift a set of digits all day while we hammer on the frame and wiggle wires. Applications for wire wigglers are now open. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/corporate_pubs/2008/RAND_CP537.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/corporate_pubs/20... Well shit I haven't used/heard the term "wire wiggler" in decades time to up my rizz with some outdated slang. It is almost certainly a WWII slang term that spread to universities post-war.
nolongerthere 2y ago
Its a good primer on getting into DevOps, but in today's market you need a lot more experience than this book can give you, especially following all the layoffs.
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  Definitely. At the same time, there's a weird dynamic in the market - because of the boom of AI (driven mostly by cloud spending) architecture, the demand for cloud engineers and even general devops has surged, but mostly in the more senior 5+ years experience market. I am getting asked a lot of questions by people messaging me about how to enter after college, and I don't really have a good answer for them. The honest truth is that it's always been a little tricky and you've gotta be a little odd to get into it in the first place, and what I usually tell people is I don't believe many senior people doing it now ever "chose" it, it usually just happens to people. Plus the fact that these AI coding assistants can almost do a passable job of a junior, to the point where most of their job is probably going to be just dumping crap into copilot or some gpt. I feel very very bad for anyone entering the market right now.
  - nolongerthere 2y ago
    Yup, the path usually looks something like: Service desk job > L2 > L3 > company pays for a bunch of cloud training so they don't have to pay for another consultant > DevOps or CE/CS intern > tasked with implementing stuff in clouds > hired as Jr SWE, but still tasked with doing those devopsy things that the real devops team doesn't wanna do > jump a few times, each time still taking on devopsy stuff > Sr DevOps Admin
    - JohnMakin 2y ago
      > CE/CS intern > tasked with implementing stuff in clouds > hired as Jr SWE, but still tasked with doing those devopsy things that the real devops team doesn't wanna do > jump a few times, each time still taking on devopsy stuff > Sr DevOps Admin Yea this is mostly the path I took. I had a hybrid lead/swe role that ended up me picking up sysadm stuff due to a weak DevOps team, then my next role was DevOps. Anecdotally, I find there's a large difference in quality of the engineer depending on which of those particular paths they took that's not usually well represented by salary ranges (although if you possess a CS degree jobs are MUCH easier to get IME).
sebastianconcpt 2y ago
A good infrastructure guy can translate problem solving and troubleshooting techniques from one domain to the other. We're natural general intelligence, remember that part?
- Vitaly_C 2y ago
  Plumbers, engineers.. we’re also all just dealing with $#%^ all day right?
david_allison 2y ago
(2021), site is now offline: https://dsresume.com/ https://dsresume.com/ Snapshot (Sept 30, 2021): https://web.archive.org/web/20210930190513/https://dsresume.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210930190513/https://dsresume....
l0c0b0x 2y ago
I TOTALLY thought this was going to be an article about Major Hayden's resume: Resume as a man page: https://majorhayden.com/ https://majorhayden.com/
bryanlarsen 2y ago
2021, so not obvious then, but I wonder when he'll switch back because pay for plumbers is higher than that in IT. Plumbing will likely eventually mostly get replaced by robots, but almost certainly they will hold on longer than most IT professionals.
- from-nibly 2y ago
  Id bet on disposable housing before I would bet on robotic plumbers.
mmh0000 2y ago
This is the greatest resume I've ever seen[1]! I'd hire this guy in an instant. [1] https://townsquare.media/site/393/files/2013/09/Redmon-Resume.pdf https://townsquare.media/site/393/files/2013/09/Redmon-Resum...
- onemoresoop 2y ago
  Definitely a candidate I'd remember after interviewing....
O1111OOO 2y ago
The resume that stands out in my mind was the famous Candy Bar Resume. It wouldn't work in the tech field but (I thought it was) brilliant in the marketing/business field: https://www.cnbc.com/id/100482311 https://www.cnbc.com/id/100482311 Direct link to image: https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/files/2013/02/22/100481398-Bar.jpeg https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/files/20...

91 points by SenHeng 2y ago

I always thought a smoke test related to “where there is smoke there is fire”. Like “where there is an API response, there must be a functioning API server”. Is that wrong? I am of course aware you can use smoke to track an air current, but is that the meaning of the phrase?

6510 2y ago
Everyone use to smoke, it was something you didn't need equipment for. If you have no idea behind which wall a pipe terminates or don't know which of 30 pipes runs to [say] the back room you blow some smoke into it (or a lot) One would mostly use it because it is really fast. Non smoking solutions take considerably longer. One might put a pull string in the tube, if you need to wire it anyway that wouldn't take much extra time but ideally you start pushing the spring into the tube on the side closest to the sharp corners. If there are many pipes on that side you would start pushing on the other and might get stuck. If the curves are really smooth the spring could drop out of the tube. You could need an extra set of hands (more expensive). With the smoke test you could push the spring in from the other end. If there are wires in the tubes you can tie them together and use an ohm meter to find the right tube. You might have to walk up the stairs 10 times. Non of it is much like software development.
- cafard 2y ago
  A local exterminator does smoke tests for the integrity of the plumbing stack: pump smoke in the outside drain, and see whether it all goes out through the roof vents, or some escapes within a house. That's how they found where rats were getting into our basement--a plumber had removed a vent pipe and had not secured the end.
hiatus 2y ago
I thought it came from hardware, where an erroneous component placement would lead to releasing the magic smoke.
linsomniac 2y ago
From Wikipedia: In Lessons Learned in Software Testing, Cem Kaner, James Bach, and Brett Pettichord provided the origin of the term: "The phrase smoke test comes from electronic hardware testing. You plug in a new board and turn on the power. If you see smoke coming from the board, turn off the power. You don't have to do any more testing." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_testing_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_testing_(software)
- philk10 2y ago
  The expression probably was first used in plumbing in referring to tests for the detection of cracks, leaks or breaks in closed systems of pipes.[1] Pre-dating the term itself, smoke tests were performed to detect leaks in wooden sailing vessels at least as early as 1836. After making a slow fire in the bottom of the hold, Richard Henry Dana writes, "Wherever smoke was seen coming out we calked and pasted and, so far as we could, make the ship smoke tight." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_testing_(mechanical) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_testing_(mechanical) ( I used to moderate a s/w testing forum and one of the most common questions was "what is the difference between smoke and sanity testing" as this seemed to be used as an interview question...)
prerok 2y ago
> In Lessons Learned in Software Testing, Cem Kaner, James Bach, and Brett Pettichord provided the origin of the term: "The phrase smoke test comes from electronic hardware testing. You plug in a new board and turn on the power. If you see smoke coming from the board, turn off the power. You don't have to do any more testing." Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_testing_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_testing_(software)
- cbsks 2y ago
  As my EE professor used to say, the problem is that once the magic smoke gets released, it’s super difficult to put back in.
  - prerok 2y ago
    Yeah, in EE there is a joke that the devices run on smoke. Once it's released it won't run anymore :)
    - dmoy 2y ago
      I also always liked the joke about "every diode can be a light emitting diode at least once"
      - AstralStorm 2y ago
        Or a space heater. That's when the smoke doesn't come out but the device still does not work and is hot.
bane 2y ago
The way I've heard it used is thus: In a complex system you are attempting to simplify (or deprecate components of), and where you cannot find an owner or stakeholder over some component system -- unplug the component and wait for errors or user complaints. Thus you will find out who is affected by the component and who likely stakeholders should be. For example, old graybeards like myself will almost all have a story of finding some lost Sun or Irix server sitting under a pile of gear in an old closet, happily turned on with nobody current employed who knows anything about it. What does it do? What's the user/password? How did it get there? all lost to the sands of time. Turning it off will let you know if you can retire it or if somebody emerges with a problem then they can own it.
- 8organicbits 2y ago
  There are only certain classes of systems this works for. If the system generates infrequent alerts, for example, the stakeholder won't know there's an issue until they independently discover that they missed an alert. That said, I've resorted to this approach before, and it works.
  - AstralStorm 2y ago
    And then you suddenly torpedoed security notifications for the whole company. Nobody noticed for a year that updates were not applied. The rest of the story writes itself.
- reidjs 2y ago
  At my company, we call this a scream test
- AstralStorm 2y ago
  And then you accidentally crashed the whole business, for months, also known as a career limiting move. The stuff The Daily WTF published for failed companies. Which is why only independent contractors can safely pull it off, and even then not always. The correct test is targeted error injection. Make the thing a bit flaky see who complains or notices. Fan favorite is explicitly laggy or busted routers in the path for networked hardware. It's still not without risks, crappy old glue or scripts tend to fail catastrophically. So as usual, backups and spares. Documentation before messing with the thing... Generally also found that it is safer to send excess garbage downstream from the putative server than induce outages. Spam gets quick results. Assumes of course you know what it is supposed to send... Or that garbage sent from there will get noticed. The last thing is an actual smoke test.
dekelpilli 2y ago
Tangential: at my first company out of uni we worked on software that ran in cars. I had never heard the term "smoke test" during my studies, and for quite a while I thought we were running tests (diagnostics) to check if the car was smoking.
drewcoo 2y ago
I got so sick of having to explain what smoke tests were that I just don't use the term anymore. In software, they tend to happen at deploy time, whether to an internal environment or production. I just call them "deploy tests" now.
snakeyjake 2y ago
Smoke test is an ancient engineering phrase to describe the first time you turn something on after building/fixing it. If it starts smoking, something is wrong. It's been in the Jargon File since the late 80s and was popular in military/defense contracting prior to that. You actually got me curious about this because it's a term I've been using for 40 years, and the earliest reference I've been able to find is in an internal memo about the development of a computer system, circa 1952: > What all this adds up to is, that if Mike Stobin and Willis Ware who have been dealing with the ventilation engineers can come through with the ventilating equipment in time, it is very likely that we can have a smoke test of the arithmetic unit on the JOHNNIAC main frame in October [of 1952]. >The goal of the test will be to connect the A [accumulator register] and MQ for end-around shifting (7.5 order)15 and let the machine shift a set of digits all day while we hammer on the frame and wiggle wires. Applications for wire wigglers are now open. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/corporate_pubs/2008/RAND_CP537.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/corporate_pubs/20... Well shit I haven't used/heard the term "wire wiggler" in decades time to up my rizz with some outdated slang. It is almost certainly a WWII slang term that spread to universities post-war.

nolongerthere 2y ago

Its a good primer on getting into DevOps, but in today's market you need a lot more experience than this book can give you, especially following all the layoffs.

JohnMakin 2y ago
Definitely. At the same time, there's a weird dynamic in the market - because of the boom of AI (driven mostly by cloud spending) architecture, the demand for cloud engineers and even general devops has surged, but mostly in the more senior 5+ years experience market. I am getting asked a lot of questions by people messaging me about how to enter after college, and I don't really have a good answer for them. The honest truth is that it's always been a little tricky and you've gotta be a little odd to get into it in the first place, and what I usually tell people is I don't believe many senior people doing it now ever "chose" it, it usually just happens to people. Plus the fact that these AI coding assistants can almost do a passable job of a junior, to the point where most of their job is probably going to be just dumping crap into copilot or some gpt. I feel very very bad for anyone entering the market right now.
- nolongerthere 2y ago
  Yup, the path usually looks something like: Service desk job > L2 > L3 > company pays for a bunch of cloud training so they don't have to pay for another consultant > DevOps or CE/CS intern > tasked with implementing stuff in clouds > hired as Jr SWE, but still tasked with doing those devopsy things that the real devops team doesn't wanna do > jump a few times, each time still taking on devopsy stuff > Sr DevOps Admin
  - JohnMakin 2y ago
    > CE/CS intern > tasked with implementing stuff in clouds > hired as Jr SWE, but still tasked with doing those devopsy things that the real devops team doesn't wanna do > jump a few times, each time still taking on devopsy stuff > Sr DevOps Admin Yea this is mostly the path I took. I had a hybrid lead/swe role that ended up me picking up sysadm stuff due to a weak DevOps team, then my next role was DevOps. Anecdotally, I find there's a large difference in quality of the engineer depending on which of those particular paths they took that's not usually well represented by salary ranges (although if you possess a CS degree jobs are MUCH easier to get IME).

sebastianconcpt 2y ago

A good infrastructure guy can translate problem solving and troubleshooting techniques from one domain to the other. We're natural general intelligence, remember that part?

Vitaly_C 2y ago
Plumbers, engineers.. we’re also all just dealing with $#%^ all day right?

david_allison 2y ago

(2021), site is now offline: https://dsresume.com/ https://dsresume.com/ Snapshot (Sept 30, 2021): https://web.archive.org/web/20210930190513/https://dsresume.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210930190513/https://dsresume....

l0c0b0x 2y ago

I TOTALLY thought this was going to be an article about Major Hayden's resume: Resume as a man page: https://majorhayden.com/ https://majorhayden.com/

bryanlarsen 2y ago

2021, so not obvious then, but I wonder when he'll switch back because pay for plumbers is higher than that in IT. Plumbing will likely eventually mostly get replaced by robots, but almost certainly they will hold on longer than most IT professionals.

from-nibly 2y ago
Id bet on disposable housing before I would bet on robotic plumbers.

mmh0000 2y ago

This is the greatest resume I've ever seen[1]! I'd hire this guy in an instant. [1] https://townsquare.media/site/393/files/2013/09/Redmon-Resume.pdf https://townsquare.media/site/393/files/2013/09/Redmon-Resum...

onemoresoop 2y ago
Definitely a candidate I'd remember after interviewing....

O1111OOO 2y ago

The resume that stands out in my mind was the famous Candy Bar Resume. It wouldn't work in the tech field but (I thought it was) brilliant in the marketing/business field: https://www.cnbc.com/id/100482311 https://www.cnbc.com/id/100482311 Direct link to image: https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/files/2013/02/22/100481398-Bar.jpeg https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/files/20...