oofnik

8 ms·

31.
by oofnik 3y ago
At the beginning of my career when I was out to prove myself, I took my job so seriously that my sense of personal self-worth was intricately tied up with the quality of my work. After a particularly disappointing experience that knocked me
32.
by oofnik 3y ago
Thank you for writing and sharing this.
33.
by oofnik 3y ago
I think the world is fundamentally divided between people who want to be heard, and people who want to be right. With all due respect to the editors of n+1, people who do well in media are almost always, with very few exceptions, of the for
34.
by oofnik 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man-Made_River 1,600 km vs. 114 km. And elsewhere in North Africa, no less. Come on, Egypt, do better.
35.
by oofnik 3y ago
Semiconductors are at their least efficient when they are neither on nor off, neither here nor there. I think humans are the same. Workplaces (read: managers) have an obligation to foster a culture of deep work - it's unreasonable to e
36.
by oofnik 3y ago
At my first DevOps job we had defined a function which deleted old partitions from time to time. If you invoked it manually because of some automation failure with the wrong arguments, it had a habit of nuking production data, which, needle
37.
by oofnik 4y ago
Can confirm that this is indeed possible
38.
by oofnik 4y ago
In my country at least, having friends or family with a foot in the door is pretty essential to landing that first interview. You still need to demonstrate competence, though. I think the newness of software engineering relative to more tra
39.
by oofnik 4y ago
This is called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
40.
by oofnik 4y ago
I grew up around the kind of people who often bragged about their humility, which bothered me greatly, and I promised myself not to be like that as an adult. The result is that I often use second-person pronouns to take credit for work I di
41.
Oy, A.I.(tabletmag.com)
3 points by oofnik 4y ago|0 comments
42.
by oofnik 4y ago
No, pets are not fine. Just the other day I had to perform some maintenance on a long-running VM hosting some monitoring software. A backup VM is supposedly always running and ready to handle the workload in case of downtime. The switchover
43.
by oofnik 4y ago
I mostly write for myself, but occasionally a discussion with a friend or colleague will come up and I'll say "hey, I wrote a blog post about this" and share the link with them. I did have one case where a job interview skipp
44.
by oofnik 4y ago
We began a transition from a single behemoth Prometheus instance to Victoria Metrics about a month ago after evaluating a couple of similar tools. VM won out because of its relative operational simplicity and eye-popping benchmark results i
45.
by oofnik 4y ago
This is good advice for clarifying your own thoughts, but your ability to communicate effectively through writing is very dependent on whether or not your team is composed of readers. I personally enjoy writing design documents and feel tha
46.
by oofnik 4y ago
I was really entertained by asking it to invent English-sounding words when given a definition, but this blew me away. Well done. P.s. the one I liked the best was for "the act of singing while drunk": boozecrooning
47.
by oofnik 4y ago
What's interesting about this piece in particular, and writing from this period in general, is the absence of psychological language. The author praises what we refer to today as the personality trait conscientiousness , although his
48.
by oofnik 4y ago
I'd say Player Piano was one of the most formative books I read growing up. Probably had a lot to do with the fact that I was studying engineering in a great American city whose economy had almost completely transitioned away from he
49.
by oofnik 4y ago
I would suggest a better word to describe systemd design philosophy is authoritarian , if we're going to stick with political science terminology. Human systems tend to flourish when political and economic decision-making is relative
50.
by oofnik 4y ago
For all the talk about American individualism, American corporate culture is actually extraordinarily collectivist. The pervasive groupthink at all levels of the hierarchy is an effective survival strategy. It's quite depressing to rea
51.
by oofnik 4y ago
I absolutely think there is a difference in mindset between people who specialize in writing code and people who specialize in operations. The number of people who excel at both skill sets (and enjoy doing both) is vanishingly small, and is
52.
by oofnik 4y ago
I think there is a genuine divide between people who view repititive tasks as an insufferable hell vs. those who either don't mind or even might enjoy the work. Most software engineers, for obvious reasons, fall into the category of th
53.
by oofnik 4y ago
A major issue with on-call, and certainly one I've encountered multiple times, is the high likelihood of moral hazard - the people who are responsible for addressing incidents are not the same people who designed and maintained the sys
54.
by oofnik 4y ago
I'm not sure there's anything special about writing in the context of managing that can't be claimed for communication in general. The ability to form words and sentences to convey ideas, meaning, and intent should be expecte
55.
by oofnik 4y ago
I get a kick out of the occasional "hey, thanks!" from some internet stranger who struggled with some problem that I happened to have solved and written about. We've all been in the stranger's situation at some point, pr
56.
by oofnik 4y ago
Why is this at all surprising? In any status-conscious society (read: any human society), given enough time, the people who make it to the top will invariably maximize opportunity afforded to their affinity group (i.e. offspring) at the exp
57.
by oofnik 4y ago
Sitting in standstill traffic in >30°C climates is more than an inconvenience; it is an acute health risk. Please consider the fact that a significant proportion of humans live in tropical or desert climates which would be otherwise unin
58.
by oofnik 4y ago
I would say Reddit, more so than any other of the potential replacements you mentioned, has taken on the role of hosting topic-based discussion which used to be the domain of forums. It's part of the relentless push toward greater reso
59.
by oofnik 4y ago
> Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fash
60.
by oofnik 4y ago
I was once hosted by a Syrian Jewish family for Passover. Their rendition of the classic had gadya (lit. "one goat") in the traditional melody brought over with them from Aleppo was hauntingly beautiful.

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