Certs are a waste of time tbh. If you have 8 years of experience, you should have more than enough to fill out a resume already.

An AWS cert is almost certainly even more useless for you specifically unless you wanted to get into devops/sre and do systems design. I have been in sre for a very long time and have never even heard of anyone writing tooling in Java. That section of the industry is entirely dominated by go, python, and (more often than anything else) bash for really quick automation.

The man is from the Midwest. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has been there and ate the food.

Bluetooth on Linux fucking sucks

Hated Windows. TechTV had a download of day that “works on both Windows and Linux!”

“I don’t know what Linux is but it can’t be worse that Windows.”

I’ve been on it ever since. That was 20+ years ago.

I honestly don’t know how windows works… I only ever used it for about a year and some change when I was a teenager in the 90s.

It’s easier to think about Linux on the context of what an individual application needs to run. Pretty much everything you do will have these components.

• configuration
• an executable
• a communication mechanism (dbus, networking, web server, etc)
• something that decides if the application runs or not (systemd, monit, docker/docker compose, kubernetes scheduler, or you as the user)
• a way of accepting input (keyboard and mouse, web requests, database queries, etc)
• a way of delivering an output (logging to unique log files, through syslog, or to stdout/stderr, showing something on a screen, playing a sound, returning a message to the client, etc)
• storage (optional)
• some cpu and memory capacity

That’s really it. If something isn’t working, it’s pretty much exclusively going to fall into one of those categories. What that means is going to vary significantly from app to app but understanding this is how literally everything works makes the troubleshooting process a lot easier.

A small container running in kubernetes on an old laptop.

My personal laptop is whatever the first gen Framework is called. After many, many years doing the “cool” distros, I’ve settled on Mint and don’t really have any motivation to do anything else… I have real work I need to do and can’t be bothered to deal with figuring out weird shit. I just need it to work.

TBH, the only things I use my laptop for anymore is a browser, vim, git, and kubernetes tooling… I barely have any interest in running Linux on a workstation at this point. The only things that really interest me anymore are being run in distributed clusters. Desktop Linux is kinda boring and tedious for me.

Those days gave me a career so I can’t really complain.

Back in the dark, old days of Linux I spent 5-6 hours digging through dbus events and X11 configs to get my mouse working. It was unplugged.

In my defense, in those days, Linux was such an insane asylum that diving into dbus and X11 as a first step was usually the logical approach.

Woops!

I actually really like The Night Before. That Joe Seth Rogan movie. It’s the only one I’ve been rewatching over the last few years.

As a counter balance to that though, interviewers need to understand what they are hiring for and tailor the questions asked to those requirements.

For example, there is genuinely very little coding required of an SRE these days but EVERY job interview wants you to do some leetcode style algorithm design… Since containers took over, the times I have used anything beyond relatively unremarkable bash scripts is exceptionally small. It’s extremely unlikely that I will be responsible for a task that is so dependent on performance that I need to design a perfect O(1) algorithm. On terraform though, I’m a fucking surgeon.

SRE specifically should HEAVILY focus on system design and almost all other things should have much much less priority… I’ve failed plenty of skill assessments just because of the code though.

Containerization (even for small things) makes modern infrastructure a LOT easier.

No. Just change the location.

Meetup.com is how you get to know people in Tokyo. I lived there for a few years and this was extremely popular.

Have you looked into getting a psych evaluation?

Trains when possible.

I’ve been riding motorcycles on and off for years. For the last 8ish months I’ve been riding one of those like city share electric moped/scooter things. It’s a cheap Chinese NIU brand. For the size and state of infrastructure in my current city (Tbilisi) it’s honestly the best way to get around.

I lived in Tokyo for years though. I would take a train network like that any day of the week.

What software are you using that is keeping you on windows?

FWIW, the last version of windows I’ve run was WinME circa 2001ish… I’ve been on Linux since '99 or so. You can certainly get by for day to day stuff. The only thing holding you back is going to be pretty niche.

Yeah Yahşi Batı isn’t my favorite but I’d watch anything with Demet Evgar. Pek Yaşında was cute though.

Irani cinema has some pretty great releases… The Wind Will Carry Us, A Separation, The Day I Became A Woman, Ten, Children Of Heaven, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, etc…

Some other good Middle Eastern ones include Capernaum, Farha, Incendies (French Canadian director), Last Man In Aleppo, The Band’s Visit, etc.

I think, in the general-ish region, Turkey has the largest and most diverse film industry by far. There are some legitimate gems. Dedemin İnsanları, Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, Son Çıkış, Annemin Yarası, Zeytin Ağacı, Bir Başkadır, Aile Arasında, Ölü Ekmeği, Yaşı Batı, G.O.R.A., Pek Yakında, Kosmos, Monseuir Ibrahim (French but it ends in Turkey).