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.

Higher’d’n AC.

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.

I honestly love it. Of course it’s not perfect but I don’t ever want to go back to the old way if I can avoid it.

Most resistance I have seen mostly comes down to a misunderstanding in the benefits that kubernetes offers. The assumption is that kube is used for autoscaling and that, if the inbound traffic is predictable then the added complexity is unnecessary. When that happens the “kube isn’t right for all situations” turns into “kube isn’t right for any situation” whether the person in question would ever admit that or not…

All of this ignores the MASSIVE reliability enhancement kube delivers and the huge amount of effort currently going into modern tool development surrounding the kube ecosystem.

Real talk, you don’t have the luxury of being an idealist right out of university. Your goal is to get a job. When you’re in that job you will likely not have the luxury of being an idealist either.

When you have enough experience making practical, reasoned decisions, then you can stand on principals.

For context, I have been in this business for nearly 20 years. The people I have personally worked with who have resisted things on philosophical grounds ALWAYS get left behind. I’ve seen it with systemd, the cloud, and now I’m seeing it again with kubernetes. You cannot escape the collective inertia of an entire industry.

Obviously there are still thresholds… I would never work for someone like Raytheon. You have to draw lines somewhere but saying you aren’t going to work for a company that does user behavior tracking is short sighted and impractical.

I only access banks electronically if they accommodate Tor.

So they know when you logged in and what you did when you got there. So you can’t escape it there.

The bank only gets to know my physical location when I do a transaction where that’s unavoidable.

So you can’t escape this either.

Even if I were to carry a mobile phone on standby wherever I go, the bank would get nothing from it if I don’t run their app.

They would get nothing except the time, location, amount, business, and how that relates to the other purchases you make and all the data those transactions generate as well. That data is shared with the bank, Visa or MasterCard, and all credit reporting agencies. This is unavoidable too.

You are not getting out of this unless you allow it to seriously affect your life.

My man… You are not getting around the tracking. It’s never going to happen. Unless you literally toss everything with a network connection and disconnect from the electric, gas, and water grids, you are going to be tracked.

Enjoy it. A night out is now cheaper.

I have a function called up. I do up X where X is the number of directories I want to go up.

up() {
  if [[ $# -eq 0 ]]; then
    cd ..
    return 0
  fi
  local path i
  for (( i=0; i < $1; i++ )); do
    path+=../
  done
  cd "$path"
}

EDIT: Don’t know if it’s just me but if you see < it should be the less than character.

Don’t overthink this. Just start using something.

We had a service that compiles a dataset once per quarter. The total size is ~30gb. We were starting a container, storing it on an EFS volume, and mounting like any other disk.

Every time a pod started it would need to read this data into memory so we would get quick initial start-up time but the time to be ready for traffic still took a while.

Since we didn’t need to update it very often, we decided to just package the compiled dataset into the container and skip the EFS volume. We updated the image pull policy to ifNotPresent so it cut egress traffic pricing from EFS to zero. Now there is a cost to pull the image from ECR but that’s only if the pod is being scheduled onto a node it hasn’t been run on before. There was no noticable change in behavior or performance and we saved a bunch on cost.

Sometimes the big, dumb option is the right choice.

Thing is, I had a reachable goal which made it easier for me to learn and feel good as I had a tangible result.

IMO, this exact thing is what separates the people who succeed and those who give up. If you are only approaching the code as some abstract concept then it will never work. Anyone learning this stuff needs to understand that the code is more like a hammer to a carpenter than anything else… It’s a very physical tool used for doing a real job. If you don’t have any nails to hit, you’re not going to get anything done.

We focus a lot more on production than the average developer. It’s our job to make sure whatever devs build is run quickly, efficiently, safely, and scalably.

You will work with a lot of kubernetes, Argo, terraform, Prometheus, grafana. You’ll design build pipelines and software rollout strategies. You plan for zero downtime migrations and upgrades, database maintenance… You’ll have your hands in everything from capacity planning to security to cost optimization to developer support… User permissions, infrastructure, networking, observability… You will write RFCs and setup POCs for new tools. You define and track error budgets and figure out how to keep your org under those projections. When there is an outage you will be involved in writing post mortems.

The days are so varied and unpredictable that it keeps things interesting. The landscape changes so often you’re never really stuck doing the same thing over and over.

I genuinely love it.

EDIT: The SRE Podcast from Google is actually really great for learning about this world. The first season talks about what you’ll be doing and why (based around the SRE O’Riley book). The second season talks about what to expect in different stages of your career progression.

Don’t program (as much). Point yourself towards DevOps, SRE, and/or Platform Engineering. You’ll be designing complex systems and will have your hands in dozens of different tech stacks.

Sometimes I think a straight dev job would be interesting but I legitimately love the SRE space.

I don’t drink coffee at all but I do live outside of the US. I have noticed that in MANY places in the world, instant coffee is the norm. It’s not normal to see coffee beans in the grocery store at all really where I am now. I would have to go to a more upscale place or to a specialty spot to find whole or ground coffee.

Not scrolling through all the comments to see if someone mentioned this yet or not but every December I check what is on the best albums of the year lists… Generally I check per-genre that I’m into. Like best black metal of 2023, best jazz of 2023, etc etc…

Other than that, bandcamp and YouTube are the biggest. I honestly buy more on bandcamp these days than I torrent though. It’s such a great site.

An RFC that essentially boiled down to saying, in excruciating detail, that I am qualified for the job I was hired for and that I can be trusted not to break the website.

It’s completely overkill for pretty much everyone but I have been thinking about building a kubernetes native client for months now.

Like the torrent should be treated as a normal resource with a Torrent CRD. It should be scheduled onto whichever node has available capacity and rescheduled onto a different node if it goes down. If allowed by the tracker, multiple instances could be run. You could set resource limits programmatically, easily configure block storage, build dashboards, export logs/metrics… It would be open ended enough that you could have interfaces built as browser extensions, web ui, mobile app, tui, cli and be unopinionated so much that the method for torrent ingestions could be left up to the used. HTTP request, watch directory, rss client, download manager… You could even do stuff like throw magnet links into a queue… etc, etc…

I keep thinking it would be a great project but I just do not have the spare time to dedicate to it… I imagine it could be used for large scale deployments for something like the Internet archive or whatever.