Amazon has the razer blade 15(2022) for about $2k, marked down from about $4k. Has a 3080ti

Rise against was kind of my introduction to protest rock before I got into my long term love interest prog rock. As a young adult it was powerful to hear songs talk about socioeconomic issues so openly. I still enjoy listening to them and while growing up they inspired me to be a part of activist efforts, especially after learning/reading about Aaron Swartz. I wish the world felt like something that could be changed, but instead it feels like something that changes you. Best you can do is offer a helping hand and be there for those you care about and occasionally offer a helping hand to strangers when you're able to.

Sometimes I listen to them while ironically working for a megacorporation

What are the implications of this?

I have been a network engineer with no degree for many years, but I did have a lot of certs. It'd be nice if there were something similar for programming. But I've never seen anyone care that much about the engineer title. I've always thought it's someone who understands his craft/engine design in and out, but doesn't design it himself. The architect designs it. The tech can perform documented solutions

I don't get a chance to compliment people that often, but I do try to genuinely listen to people.

I worked as a network engineer and got pretty frustrated working with outdated applications that were not user friendly. Once I became a supervisor, a large part of my job became writing and generating reports summarizing events that happened on the network that no one would ever read. I wanted to learn programming to automate the things I hated about my job.

I'm still an engineer, not a developer, but I enjoy writing user focused programs that reduce or eliminate worker frustration. As with many jobs, it's not the networking that's difficult, it's all the other bullshit you have to do.

Also, learning how to parse, model and visualize data can really help you make your point to your management and get your ideas pushed through. Also a great way to earn brownie points with your bosses, as managers tend to love graphs.

Wish I could say it was a passion for me but I really learned out of necessity.

The nice thing in Lemmy is that even when the posts have a lot of comments, you get good engagement. And I haven't come across many of the bad attitudes from reddit

Bro me too LMAO. I've posted a few thoughtful, well thought out comments to bring some perspective to a conversation... No replies, no comments, nothing. I was beginning to think Lemmy was dead

Mixed feelings here, what is an "inner child?" Feelings of exercising creativity and spontnuity don't have to be "compartmentalized"... Just work that into your adult life. only thing that is different otherwise is obviously responsibility, that will never go away. You might have to answer to your wife as to why you chose to spend a whole Saturday watching cartoons, but as long as you make your needs known, that shouldn't be an issue as well.

I'm sensing you have problems communicating your desires(ideas, inspirations, etc) ... other than that, you might be feeling nostalgia. But nostalgia is mostly ignorance. It felt like good times at times because I was ignorant to how my parents struggled.

That's great. That's basically the route I'm looking to take, though my background is mostly with networking, so I have some catching up to do in sysadmin skills. Thanks for your insight! I'll give you a follow (idk if that exists in the fediverse lol) and maybe follow up with you later. It's great you're willing to be a resource for the aspiring engineers. That's the kind of spirit I try to embody.

RIP Aaron Swartz.

Dang, I thought it was easier to break into programming. Did you have any formal education? I totally felt that, I had to climb through the ranks one painful step at a time.

Yeah, in my case, the decision to hire me had been made, but HR would of course onboard me. I got kind of blindsided as the person who asked me wasn't the person who would be making the decision, she was basically a proxy. I asked what the range was and I got some generic "it depends".... I checked most of the boxes for skills but I don't have a degree and for some reason that's off-putting to large companies. Anyways yeah it didn't feel right to be pushy so early

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT86J7mpN/

That was basically how the meeting went lol

That's great, can you elaborate what you mean by ops>devops? Do you support infrastructure or applications? I know devops is kind of a catch-all term now for automation, did you work on understanding cloud deployments from the POV of the servers/application or from infra?

I only ask because some of what I do is considered "devops" in the sense that I'm working on network automation, but a lot of times when I hear people discuss devops they're talking about supporting applications

I think you're right. Despite my bandwagon fandom, I Believe Go is more appropriate for my needs. I think a compiled language with more intuitive parallelism is what I need

Thank you, great response. Based on your opinion and another, I believe I will focus on learning Go. I mostly need the benefits of compiled languages in order to easily distribute, as well as easier parallelism, as I've always found that to be a pain in the ass with Python. Not sure if Threading, Concurrency, or Asyncio are the "best" way to handle threading of non CPU intensive tasks, such as sending a request and waiting for a response. But I know that it seems since Python has taken so long to attempt to allow easier bypassing of the GIL, you get a lot of decent ways of doing something, but no great ways.

wow, great response. thank you. I'll give it a shot!

To be fair, most of the work that you have to do in a NOC is total bullshit. About 30% of the time you will be working on technical issues, and for most other people in the NOC, that would mean escalating the technical issues to me. Unfortunately, I had to earn the stripes, which means I had to work harder than everyone else, which meant doing their work as well as handling all escalations. Eventually, I was promoted to a supervisor for my efforts, but I did not want to be in a managerial role.

The real bulk of NOC work that is tiresome is the amount of alarms that are unnecessary. Managing SNMP is a nightmare, and configuring it properly involves a deep level of engineering knowledge. You can either tune the alarm board to only show certain alarms(which means parsing through many alarms to find out what is necessary and what isn't), or you make sure that devices that are onboarded are configured locally for what SNMP traps they will alert for. Typically, the devices' SNMP settings are not configured, so all alarms get sent to the SNMP server, and the SNMP server was never tuned to know which alarms it should show or it shouldn't, so there are alarms which don't really "mean anything" and alarms that "could potentially mean something if it's correlated with this other alarm," but most of the work is sifting through so much shit, to then have to troubleshoot a network issue for a network that was never documented in the first place.

I work in networking, a job that traditionally has been managed by a terminal and vendor-specific syntax. I used to hate the thought of automation when I was younger, why would something as important as networking be automated? I've made my career on being the clutch guy, troubleshooting complex problems, I love the art of understanding every cog in the machine and being able to visualize it. Then I started learning Python, and learning it was extremely difficult for me. It felt like an eternity between the time I poured myself into learning Python until the time I could actually make things people would want to use.

I was a supervisor working in a NOC. A NOC that had many beaurocratic requirements which got in the way of break/fix operational support, such as having to manually write an email to every customer that had an alarm, and calling every point of contact for that customer, as well as notifying the field techs of outages in their areas, and managing real operational issues. So many times I had to let real work slip through my hands because there were so many calls, so many cases, so many things to do.

Like most NOCs, we viewed alarms from SNMP. When something failed to ping, it would generate a loss of comms alarm. I had this idea to automatically notify the field tech for the specified area when a customer site was downed for more than 30 minutes, and that was a very complex thing to do, it required that I clean a lot of data... I spent days converting things like date strings into proper formatting. Once I presented it, I was told that we couldn't do this, because some political agreement made it to where the NOC was required to provide "positive contact" to other groups. I wrote it, tested it as proof of concept, specd out costs(MRC for the API I was using to send text messages was extremely cheap, it would cost the company about 6 dollars per month). Just like that, it was dead.

My director then wanted me to do something similar for our phone systems. Since our queue depended on user agent availability(your presence status), my boss wanted me to write a program to notify him if someone was unavailable for too long and the reason why. Yes, he wanted to know if someone took more than a few minutes to take a shit or get coffee.

That's when I learned, boomers only care about micro management, not efficiency.