Thank you, that’s an excellent read! This reminds me of the “expected value of perfect information” - sometimes it is worthwhile to answer a question, and sometimes it isn’t. Every once in a while I find myself in an engineering call discussing a minor problem, and I run the numbers to see if the change we are discussing is even worth talking about. One time the combined salaries of the people on the call had already outpaced the cost savings of the change over the next 10 years. We quickly stopped that discussion lol

I love grammars. It’s like an API or a data schema, but for a language. This would be very cool and I would love to see it!

I recently picked up a pipe. It has all the rituals and escapism of a cigar, without the hour-long commitment.

That being said, sometimes being”occupied” for an hour is part of the appeal. Each has their place ime.

Is American Pragmatism a thing? If you explain it to me, will I feel better about myself?

Devops is a meaningful term

You’re out here solving impossible problems. You’re “The Fixer” from Pulp Fiction. Fools look at story points. Pros see an unsolvable story that languished for years until you came along and defeated it. A single point for you is an entire epic to other teams.

Everything is a differentiator that can be spun to your advantage. The points aren’t accurate, and you’re the only one with enough guts to step up to the plate and finally work these neglected tickets; even if it won’t “look good” on some “dashboard” - that’s not what’s important; you’re here to help the organization succeed.

If the system doesn’t make you look good, you have to make yourself look good. If you weren’t putting in the effort, it would be hard - but as you say, everyone who takes a deeper look clearly sees the odds stacked against you, and how hard you’re working / the progress you’re making; despite those odds.

Don’t let some metrics dashboard decide your worth, king!

I’m very flaky here, as rust is the big one, but I think zig and/or nim might be

Indeed, and good points. How many users do you have? I assume this isn’t just for you, and setting up multiple nfs shares with tailscale access policies isn’t feasible. SMB might be the best play. I’ll have to refresh my memory on file sharing protocols

NFS for storage, tailscale / wireguard for access control?

Put http://0.0.0.0:11473

Your current setting is the “loopback” address. You’re listening for traffic to this address, and the only thing that can send to the loopback is yourself. This is a safe default, it means only the computer running the software can talk to it. Generally 0.0.0.0 listens on all available addresses. If that doesn’t work, use your local / internal ip.

This ui smells like it’s trying to hide the implementation details, but that makes things extremely difficult when troubleshooting

I’m skeptical of certs, they don’t represent much more than a shallow baseline of knowledge and a minimum initiative to go get them. That being said, they’re much better than nothing.

Imo understanding networking fundamentals is huge. If you google “overthewire banditlabs”, there’s a series of challenges that test / teach you important skills.

Personally, I would rather see banditlabs over a cert, a cert over nothing, and tbh enthusiasm / teachability over everything.

Absolutely - self-hosting something like that is in and of itself a project!

I wouldn’t worry about discoverability - you want to hunt for the job you want, not necessarily wait to be discovered. Once you have a position in your sights, you get to point at your site / projects / git host via everything - your cover letter, resume, business cards, etc.

Having a blog is fantastic. You get to showcase your interests and skills in whatever areas you want, and a good combination of technical capability and enthusiasm will get you in most doors easily.

Linkdin is effectively a personal website generator with social features. Your profile page is the important part, but only if you’re optimizing for “searchability” / random discovery. If you’re doing that, then you’re competing with everyone else who is also doing that.

A personal website is fine; better even. It’s a project all on its own, and you can do cool stuff with it. Show off your projects on it. You can host your code on any platform that supports git, but you’ll get bonus points for using a self-hosted instance.

I have a linkdin account only to reserve my name and link to my website.

How do you feel about cybersecurity? It’s a much larger field than it appears on the surface, and to my recollection the unemployment rate has never been positive - we have always had more jobs than people.

Vscode already supports linting yaml against a schema file. Once you start configuring your code with configuration-as-code, you’re just writing more code.

If I need to “generate” some insane config with miles of boilerplate, I would use js to build my json, which can be ported to just about anything. This would replace js in that process.

I’m not sold on the need for this.

Even with something like k8s, I’d reach for pulumi before I put another layer on top of yaml.

You can reduce doorknob turning dramatically by running on a non-standard port.

Scanners love 80 and 443, and they really love 20, but not so much 4263.

I used to run a landing page on my domain with buttons to either the request system / jellyfin viva la reverse proxy. If you’re paranoid about it, tie nginx to a waf. If you’re extra paranoid, you’ll need some kind of vpn / ip allow-listing

That looks promising. Just keep in mind that this will take a very long time to run. I believe there is a *arr out there that can manage this / show progress, but the name escapes me

Other comments here do a great job pointing to DH key exchange; I’d like to try explaining it with the paint analogy.

You and Youtube need to agree on a “color of paint” (encryption key) without ever sending it over the network.

You and Youtube agree on a common “yellow” in the clear, and you each pick a secret color. Youtube mixes yellow and their secret and sends it to you. This is okay, because un-mixing paint (factoring large prime numbers) is really hard. You add your secret to the mixture, and now you have yellow+Youtube’s secret+your secret.

You mix yellow and your secret and send it to youtube. Youtube adds their secret; now they’ve got yellow+Youtube’s secret+your secret. You both have the final color!

An eavesdropper can’t reconstruct this - everything sent over the network had yellow mixed in, and un-mixing paint can be really hard. Maybe you can guess that green minus yellow is probably blue, but you can’t get close enough to decrypt anything. And what if it’s brown? Is that blue + orange, or is it red + green?

Cryptographers have worked very hard to make the communications secure. I would be more worried about the other end ratting you out - using a relay / proxy / vpn that you trust is a good idea :)

Are you telling me that pop tarts are not in fact ravioli?

I use a very simple “hashing” algorithm that I can do mentally. If I want to log into a service, I “hash” its name, and that’s my password.

Every service I use has a different password, and I don’t have to remember any of them. I have no keyvault that can be stolen.

MFA is still an issue. You’ll need your recovery codes to be accessible, but encrypted.