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My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server
I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.
It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.
One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.
Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.
Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.
Then, next week, it happened again.
My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.
(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).
Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.
I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."
My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.
Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.
Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.
My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.
This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...
So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.
So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.
The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.
One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.
The cleaning staff came in.
Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.
Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.
We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.
You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.9 -
A year ago I would have said:
"Because I love solving logic puzzles, there's no greater joy than finding a very simple, elegant translation of a user's requirements into code"
Then 2020 came. I'm SO FUCKING FED UP with coworkers and managers who miss all the required competence to organize and communicate about projects as they are fundamentally incompatible with the concept of working from home.
I'm quite sure I'm the last one to give up at my work.
The company chat has completely died down. I've tried setting up meetings, but even my bosses show up irregularly, confused about why I'm calling them in the middle of their Netflix marathon.
So if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. My answer is now:
"I'm a developer because I get nearly 6 figures, for going through my Steam Library while completely shitfaced at 11AM. When I sober up in the afternoon, I work on some hobby projects. I get to spend 500/m on ordering sandwiches"8 -
You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.
A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.
After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.
I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.
They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.
So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.
From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )
So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )
Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .
Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.
After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.
He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.
They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.
I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.
I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.
They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.
If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.
Have a nice day.5 -
Some words of wisdom passed on by our Scrum.
1. I am responsible for setting boundaries. Work time, sleep time, family time, me time. If I don't set them properly, things WILL get unbalanced very quickly. (And I would add, burnout will follow closely).
2. Being productive isn't about doing more and more in less time. It's about doing only the most important things well, and either saying no to the other things, or finding another way to get them done. (Prioritize!)
3. I can't win (let alone run) a marathon by thinking of it as a 26 mile long sprint, or a week as a five day sprint. (Eat a digital elephant a byte at a time).
4. Loved ones are good judges of when things are in and out of balance.
5. Taking time off is essential. Vacations, yes, but also nights and weekends. (Or you WILL burn out and hate what you do).
Comments in () are mine.1 -
Why does it feel like learning to code requires a building of endurance? Like training for a marathon, you have to build up to bigger and deeper learning sessions. Rewarding and frustrating at the same time.
25 -
It's amazing what two cans of redbull and monster, a well organized to-do list on Wunderlist, 36 hours of nonstop programming and a deadline that's dangerously approaching can do in a sane man.
Now excuse me world but I'll have the longest nap in years starting fro3 -
Might be a loose interpretation of 'vacation', but I was running a marathon using my phone for tunes, when suddenly I got a call from my boss; our application server had died and he had no idea how to restart it. So while running the race I was timing my exhales to give him the step-by-step instructions for reset-to-restart. The good news is that the miles just flew by as he read the logs, and I responded with commands. Suddenly I was at mile 22 and was actually feeling pretty good; didn't finish the race with a PR but was happy with the result and did get the server back up.2
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To me, it seems like the rise of distributed systems like mesos / kubernetes combined with Docker require you to be master sysadmin, veteran kernel hacker and a part time c developer ALL AT ONCE if you really want to shave off time from debugging/ performance tuning sessions. Anyone wish they paid more attention in class ? Lol.
4 -
Don't start crying when you feel programming is not for you. Learning new is always hard. Just "behave" like a Rhino.6
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Hmm..... Do I have time before work tomorrow to watch all 3 matrix movies?
Screw it who cares. Marathon time!!!5 -
Spends 5 days working from home at my desk.... Stressful week...
Spends weekend playing diablo 3 with son at same desk.... Relaxing...
Wife says I need to get out more.... *looks outside* raining...3 -
Whichever learning path you choose, its gotta be a marathon not a sprint. Start off with 30 minutes or an hour every few days. Make it as fun as possible1
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*leaning back in the story chair*
One night, a long time ago, I was playing computer games with my closest friends through the night. We would meet for a whole weekend extended through some holiday to excessively celebrate our collaborative and competitive gaming skills. In other words we would definitely kick our asses all the time. Laughing at each other for every kill we made and game we won. Crying for every kill received and game lost. A great fun that was.
Sleep level through the first 48 hours was around 0 hours. After some fresh air I thought it would be a very good idea to sit down, taking the time to eventually change all my accounts passwords including the password safe master password. Of course I also had to generate a new key file. You can't be too serious about security these days.
One additional 48 hours, including 13 hours of sleep, some good rounds Call of Duty, Counter Strike and Crashday plus an insane Star Wars Marathon in between later...
I woke up. A tiereing but fun weekend was over again. After I got the usual cereals for breakfast I set down to work on one of my theory magic decks. I opened the browser, navigated to the Web page and opened my password manager. I type in the password as usual.
Error: incorrect password.
I retry about 20 times. Each time getting more and more terrified.
WTF? Did I change my password or what?...
Fuck.
Ffuck fuck fuck FUCKK.
I've reset and now forgotten my master password. I completely lost memory of that moment. I'm screwed.
---
Disclaimer: sure it's in my brain, but it's still data right?
I remembered the situation but until today I can't remember which password I set.
Fun fact. I also could not remember the contents of episode 6 by the time we started the movie although I'd seen the movie about 10 - 15 times up to that point. Just brain afk. -
Fastforwarded a bit, I have LOTR marathon to catch later.. 😋
May your bugs diminish, coworkers grow brains & clients calm the fuck down!!
Happy, better & successful 2018 everyone!!
🍦1 -
Been asked to give a lecture to the freshmen at ye olde alma mater.
They are gonna pay for the air ticket, the shuttle to and from campus and a couple nights at a fairly ok hotel.
Feeling like a fucking rockstar.
...
Gave the lecture. Only half those kids spent the whole time on their phones. My old drinking buddy and now a professor at the school said it was more direct attention than one could expect at a music concert.
...
Feeling kinda scared about how young women dress nowadays, but I do am an old indian dude, so what do I know?
Also, since when is lifting weights and running a half-marathon a requirement for a degree in computer sciences? Turing might have been an Olympian, but I'm pretty sure that since the invention of the integrated circuit my people have spent more time in labs than in gyms. That is not true for those kids.
Maybe it's a freshmen thing, and they will age out of that healthy living nonsense. Maybe the real world will crush it under bills and tuition loan repayments.
...
Tried to ask the university for a refund of the hotel and taxi bills that I've paid out of pocket. Two hours in four different queues and two opposite-sode-of-campus buildings. Suddenly remembered the true meaning of the word "Kafkaesque".
...
Remembering the old uni days with some still-in-grad-school / faculty old friends and getting drunk in the old watering holes? Priceless.2 -
Worst interview experience was a marathon. 3 interviews in a day.
I asked the recruiter to assemble them like that after I had to remind her I was still employed and could go about having interviews all week. I took a day off and departed.
The first interview was with a company that had moved fro their previous address. Since the recruiter obviously checked that, I got to the right place late and with little mojo left.
The second interview was with a company that explained to me how they actually did not need my expertise.
The third was with a company that had just won Apple's Best of the Year award:
Me: So how is it having received the award?
Him: Nah, it's just another one. You get used to it.
[A little more interview]
[We wrap things up and stand up to leave]
Him: Well, thanks for stopping by and talking to us. And sorry we had to do this at our ping pong table. You know, the CEO and I are always playing. He says he's the best, but I always beat him.
All of that sprinkled with a very energising bellyache I had to take to the toilet every now and then (no idea what I ate the night before).
After the marathon, I told the recruiter the third company seemed the most promising, although I couldn't see myself working with someone that pretentious, to which she replied "I thought you had very similar personalities and you have a lot in common".
WHAT?! I've never said anything like that my whole life and now you're telling me you know me from the three fucking phone calls we had?
From that moment on, I've moved away from recruiters and towards networking.1 -
I have a lot of fun during crunch time.
It's like running a marathon. It is both physically and mentally taxing, and I get a rush out of seeing how hard I can push myself.
But like a marathon, it suuuuucks if you are not prepared, or you otherwise didn't want to do that.
You hear that bosses?
Crunch is like running a marathon. That thing that people, who prepare for years to do, still causes them to piss and shit themselves while their nipples bleed. And that's when they are fully prepared. That is what you are asking your team to do without any notice ahead of time.
"Ok Derrick, I know you wanted to visit your family in the country this weekend. But we need you to run uphill, fuled only by diet dr pepper and fear of loosing your job, untill you pass out and need an I.V. to keep you from stroking out. '
Otherwise a lot of fun. -
2am: I can just go to bed at 4am and get 4 hours of sleep and be fine
4am: Eh, I'll just sleep at 6am and take a nap before work.
6am: Who the fuck needs sleep? That's why I bought coffee -
I really want 2017 to be a great year...
One thing I do is have a movie marathon ... Last few years I did the Hobbit movies ...
I can't think what to do to start of this year 🤔
I'm already building this site ... For new year's day but I dunno what to watch to get me in the spirit , any suggestions ?5 -
Is sleeping on your desk an actual thing which happen or it is a misconception provided by movies?
I have never slept on my desk no matter how tired I am (I had done a week coding marathon) .I always wrap myself with fluffy blanket when sleeping.10 -
I really want to marathon-watch all of the Star Wars movies in order before The Last Jedi comes out, but I'm putting it off because I'm dreading having to watch The Phantom Menace.3
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... worst drunk coding experience?
none. or to be more precise, all of the three of them I had. I can't code drunk, i hate doing it, i hatw even thinking about doing it when drunk.
so after those initial three attempts i don't try to do it again, ever.
BUT, best coding experience while high?
ALL OF THEM.
some of the best pieces of code I wrote i did when I was high. my mind goes into overdrive at those times, and my thinking is not lines/threads of thought, but TREES of thought, branching and branching, all nodes of each layer of the tree coming to me AT ONCE, one packet == whole layer across all of the branches.
and the best was when one day, in about 14 hour marathon of coding while high, i wrote from scratch a whole vertical slice of my AI system that i've been toying around in my head for several years prior, and I had all of the high-level concepts ALMOST down, but could never specify them into concrete implementations.
and I do mean MY ai system, my own design, from the ground up, mixing principles of neural networks and neuropsychology/human brain that I still haven't seen even mentioned anywhere.
autonomous game ai which percieves and explores its environment and tools within it via code reflection, remembers and learns, uses tools, makes decisions for itself for its own well-being.
in the end, i had a testbed with person, zombie and shotgun.
all they had pre-defined in their brains were concepts of hunger and health. nothing more.
upon launching it, zombie realized it wants to feed, approached oblivious person, and started eating it.
at which point, purely out of how the system worked, person realized: "this hurts, the hurt is caused by zombie, therefore i hate zombie, therefore i want to hurt it", then looked around, saw the shotgun, inspected its class by reflection, realized "this can hurt stuff", picked the shotgun up, and shot the zombie.
remembered all of that, and upon seeing another zombie, shot it immediately.
it was a complete system, all it needed to become full-fledged thing was adding more concepts and usable objects, and it would automatically be able to create complex multi-stage, multi-element plans to achieve its goals/needs/wants and execute them. and the system was designed in such a way that by just adding a dictionary of natural language words for the concept objects on top of it, it should have been able to generate (crude but functional) english sentences to "talk" about its memories, explain what happened when, how it reacted, what it did and why, just by exploring the memory graph the same way as when it was doing its decision process... and by reversing the function, it should have been able to recieve (crude) english sentences that would make it learn what happened somewhere else in the gameworld to someone else, how to use stuff and tell it what to do, as in, actually transfer actual actionable usable knowledge to it...
it felt amazing to code for 14 hours straight, with no testruns during that, run it for the first time after those 14 hours, and see that happen.
and it did, i swear! while i was coding, i was routinely just realizing typos and mistakes i did 5-20 minutes ago, 4 files/classes ago! the kind you (and i) usually notice only when you try to run the thing and it bugs out.
it was a transcendental experience.
and then, two days later, i don't remember anymore what happened, but i lost all of that code.
and since then, i never mustered enough strength and resolve to try and write the whole thing again.
... that was like 4 years ago.
i hope that miracle will happen again one day...3 -
I was trying to watch Captain America civil war, and since I wasn't understanding where half of the character me from I looked for an article explaining them, so I realized I had skipped some movies of the series and around it, now find myself in a Marcel marathon from the 2003 and on. Avengers, x-men, iron man's, captain America's, ant - man. Gotta skip work tomorrow xD1
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!(dev|rant)
TL,DR : I am happy with my life
Order by * random;
I am a human being, living on Earth, in the European continent, in a non-splited family, my wife and my children are wonderful, I can eat all I want, I am healthy, I have enough free time to play with my children do gardening and train for a marathon,
I live in a lovely house,
I have a good education, a lot of video games on my PC (which I made from scratch), my wife starts to play video games and learn about computers,
My dev job is wonderful. My boss is happy with me, I can manage my time as I want, I don't work in an open space, I still learn about dev, frameworks, and stuff, I work with great co-workers,
... All the things listed were my dream when I was young. I feel very lucky to have this life, I am the happiest man in the world.
Be happy with your life. If you can read this post and reply, you are luckier than you think.4 -
I have got ton of great colleagues that I have worked it and consider myself very fortunate that they were hunble and patience enough to deal with me.
Having said that, it would be evident that I have gotten some great advice too. In fact those minor comments here and there made me who I am today (a much better version of my past self).
One advice that I got from my South Korean colleague, who was based in Singapore and used to collaborate with team in Pacific time (US west coast) at odd hours uptil of 12 AM almost everyday.
When I was new, she kept telling me to get enough rest and not burn myself out. In early days I was very excited about the new stuff.
She said, 'Floyd make sure you set yourself up for a marathon and not a sprint.'
Damn! That hit me hard. Not just from a professional stand point, but also from a personal perspective, I realised that I need to slow down, enjoy the details, live those moments, and let shit go.
She is one of my favourites.3 -
Just finished coding/support/putting fires down marathon that lasted 2 weeks.
Basically I launched 2 gaming servers got around 600 online players and had to spend 2 weeks around 12 hours everyday supporting them doing hotfixes and etc. I had no time for life. Ioved the work, debugging, responsibility and making impact. Also made some money.
Now I feel completely drained, sick and tired. I think I hit a burnout. I thought I will enjoy my time off with my gf but I just wanna lie in bed and dont do shit for at least 2-3 days. Extended stress over time did a number on me, I am now a nervous wreck.
How can I bounce back asap after a burnout? I have 2 weeks to rest and will have to launch 2 projects again and deal with christmas/new year bullshit...1 -
I want to rant here but I have a lot of backlog. They’re all pretty deep for refinement. So I want to put them all in one sprint. Because I don’t want a marathon of ranting.
But I do realise in IT sprints never end, and eventually turn out to be a marathon of sprints. I came to a point to deliver over 100 story points in one sprint. Maybe I shall write a book instead of exploding this app.
I could have never imagined the dark side of this occupation.
However I love coding so much I’ll brush the backlog under the carpet😏
But you know there are always saviour heros wanted for refactoring. This honour goes to:
The arrogant guys who think they’re a genius when their code compiles.
The insecure guys who want to overpower the next available when their code doesn’t compile.
The egoists who like to underestimate and show of, where their faulty biased googles display a little girl instead of a developer.
The aggressives when they are invited to the reality and kindly offered to sit back on their place.
I hope this rant wouldn’t ouch anyone. If it does, not sorry, the message is delivered.
If there’s an offence or reaction to this refactoring job, the 4th one would be offered to clean the mess.2 -
What is your favourite track that helps you get in the zone for marathon coding sessions? Mine is Megadeth's She-Wolf on repeat.5
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git commit -m "The test core dumps, I go home" && git push
(OpenSSL is like running a marathon: It's just some month away and you already forgot how much fucking pain it was. Nah, can't have been that bad. Shit, it is.) -
What’s your personal tick for getting that mental laser focus and hyper brain performance for that marathon coding and problem solving session ? ( food, music, supplements, coffee, redbull, some biohack )4
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Dealing with work hangover.
I'm in a state of lull and daze and don't know what to do next.
Y'all got any suggestions?4
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