--- HTTP/3 is coming! And it won't use TCP! ---

A recent announcement reveals that HTTP - the protocol used by browsers to communicate with web servers - will get a major change in version 3!

Before, the HTTP protocols (version 1.0, 1.1 and 2.2) were all layered on top of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol).
TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of data over an IP network.
It can handle hardware failures, timeouts, etc. and makes sure the data is received in the order it was transmitted in.
Also you can easily detect if any corruption during transmission has occurred.
All these features are necessary for a protocol such as HTTP, but TCP wasn't originally designed for HTTP!
It's a "one-size-fits-all" solution, suitable for *any* application that needs this kind of reliability.
TCP does a lot of round trips between the client and the server to make sure everybody receives their data. Especially if you're using SSL. This results in a high network latency.
So if we had a protocol which is basically designed for HTTP, it could help a lot at fixing all these problems.
This is the idea behind "QUIC", an experimental network protocol, originally created by Google, using UDP.

Now we all know how unreliable UDP is: You don't know if the data you sent was received nor does the receiver know if there is anything missing. Also, data is unordered, so if anything takes longer to send, it will most likely mix up with the other pieces of data. The only good part of UDP is its simplicity.
So why use this crappy thing for such an important protocol as HTTP?
Well, QUIC fixes all these problems UDP has, and provides the reliability of TCP but without introducing lots of round trips and a high latency! (How cool is that?)

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working (or is still working) on a standardized version of QUIC, although it's very different from Google's original proposal.
The IETF also wants to create a version of HTTP that uses QUIC, previously referred to as HTTP-over-QUIC. HTTP-over-QUIC isn't, however, HTTP/2 over QUIC.
It's a new, updated version of HTTP built for QUIC.

Now, the chairman of both the HTTP working group and the QUIC working group for IETF, Mark Nottingham, wanted to rename HTTP-over-QUIC to HTTP/3, and it seems like his proposal got accepted!
So version 3 of HTTP will have QUIC as an essential, integral feature, and we can expect that it no longer uses TCP as its network protocol.

We will see how it turns out in the end, but I'm sure we will have to wait a couple more years for HTTP/3, when it has been thoroughly tested and integrated.

Thank you for reading!

I really enjoy my job engineering high-traffic sites for a large adult network!
Watching pornsites @office every day (probably getting fired if I DON'T) and see the customers spending $$$ like crazy :)

The stupid stories of how I was able to break my schools network just to get better internet, as well as more ridiculous fun. XD

1st year:
It was my freshman year in college. The internet sucked really, really, really badly! Too many people were clearly using it. I had to find another way to remedy this. Upon some further research through Google I found out that one can in fact turn their computer into a router. Now what’s interesting about this network is that it only works with computers by downloading the necessary software that this network provides for you. Some weird software that actually looks through your computer and makes sure it’s ok to be added to the network. Unfortunately, routers can’t download and install that software, thus no internet… but a PC that can be changed into a router itself is a different story. I found that I can download the software check the PC and then turn on my Router feature. Viola, personal fast internet connected directly into the wall. No more sharing a single shitty router!

2nd year:
This was about the year when bitcoin mining was becoming a thing, and everyone was in on it. My shitty computer couldn’t possibly pull off mining for bitcoins. I needed something faster. How I found out that I could use my schools servers was merely an accident.
I had been installing the software on every possible PC I owned, but alas all my PC’s were just not fast enough. I decided to try it on the RDS server. It worked; the command window was pumping out coins! What I came to find out was that the RDS server had 36 cores. This thing was a beast! And it made sense that it could actually pull off mining for bitcoins. A couple nights later I signed in remotely to the RDS server. I created a macro that would continuously move my mouse around in the Remote desktop screen to keep my session alive at all times, and then I’d start my bitcoin mining operation. The following morning I wake up and my session was gone. How sad I thought. I quickly try to remote back in to see what I had collected. “Error, could not connect”. Weird… this usually never happens, maybe I did the remoting wrong. I went to my schools website to do some research on my remoting problem. It was down. In fact, everything was down… I come to find out that I had accidentally shut down the schools network because of my mining operation. I wasn’t found out, but I haven’t done any mining since then.

3rd year:
As an engineering student I found out that all engineering students get access to the school’s VPN. Cool, it is technically used to get around some wonky issues with remoting into the RDS servers. What I come to find out, after messing around with it frequently, is that I can actually use the VPN against the screwed up security on the network. Remember, how I told you that a program has to be downloaded and then one can be accepted into the network? Well, I was able to bypass all of that, simply by using the school’s VPN against itself… How dense does one have to be to not have patched that one?

4th year:
It was another programming day, and I needed access to my phones memory. Using some specially made apps I could easily connect to my phone from my computer and continue my work. But what I found out was that I could in fact travel around in the network. I discovered that I can, in fact, access my phone through the network from anywhere. What resulted was the discovery that the network scales the entirety of the school. I discovered that if I left my phone down in the engineering building and then went north to the biology building, I could still continue to access it. This seems like a very fatal flaw. My idea is to hook up a webcam to a robot and remotely controlling it from the RDS servers and having this little robot go to my classes for me.

What crazy shit have you done at your University?

Got laid off on Friday because of a workforce reduction. When I was in the office with my boss, someone went into my cubicle and confiscated my laptop. My badge was immediately revoked as was my access to network resources such as email and file storage. I then had to pack up my cubicle, which filled up the entire bed of my pickup truck, with a chaperone from Human Resources looking suspiciously over my shoulder the whole time. They promised to get me a thumb drive of my personal data. This all happens before the Holidays are over. I feel like I was speed-raped by the Flash and am only just now starting to feel less sick to the stomach. I wanted to stay with this company for the long haul, but I guess in the software engineering world, there is no such thing as job security and things are constantly shifting. Anyone have stories/tips to make me feel better? Perhaps how you have gotten through it? 😔😑😐

Here are the reasons why I don't like IPv6.

Now I'll be honest, I hate IPv6 with all my heart. So I'm not supporting it until inevitably it becomes the de facto standard of the internet. In home networks on the other hand.. huehue...

The main reason why I hate it is because it looks in every way overengineered. Or rather, poorly engineered. IPv4 has 32 bits worth, which translates to about 4 billion addresses. IPv6 on the other hand has 128 bits worth of addresses.. which translates to.. some obscenely huge number that I don't even want to start translating.

That's the problem. It's too big. Anyone who's worked on the internet for any amount of time knows that the internet on this planet will likely not exceed an amount of machines equal to about 1 or 2 extra bits (8.5B and 17.1B respectively). Now of course 33 or 34 bits in total is unwieldy, it doesn't go well with electronics. From 32 you essentially have to go up to 64 straight away. That's why 64-bit processors are.. well, 64 bits. The memory grew larger than the 4GB that a 32-bit processor could support, so that's what happened.

The internet could've grown that way too. Heck it probably could've become 64 bits in total of which 34 are assigned to the internet and the remaining bits are for whatever purposes large IP consumers would like to use the remainder for.

Whoever designed IPv6 however.. nope! Let's give everyone a /64 range, and give them quite literally an IP pool far, FAR larger than the entire current internet. What's the fucking point!?

The IPv6 standard is far larger than it should've been. It should've been 64 bits instead of 128, and it should've been separated differently. What were they thinking? A bazillion colonized planets' internetworks that would join the main internet as well? Yeah that's clearly something that the internet will develop into. The internet which is effectively just a big network that everyone leases and controls a little bit of. Just like a home network but scaled up. Imagine or even just look at the engineering challenges that interplanetary communications present. That is not going to be feasible for connecting multiple planets' internets. You can engineer however you want but you can't engineer around the hard limit of light speed. Besides, are our satellites internet-connected? Well yes but try using one. And those whizz only a couple of km above sea level. The latency involved makes it barely usable. Imagine communicating to the ISS, the moon or Mars. That is not going to happen at an internet scale. Not even close. And those are only the closest celestial objects out there.

So why was IPv6 engineered with hundreds of years of development and likely at least a stage 4 civilization in mind? No idea. Future-proofing or poor engineering? I honestly don't know. But as a stage 0 or maybe stage 1 person, I don't think that I or civilization for that matter is ready for a 128-bit internet. And we aren't even close to needing so many bits.

Going back to 64-bit processors and memory. We've passed 32 bit address width about a decade ago. But even now, we're only at about twice that size on average. We're not even close to saturating 64-bit address width, and that will likely take at least a few hundred years as well. I'd say that's more than sufficient. The internet should've really become a 64-bit internet too.

So, a rather unfortunate bug on the Minecraft website.

Minecraft allows you to change your name every 30 days. I was reverse engineering their API so I could use it personally.

On the username change form there are two fields: your desired username, and your password.

To protect myself from actually changing my name, I purposefully put in password123 so that it would fail. Then, I clicked "Change name" to monitor the network traffic.

Well that's when two unfortunate things combined.

#1: I used my last name to test. It's a unique word that is relatively short and very easy for me to type out of habit.

#2: That password field doesn't actually get validated.

So imagine my shock when I clicked "change username" and it WORKED.

And now my username is doxxing me for at least 30 days + the permanent name history

FUCK me

A lot of engineering fads go in circle.

Architecture in the 80s: Mainframe and clients.

Architecture in the 90s: Software systems connected by an ESB.

Architecture in the 2000s: Big central service and everyone connects to it for everything

Architecture in the 2010s: Decentralized microservices that communicate with queues.

Current: RabbitMQ and Kafka.

... Can't we just go back to the 90s?

I hate fads.
I hate when I have to get some data, and it's scattered on 20 different servers, and to load a fucking account page, a convoluted network of 40 apps have to be activated, some in PHP, others in JS, others on Java, that are developed by different teams, connected to different tiny ass DBs, all on huge clusters of tiny ass virtual machines that get 30% load at peak hours, 90% of which comes from serializing and parsing messages. 40 people maintaining this nightmare, that could've been just 7 people making a small monolithic system that easily handles this workload on a 4-core server with 32GB of RAM.
Tripple it, put it behind a load balancer, proper DB replication (use fucking CockroachDB if you really want survivability), and you've got zero downtime at a fraction of the cost.

Just because something's cool now, doesn't mean that everybody has to blindly follow it for fucks sake!

Same rant goes for functional vs OOP and all that crap. Going blindly with any of these is just a stupid fad, and the main reason why companies need refactoring of legacy code.

Tldr: I just FAILED AN EXAM because of my uni's SHITTIEST SERVERS EVER. YEAR AFTER YEAR THE EXACT SAME SHIT HAPPENS, THEIR SERVERS OR NETWORK FAIL HARD AND STUDENTS FAIL EXAMS BECAUSE OF IT, AND THEY NEVER FIX IT.
FUCK

In the middle of a 3h exam at uni, using Matlab through virtualdesktop, when suddenly it stops working entirely. Trying to restart it, no go. A few other people are having the same issue as well.
After 20 minutes of waiting, one IT tech shows up saying people in other labs are having the same issue, big problems.
Ended up wasting nearly an hour waiting for shit to work again - which it did, but only when the extra time they had given us ran out.
Desperately tried to salvage what I could of my exam, but I don't think I did enough to pass.

This is not the first time it happens. Exam after exam, shit like this keeps happening over and over again, and every time some students get fucked in the ass and have to take the exam again - the next semester.

This is supposed to be one of the top universities in the country, and top 20 engineering schools in the world.
FUCK THIS SHIT

What you are expected to learn in 3 years:

power electronics,
analogue signal,
digital signal processing,
VDHL development,
VLSI debelopment,
antenna design,
optical communication,
networking,
digital storage,
electromagnetic,
ARM ISA,
x86 ISA,
signal and control system,
robotics,
computer vision,
NLP, data algorithm,
Java, C++, Python,
javascript frameworks,
ASP.NET web development,
cloud computing,
computer security ,
Information coding,
ethical hacking,
statistics,
machine learning,
data mining,
data analysis,
cloud computing,
Matlab,
Android app development,
IOS app development,
Computer architecture,
Computer network,
discrete structure,
3D game development,
operating system,
introduction to DevOps,
how-to -fix- computer,
system administration,
Project of being entrepreneur,

and 24 random unrelated subjects of your choices

This is a major called "computer engineering"

I have a server. I want to filter connections to that server so only people on my work network can access the server. A quick search yielded my public IP address.

"Is this static?" I asked IT. "Do we have static IP address?"

"What do you mean? What do you need that for? You better know EXACTLY what you are doing before we release that information to you!!!! This needs to go to my manager. My manager is demanding to know why you want that information - we are having Network Engineering look into this request, someone will be in touch to find out more."

I have now been waiting for 3 hours. I think I will just go ahead and assume my IP is not going to change...

Unnamed hacking game - "terminal" graphics
-Multiplayer. Last man standing.
-Like a tower-defence game but technical
You work for a company that has outsourced their technical department to Bykazistan, a country with good internet and bad laws. On one hand, labor is very cheap! There are no pesky laws protecting workers, so you don't need to pay them what they're worth. Phew. However, there are also no laws against cyber crime. But for a start-up like you, the risk is worth the reward!
...which would be great! If you were the only company with that idea. As it turns out, you aren't. All of your competitors also recently outsourced to Bykazistan, and that could be an issue.
You would be afraid, but you are a hardened businessman. You are familiar with the cut-throat nature of the business world and where others see risk, you see opportunity. Let the games begin.
Your mission is to protect your ciritical assets at all costs, eliminate your opponents, and make ciritical financial decisions - all while maintaining your uptime!
Build a botnet and attack your competition to decrease their uptime and disable their attacks. Port scan your opponents to learn more about their network, but beware of honeypots! Initiate devastating social engineering attacks - and train your employees against them! Brute-force their credentials, and strengthen your own.
Make sure to keep your software patched...

I’m hired as pizza making burger flipper for $12/hr since I have no formal schooling and then I am walked out back to the utility room to do what cooks REALLY DO... Secret network engineering and admin... Never fails... They always find out and I always end up replacing whatever company or person they used for tech/admin work.

Time to at least get some Oracle certs and a nano degree!

In my current company (200+ employees) we have 3 guys who deals with everything related to service desk (format computers, fix network issues, help non-tech people...)

The same team is responsible for the AWS accounts and permissions, Jenkins, self hosted Gitlab... anyway, DevOps stuff.

Thing is: only one of them have enough DevOps background to handle the requests from the engineering team (~15 people). Also, he usually do anything "by hand" clicking trough the AWS interface on each account, never using tools like Infrastructure as Code to help (that's why I started to refer to his role only as Ops, because there's no Dev being done there).

Anyway... I asked my manager why that team is responsible for both jobs, despite the engineering guys having far more experience with those tools. He answered with a shamed smile, as he probably questioned the same to his manager:

- Because they are responsible for everything related to our Infrastructure.

Does it make sense for anyone? Am I missing something here? In what universe this kind of organization is a healthy choice?

Devils Advocate moment: A proper PM can assist greatly on projects.

Don't get me wrong, you have all for the most part been faced with the incompetence of glorified quasi manager positions. But a proper PM can be a gift really.

I absolutely despise generalizations, I do get that percentages matter, but shitting on professions when the realm of possibilities have yet to be touched to the full extend of capabilities seems like child's play really.

remember, y'all think you are all God's gift to the world through coding experience, but a solid network engineer might have as much gripes about developers as y'all do about managers, project managers, sys admins etc, and the same shit can be applied vice versa.

Software engineering is magic, in the sense of the tv show "The Magicians" where you can make an incantation and suddenly your penis/tiddys explode: inexact science.

Be a tad bit open minded, learn enough about their shit to tell them that they are fucktards, and run from the ones that know but don't fix shit.

Peace pendejos

Storytime!

(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)

TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.

My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.

I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )

At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.

However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.

The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.

At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...

What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).

I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:

1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.

2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.

They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)

I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.

The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.

But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.

In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.

Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.

Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.

This was originally a reply to a rant about the excessive complexity of webdev.

The complexity in webdev is mostly necessary to deal with Javascript and the browser APIs, coupled with the general difficulty of the task at hand, namely to let the user interact with amounts of data far beyond network capacity. The solution isn't to reject progress but to pick your libraries wisely and manage your complexity with tools like type safe languages, unit tests and good architecture.

When webdev was simple, it was normal to have the user redownload the whole page everytime you wanted to change something. It was also normal to have the server query the database everytime a new user requested the same page even though nothing could have changed. It was an inefficient sloppy mess that only passed because we had nothing better and because most webpages were built by amateurs.

Today webpages are built like actual programs, with executables downloaded from a static file server and variable data obtained through an API that's preferably stateless by design and has a clever stateful cache. Client side caches are programmable and invalidations can be delivered through any of three widely supported server-client message protocols. It's not to look smart, it's engineering. Although 5G gets a lot of media coverage, most mobile traffic still flows through slow and expensive connections to devices with tiny batteries, and the only reason our ever increasing traffic doesn't break everything is the insanely sophisticated infrastructure we designed to make things as efficient as humanly possible.

I continue to internally read and study about Smalltalk in an effort to see where we might have FUCKED UP and went backwards in terms of software engineering since I do not believe that complex source code based languages are the solution.

So I have Pharo. Nothin to complex really, everything is an object, yet, you do have room for building DSL's inside of it over a simple object model with no issue, the system browser can be opened across multiple screens (morph windows inside of a smalltalk system) for which you can edit you code in composable blocks with no issues. Blocks being a particular part of the language (think Ruby in more modern features) give ample room for functional programming. Thus far we have FP and OO (the original mind you) styles out in the open for development.

Your main code can be executed and instantly ALTER the live environment of a program as it is running, if what you are trying to do is stupid it won't affect the live instance, live programming is ahead of its time, and impressive, considering how old Smalltalk is. GUI applications can be given headless (this is also old in terms of how this shit was first distributed) So I can go ahead and package the virtual machine with the entire application into a folder, and distribute it agains't an organization "but why!!!! that package is 80+ mbs!") yeah cuz it carries the entire virtual machine, but go ahead and give it to the Mac user, or the Linux user, it will run, natively once it is clicked.

Server side applications run in similar fashion to php, in terms of lifecycles of request and how session storage is handled, this to me is interesting, no additional runtimes, drop it on a server, configure it properly and off you go, but this is common on other languages so really not that much of a point.

BUT if over a network a user is using your application and you change it and send that change over the network then the the change is damn near instant and fault tolerant due to the nature of the language.

Honestly, I don't know what went wrong or why we are not bringing this shit to the masses, the language was built for fucking kids, it was the first "y'all too stupid to get it, so here is simple" engine and we still said "nah fuck it, unlimited file system based programs, horrible build engines and {}; all over the place"

I am now writing a large budget managing application in Pharo Smalltalk which I want to go ahead and put to test soon at my institution. I do not have any issues thus far, other than my documentation help is literally "read the source code of the package system" which is easy as shit since it is already included inside. My scripts are small, my class hierarchies cover on themselves AND testing is part of the system. I honestly see no faults other than "well....fuck you I like opening vim and editing 300000000 files"

And honestly that is fine, my questions are: why is a paradigm that fits procedural, functional and OBVIOUSLY OO while including an all encompassing IDE NOT more famous, SELECTION is fine and other languages are a better fit, but why is such environment not more famous?

Yay! My Unifi stuff arrived today.
Time to do some Network engineering 😁

This is what I’ve got on LinkedIn today People are getting creative, not sure how to respond to that. I am curious to see what this scam is all about 🤷‍♂️

Dear PappyHans,

I hope this email finds you well and safe. My name is **** and I work for ******, a leading expert network company based in New York. I am currently working with a client who is conducting a project and needs expertise on Digital Engineering - ***** .

After some research I did regarding the topic, I concluded that you would be a great fit for this project, given your experience.

Please, let me know if you would be willing to share your expertise on this subject through a paid phone consultation. For your input and time, you will be compensated with a fee that you can set yourself. As a reference – the average rate of our consultations is around 400$/hour.

It is essential to note that in no way will you be asked to discuss your current employer nor any kind of confidential information during the phone consultation.

Should you be interested in this subject, I would be more than happy to address any questions regarding the topic on LinkedIn or by phone

Kind Regards
(Sender name)

I'm studying a mix of computer science and engineering. This semester we were tasked with hacking a "smart-production"-production-machine.... And OMFG it's shit!

This is a product by a major company and it's version 4... How the fuck is it this bad?
Like, using the same 5-letter password on all the PLC's FOR THE ROOT USER!!! WTF!!! AND open, unencrypted Telnet.....
This is a million dollar machine and, as soon as a hacker is on the same network it is done for! wtf.... I just can't believe how easy it was to get in and reek havoc.

So my first rant is about my current job. I got out of college after a year doing basic research on a SBIR/NASA grant. Nothing too interesting but great entry-level experience on sub-sustenance wages based on the cost of living in 1971.. And finally got that great offer to work with an IoT company for a living wage, with a chance to really flex my hard earned skills, and maybe even the ability to afford medical insurance while paying my rent on time!

They said 'network & software engineering', but my only projects are graphic design for sales copy with a guy who thinks FourSquare is a website hosting service.
They said 'full time', but in reality it isn't.
They said $50k a year, but apparently their mouths wrote a check that they don't have bank to cash.
The guy who approves my projects is taking a vacation because of the coronavirus panic and now I won't get paid for a week.
They seem like nice folks, but also a bit irresponsible and it looks like I fell for a bait-and-switch.
Now I'm trying to find a way of spinning off this experience into something that doesn't look like a lame free-lance graphic design gig while looking for better paying work.

if (!ethical) { alert("fml"); }

Hi fellow devranters,
Just started working for a small engineering company ~10 employees. They have a single guy that have done most og the development work and version control management. Turns out everything was stored om his personal harddrive with a backup on an USB drive. I'm doing the "dirty work" on porting the version control to a network drive. Not ideal, but the boss was insisting on doing it this way. Have anybody encountered anything like this?

as a seasoned systems eng myself, i had huge mental block of "i am not a programmer" whining when starting to incorperate agile/infrastructure as code for more seasoned syseng staff.

leadership made devops a role and not a practice so lots of growing pains. was finally able to win them over by asking them to look at how many 'scripts' and 'tools' they wrote to make life easier... and how much simpler and sustainable using puppet/ansible/chef/salt... and checking in all our sacred bin files and only approved 'scripts' would be pushed thru automation tool after post review.

we still are not programmers or developers, but using specific practices and source control took some time but saving us loads of time and gives us ability to actually do engineering

but just have 2 groups of younger guys that grew up wanting to be the bofh/crumudgen get off my systems types that are like not even 30... frustrating as they are the ones that should be more familiar with the shift from strictly ops to some overlap. and the devs that ask for root now that they can launch instances on aws or can launch docker containers and microservice..... ugggg. these 2 groups have never had to rack and stack servers, network gear, storage... just all magic to them because they can start 50 servers with a button click.

try to get past the iam roles, acls, facls, selinux and noshell i have been pushing. bitches.

Is there anyone out there that has experience with reactor network solvers in C++ I could ask some stuff? I hope I'm "Dev" enough to be here, even if I'm a chemical engineering student and not a "classical" developer :)

I knew programming was for me, MUCH later in life.

I loved playing with computers growing up but it wasn't until college that I tried programming ... and failed...

At the college I was at the first class you took was a class about C. It was taught by someone who 'just gets it', read from a old dusty book about C, that assumes you already know C... programming concepts and a ton more. It was horrible. He read from the book, then gave you your assignment and off you went.

This was before the age when the internet had a lot of good data available on programming. And it didn't help that I was a terrible student. I wasn't mature enough, I had no attention span.

So I decide programming is not for me and i drop out of school and through some lucky events I went on to make a good career in the tech world in networking. Good income and working with good people and all that.

Then after age 40... I'm at a company who is acquired (approved by the Trump administration ... who said there would be lots of great jobs) and they laid most people off.

I wasn't too sad about the layoffs that we knew were comming, it was a good career but I was tiring on the network / tech support world. If you think tech debt is bad, try working in networking land where every protocols shortcomings are 40+ years in the making and they can't be fixed ... without another layer of 20 year old bad ideas... and there's just no way out.

It was also an area where at most companies even where those staff are valued, eventually they decide you're just 'maintenance'.

I had worked really closely with the developers at this company, and I found they got along with me, and I got along with them to the point that they asked some issues be assigned to me. I could spot patterns in bugs and provide engineering data they wanted (accurate / logical troubleshooting, clear documentation, no guessing, tell them "i don't know" when I really don't ... surprising how few people do that).

We had such a good relationship that the directors in my department couldn't get a hold of engineering resources when they wanted ... but engineering would always answer my "Bro, you're going to want to be ready for this one, here's the details..." calls.

I hadn't seen their code ever (it was closely guarded) ... but I felt like I 'knew' it.

But no matter how valuable I was to the engineering teams I was in support... not engineering and thus I was expendable / our department was seen / treated as a cost center.

So as layoff time drew near I knew I liked working with the engineering team and I wondered what to do and I thought maybe I'd take a shot at programming while I had time at work. I read a bunch on the internet and played with some JavaScript as it was super accessible and ... found a whole community that was a hell of a lot more helpful than in my college years and all sorts of info on the internet.

So I do a bunch of stuff online and I'm enjoying it, but I also want a classroom experience to get questions answered and etc.

Unfortunately, as far as in person options are it felt like me it was:

- Go back to college for years ---- un no I've got fam and kids.

- Bootcamps, who have pretty mixed (i'm being nice) reputations.

So layoff time comes, I was really fortunate to get a good severance so I've got time ... but not go back to college time.

So I sign up for the canned bootcamp at my local university.

I could go on for ages about how everyone who hates boot camps is wrong ... and right about them. But I'll skip that for now and say that ... I actually had a great time.

I (and the handful of capable folks in the class) found that while we weren't great students in the past ... we were suddenly super excited about going to class every day and having someone drop knowledge on us each day was ultra motivating.

After that I picked up my first job and it has been fun since then. I like fixing stuff, I like making it 'better' and easier to use (for me, coworkers, and the customer) and it's fun learning / trying new things all the time.

!rant

Hi fellow DevRanters! I've been studying software engineering for a while now and, while I love programming, I'm starting to think that all I'll be doing as a software engineer now a days is pulling data from a database, sticking it in a nice gui with some buttons and moving on to the next, similar, project. At the same time I am loving linux more and more, I love working with bash and other unix-like tools and I am interested in systems languages like C and Rust. It is for these reasons that I am playing with the idea of switching to Systems and network engineering. What are your thoughts on this? Is Systems and network engineering a field in which I get to program a lot? Will there be more variation in it? Is my view of software engineering completely off? Please share your thoughts and opinions!

Honestly, I'm kinda sick of programming. I would like to work in some other area of systems engineering, like business intelligence or network security, I don't know. Do you guys have any experience on other fields besides programming?