Honest question. When do you consider yourself a "Big data engineer"?

Today I managed to create a system that collects historical metrics from monitoring tools every 5 minutes and do all sorts of crazy transformations to make them ingestible by grafana Mimir in OTLP protocol. Doing 600gb a dat, millions of active time series, .... And I still feel it's, "small"

Thoughts?

No work today....

Today my cat, my oldest girlfriend, passed away. She chose to be in the sun for her passing. I'm happy she had a good life in the end with all the space she needed. She did not suffer. It was sudden and just a cardiac arrest.

May she hunt many more mice and little birds in the afterlife.

So here I work with this colleague that , at first , had a reasonable résumé. Whatever.

Time goed by and he is just doing tickets, clicking left and right, the usual grind of a shitty monitoring system which I am working intensely on deprecating that shit. Anyhoo

The last few days it became apparent that his resume was basically a hot air cake and he knows basically nothing intrinsically.
As I have stated before in previous rants, "everyone was a noob once"... But this guy...

He wants to do "something with Ansible"... "Ok what do you want to do?" , I asked (and I regret to have asked).
He basically wants to write new files on targets. Easy enough, I show him how he could do it with playbooks, inventory and role just for demonstrating the entire chain.

This guy chanes everything up, thereby breaking host group assignment, he launchea it on ALL machines...

Luckily it's a harmless file, so dodged a bullet there.

But the real wtf ia that he did it with the root account for our systems, without understanding the difference between "authentication" and "authorization"...

I am now explaining him what the difference is and how he can be able to check it. I give him the commands literally! ( sudo -l -U <user>)

Manages to fucking open up each sudoer file in vim , mistype or whatever he did in an attempt to leave vim... Breaks sudo...

Now he tries to spin it in such a way that I have steered him to break things.

"Dude you just fucking failed a copy/paste and you did absolutely fuckall without understanding what you are doing, then splurge out accusations because you did it wrong!"

FML

Well, I thought "hey, I need to urgently update my own infra for a change, been neglecting this way too long, but should not be longer then a day."

I spent the whole weekend dependency resolving, modulesyncing and ensure deps are met ... And every single goddamn time it's stdlib causing a whoupsie on another module...

Oh at least I am having fun. Sort of.

Everyone was a noob once. I am the first to tell that to everyone. But there are limits.

Where I work we got new colleagues, fresh from college, claims to have extensive knowledge about Ansible and knows his way around a Linux system.... Or so he claims.

I desperately need some automation reinforcements since the project requires a lot of work to be done.

I have given a half day training on how to develop, starting from ssh keys setup and local machine, the project directory layout, the components the designs, the scripts, everything...
I ask "Do you understand this?"
"Yes, I understand. " Was the reply.

I give a very simple task really. Just adapt get_url tasks in such a way that it accepts headers, of any kind.
It's literally a one line job.

A week passes by, today is "deadline".

Nothing works, guy confuses roles with playbooks, sets secrets in roles hardcodes, does not create inventory files for specifications, no playbooks, does everything on the testing machine itself, abuses SSH Keys from the Controller node.... It's a fucking ga-mess.

Clearly he does not understand at all what he is doing.

Today he comes "sorry but I cannot finish it"
"Why not?" I ask.
"I get this error" sends a fucking screenshot. I see the fucking disaster setup in one shot ...

"You totally have not done the things like I taught you. Where are your commits and what are.your branch names?"
"Euuuh I don't have any"
Saywhatnow.jpeg

I get frustrated, but nonetheless I re-explain everything from too to bottom! I actually give him a working example of what he should do!

Me: "Do you understand now?"
Colleague: "Yes, I do understand now?"
Me: "Are you sure you understand now?"
C: "yes I do"

Proceeds to do fucking shit all...

WHY FUCKING LIE ABOUT THE THINGS YOU DONT UNDERSTAND??? WHAT KIND OF COGNITIVE MALFUNCTION IA HAPPENING IN YOUR HEAD THAT EVEN GIVEN A WORKING EXAMPLE YOU CANT REPLICATE???
WHY APPLY FOR A FUCKING JOB AND LIE ABOUT YOUR COMPETENCES WHEN YOU DO T EVEN GET THE FUCKING BASICS!?!?

WHY WASTE MY FUCKING TIME?!?!?!

Told my "dear team leader" (see previous rants) that it's not okay to lie about that, we desperately need capable people and he does not seem to be one of them.

"Sorry about that NeatNerdPrime but be patient, he is still a junior"

YOU FUCKING HIRED THAT PERSON WITH FULL KNOWLEDGE ABOUT HAI RESUME AND ACCEPTED HIS WORDS AT FACE VALUE WITHOUT EVEN A PROPER TECHNICAL TEST. YOU PROMISED HE WAS CAPABLE AND HE IS FUCKING NOT, FUCK YOU AND YOUR PEOPLE MANAGEMENT SKILLS, YOU ALREADY FAIL AT THE START.

FUCK THIS. I WILL SLACK OFF TODAY BECAUSE WITHOUT ME THIS TEAM AND THIS PROJECT JUST CRUMBLES DOWN DUE TO SHEER INCOMPETENCE.

Beautiful...

!dev

> Be me
> Birthday today, spend entire day in hospitals due to my beloved's cancer (see previous rants)
> After an entire tiring day, decide to order Chinese food from restaurant in région.
> Call, difficult to make him understand my order although being a native Belgian... After 10 minutes order placed.
> Drive to restaurant to come to pick up
> "It's 121 in total"
> "Wait you said 98"
> " No sir I did not say that"
> Ok fine I'm hungry
> We don't use debit card here ?
> Comeagain.gif
> I got 115 on me in cash.
> "Sorry sir we can't give you a discount on the order" despite advertising the discount
> "Why not? You advertising says so"
> "We haven't changed that yet."
> "So what now?"
> Guy puts back box in the back
> Ok that's clear enough for me.

Walk away, fed up.

Now I am in another restaurant, ordered the same amount-ish and got cheaper off and got even a small beverage for free while waiting!

Continuation of the events ranted here: https://devrant.com/rants/9895220/...

In a turn of events and very emotional moments of human admissions, it turned out that the team leader in question is in fact suffering a lot on a personal level. Not to detail here but suffice to say that, if his story is true, is enough to make everyone have a very short fuse.

He - eventually - admitted his wrongdoings, asked/begged me to stay, promised on his life and soul to never communicate unprofessionally ever again, to take a long vacation to mourn and reflect and will consider relinquishing the position of team leader for my team and just focus on the other one he manages.

I considered this a win. I stood my ground, made very clear the terms on how I continue working in the organization, the project, and with him, and kept my client and money rolling.

That being said if it ever happens once more. I immediately resign and he will be left without any chance of recovery.

This happened yesterday during 1-2-1 meeting

My dear teamleader telling me.

"You're just a stupid consultant"

Well, this 'stupid consultant' has had enough of your bullshit and will look for future endeavors elsewhere.

You are free to consider your options and make the bad decisions, dear team 'leader'.

Cry at the sheer amount of work 'your' project really entails and I will revel in your failure

I'm done with this guy.

Team leaders should be ousted if they fail their team members and the projects they are responsible for.

This Monday, I have become a father.

It's a boy and he is awesome, in perfect health. We, as a couple could not be happier about that.

His name is Cyrus, named after Cyrus the second , the great.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

However, all our happiness is overshadowed by a major blow.
My love of my life, the mother of my child, has been diagnosed with breast cancer , right before the labor.

We are in a rollercoaster right now and are torn between happiness and despair. Hard to deal with.

This is one of those things I am unable to manage with my knowledge and expertise. I can't just "configure cancer away". There is no flag that I can set as "absent" or "false".

Today we're going to hear what the strategy will be to battle this monstrosity. We're bracing ourselves for the worst.

On my list:

* John Romero (id Software)
* Yukihiro Matsumoto (Ruby programming language)
* Donald Knuth (LaTeX)
* Gosuke Myashita (serverspec)
* Johan de Wit (puppet guru and my personal sensei that taught me a lot of things and also a good friend I cherish)

Today during a follow-up meeting of the grand project I'm workng on...

TL: ... and I want to start working on the production environment and have it ready by next month.
Me: (interrupts) hold up! We are not ready, we have a huge backlog of technical tasks that need to be addressed and we are still not in possession of the very crucial business and functional requirements that you are supposed to provide. The acceptation environment is just set up on infra perspective but does not have anything running yet! The API we depend on is still not ready because you keep adding change tasks to it. We have a mountain of work to do to even get to a first release to integration yet and there is still the estimations on data loads and systems... your dream will not be possible until at least Q2 of 2024.
TL: stop being so negative @neatnerdprime and try to be more customer friendly. I want it by the end of the next month.
Me: remember what I said to you about moving prematurely. Remember I don't take any responsibility if things break because you rush the project. Please, reconsider!
TL: I just want it, please do it

FUCK YOU YOU SORRY EXCUSE OF A PEOPLE PERSON KNOWING JACK SHIT AND JUST LICKING THE MIDDLE MANAGEMENT ASSHOLE TO RECEIVE ATTABOY PETS ON YOUR UGLY ASS BALD HEAD AND CROOKED TEETH. YOU SHOULD FUCKING DIE IN A FURNACE AND LEAVE NO TRACE BEHIND.

Lower/middle Management refusing to look at boards and wanting daily résumé of activity in an email they will never read nor comprehend.

Unpopular opinion.

TOML sucks

* it does not claim to care about indentation but it actually does
* nested datastructures are a nightmare, especially 'inline' for 'readability'
* oh fuck me everything must be "double quotes"
* booleans always lowercase, there is no "truthy" here.
* Tables are not intuitive at all.

And all this from working with it first time because I had the silly idea to modernize a python project to use pyproject.toml

Oh and don't get me started on pyproject.toml files. The documentation sucks!

> be me, working while at the beach
> SO: " hey, do you want me to make a bracelet?"
> me: "sure, make me whatever, something that fits me."
> what I get is picrel.

Damn true

Sometimes all you need is a workation....

Current office view for the coming days.

Someone from my current workplace found out who I am here. There goes my relative anonymous life here.

To all my colleagues, especially in the 'ansible' group chat.

I love you all (most of the time).
Please don't send this to upper management. Thank you.

Whatever was going on in the weekdays ... I forget about it right here, in my garden.

Have a nice weekend you all.

Usually I do love my colleagues, but lately....

FOR FUCKS SAKE I AM NOT YOUR WALKING HUMAN GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE SHITOVERFLOW CHATGEPETTO INSTANCE! READ YOUR FUCKING LOGS, DO A FUCKING INFORMATION LOOKUP, READ THE FUCKING MANUAL.

OH YOU HAVE A QUESTION YOU SAY? PLEASE FOR FUCK SAKE ELABORATE WITH SOMETHING MORE THEN 'Please help me with the pipeline"' WHILE YOUR ACTUAL PROBLEM IS A LACK OF KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING OF GIT, LINUX OPERATING SYSTEMS AND AUTOMATION.

OH YOUR BRANCH IS, WHAT, 3 MONTHS BEHIND MASTER? NEVER HEARD OF A FUCKING REBASE? WHATS THAT YOU SAY??? YOU DONT KNOW WHEN TO SKIP A COMMIT??? ITS YOUR FUCKING CODEBASE! READ THE FUCKING DOCUMENTATION !!!

WHATS THAT? YOU WORK IN VSCODE AND YOU DO T K OW HOW? AGAIN READ THE FUCKING DOCUMENTATION !

Self.end(rant)

Quest.com APM software. Foglight. Terrible support site, terrible product, everything is terrible. Support engineers that still need to be explained the difference between disk space and inodes....

MFW I'm looking at my own code for generating images with packer & vagrant last updated two years ago and so much new stuff has come along...

I fucking hate foglight!
Fucking piece of over bloated shit software that can't do anything right!
This pile of harkonnen vomit is such a source of stress and frustration.
Can you believe that a monitoring tool, that needs to monitor 550 agents (host,dB's, webservices,whatever) needs a whopping 20+GB ram and 4vcpu's just to receive metrics and sent it to the main server, for just being a middleman???

Fucking piece of shit.

And worse of it all, due to some fuckery at mgmt-customer relationship level, they want to I stall MORE of this shit

Fucking shit

Quest software, never engage with them. You'll lose equal amounts of money as for dynatrace but be very bad off

!rant

Coming from a pure sysadmin environment and profession, I feel a great sense of accomplishment when I've successfully managed to use a ruby library properly instead if shelling out to use it's cli interface, with optparse, proper rake task in the lib folders and proper exit code handling.

It's never too late to learn how to program in any language for your personal project.

I have been 'called' by a very unusual number. Seems to originate from Russia
For reference, don't call them back!

+79540118049

Now I'm in paranoid mode due to The whole pegasus affair where a simple phone call already infects your phone

Am I paranoid android?

TIL

Ctrl-w tot clear the console Line

Can you believe is was always using Ctrl-c to empty my terminal Line when mistyping?

And out of sheer coïncidence of closing all my tabs, is accidentally die this in my terminal window, and then in was like 'wait What?'

Quest software: foglight.

Everything from that company is technical debt.

Avoid at all costs

> be me
> " It's Sunday, time for some battlestation housekeeping"
> " Oh easy, every git repo should do 'git clean -dfx'"
> Goes to ~/.rbenv
> Executes 'git clean -dfx'
> A whole 15 minutes long my drives go in overdrive...
> Removed 37 ruby versions and their gems, 104GB space freed up

I should do this more often

And I should now pull in all new versions and other things...

Always, always, with every estimate in time or resources you or your pm/manager/whatever thinks to need. Multiply that number by pi.

That's a more real-world estimate.

Monitoring tools madness: quest foglight.

So, setting a blackout for an FMS "HA cluster" (which does not work due to a bug infested custom jboss implementation) can bring the servers down... And no way to bring them back up.

This brilliant piece of enterprise APM software costs 600.000€ for a 5year license.

I,ve added more drama (logs, threaddumps, support bundles and screenshots) to the support portal...

45 cases now in total, oldest case still open date 2017...

Fuck you quest software