Amen.
I don’t like plebbit, but I agree with the sentiment. I’ve gone to university too, it didn’t help with s***. Most of the things taught at uni, I either learned in high school, or were useless (like Keynesian economics). Some math problems were kinda new to me (like algorithms for calculating the shortest path, which I forgot already how to do, but I found that interesting at the time).
But nothing even compares to what I learned while working. Even now, in my homelab, I don’t have a lot of opportunity to learn a lot (well, TBH I also have other non-tech projects I worked on over the years, like loft bed and a parcel box, which out of necessity made me learn how to use basic features in FreeCAD).
I’m pretty sure Wendell learned things in his own time and had a bigger drive to learn than myself, but he also found challenges and worked to overcome them and that’s how he learned. At least that’s what I can gather from the few times he talked about his past when he was a growing up janitor-in-training. I vaguely remember him talking about the monstrosities he saw in school, when he made new systems that were rejected by the school’s IT admins, because it would basically lead to a lot of people’s demise (basically playing politics over innovation, which I’m sure Wendell saw a lot of these horror stories in his lifetime).
You can say that twice. Here’s some wise words from Laurent Bercot.
The other more or less viable development model for a project is to be company-driven: making up for the lack of technical excellence with manpower and procedures. Needless to say, companies usually do not produce either free or good software, and they are not efficient at doing so.
If you come from a lower education institution of different expertise (like, idk, high-schools that feature wood-working classes, which I would’ve loved to have in my high-school), then going to an university to learn some IT makes some amount of sense. However, it’ll have filler crap that you might not even want to learn (like in my case, economics). And most of what you want to learn, you can learn at home, if you offer yourself enough time to “get bored” and not have to work on the side.
Having a job and trying to learn other skills on the side take a very long time (I was taking time off from work to work on things like my loft-bed, my first wood-working project that I overbuilt).
If they haven’t, they should’ve automated their tasks already. Even things like rundeck on a timer would be ok, if not something nicer, like a monitoring agent with some automation (like have a few test servers update automatically and if things go south, stop the update on prod - delay the update between test and prod by about 2 weeks or so, except for security patches). I’ve been bash scripting and pssh’ing a lot when I was managing my own servers.
I thought he has his own consulting company.
This. Writing documentation and trying to teach people about a product is how you learn. That’s why I tried writing a lot of stuff about s6 a few months back (currently on hiatus again, too many other stuff going on).
I’d argue it’s a terrible thing. In the computer janitor world, things like ISO 27k1 is decent standard to follow, but it’s mostly a baseline and some thing don’t really make a ton of sense (particularly documenting procedural stuff for compliance sake, instead of having a log / journal done for internal auditing - there’s a bunch of companies that are doing things mostly for the accreditation, without having the smart people to actually do the good things one’s supposed to do). I used to do the 27k1 SOP docs and do the yearly audit - it was crap and I barely had time to actually work on that. Instead, I focused on what actually mattered, like deploying OCI-Inventory to check people’s laptops for hardware and software changes and comparing old versions of stuff for vulnerabilities. I wanted to implement more stuff, like an internal updates server, but that was a long way to go (without any budget to work with).
I mean, that’s true for many things. Always have safeties like alias rm=“rm -i” and stuff and teach people not to use rm -rf blindly (and have safety measures for when they do). Or better yet, teach them to always use rm -i manually. After I left my previous company, someone I trained and was doing a decent job, managed to delete my whole samba user configuration. He called me, panicked, because people were reporting they couldn’t access their files anymore.
Thankfully, I set automatic backups and talked with my other colleague (we got hired around the same time) and I told him to grab the backed up samba files and slap them back in place. What can I say, mistakes were made. That guy was fine, it was just an oopsie, but he probably learned his lesson the hard way, causing down-time to around 80 people, lmao. And yes, I’ve documented how samba works and how I configured it, but the guy was in panic mode, afraid he might lose his job.
You can say that twice (like the example above).
I was referring to this thou: