Staring down the barrel of being primary on-call over Christmas for a dozen k8s clusters running thousands of nodes. How I wish it were true that we could trust computer programs to just keep running.
If your work place has a long enough history, try comparing incidents on work days versus weekends or holidays. Typically the incident rate is dramatically lower when no one is making changes.
Totally true, but we host other people's code (PaaS, etc). We don't get to dictate their working hours.
It also doesn't mean nothing breaks when people aren't making changes. Certificate expiration is the classic example of something breaking _because_ someone hasn't made a change. Or a slow memory leak. There's a whole classification of issues that get worse when nothing is redeployed for long enough.
A bit more heavyweight, but we implemented a rotation program when I was managing an internal tools team at a previous company. We'd trade an engineer from our team with an engineer from a feature team for a quarter.
The amount of improvements to our collective understandings was super valuable. Feature devs got to help fix problems with their tools more directly (while also learning that it's not always as straightforward as it may seem), and we brought back much stronger insights into the experience of actually using our tools day-to-day.
“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
I think the nice thing about the modern Internet of things, is that all you have to do is probably wait about 2 or 3 years in the case of the Samsung refrigerator, and the ad software will already be out of support.
Maybe it's just me, but nothing sounds simple about offline mode. The changeset resolution necessary to resync after going back online sounds TOUGH to build in a way that doesn't result in user data loss ever without being more cumbersome than it's worth.
Sad to hear about how much the Space & Rocket center has been let to deteriorate. That place really sparked my interest in science & engineering as a child. Even went to Space Camp there way back in the day.
Yeah, I remember going as a kid (the Saturn V and "rocket garden" are what stuck with me and how I realized I'd been there before) and thinking it was great, but going again a couple years ago it was a huge let-down. So much of it was just ugly MIC sales powerpoint infographics with not-great accompanying displays of missiles and such, there was a whole area that seemed to just be a warfare drone military contractor showroom (which could be cool, but the presentation was about as boring as possible in this case), a bunch of the interactive bits were broken, most of the handful still working cost extra (and admission was not what I'd call cheap), and in general it just felt like a place struggling to survive. It gave an almost ex-Warsaw-Pact vibe of being well past its prime and decaying in place. The Saturn V is still amazing, though, but even there the little bit of the hangar floor and wall space that they actually bothered to use was given over to kinda-lame material about things like the SLS that also had a strong "this came straight from a contractor's marketing department" feeling.
I'd also been to the Cosmosphere as a kid (the SR-71 in the lobby is how I recognized that one when I returned, haha, don't see that every day) and have been about three more times over the last 15 years, as an adult, and it's still great.
They seem to be getting more proactive in general. I was surprised last night when the one I was in went full barrel through a light that was already yellow and turned red while we were still in the intersection.
Ha, I had the exact same experience on a Waymo last night.
The light had just turned yellow before we entered the intersection, and I was sure it would slam the brakes (there was no one behind, so no risk of being read-ended). Yet it accelerated and cleared the intersection as the light turned red. It was what any reasonably good driver would do, but certainly edgy for a 100% law-abiding robot.
I’ll definitely take that over the Lyft driver I once had who went through a red light 1-2 seconds after it turned red. Not that that’s typical for ride share drivers in my area, but still.
Their wait times tend to be worse, but that's getting better too. The trip speed has also noticeably improved. I've taken about 50 over the past 2 years.
Even if they're sometimes slower in pickup or trip time, on average, I greatly value the consistency of the experience over everything else.
Y'all forever. One of the few southern mannerisms I intentionally don't drop as a lapsed southerner in California.
As an aside, I find it strange how many aspects of "the south" are labeled as "Texan" outside the south. I lived and visited all over the Deep South and y'all was standard vernacular pretty much everywhere. I'm not saying Texans don't say y'all, but they definitely don't have any unique claim to using it as second-person plural.
I grew up mostly in the north and talk very northernly, but somehow the only exception is that 'howdy' became my standard greeting. 'yall' feels like too much, but 'howdy' just rolls off the tongue so smoothly. Other greetings always sound too terse (hi, hey), too formal (hello), or are questions (how's it going, what's up) which I just loathe. Though technically howdy is sort of a question too, coming from 'how do you do'.
What's 'a piece'? Don't think I've heard that one.
I love this explanation. One unfortunately confusing extra piece that some people might occasionally run into is that there are two types of tag. Most tags are what you describe: pointers (git ref) to a commit (git object) and nothing more. These are usually referred to as lightweight tags.
There are also annotated tags that can contain a message, have a timestamp, and sha, etc. These are proper git objects that behave a lot like commit objects, except they're still typically only referring to another git object (commit).
When you `git fetch`, git is asking the remote to walk a tree of objects — starting at the commit object that the ref points to — and deliver them to you, to unpack into your own object store.
Git could in theory do a lot with just objects — with the whole "data state" of the repo (config, reflog, etc) just being objects, and then one toplevel journal file to track the hash of the newest versions of these state objects. (Sort of like how many DBMSes keep much of the config inside the database.)
But git mostly isn't designed to do this. Instead, git's higher SCM layers manage their state directly, outside of the object store, as files in well-known locations under .git/. This means that this higher-level state isn't part of the object-store synchronization step, and there must instead be a domain-specific synchronization step for each kind of SCM state metadata where applicable.
Tags are an interesting exception, though, in that while the default "lightweight" tags are "high-level SCM metadata" of the kind that isn't held in the object store; "annotated" tags become objects held in the object store.
(To be honest, I'm not sure what the benefit is of having "lightweight" tags that live outside the object store. To me, it looks like tags could just always be objects, and "lightweight" vs "annotated" should just determine the required fields of the data in the object. Maybe it's a legacy thing? Maybe third-party tooling parses lightweight tags out of the .git/ directory directly, and can't "see" annotated tags?)
Lightweight tags are simply references to commits that lie in refs/tags instead of refs/heads. Annotated tags are references to tag objects rather than commit objects. In both cases, the purpose of the reference is to give the object (tag or commit) a name.
I think no one uses lightweight tags anymore, except if you push by mistake a commit to refs/tags/something.
Real sudafed is OTC, you just need to ask for it at the counter. No prescription is required. They just don't have it on shelves, because they require you to show your ID when purchasing it. I'm assuming this is so they can track how much a person is buying to track people who are using it for illicit purposes.
Interesting, today I learned it had a more specific term. Still, saying something "isn't OTC" implies you need a prescription to most people. At least in my experience.
PagerDuty wouldn't exist if this were true.
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