lycidas

For anyone interested in a more philosophical look at how this affects people, Byung-Chul Han has some great writings about how modern technological society affects the individual in books such as The Burnout Society.

For me, I find that I have to create the conditions for it and it'll naturally come along.

Taking the quarantine for example, I initially thought I would have an infinite amount of time to read new subjects and practice on topics I haven't for awhile, but I quickly found myself spending most of my time on video games. After adjusting my schedule of daily workouts, cooking, sleeping, and everything else I thought was mundane, my motivation to start reading one esoteric security topics and browse new open source projects came back up. Like what other posters are saying, you have to take care of the rest of your life first, both physically and emotionally, and then you'll naturally be creative and daring.

"The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein discusses this phenomenon more with regards to economic policies.

I've been looking at this for awhile and it's super cool! As a person who's used Terraform extensively and has ran into a lot of issues with it's declarative, non-scriptability (at least before 0.12), pulumi seems great. And it's also great its able to wrap any Terraform-compatible provider out of the box.

One question I have for anyone who's used it or the team if they're here is how they convinced their company to use it? Last time I checked pulumi was a small company with only 20M in funding versus hashicorp which was more established. What happens if the pulumi team runs out of money and we've moved all our infra onto pulumi?

I recently read "Bad Samaritans" by Ha-Joon Chang and a lot of it giving an overview of how the Korean economy developed in the 20th century.

Pretty useful for design interviews and also a general overview. For a more in depth look would recommend the https://dataintensive.net/ book. It's a great deep dive into modern distributed computing and data architectures.

For cost, stackdriver works the best. Idk if they have a custom agent but Fluentd works great to ship logs to your platform of choice.

AWS cloudwatch is also good for cost but has much slower query speeds (the slowness makes me think it's not Lucene based?).

If you could splurge on hosted services, my favorite logging goes to datadog and it has all the other bits of observability built in for down the road.

https://landscape.cncf.io/ is usually my go-to if you wanna find best-in-class solutions to host yourself.

The thing that annoys me the most is that tech companies, mine included, will reimburse gladly books, but no one is ever allowed to be seen reading books at their desk on company time. Whereas being on hacker news, reddit, NYT visibly is okay. I've just started reading PDF's on my computer screen but I'd prefer a real book of the same thing most of the time.

I think we can't really expect the opposite to happen. There's not an educational system out there that would actively try to delegitimize itself or the power structures it exists in.

That being said, Chomsky's works -- especially, Understanding Power and Manufacturing Consent -- are extremely helpful to understanding our current world. Even if the examples are out-dated, you can see the same things play out today as they did in the 80's. I would recommend them even if you don't align personally with his politics.

At my company, we were migrating all our apps to a kubernetes + istio platform over the past couple of months and my advice is this - don't use a service mesh unless you really, really need to.

We initially choose istio because it seemed to satisfy all our requirements and more - mTLS, sidecar authz, etc - but configuring it turned out to be a huge pain. Things like crafting a non-superadmin pod security policy for it, trying to upgrade versions via helm, and trying to debug authz policies took up a non-trivial amount of time. In the end, we got everything working but I probably wouldn't recommend it again.

It's funny that I was at kubecon last week and there was a start up whose value prop was hassle-free istio and the linkerd people stressed that they were less complex than istio.

Has it always felt this way? I've been reading a lot of Chomsky lately and it seems at least for a few decades in the later 1900's workers had more power in the workplace.

That aspect was ameliorated slightly this year with a 60 day grace period after loss of employment. https://www.uscis.gov/news/news-releases/uscis-publishes-fin....

Despite the lack of content in the article, this post seems have to attracted a few comments. Before everyone comes in here with explanations of "oh it is because Asians work harder, are smarter, and have better culture" argument - thus not only further propagating the harmful model minority stereotype but also implying that certain other races aren't as smart or don't have 'good' culture - I'd like to propose it is simply because of socioeconomic status and selection effect.

Your adult income levels is heavily correlated to the socioeconomic status of the family you grew up in. Asian Americans have the highest average family income out of any major immigrant groups because Asia is a huge place with many wealthy and educated citizens who then decide to immigrate over to America. The selection effect comes from the fact that the people who do immigrate from Asia are usually either wealthy or well educated or both, because the lack of these factors prevent poorer families from doing so. These families then have higher than average socioeconomic status and their children go on to become well educated and get better paying jobs (1). As for why Asian Men are specifically higher earning, we still live in a non post gender world. For an example of institutionalized sexism in tech I would recommend this recent documentary that just came out (2). As a last point, income isn't everything. Asian Americans, though facing less severe issues than other minority groups in America, still have to deal with everyday issues such as the model minority stereotype or with being perceived as the perpetual foreigner.

(1) Education and Immigration - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0745648320. This is a great read about how basically everything people associate with immigrants comes down to socioeconomic status.

(2) http://www.codedocumentary.com/ - Documentary about females and minorities or lack thereof in tech.

The book mentioned in the article "The New Jim Crow" is an extraordinary good read for people more interested in gaining context on the situation between race and crime mentioned in the article. It is also good to gain more insight into how politics can be racially coded without ever mentioning race - great given the current political climate.

Chinese and Indian students in America also have the benefit of being from some of the highest socioeconomic groups in America [0]. It is more a factor of the group's average wealth rather than the fact that they are foreign.

[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

Good stuff. I like how quick it is to make and post a question.

It does not have an exact API demo, but I think some of the stuff over at http://www.startbootstrap.com would be well suited to your needs.

In particular this one, http://startbootstrap.com/sb-admin-v2, could be a good start. It is made with all bootstrap styles and easily changeable and extensible.

Providing actual values sounds like a great idea to stand out. I would like to hear if you have tried this yourself or seen it done before. What was the result?

I found that having problem statements does energize hackers. As a participant, I've seen a lot of people not having "cool" ideas to work on and instead ending up smashing together a bunch of API's or building another social share app.

To relate to your point of organizing purpose-based hackathons, I've helped organize a hackathon last year, in which we brought in NGO's and had them issue problem statements about specific problems in the third world. Then hackers were encouraged to try to solve these problems using tech. I was amazed at the results -- people had actually built something useful to the world outside the narrow 48-hour time window! And in the end, the programmers seemed happy that they were solving a real problem, of course doing it in their own "cool" way.

Great post (oops just said what you explicitly said not to in one of your posts)! My main takeaway from your articles was that most of these skills only come to people who very pro-actively develop them. As a college student, I used to think that what I needed to learn for my career would be eventually taught to me in college. Boy has that been wrong. This has been a pretty good kick in the behind for me to really start developing these skills if I ever want a shot at becoming a great entrepreneur.