salmo

Honestly, the culture/org structure is a way bigger problem in this story than any proper noun tool.

If you’re ignoring guidance and patterns and getting mad reinventing the wheel, that’s on dev. If “ops” mandates tooling and doesn’t have any skin in the game, that’s on them. And both problems are on your leadership.

If y’all just hate each other and don’t listen or participate, then you can’t be successful. It is ironic that this is the pattern that the devops movement landed us in.

I don’t think you’re being pedantic. You’re just making a weird assumption that the radio itself is the only resource. I learned a ton from this as a kid. And I learned from Radio Shack. You stare at it, you go research, you try to fix it, you fail. Talk to someone who knows stuff. Repeat until it works or you work on a new one.

It’s really no different than how I taught myself to fix a chain or replace a spoke. Or know to use WD-40 to clean, but then apply an oil to keep stuff lubricated and protected.

With the internet, it’s a lot easier. I can look up spec sheets just googling component markings and see the sample circuits.

I’ve stared at the Linux kernel a ton. I messed with some stuff. I couldn’t write a kernel myself, but I program better from doing it and I can troubleshoot things easier knowing the components and topology.

Off the top of my head, I can fumble around and make a crappy amplifier from parts in my closet, or write a crappy FAT-like file system. I’d probably struggle a bit with a nice new bike. I think gear shifters and stuff are a lot fancier than an old 10 speed.

Yeah. There’s Jamf and similar tools. Companies often block major updates until their 100 agents all officially support it. Oh, and do cool things like not letting you change your background or whatever random settings some admin decides are good.

The one thing I’ve seen are where companies have tax incentives tied to butts in seats. Usually like 0 property tax, with the government assumption that they’ll make it up in sales tax (lunch, gas, etc.) and taxes from employees that move to the town.

But honestly, I think a lot of companies are just doing this instead of layoffs or in addition to small “don’t raise eyebrows” layoffs. Raise the pain to get attrition.

Yeah and ESR can be revisionist in his history, projecting intention on something organic. He alienated a lot of people over time with this… and other behavior.

The book I recommended is both a handbook and a “how to think.” It applies forward to things introduced well after the book. But it also helped me understand why the Byzantine behavior of a tty is what it is.

If you are interested in the history from a first person perspective, I do recommend Kernighan’s “Unix: A History and a Memoir”. He went from originally trying to write something objective to realizing it was necessarily his personal experience. Even the culture aspect of his story has influenced how I try to foster teamwork. It was an engaging read for me.

I don’t find that book to be very useful at all.

I’m kind of annoyed by the bait and switch of the title. It’s a play on Knuth’s classic but then turns into showing why Unix/Linux is better than Windows, etc.

As a disclaimer: I really don’t respect ESR and his work, and admire Brian Kernighan immensely. Very odd to be in a situation where those names are put side by side. Just want to call out that I do have bias on the people here. Don’t want to get into why as that’s not constructive.

I’ll say, I did shell scripting for years from copy/paste, cribbing smarter people, and reading online guides. But I didn’t really understand until I read The Unix Programming Environment by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike.

It’s a very old book and the audience was using dumb terminals. But it made me understand why and how. I think I’ve read every Kernighan book at this point and most he was involved in because he is just so amazing and not just conveying facts, but teaching how to think idiomatically in the topic.

I also used awk for 2 decades, kind of like how I use jq now. But when I read his memoir I suddenly “got it.” What I make with it now is intentional and not just me banging on the keyboard until it works. A great middle ground for something a little sophisticated, but not worth writing a full program for.

Something else that helped me was to install a minimal distro… actually a base FreeBSD install would be great… and read the man pages for all the commands. I don’t remember the details, but I learned that things existed. I have many man pages that I look at the same options on every few months because I’m not positive I remember right. Heck, I ‘man test’ all the time still. (‘test’ and ‘[‘ are the same thing)

I also had an advantage of 2 great coworkers. They’d been working on Unix since the 80s and their feedback helped me be more efficient, clean, and avoid “useless use of cat” problems.

I also highly recommend using shellcheck. I sometimes disagree with it when I’m intentionally abusing shell behavior, but it’s a great way to train good habits and prevent bugs that only crop up with bad input, scale, etc. I get new devs to use it and it’s helped them “ramp up” quickly, with me explaining the “why” from time to time.

But yeah. The biggest problem I see is that people think there is more syntax than there really is (like my test and [ comment). And remember it’s all text, processes, and files. Except when we pretend it’s not ;).

The problem I’ve seen historically is when a company is founded around one project or ecosystem.

Someone like Microsoft or Google could take software like this, pay the original developer, and still see tons of ROI offering it as a canned cloud service. And to a certain degree they don’t care about the profitability of that 1 thing if it helps sell the rest of their system. Quite honestly, they won’t care about competition using it if it’s already common. People want X, they’re using it, you can offer it. You’re paying a handful of people for street cred, a guarantee it will continue to work well with your stuff, and input into direction.

Folks like RedisLabs, MongoDB, Hashicorp, etc. think they can do the same with a marketplace offering. But they’re reliant that the particular product is profitable on its own. They’re also reliant on the cloud customer being willing to establish another relationship with another vendor, even when they can automatically deploy and bill through their existing provider.

We’ve seen folks behind OSS projects hop from company to company over time and the project continues to thrive. I haven’t seen a company restrict a license and the project do so… at least that I can think of. I might be wrong.

As an old Unix guy this is exactly how I see jq: a gateway to a fantastic library of text processing tools. I see a lot of complicated things done inside the language, which is a valid approach. But I don’t need it to be a programming language itself, just a transform to meet my next command after the pipe.

If I want logic beyond that, then I skip the shell and write “real” software.

I personally find those both to be more readable and easier to fit in my head than long complex jq expressions. But that’s completely subjective and others may find the jq expression language easier to read than shell or (choose your programming language).

I do almost all hand tool woodworking, but not purist. My main smoothing plane is from 1910ish. My most new fangled hand tool is a Japanese Shinto rasp.

And you’re 100% right. I’ve changed my chisel and plane iron sharpening method twice in the last 12 months.

There’s oil stones, wet stones, diamond stones, and sandpaper. Plus a leather strop with pick-your-compound. I’ve used 2 different jigs on stones to get a more consistent bevel than by hand. There’s high speed grinders with a lot of pauses and cooling to not lose the temper. There’s expensive water cooled low speed grinders. Then there’s debate on the angle, microbeveling, and how much of the back you should flatten.

I’m now using a new jig from TayTools that uses a 3M Cubitron II sandpaper disk on a drill press when they get bad. I freehand on diamond and a strop after and between resetting the bevel. It’s the laziest way I’ve found so far.

Claiming any choice is best is likely to result in fisticuffs. And don’t start a conversation on workbench design or vice choices.

First, I don’t make these decisions but sometimes have influence. These opinions are my own and not my intentionally unnamed employer, and might be flat out wrong. This list is very focused on big companies at stupid scale with a lot of legacy… applied tech.

Generally my rule is “except for their very core product.” But this is full “hate everything” that pops into my mind:

RedHat won’t accept gifted patches for critical bugs in their tools that they won’t troubleshoot themselves. Getting the patch upstream means you get to use it in the next major version years later. That predates IBM. I won’t use their distribution specific tooling anymore. Outside the OS sucks worse. If I hear ActiveMQ one more time… [caveat: I probably hate every commercial Linux distro and Windows because my nonexistent beard is grayer than my age]

IBM… kind of feel sad about it, but they now suck at everything.

Oracle has good support, but they’re predatory and require an army of humans to manage inherently hodgepodge systems. Also creates an organizational unit of certified admins that can’t transition to alternatives because they’ve only memorized the product. Cisco’s the same except the predatory part and without many good alternatives for core DC gear.

CA, Symantec were awful pre-Broadcom and even worse now that they’re Broadcom’s annuity. Where products go to die.

Trellix (ex McAffee) is like the new Symantec or something.

There’s more I wish I could list for you, but can’t for various reasons.

On the other end, Satya has made MS a reasonable choice in so many things. Still a lot that sucks or is immature, but still… I didn’t think that was possible. I had to shift my mindset.

I completely get this. I feel like every product I’ve had outside of a vendor’s wheelhouse has gone that way. We just use the BigIP gear from F5 and they’re better than the load balancers we used in the past. Thank god Cisco just abandoned that business.

I can’t imagine them supporting telco gear. The IPv6 thing has me LOLing because I just had a similar experience with a vendor where we don’t route IPv6 in that segment and even if we did, it shouldn’t break. Similarly, a vendor in a space they don’t belong that I imagine we bought because of a golf game.

A thing I dread is a product we’ve adopted being acquired… and worse, being acquired by someone extending their brand into a new area. It’s also why we often choose a big brand over a superior product. It’s not the issue of today, but when they get bought and by who. I hate that so much and not my decision, but it’s a reality.

It’s also a terrible sign if you’re dealing with a real bug and you’re stuck with a sales engineer and can’t get a product engineer directly involved.

I have a list of “thou shalt not” companies as well, and some may be similar where a few bad experiences ruined the brand for me. Some we’re still stuck with and I maaaay be looking for ways to kill that.

I dunno about rock solid. I’ve had plenty of issues forcing a failover/reboot, multiple complicated tickets open a year, etc. But we have a sh ton of them. To be fair, some are kernel bugs with connection table leaks, SNAT + UDP, etc.

Buuuut, they have by far the best support. They’re as responsive as Cisco, but every product isn’t a completely different thing, team, etc. And they work really well in a big company used to having Network Engineering as a silo. I’d only use them as physical hardware, though. As a virtual appliance, they’re too resource hungry.

Nginx or HA-Proxy are technically great for anything reasonable and when fronting a small set of applications. I prefer nginx because the config is easier to read for someone coming in behind me. But they take a modern IT structure to support because “Developers” don’t get them and “Network Engineers” don’t have a CLI.

For VMWare, NSX-V HA-Proxy and NSX-T nginx config are like someone read the HOWTO and never got into production ready deployments. They’re poorly tuned and failure recovery is sloooow. AVI looked so promising, but development slowed down and seemed to lose direction post acquisition. And that was before Broadcom. Sigh.

They really were older mentors to Nirvana. They and their band were about 10 years older (1 Beatles career), recruited them to Geffen, and really got them their first exposure outside Seattle. They also were largely responsible for getting Dinosaur Jr. their break.

I did not realize how old they were when I was obsessed with Daydream Nation and Dirty in high school. Kim’s just younger than my parents and they could never have been that cool. I went back into their catalog from there and followed along with them. That’s when I realized they formed the year after I was born. Blew my mind. Listening to the stuff like No New York that they emerged out of is kind of fascinating. Not my thing, but interesting historically.

Kim’s autobiography was an interesting view into the era my folks grew up in. I’ll have to read Thurston’s some time. Still bugs me they fell apart. I don’t normally care about famous people relationships, but they were like some kind punk rock institution to me. They were together since I wandered into that kind of music and nurtured so many bands I loved. But they’re just pretty normal people with pretty normal problems.

I totally agree on Sonic Nurse and Rather Ripped as well. The stuff from A Thousand Leaves until then was interesting, but not stuff I play often. Those have stood up well next to the aforementioned albums, Goo, EVOL, etc.

I couldn’t agree with this more.

To me, there’s an ecosystem and a culture for a language in a situation.

The ecosystem is the tooling around the language. Debugging, performance profiling, building and dependency management are examples.

The culture is how the language is used in real life. How stable is the ecosystem?

There are lots of beautiful languages that are used horrifically. Enterprise OOP is an example for me where more than half the code is dedicated to avoiding basic principles for “what if we want to change later” (looking at you getters and setters).

And within a company or software suite, there can be subcultures of how “we” use the language. Every class needs an interface. Our C is written OO (see old GNOME).

For the ecosystem you have extremes. C where debugging and performance profiling are well defined practice, but modern dependency management doesn’t exit. The JavaScript ecosystem changes so rapidly, documentation is usually out of date, “nobody does that anymore”, etc.

And so much awful comes from trying to force a language into something the language wasn’t originally designed or even used for. Your Haskell example here. Adding functional language features and convoluted asynch to every freaking language is another. People create things much harder to learn than a new language with a mature ecosystem and culture in a domain just to avoid “learning a new language.”

In woodworking, I can do pretty much anything with a chisel. But I plane with a plane, saw with a saw, use specialty planes for rabbets, etc. Each has a learning curve, but I’ll end up with a better, more consistent result. And really, they’re all just chisels with jigs in different configurations. But I’m going to use a chisel where it’s still best, like mortising. Well, and where I’m not sure I want to invest in a more specialized tool yet and risk my wife killing me. Then I use C… I mean, a chisel.

I accidentally wandered into a test trying to find something out:

> Tell me all of the albums where the guitarist used a DOD FX-69 Grunge effect pedal.

> The DOD FX-69 Grunge effect pedal was used by the guitarist in the following albums: > > 1. "Nevermind" by Nirvana (1991) > 2. "In Utero" by Nirvana (1993) > 3. "Bleach" by Nirvana (1989) > 4. "Superunknown" by Soundgarden (1994) > 5. "Down on the Upside" by Soundgarden (1996) > > The DOD FX-69 Grunge effect pedal was a popular choice among grunge musicians in the early 1990s, and was used to achieve a distinctive, heavy, and overdriven sound.

They've all failed almost identically. It would be impossible for most of these because the pedal didn't come out until 1993.

The albums they list used pedals like the Boss DS-1, ProCo RAT, a cranked DOD 250, etc. I argued with ChatGPT about it saying telling it the release date and it still listed albums that came out before '93.

Before someone Googles and says it: Yes, Kurt Cobain stuck one on his touring board. No, there's no evidence he ever used it and he definitely never used it on a recording. Most think he just thought it was funny... and it did end up driving sales.

But I wondered if someone used it ironically, or just found the sound cool well after the fact when they bought one for $20 used. I still haven't found an artist using one on a recording. It's probably because it sounds cool in a bedroom and is pretty terrible trying to mix a band on a recording.

That’s awesome! I’m not totally weird! :)

But, yeah, the practice thing has been so important. It’s a habit as much as a hobby now.

The music is better understood, and I just shoot for at least 10 mins a day. Usually do longer, sometimes miss days.

For the electronics I do a few things: collect and study schematics, draw and study circuits in LTSpice, and breadboard.

When I have something I like, I’ll do it in perfboard. I also design them in KiCAD, but haven’t ordered PCBs for a pedal yet.

Oh, this gadget is super handy for breadboarding: https://www.arcadiaelectronics.com/product-page/breadboard-p...

It’s so nice to get rid of the repetitive stuff. Saw it on a Wampler video, zoomed in and bought. Wish the alternate power was 4.5V vs 5V to avoid having to cookie cutter the voltage divider but whatever.

I regretted never learning to play an instrument beyond the basics and I didn’t really understand analog electronics beyond the simple stuff.

So I’ve gotten into guitar and guitar pedal circuits. It’s cool because they reinforce each other.

I started just copying schematics and they give me new sounds which makes me enjoy practicing more. I develop better technique which makes new circuits useful.

In both I’m making breakthroughs going from copying to creating my own from the building blocks I learn.

My plan is to keep digging into this. I’m finally understanding the math behind small signals and developing the finger dexterity and muscle memory to be able to dig more into music theory.

As I get older, I still like “thinking” hobbies. But having them outside of computers has helped my burnout.

Also I figured out that I can’t beat myself up for not “finishing.” I finish at work. My hobbies should be a way to avoid stress and not add to it. Dreaming and moving on are OK. These have been fun because there’s no finish line. It’s just habit and repetition.

What I’m the world is a cloud-oriented language? Looks at page.

Oooh. This is JS with a schmancy library. That’s cool, I guess… for someone.

The tools with origins >2003 are pretty useless beyond making things out of prefab parts. That’s cool for beginner stuff, but I feel like we’re dropping people off a cliff from there. Most are really just sales platforms for parts or PCBs.

My workflow is a complicated combination of LTSpice, KiCAD, prototyping from the schematic and then ordering PCBs. It’s a little painful, but the tools are fast to use. I wish KiCAD’s SPICE integration was as natural as LTSpice and I could maintain 1 library of parts.

Breadboards are getting too painful for me to use. Too much time dealing with bad connections or noise from jumper wires being little antennas. It’s more of an issue with audio circuits than digital.

I guess my dream is if you could easily get a symbol, footprint, SPICE model, and 3D model of parts from vendors that all dropped into 1 toolchain.

Maybe a commercial offering is more like that. I’ve never really looked.

This general idea that a previous generation was better because they lead a less pampered life goes back to some of the earliest writing. Yet here we are.

World changing people seem to me to be very much the right people in the right place at the right time. The best way to find them is to try to create those places now.

Opportunities for WWII and post-war era research don’t exist now. Everything with funding is very short term, politicized, and narrowly focused within a micro specialty.

Realistically, I don’t think that will change until it has to.

They took much more on with IPv6 than IPv4 replacement. The spec goes much deeper than IPv4 did, replacing ARP, DHCP, etc. It's a product of its time, including a lot of over-engineering by committee. Many of the problems they tried to address didn't pan out to be real issues. You can read the RFCs and compare.

IPv4 w/ more bits is a lot more simple. Yes, older network gear wouldn't deal with it well, but that's not a real issue today because that same network gear supports IPv6.

Buuut, one of the biggest problems with app-level issues is just that the app doesn't bother dealing with IPv6 addresses and AAAA records. It would be the same issue with an imaginary IPv4*2.

That's pretty brilliant.

My windows experience is really out of date. I knew NT4 and 2000 the best. Then I picked up 2008 for a while supporting small businesses. I don't hate it or anything, but am definitely deeper on Unixes and about equal on VMS that I supported as my NT4/2000 time. I'll work on whatever pays :).

Yeah, my habits come from using GNU, BSD, SysV and having to use the lowest common denominator.

Yes, just dumb fingers typing the comment. :(

Interesting. I’ve just used df-m | sort -n and walked the tree from the CLI for so long.

I’ve also used windirstat (I think that’s what it was called) years ago on Windows and Disk Inventory X on MacOS graphically.

This seems like a nice in between that could replace both methods for me. I’ll have to try.

The GUI bunch of squares is really only useful when you can hover with a mouse and would be clunky in a TUI even if you could render it. And the FS structure isn’t immediately obvious, so I find myself wasting time wandering hovering over big files and globs of little ones.

I really like to avoid a mouse when I can unless it’s really useful.

I played Maniac Mansion the first time that way. I never got it originally, but played Day of the Tentacle and got side tracked finishing that game inside the game.

That reminds me of my days doing shudder ColdFusion and seeing Microsoft Liquid Motion, their short-lived Macromedia Flash competitor.

Well and DHTML immediately reminds me of Dreamweaver and trying to make everything compatible with IE and Netscape with a lot of browser detection.

I miss the people I worked with back then. But not UI work. As bad as it was, it was less complicated and more stable than it seems to be today.

And I don't miss people asking me to make something "more green" that is #0000FF. To paraphrase Spinal Tap: "None. None more green"

Sorry, I don't disagree at all and the message passing was a little tongue in cheek. I was in CS in the 90s, when the dream of a message passing microkernel utopia was so hot.

I don't see a way around this complaint other than starting from scratch. If you "fixed" C, you'd have to rebuild all those things underneath you. And the reason we do FFI is to not reinvent some chunk of code.

I think you fundamentally run into issues with ABI compatibility regardless of language. You get a step better if you could derive the ABI from the code, but there's always interop issues cross-language. I don't think you can avoid wandering into having to implement the isms of the provider's language.

So much baggage just comes from strings. Then you have higher level constructs like making threading/concurrency, memory management, etc. jive. That's even an issue at the API level. I use a ton of libraries that just wrap a C library with a language-idiomatic interface.

I think the issue with the footprint here is not wanting to reinvent wheels.

In theory, if you scrapped libc and up, you could limit your "speaking C" to the kernel of whatever OS/architecture you're using. Different OS/architecture combos would be more of a nightmare than others, but we cheat off libc for that , except we have to do things to support multiple libc implementations some times.

It doesn't solve interop with other languages, because they don't want to reinvent wheels either.

In theory, you could scrap it all and go hardware up. Have a nice OS with a well defined message passing interface that any language could interact with. You could even make a libc wrapper on top to address portability. In 20 years, it may have serious adoption.

The problem is that the situation is "good enough" that nobody wants to solve it. That applies to most technical debt, and really any other human concern.