SEEKING WORK | Germany or remote | DevOps strategy and (as a hobby) implememtation
I'm a senior DevOps person. My mission is to enable teams to work together better, faster, more enjoyably.
I firmly believe that engineering is what happens when engineers talk to one another. I
enable teams by making them understand what they can do and what they feel they should be doing.
It's not enough to work on one aspect of your practice; instead you'll need to address improvements at all levels.
To that end I offer everything you need to level up your development efforts:
* training on cultural aspects of DevOps
* training on methods used in DevOps
* training on technology to support DevOps
* ongoing consulting and coaching
* potentially, some hands-on work to get your tech stack off the ground
I'm also pretty active in the community, and am happy to speak at events or on podcasts.
Let me point out: to me, auto-updating isn't even the crucial issue (I use unattended-upgrades as well, so whatever).
Yes, functionality and workflows around installation and updates are still insufficient for many use cases, but that could have been ironed out given enough time.
But what you messed up badly, IMO, was to force-migrate packages to Snap in an LTS release before it was ready.
Had you waited until Ubuntu 20.10, I'd have been more forgiving. But you (collectively) were so eager to get this in before the window closed for another two years.
If you had made Snap a compelling product, even LTS users might have voluntarily migrated to snaps once they saw how good it was. Now you've kind of pulled off the opposite.
Sadly the ship has sailed: Both in general, since you've pushed so heavily for Snap in a LTS release when it simply wasn't ready yet. And for me personally, where the forced installation of Snaps by some debs (notably Chromium) broke my trust significantly enough that I turned my back on Ubuntu after over a decade.
Not only is the Chromium Snap dog slow, it also can't see my NFS shares. So the snap version is objectively worse, at least for now.
But if I install a deb, I expect to get a deb. You don't want to offer it anymore, fine, take it out of the repo. But sneakily migrating me to a snap, and not even notifying me, is just trust-breaking.
> > "You’d never hear anyone say, 'We help mechanical engineers be agile. That would be silly. And I mean that in the worst possible sense of the word".
This quote is silly.
To me, agile is just good engineering practice, applied to software. Of course mechanical engineers apply its principles, and have for decades before the term Agile was coined.
And as such, this practice is far older than software.
The Apollo space programme is my favourite example: the ultimate goal remained fixed (man/moon/before end of decade), but all steps of the way were discovered and redefined over the programme's course.
Mission objectives were changed depending on what was learned, often even in flight.
This was a very nice and agile (and sensible) approach, regardless of what it was called.
> meaning that they are not updated with security fixes in any systematic manner.
Interestingly, that exact thing was always my worry about Snap (or Flatpack) as well.
Sure, big-name software such as Spotify will keep their Snap package well in order; they've got both the incentive and manpower to do so. (Incidentally, they could also use this manpower to build distro-specific packages).
But what about all the little open-source hobby projects? They'll be packaged with whatever library version happens to be latest at the time. And then, be updated whenever the hobbyist dev finds the time and inclination.
So on my system I might have a huge zoo of different versions of the same library, with various bugs or vulnerabilities.
If they all used the same system-wide library, at least they would all be fixed at the same time (when the library maintainers publish an updated .deb).
To me, Snap and the like feel like they're essentially the same as static linking, except more opaque.
It's getting long in the tooth by Google standards I suppose. Who knows when they'll axe it.
I think it's strictly 1:1 (which, I gather, Facetime isn't?).
It has good video quality, but what I like most about it is that it's nicely resilient on dodgy connections.
I've often used it wandering around my garden, at the fringe of Wifi range, and it does the right thing: tries to stay on Wifi, but switches over to 4G if the connection becomes too dodgy, then back to Wifi once that's stable again.
All of that with pretty minimal artefacts.
> Facetime has the best audio/video quality of any conferencing software I've used by a mile.
Out of curiosity: can you compare it to Google Duo? Because it has the best quality and stability of any 1:1 product I've ever tried (never tried Facetime)
> Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases.
The other day I came across something interesting: two comments, for two different but related products (dynamos). One comment was in German, the other in Italian, but they both had the same non-sequitur in them.
Apparently scammers reuse comments across products (not surprising) and languages (more surprising).
I don't think I subvocalise, I read way faster than I can speak. There's certainly ideas flowing through my mind as I read, but not sounds. It feels like a mixture between words, thoughts and emotions, not a stream of (silently) spoken words.
I bought a book on speed reading because I was dissatisfied with my "slow" reading, only to discover that according to their tests I was way up there in both speed and comprehension :-D
I was shocked to learn from that book that many people subvocalise - it felt so foreign (and utterly cumbersome) to me. I hadn't even considered people did that.
Most of the book was about not subvocalising - which I don't think I do anyway, so I never read it to the end.
Indeed if I read to my kids I'm often simultaneously reading one sentence aloud, and reading 1...2 sentences ahead for myself so I get the voices right. So in effect I'm reading the entire text twice while speaking it once.
> You can opt out of recaptcha by just boycotting the website which uses it.
Ah, I was waiting for somebody to make this argument, which I find somewhat disingenuous given how widespread reCaptcha's use is.
With sites I don't care about leaving them is exactly what I do - but there are sites I pay a lot of money to use, and can't really avoid using for business reasons, yet they still subject me to reCaptcha.
The path I've taken instead is to address this with the site owners. Most weren't really aware of how overreaching reCaptcha feels to some, and I've had good discussions. Of course nobody changed their site based on my complaint, but I like to think I raised awareness.
> But of course by "opt out" you mean to remain a user of a service but not the parts you don't like.
Specifically, a part of user verification. I'm still not sure why they feel they need to verify my humanity - they've got my credit card details and everything.
> Whether you are entitled to do this or not is still up for debate.
Let me ask the opposite question: is the owner of a website entitled to sell my privacy for their own (debatable) convenience?
Unfortunately, Jitsi isn't a viable solution at this point except for 1 on 1.