I am in a very similar boat, age and experience-wise. I would like to work backward from the observation that there is no resource constraints and we're collectively hopelessly lost up the abstraction Jenga tower.
I observe that the way we taught math was not oriented on the idea that everyone would need to know trigonometric functions or how to do derivatives. I like to believe math curricula was centered around standardizing a system of thinking about maths and those of us who were serious about our educational development would all speak the same language. It was about learning a language and laying down processes that everyone else could understand. And that shaped us, and it's foolish to challenge or complain about that or, God forbid, radically change the way we teach math subjects because it damages our ability to think alike. (I know the above is probably completely idealistic verging on personal myth, but that's how I choose to look at it.)
In my opinion, we never approached software engineering the same way. We were so focused on the compiler and the type calculus, and we never taught people about what makes code valuable and robust. If I had FU money to burn today, I'd start a Mathnasium company focused around making kids into systems integrators with great soft skills and the ability to produce high quality software. I would pitch this business under the assumption that the jenga tower is going to be collapsing pretty much continuously for the next 25-50 years and civilization needs absolute unit super developers coming out of nowhere who will be able to make a small fortune helping companies dig their way out of 75 years of tech debt.
Isn't Availablility the ability to connect to something? If I'm calling from region A to region A servers, and the region A servers' networks go down. Well, my client is clever and can failover to region B servers. Except, all my state and context was on region A servers, and maybe that state wasn't replicated over to region B - that replication might only happen on a nightly basis.
When I reconnect, my dating profile is missing all the pictures I uploaded of me in my new convertible with me lowering my sunglasses and winking at the camera.
The LovinHuggin.com server architecture is Available, but not Partition Tolerant. And after I upload different pictures of me in tuxedos and talking like a boss on the cellphone to region B, I've potentially created a weird "split brain" situation. Region A and region B servers have different views of me. Both views are super hot, but the client might get confused if my session returns to region A when their network heals, and the nightly region replication might be messy with reconciling the split brain. Eventual consistency is a helpful (or fraught) feature to have in the database when things like split brain happen.
I am not having fun with GitHub Actions right now! Why does everything have to be so hard?
I like being able to run self-hosted runners, that is a very cool part of GitHub Actions/Workflow.
I appreciate all the other advice about limit my yamls to: 1) checkout, 2) call a script to do the entire task. I am already half-way there, just need to knuckle-down and do the work.
I was dismayed that parallel tasks aren't really a thing in the yaml, I wanted to fanout a bunch of parallel tasks and I found I couldn't do it. Now that I'm going to consolidate my build process into a single script I own, I can do the fanout myself.
Jobs run in parallel, so if you used Make you could have one job called 'formatting' calling 'make check-formatting', one called linting calling ''make check-linting', one called 'compiling' calling 'make compile' etc.
The best promotion advice I have is to pick a great manager who is genuinely motivated to help you advance in your career. You won't get promoted easily by a manager who's checked out or likes counting beans.
Managers like that are few and far between. If you find one, make it clear to them you want to follow them because they'll get snatched from you in no time and be themselves promoted far far away.
How to find said manager? Ask around, do a little org chart recon in Outlook and do some networking. Where is the drama kept to a minimum in the org? What teams seem to be succeeding both internally and across to other teams. Are there teams where the techies are outspoken (positively) within the org and making a name for themselves in the org? Get to know the managers for those teams.
You may have heard people quit when their manager is a tyrant, this is very true! But there is a middling type of manager, not a horrible person, but also one that isn't helping you along either. Maybe plot and scheme on how to gracefully move to other teams you could better contribute to.
I wrote a C++ implementation of the Framework for Integrated Test (FIT) called CeeFIT, and I was really proud of the way it registered fixtures at compile time.
Anyhow, I was surprised that more than one user was using CeeFIT as a sort of batch runner for C++ code, feeding in rows tabular data and executing it against their code. There were a couple bugs I had to fix to support their use cases.
Some of the most successful products were originally intended for a completely different use case. R7 rockets, Viagra, Hugging Face. The ability to pivot - and to recognize when to pivot - is what makes or breaks.
I actually used an M1 MacBook Air for encoding/compositing by sending the video/audio sources over from my main PC with DistroAV (LAN).
Worked reasonably well (you can send camera/VTuber output and captured video from game and any overlays separately, or just use the setup in a similar way to a capture card and run ONLY the game on the gaming PC and everything else on the Mac), but added some complexity to it all.
A beefy Nvidia GPU would make that setup not necessary, unless you want to directly play games on the Mac.
Streaming video from camera? In general the newer Mac Minis in general were fine already just because the M-series chips are very fast, but hopefully this should make it much more efficient
That's great to hear, but perhaps I will ask too much even of the M-series chips.
Occasionally, I will show 3 things at once: an MP4 that the Mac Mini plays from its storage transitioning into captured hdmi signal from a canon camera as picture-in-picture with the main body of the stream containing captured hdmi output from my development laptop.
I'm not sure what my capture solution will be, but it seems there are a wide variety of USB-C capture adapters that I could use that are compatible with OBS on Mac and are even bus powered.
Other comments seem to indicate there are bugs in that specific picture-in-picture setup, but I'm sure those will get ironed out.
Your system sounds centralized, and because lots of other people/the government are involved, I predict it will produce a cyberpunk, pink slime and soylent green dystopia.
I have lost faith that other people who are not in my situation will do kind, high quality work for my benefit over long periods of time (my lifetime.)
I have a crazy dream of single families or neighborhoods owning land and owning lots of cheap open source robots that tend crops and maintain one another over time. And when I say cheap, I mean not worth the trouble to steal. Big backyards in urban settings will be coveted, community gardens everywhere. The software to run it would be open source and free, it would be designed to not deplete the land.
Maybe in my scheme no insecticides are needed because the robots can spot them as they enter the fields and kill them with pinching armatures or pew pew lasers.
My dream is probably stupid in a million ways and impossible unless I get lots of F-U money to do it myself. I imagine big ag interests would make it impossible to succeed and then I'd need 2x F-U money to out-lobby them. ;(
I observe that the way we taught math was not oriented on the idea that everyone would need to know trigonometric functions or how to do derivatives. I like to believe math curricula was centered around standardizing a system of thinking about maths and those of us who were serious about our educational development would all speak the same language. It was about learning a language and laying down processes that everyone else could understand. And that shaped us, and it's foolish to challenge or complain about that or, God forbid, radically change the way we teach math subjects because it damages our ability to think alike. (I know the above is probably completely idealistic verging on personal myth, but that's how I choose to look at it.)
In my opinion, we never approached software engineering the same way. We were so focused on the compiler and the type calculus, and we never taught people about what makes code valuable and robust. If I had FU money to burn today, I'd start a Mathnasium company focused around making kids into systems integrators with great soft skills and the ability to produce high quality software. I would pitch this business under the assumption that the jenga tower is going to be collapsing pretty much continuously for the next 25-50 years and civilization needs absolute unit super developers coming out of nowhere who will be able to make a small fortune helping companies dig their way out of 75 years of tech debt.
reply