thelastknowngod @ thelastknowngod @lemm.ee

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299

Joined

2 yr. ago

Honestly just changing the interview process would be enough to get more people into the business.

Literally yesterday I did a code challenge to track the distance, speed, maintenance schedules, and predict collisions of forklifts in a warehouse. The job I was applying for was a pretty average SRE roll.. System design, IaC, CI/CD pipelines, PromQL, etc.. How is the code challenge representative of the job in any way?

I feel like I need to learn leetcode algorithm patterns just for the interviews.. I never need them for the actual jobs I get hired for.

Figured this would be one of the responses. Thanks. I don't interact with node very often. I assumed there was a better option but wasn't sure which.. This is just the first result.

You can do it bro. Dockerfiles are basically just shell scripts with a few extras.

It uses npm to build so start with a node base container. You can find them on docker hub. Alpine-based images are a good starting point.

    
FROM appdynamics/nodejs-agent:23.5.0-19-alpine 

RUN git clone https://github.com/stophecom/sharrr-svelte.git && \ 
    cd sharrr-svelt/ && \
    npm run build

  

If you need to access files from outside of the container, include a VOLUME line. If it needs to be accessible from a specific network port, add an EXPOSE line. Add a CMD line at the end to start whatever command needs to be run to start the process.

Save your Dockerfile and build.

    
docker build . -t my-sharrr-image

  

For what it's worth, I haven't paid more than ~1% effective tax rate in years. This past year I owed like $50 total.. For the whole year. Something like 0.03% of my actual income.

If you want to stay stationary, 7% is pretty decent but you can do better bouncing around.

There are build instructions in the readme. What's stopping you?

Kubernetes podcast from Google.

DevOps Paradox.

It sounds like you're chasing something that doesn't exist. There isn't really like a point you get to when everything is "optimized" or whatever... That word doesn't really mean anything. Optimization is a process that you use for really specific situations. It's not a state you get to.

For example, if I was serving a website and the server was showing high CPU usage and disk activity, I might find what files are being accessed most often and add a caching layer (redis, varnish, memcache, etc). That would optimize for more efficient CPU usage and lower disk activity but it would also increase memory usage. That's a trade off I would need to consider before implementing that change. If the apps I am running are already consuming a lot of memory, I might run the risk of exhausting all the memory and having processes killed off (aka OOM errors). Maybe I try something else then.

You need to find what's happening with your system and then figure out what you can do to mitigate the behavior of any poorly performing apps. That all starts with good monitoring but beyond that its impossible to say because it's extremely dependent on how you have chosen to configure your system and what you are running.

This type of investigation is what gets you to be a real engineer.

There's no one answer here. It's going to take a lot of trial and error and experimenting. All of the issues you mention are going to have to be addressed individually as well. There is never going to be a single tool to do this for you.

As far as tracking state over time, standing up a proper, modern monitoring stack will help tremendously. If you send logs to loki, collect metrics with Prometheus or OpenTelemetry, and graph them both with grafana, you should have really great insights to whatever is happening.. It's never going to be finished though. It's always a work in progress.

Yep. Meetups are the best. You def have to go regularly though.. Don't expect magic from day 1.

Warrio all day

https://lemm.ee/comment/3057321

https://lemm.ee/comment/3057321

https://lemm.ee/comment/3057321

As a US citizen you are technically always responsible for paying taxes no matter where you live. The US has a citizenship-based tax system (you owe on worldwide income regardless of where you live). Most other countries in the world have only a residency-based system (you owe only if you are actively living in that particular country). You are still required to file every year and you're going to need someone more sophisticated than the dude at H&R Block or a free Quickbooks whatever. You need someone who is comfortable working with expats.

"Doesn't that mean I have to pay taxes for both the US and my new country then?" No. The US has dual taxation agreements with most countries. That means that, basically, the US will not charge you taxes for things you've already been taxed for.

The main goal of paying less in taxes is to reduce your taxable income. The biggest chunk of this will happen with the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion. That essentially says that the first $120k you earn in a year is tax free. You can qualify for it by staying out of America for 330 days per year. There is no requirement to have residency anywhere else.. You just have to be outside of the US.

That $120k rises every year. When you make more than that and do start to owe taxes, you will start to owe from the lowest tax bracket as well.

If you make $120k and do this, you just got a $30k raise in the form of taxes you no longer owe.. You can pretty much travel the world for free using this money.

Now, I said that most non-US countries have a residency-based taxation system. That generally only starts to kick in after living in that country for 181 days. If you stay there for less time, you don't owe them any money.

There are also countries who don't have income tax or do but actively tell you not to pay it.

Living in a combination of these places, and bouncing around every few months you avoid any real responsibility to anyone.

If you do earn more than $120k per year, you can reduce your taxable income even further by doing things like maxing out your 401k contribution.. That gets you to $142500 or so tax free. And again, you'd start paying taxes at the lowest rate above that.

Any other thing you mention in your US filing that can reduce your taxable income also contributes.. Getting married, depreciation value on a home (US or not), investment losses, etc..

Working remotely from the US also gets you a higher salary than if you had just taken a job in the UK or Germany or Japan or something.. So you can have the higher salary and the higher quality of live at the same time. You give up some employment protections and European style summer vacations but I'm personally ok with it.

Also, if you are working for a US company remotely, you can add these expected deductions to you W4 and never get charged for them in the first place.. You'd have a MUCH higher weekly salary and wouldn't have to wait for your tax return every year to take advantage of these benefits.

So spend summers in Italy, autumn in Japan, winter in New Zealand, and spring in Mexico. You earn an American salary, take advantage of lower cost of living, travel the world, and its all basically free.. Good luck trying to get me to move back to the US.

There's more but these are the major points.

I'm an American who has been living abroad for 7ish years now. I often read comments from people who say they would do it "but the taxes are brutal." Absolutely not the case. I dug deep into tax programs when I left and can comfortably say I am better off financially now than at any time I ever lived in the States.. A major part of that is my tax strategy.

I love talking about this but most people don't really care or realize how significantly it can change their lives.. Eyes just tend to glaze over.

The NYT has had pro life op eds too.. It's important to understand where the other side's dumb arguments come from so you can more easily defend against them.

For me, I try to follow a bunch of sources with differing views.. PBS and NPR for mostly middle of the road American news. The Times for left leaning, WSJ and Bloomberg because it's the closest thing to right leaning that isn't batshit crazy. Al Jazeera, BBC, and the Japan Times for international news. A few Turkish and Georgian sources because it's where I've been living for a couple years. Then just a lot of tech industry specific stuff because it's my field.

The money hoarded by the boomers likely won't be released back into the economy though.. It will move upstream to the rich vultures who bled them dry through end of life care (retirement homes, home aide agencies, funeral industry, etc).

Kubernetes and the ecosystem around it.. Things like external-dns, autoscalers, external secrets operator, istio, cilium, vitess, etc.. It's a joy to work with and I don't want to go back to the old way if I can avoid it.

I would love an Onion for software. This was great.

Yep. IO.

OP, this might be overkill for you but it might be worth standing up a grafana/prometheus stack.. You'd be able to see this stuff a lot faster and potentially narrow in on a root cause.