i like to sample music and make worse music out of that.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • My background is not on STEM and I was always passed the notion that without roots in hard math I can’t go far in programming.

    I swear this is some BS repeated by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. I got told pretty much the same when I was younger - don’t believe it. It may have been true to some degree at some point in the distant past, but it’s outdated advice at best.

    Your main general skills when it comes to writing code are the ability to think logically and to think about abstract concepts. Creativity and imagination can definitely help. The ability to keep organized in your thoughts can also go a long way. Just about everything else comes in the form of knowing the language you’re working in, exposure to common coding and software design principles, and knowing your coding environment.

    Math can figure into a lot of different types of programming careers… Shit like writing video game engines and other complicated things that model physics and stuff come to mind. But it’s not so much that math is intrinsic to programming, but rather that those types of software just require a lot of advanced math.

    For example, I’m an automation engineer. It’s just a sysadmin who writes a decent amount of code. Most of my programming work revolves around sending requests over our company’s local network to servers or internal websites to do shit like remotely power up or shutdown machines or trigger a task or open up work orders. There is very little actual math, if any, in the entirety of my work.

    At it’s core, programming is just the storing, moving around, manipulating, and keeping track of bits of information. Especially in a language like Python (which is my primary language).

    EDIT: I should probably add my background isn’t STEM either. I’m a two time college dropout who got a break 14 years ago and left the restaurant industry to go into the tech sector instead.


  • That’s basically where I’m wedging myself in now. Ansible and Python, higher value but lower stress projects. Bigger wins, but ones that are able take the time needed to put them together, test, and refine.

    It’s almost a back-to-my-roots kind of thing for me, but with a fresh twist in terms of approach. I’m basically writing automations that make life easier for ops guys, to boil it down to it’s essence.


  • Ah, alright, not quite me - I’ll be 14 years deep in November. Honestly, one of the things that kept me motivated over the years was moving around - I stayed at the same company, but I started out doing QA (by hand, no automation), then got moved to handle release management, then moved to IT as a general Linux admin and spent a few years doing that, made friends with an infosec manager and he offered me a spot on his team working remote and doing container/docker security which morphed into a cloud security thing after he left the company (I hated the cloud). A couple years back I moved back to non-cloud/non-infosec work doing automation stuff with Ansible mainly, and for the time being only for our on-prem infrastructure (this may change in the future and I’m not really looking forward to it all that much).

    At this point, nothing is really helping get my head back into the game 100% but I can still put out work and I’m just trying to find the joy in small victories and chasing the high you get when the code you wrote works flawlessly. I’m blessed to have a solid management structure above me who a) know me, b) like me (and the feeling is mutual, they’re all great people), and c) are happy with my output.

    I don’t envy you working with kubernetes - my time in container security came during the early days of large companies trying to move to turning everything into microservices. It was a wild west kind of vibe and I basically had free reign… nowadays, I don’t think I’d enjoy any of that in its current form.

    I have great soft skills and I write pretty well, but outside of that my skillset is basically a degraded/decayed technology one because I’ve been treading water for a while now and not actively keeping up with all the shit in our sector that changes on a constant basis.

    I’ve also seriously weighed moving into development, but I’m not sure if that’s just going to fix anything for me. I like writing Python, but I don’t know how that would feel full-time. Sucks, man.







  • it needs time and more users, but I think it’s alright so far.

    I had looked into a couple other decentralized or federated services in the past and they seemed like kind of a pain or they were poorly explained. until now, all of it also seemed too obscure to have any kind of notable traffic. if this isn’t temporary and the reddit api controversy actually did something meaningful, then I look forward to seeing how the federated service ecosystem grows and changes.

    reddit’s dethroning was a long time coming in my eyes. it’s just not going to be as smooth as the digg -> reddit pipeline years ago.

    I think there may be room for another couple million users spread across a ton of communities. wishful thinking, but maybe that would keeps thing toned down with the bots and other shady shit.

    lots of polish and QoL needed both on the main site(s) and the mobile offerings out so far. all in all, pretty good start.