*NIX enthusiast, Metal Head, MUDder, ex-WoW head, and Anon radio fan.

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

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  • I do greatly appreciate my management and general company tech culture, they’re great.

    I agree with your stance here, because it’s part of my point. I tend to see more people bitching about Agile itself and not management or their particular implementation.

    The jobs where I was only given enough info to plan 2 - 4 weeks out were so stressful because I frequently felt like I was guessing at which work was important or even actually relevant. Hated it.

    Turns out it’s a skill issue ;p (on the management level to be clear). Folks, don’t let your lazy managers ruin you on a system that can be perfectly fine if done right.



  • 2-3 sprints?! Y’all really flying by the seat of your pants out here huh?

    My teammates and I have no trouble planning multiple quarters in advance. If something crops up like some company wide security initiative, or an impactful bug needing fixed, etc then the related work is planned and then gets inserted ahead of some of the previously planned things and that’s fine because we’re “agile”.

    I delivered a thing at the end of Q3 when we planned to deliver at the start of Q3? Nobody is surprised because when the interruptions came leadership had to choose which things get pushed back.

    I love it. I get clear expectations set in regards to both the “when” and the “what”, and every delay/reprioritization that isn’t just someone slacking was chosen by management.




  • You’re absolutely right. For what it’s worth, it’s just the first part that’s important.

    When you pick up a new concept from a “resource” such as a tutorial, take a minute to explore the concept and understand the semantics of what you’re doing. In the name of illustrating a concept tutorials can often be misleading in subtle ways.

    An explanation of my “useless use of cat” example:

    The command line has a concept called “piping”. This lets one command send output to a second command. It’s very handy. There is usually also a “cat” command, which will read a file and send the contents where you tell it. This is often your screen, or through a “pipe” to a second command. There is also a “grep” command that lets you search data for certain words.

    Many “linux newbie” tutorials combine these tools to show how “piping” lets you send data from one command to another. “cat” some text file, then “pipe” the output to “grep” to search for your words. It usually looks something like cat ./my_address_book.txt | grep Giles to find lines in “./my_address_book.txt” that contain the word “Giles”. The thing is that “grep” can take a file name as an argument. You can just do grep Giles ./my_address_book.txt, and cat is for concatenating files into one. If you want to simply read a file there are more appropriate tools such as “less”. This by the way is the “useless use of cat”

    When you’re a newbie though, it may be the first time you’re seeing either “grep” or “cat”. The tutorial is just trying to show you “pipes”. Along the way you’re picking up these “bad habits”. I’ve met professional sysadmins who didn’t know grep took a filename as an argument. It was always “cat blah | grep my_search”. I will see people type “cat /some/file | less” instead of “less /some/file”. It shows a lack of understanding of what these tools actually do, and IMO it just comes down to regurgitating tutorial actions without bothering to understand the semantics of what you’re being shown.


  • Don’t follow tutorials, understand them. I’m so tired of seeing useless uses of cat because some asshole writing a tutorial 20 years ago decided to illustrate how pipes work with a good ol cat file | grep string as if grep didn’t take a file name as an argument.

    The more time I spend being mad about this the more I notice people using horrible practices in tutorials because they’re too lazy to setup a legit use case.

    A new user sees this and thinks this is how grep works.

    Loops are another common one. People going around not knowing you can pass a glob to a shell for loop. Because the tutorial they read was lazily written and they didn’t bother to understand the bits of what they were being shown, only how to reproduce/mangle the command until they manage to get close enough to what they want out of it.





  • Same here. Reference, particularly sheet music and cooking recipes work fine for me digitally.

    I can sit at the computer and read social/news media for hours with no problem, but the way ebooks are displayed tires my eyes very quickly for some reason.

    While I don’t have this issue with the e-ink/e-paper stuff, I’ve never owned one. I also appreciate that physical books are often much harder to damage and will work without electricity.


  • I also have a small domain that is relatively low traffic. A lot of the “all in one” software on the list you linked looks pretty cool, I can’t deny.

    What I found is that I make very few changes. I used to add mailbox aliases fairly often, but the fact is there are only two users and enabling the “+” syntax in addresses put a stop to me needing to make new aliases when I wanted a new address.

    I just don’t feel like I need a management interface. Because of this I’ve just sort of frankensteined my own setup together and I love it. It operates how I expect it to, and enforces the standards I care about to the extent that I desire (e.g. which SPF result codes am I ok accepting?).

    • Postfix as SMTP/Submission server. I chose to go w/PAM based for outbound SMTP auth.
    • Courier for IMAPS
    • Dovecot for LDA (sieve is delightful)
    • Snappymail for webmail (served by apache httpd)




  • Bouncing around between two for the most part.

    I’m mostly playing Guild Wars 2, enjoying saving the world from demonic invasion in what has so far been a pretty great expansion IMO and I am a bit of a hoor for some of the new cosmetics.

    When I need a break from the rough grind, I jump into a super duper rough grind by firing up ol Leaf Blower Revolution. Idle game my ass, I’m clicking more than 5 cookie clicker players combined! There are still leaves everywhere!



  • you can set the “FROM” address to literally anything.

    Hey all, “that guy” chiming in.

    You can set the “FROM” address to any string that meets the specifications of the “Address Specification” section of the relevant RFCs (5322 and 6854, maybe others). Which is SUPER FAR from “literally anything”.

    I know this seems like some neck-beard bullshit, but we’re here answering the question for someone who clearly has little understanding of email internals. Hyperbole is bad in this context IMO.


  • An absolute lack of consideration in regards to chat etiquette. Man now that I think about it, it’s chat threads/notification in particular.

    People who carry on side conversations in threads. You’re giving everyone else who has participated in the thread the choice of “disable notifications for this thread and risk missing something relevant come back around, or get a notification for every single side message they’re sending”. Especially when someone is chiming in like 4 hours later. “Glad you guys got this sorted out”. Yes, all 12 of us on-call people in this thread needed to get that message direct to our phones at 3a.m. 4 hours after the outage has been resolved. Thanks for that. Very fucking helpful. High value communication.

    People who will not use threads. I don’t need a new fucking notification every 20 seconds because you guys are deciding to have a chat about e-bikes. Make a goddamn thread or use a room made for chit chat, we’re all on the same team, we’re all in on-call positions. I’m paid to respond when this thing makes a noise. I am NOT comfortable muting the team channel.

    It’s addressed elsewhere in these comments, but +1 to folks who just message you “hi”. Go get stabbed.

    On the topic of notification fatigue:

    People who will just not finish a thought.
    
    Before hitting their enter button.
    
    So they end up like doing this thing.
    
    Where you get a notification every 15 seconds, because they are just absolutely addicted.
    
    To their enter key I mean.
    
    They are addicted to thier enter key.
    
    their*
    
    Oh.
    
    I guess I could have just edited that message instead of sending the correction with the thing.
    
    Asterisk? Asterisx? I forget what it's called.
    
    LOL.
    
    Anyway, that thing.
    

    Also, when I’m helping you I am 100% going to stop what I am doing every time I get a message and read the message. There’s no way for me to know whether or not you’re messaging me “Oh never mind, I had a typo” or “here is more relevant info to make your work easier”. That message may very well have immediate impact on what I’m doing, and affect the course I take. Of course I’m going to stop what I’m doing to read it. So maybe don’t wait 5 minutes to send me the message “k” after I kindly, thoughtfully provide you with the status update “I think it’s the fizzibob, let me verify in the logs real quick” of my own volition so that you are not only aware of what’s going on, but don’t have any question as to whether or not your question is still being looked at.