I must say I was immensely entertained by reading "IBM stepped up with buildfarm animals". :)
148 karma · joined November 2, 2011
Some vendors also explicitly detail exactly which distro and versions they support ("RHEL or Centos x.y"), so even if you can get things to work on another distro, a vendor can easily deny your support request with the usual BS line: "that configuration is not supported. Switch back to RHEL x.y or SLES and let us know if you can reproduce the issue! La-la-la have a nice day, buh-bye! phone click".
Another unfortunate "feature" was that the device refused to be powered with it's own USB cable. It felt to me like the manufacturer were deliberately trying to limit your options as a customer so that you had to keep re-buying batteries from them - reminding me very much of the situation with printer ink cartridges.
It does feel like there needs to be a better tradeoff between consumer safety and repairability. I can replace nearly every part in my car with an aftermarket part, so why can't we do the same with these little computing devices etc?
For awhile I limped along by buying a few cells online and jerry-rigging my own connectors with a soldering iron but after the printer itself finally died recently, I actually replaced it with an _older_ 160 model that uses AAA cells instead - go figure - newer is worse.
Using goto judiciously to more easily escape a deeply nested block of code and/or jump to a cleanup section is not hard to follow.
My preference is to WFH most of the time, but not all the time. When WFH for awhile, I can much more easily get into a zen-like state of concentration after an hour or so that is extremely difficult to get in an office. At the office I have to contend with constant sources of distractions and interruptions (people walking up on foot, phone ringing, non-work related discussion, ...) which has often made me feel like the only time I can push through a hard problem is during off-hours when no one is around. Most importantly, being in a zen-like state while working and getting stuff done is what makes work enjoyable for me.
That said, whenever there is a significant amount of collaboration or a need for a lot of round-trip communication with someone (new employee, need to bring someone up to speed, ...) it's better in person - but I find this to be only an occasional need.
It's hard for me to imagine that atlassian would allow individual instances of jira/confluence/etc in their cloud versions to get nearly as much resources as you need to give them on-prem. The incentive would always be for them to try to minimize the amount of memory every instance gets, which does NOT maximize your individual performance. Shared resources will also make performance more variable and "noisy", making it more difficult to narrow down specific causes. It's hard for me to see how "Java" and "cloud" go together.
Bamboo on the other hand is IMO the worst of the commercial CI tools by far and where I work has gone down for us the most. Atlassian itself doesn't appear to be investing in it much anymore judging by the slow pace of development in recent years and at their most recent conference, you can hardly find it mentioned or see much presence for it anywhere.
In all the CI systems I've used though, there has not been one that I haven't encountered some major difficulties with.
Beyond that, anything to do with build automation for a large number of users always quickly becomes a support & maintenance quagmire. Users frequently want to install a new (barely maintained) plugin to solve a problem they have, complex interactions lead to difficult to understand failure modes that require time consuming investigations ("your CI tool is the problem and broke my build" ... "No, your build is broken" ...).
If you wanna get a little geeky about it like I was, could consider buying a Precision Xtra to measure your glucose and ketone levels. For me this was helpful because I could see changes in the numbers after changing my eating habits. Had I not seen that, I would have only my scale to see body weight, and would've just looked at that and thought "looks like nothing changed, maybe this isn't working / doing anything at all." This also allowed me to "gamify" the whole process a bit ("I wonder how low I can get these numbers to go? how long I can stay there?" ... etc).
So, I cut out out all sugary drinks, refined carbs, late night eating (!!) and tried various intermittent fasting / time restricted feeding techniques (5:2, alternate day, one-meal-a-day) and after about 3.5 months my glucose readings returned to the "normal" range. (Which is WAY more tolerable than sticking to a low-calorie diet every single day IME. I still had pizza and cheeseburgers on occasion, just no soda, fries, "junk" etc.)
After around 6-7 months I'd lost 40+lbs, my knee stopped bothering me and no longer had to entertain the idea of fixing it with surgery. I'm now down well over 60+lbs without having put in hardly any effort to exercise (occasional walking) - pretty stunning to me.
The gov't should not be able to be so asinine as to say something like "ability to pay does not affect obligation to pay" -- in other words when a (typically father) gets laid off or makes much less money, they will not lower his support payments to be in line with his new pay. This is how we get working, homeless men living in vans -- some of whom later kill themselves.