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I’ve been having sleep issues lately. The only thing that consistently works is making the room very cold. I’ve tried meditation and less computer time and it didn’t really help, only a colder room did.

If you’re having sleep trouble give it a shot.

Honestly I understand the hard work it takes to manage all the clusters, but this was a total bait and switch and hurts the reputation that everyone has with Google Cloud. Telling us to DIY because we cannot pay $71 just sounds like someone who works at Google would say, which you do work at Google.

The sentiment with my clients before was that Google Cloud was a great choice because of the security and expertise with GKE. It's also free!

Meanwhile, in the back of my head I've always had this fear because of your reputation that you do not keep your promises and that you do not care about your users. Because of this fear, we have tried to make every infrastructure decision not use a managed service by Google even though it may be easier to do so short-term.

For the product I'm working on, we decided to use Kubernetes just in case you baited and switched us with the reputation you have. In terms of monitoring, we really wanted to use Stackdriver, but now we're 100% using fluent-bit + prometheus + loki + grafana. It's the only way to protect ourselves from your reputation which is becoming a reality.

So yeah, this is pretty sad and a bad decision. Should have priced GKE at $70 / month to begin with and we would have been fine with it. Now we're (actually) looking at EKS since Amazon doesn't seem to have this reputation and you've spooked us. We never would have thought about using any other provider until today.

Oh wow, one of the biggest reasons we picked Google Cloud was that you did not have to pay a flat fee for their managed Kubernetes service. Luckily there is Kubernetes support across all Cloud Providers so we're happy we're not vendor locked in. (biggest reason we picked Kubernetes in the first place.)

We were thinking of using Stackdriver for logging, but we were scared of vendor locked in due to price increases or other changes that we've been warned about with Google. In this case, I think it's safe to say we'll be using Prometheus + Grafana + Loki instead since there may be a random Stackdriver flat fee introduced or some other weird fee and we may need to migrate out of Google.

This isn't always true. On GKE for example, LoadBalancer is very expensive first of all. Second of all, if you use LetsEncrypt such as cert-manager, the GKE load balancer is awful to configure and takes forever to get a cert.

Also by using the GKE load balancer for ingress, you lose out on a lot of things, like password protection, or certain rules you want with nginx.

I've tried my best to stick with GKE LoadBalancer, but it's just an awful experience. Now I have GKE to load balance traffic to nginx-ingress, the level 3 load balancer is just not flexible enough and in general annoying to configure.

I remember seeing documentation on this a while ago, but I can't seem to find any documentation from nginx-ingress that talks about how nginx-ingress uses readinessprobe or livenessprobe.

I was looking into this because if I have a pod with 3 containers, if 1 container wasn't running, nginx-ingress stopped serving traffic. I actually want to continue serving traffic if a certain container is still running, not all 3 running necessarily

Do you know or have any documentation on how nginx-ingress actually does its readiness/liveness checks?

I'm also convinced of the same thing, I don't know enough about biology, but I have days where I feel like the only thing that could be causing certain emotions is an infection that I don't know about.

For example, I use to feel tired all the time, and I would get sick all the time. I swear I could "feel" that my immune system sucked and I constantly had to fight things off.

Now I feel like my immune system is stronger, and it shows because I get sick so less often. My brain fog is basically gone and my energy levels are a lot higher. Every now and then it comes back, but recently I always wondered:

Is there a set of anti-biotics, anti-parasitical, anti-viral drugs that you could take in a row to try to flush the body of any infections? There's been similar comments about HSV1, that a lot of people have, but there's also Toxoplasmosis. If you look into it, so many people have both of these infections, but what are the side effects on the body?

I think immune system is one part of the picture. I also think your bodies natural response to the environment has something to do with this. I've been way more social and have gotten WAY better social feedback from all angles in my life (positive feedback loop) and that has helped immensely with mood and feeling good all the time.

When you combine a lot of these things, such as: poor immune system, conflicted social life, bad diet, and lack of exercise, I could see how the combination could manifest its self into mental illness.

I'm still convinced pathogens have a high ranking in the cause of brain fog and emotional issues tho, social life being second, diet third and surprisingly exercise being last even though I initially thought it was number 1. It just made me feel good, but it didn't really get to the root of any issue for some reason.

Helm was great when I first started to learn Kubernetes, but overall has been extremely annoying and I would not recommend it for anything. I personally no longer use it on any cluster and if a specific piece of software in a cluster is on Helm, I immediately feel dread since I have no idea how that chart is going to behave on an upgrade or a change

A recent example of Helm being a problem for me is their Elasticsearch chart. I tried to shutdown my data nodes to increase disk space on all of them, but I noticed after scaling down, the first instance was taking a _very_ long time to shutdown.

Turns out, there's a default lifecycle hook (pre-stop.sh) that drains the node and rebalances the shards to the other nodes as a pre-stop hook. (to me, this is a bad idea, the cluster operator should control draining and rebalancing the nodes.)

Guess what, there's no way to comment out the draining functionality since the shell script is mounted as a read-only ConfigMap. Annoyingly, the only solution was to disable re-balancing across the entire cluster, and then jumping on each node and run $ kill on the shell script for each node.

I've ran into strange defaults like that multiple times. I've ran into images randomly being changed, charts being upgraded but breaking your live deployment. Overall just a nightmare.

Kubernetes is actually quite understandable and consistent. Helm adds a layer of complexity that makes you scared to upgrade or change your cluster. If you stick to Kubernetes primitives like Deployments and StatefulSets, it's super easy to know what changes are going to occur in your cluster.

It sounds like you are doing $10k-$20k jobs in a few days or weeks.

Charge way more than you're charging. If you're successfully building our their entire backend, their internal tools and their automation in a few weeks, you should be charging for a few months instead of a few weeks.

In your case, it sounds like project work is better for you. I wouldn't recommend that you work hourly since that's probably where you're being burned. If you quote a REST API, automation system and internal tools for $10k-$30k and you finish it in 2 weeks, then you're golden and so is the startup since they just saved a lot of time.

I would highly recommend that you get on retainers with your clients. If they appreciate your work, and need help from time-to-time, you shouldn't be charged for 1 hour whenever they need you. They should pay for you to be available for them, so perhaps try to get on $500 - $1000 / month retainers. They may only need you a few times a month, but you're not billing them for $100-$200 for 1 hour of work, what a bad deal for you (and a great deal for them!)

I've been able to scale consulting to about 20-35k / mo as a single developer.I've gotten all of my clients through word-of-mouth and I've spend zero dollars in marketing. The trick being that I always try to do the best work and communicate instantly with my clients. I.e, if a client e-mails me, or sends me a text, I respond in about one second. They seem to love that.

I try to be as honest and forthcoming with each client and I've basically hit a cap now in being able to add any new ones and deliver the experience I want to each client. Scaling is the most difficult part for me right now since all my clients are quite varied. Some of them are web apps, other mobile apps and others just pure cybersecurity. They're so vastly different from each other that it's a bit difficult to hire someone who can handle the diverse amount of work. Also, I think for the amount of work I do, I should probably have much bigger retainers, so some clients are $1,250 / month, but jesus is that hard. It should probably be at least $5,000 /month.

For me tho, I've learned so much about business and my technical skills have skyrocketed. I honestly feel like I can tackle any problem in the world and it's a powerful feeling. I make decisions based on the problem its self and have no loyalty really to a specific technology. I understand why a client may want to use WordPress and why a client may want to use Kubernetes. Some clients want to just do servers using Linux and that's okay. I've learned that more basic technology (like bash) can be hugely beneficial to trying to write your own solution. When you're under time constraints, you start to have some pretty creative solutions, and not the creative where it breaks later, the creative where it does exactly what it needs to do, but it's done in 1 hour instead of 1 month.

The best advice I could give is to basically be brutally honest with each client, do the best work that you can and always reply in a timely manner, regardless of what's happening in your life. So many consulting companies are slow to reply, or don't really care about their clients on a personal level that clients will really love you if you spend time thinking about their business on a personal level, being responsive and just being honest when you're overloaded in work.

It is a stressful business tho and I'm in the alpha stages of a product I'm working on based on the problems I've seen over the years. It'll be interesting to move from consulting to a SaaS product. The transition being the consulting provides the funding to be able to work on the SaaS and then hopefully the recurring revenue outpaces consulting eventually and I live a less stressful life!

This looks fantastic! I've used Mint to track my expenses and this looks way better (especially the course correction concept.) The biggest issue that comes up when entering financial data into something like this is how is the data stored and what security measures are in place? If my financial data was leaked, I know that hackers could use that to get access to my bank accounts.

Please don't take this personally, but reading through your blog post, you mentioned that you had limited DevOps experience that makes me a bit scared that regular security updates and security practices may not be something that you were thinking about when the app was being developed.

I'm going to signup and play with it regardless, but it would be really difficult to put my actual financial data in the app.

Question: Is security of user data something you have thought of? Do you plan to hire someone that is security minded if the app does well?

I know it’s easy to crap on people believing whatever is shared on social media and then laugh about how everyone got it wrong..

But I just don’t like this article. I don’t see how a 7% increase in forest fires in the Amazon is nothing to care about and something about the tone of the article doesn’t sit well with me.

It’s somehow trying to convince me that deforestation is going down, this is an overreaction and it’s hurting farmers.

I don’t know about that... i’ll just side with I want to remain living on this planet and I want my children to as well, more power to environmental viral hits, even if they got the facts.. a bit wrong.

A family members home was broken into, we checked the routers DHCP logs to determine what phones connected that day.

We were able to determine the person AND the time it happened since an IP is only held on for 24 hours before being released. The person ended up being a friend that had connected to the WiFi in the past! (Yes, that friendship is very over.)

It was a real life CSI moment, and yes, criminals are generally oblivious to their phone identifying them! Good thing for my family member!

Exactly what happened to me. I accidentally left my phone in my pocket and did a load of laundry. My phone was destroyed and could not be recovered.I had iCloud backups, but that didn't do anything for Google authenticator.

Now it's been a nightmare to recover my accounts.

I work at WeWork and I love it. The value comes from being able to network and have a place to meet and socialize while contracting. I don't really value WeWork for the space, but for the people. I find coworking spaces like WeWork to be quite an amazing place to socialize. As you age, it becomes more difficult to make friends and when working at 1 company, you usually surround yourself with the same people.

At WeWork you get to meet people from many different backgrounds and companies. I met a friend who owns an insurance company (on a Microsoft stack.), another that owns a tech company for efficient travel to work (on a React stack), a group of people who have monthly subscription box companies (Shopify + CMS) and then an individual who owns an investment firm (various advice on how startups are doing in the city.)

Each individual brings something to the table and I've learned a lot from them. We hang out on weekends and drink beer together. Socializing is critical for human happiness. That's the value add for WeWork for contractors in my opinion, the space is secondary.

There are competitors, I've tried a few, but I found the WeWork space to be more professional. It costs more, but you get more in my opinion (in terms of space.) The other coworking spaces are kind of ugly, or they don't have constant events like WeWork. I'm sure this point varies heavily depending on the city. I'm sure monthly rate helps with keeping the space fresh.

I am unsure about the valuation here, but I would consider WeWork and coworking spaces the best thing to ever happen to my social life. I went from a rather introverted person to being quite extroverted and growing emotionally. This had many other factors, but WeWork contributed.

Hello, I had a question about how Cloud Run handles security between containers being run on the cloud.

I assume my container runs alongside other containers on the same host, how do you prevent privilege escalation exploits?

Send me an email if you want to share some ideas.

ari@stacksoft.io

I'm not sure how much reading that book would help in terms of creating a sustainable business model that does not require significant daily work from the founder and also allows you to scale in a reasonably way.

It does help with the operations side of running a business and does give you insight on how some other CEOs might run certain parts of the company (such as marketing, hiring and finding product market fit.)

I've been looking at similar business models outside of software development (such as law firms.) to get a better idea on how this business model could scale.

Long term tho, I do not plan to scale the consulting side of the business, but hope to phase it out since I believe products are probably a better way to scale a business.

I don't think consulting is entirely a bad thing for us tho, I still strongly believe it gives you insights into other companies and allows you to see other companies mistakes every day and that's super useful.

Good luck to you.

I'm in a pretty similar situation, but it's actually working really well for me because of some important things.

1. Having a healthy amount of savings before embarking on a bootstrapping business. There has been never a point where I have had trouble paying bills. I have 5-6 years of expenses saved up.

2. Doing the research in terms of how to run a business. I have an accountant, I did tax planning from the beginning and I make sure to evolve on the business operating side constantly. (use software that makes the process easier, such as automatic invoicing, working with an accountant, working with a lawyer.)

3. Working in a start-up environment and learning how to prioritize work.

4. Reading The Great CEO Within from Matt Mochary, there's so many tips in there that have been amazing and helpful

I'm definitely struggling with the scaling issue of consulting tho. It's great and all, but I find it a struggle to add people to the company because of how specialized and good I am at my work. I'm generally the selling point.

I am working on 2-3 products on the side of the consulting work with the hope that the products eventually become the focus. I do understand the downfall of the consulting taking a lot of my time and not spending enough on product work, but somehow I've been able to keep up.

The great part about doing this is that you work with a lot of different companies and you actually get to learn a bunch of of things that work and do not work. You get to see how different business models work and scale and it's very enlightening on your own company.

For example, I'm averse to starting any sort of agency in terms of web development, since I've seen multiple of my clients have issues with scaling the business model and retaining customers.

Overall, consulting has been a pretty positive experience. I've only been doing it for 2 years, so we'll see how it works in the long term. But my side product is generating $800 / mo in income and I hope to scale it to cover all my expenses and then I'm more able to work on products and do less consulting.

Hmm, this isn't great. Currently using Azure Kubernetes Service and we haven't had many issues so far, but we just made the shift.

Hope I don't have to move over to Google cloud.

I've been using Kubernetes on Azure and GCE recently and it's absolutely wonderful.

I was able to setup an entire ecosystem from scratch in a week that scales well and can be managed in one location.

When I first looked at Kubernetes, the complicated part was setting it up on a cluster. If you use Kubernetes on GCE, or Azure, you don't have to do that step, everything else is ready to go for you!

- Automatic scaling of your application

- Service discovery

- Secrets and config management

- Logging in one central dashboard

- Able to deploy various complicated, distributed, pieces of software very easily using Helm (Jenkins, Kafka, Grafana + Prometheus)

- Able to add new nodes to the cluster easily

- Health checks and automatic restarts

- Able to deploy any container to your cluster in a really simple way (if you look at Deployments, it's really simple.)

- Switch between cloud providers and still maintain the same workflow.

I won't ever touch Ansible again, I really prefer the Kubernetes way of handling operations (it's like a live organism instead of something you apply changes to.)

Also, the entire argument that you probably don't need Kubernetes because your organization doesn't have 10s, or 100s of nodes just doesn't make sense after using it.

Having a Kubernetes cluster with 3 nodes is 100% worth it, even for rather simple applications in my opinion. The benefits are just way too good.

I just asked a friend of mine beside me to read it, and she read the same thing, "Paris" instead of Pairs. I also made the same mistake.

Hah!

In Canada, renting a car when you're under 25 years old is pretty annoying. It's usually an extra $25 a day and that's what turned me off to renting. Some rental companies won't even let you get a car if you're under 25. It's actually a function of age, so I'm currently 24 and in theory, it should be cheaper now.. so let's do some blanket math to entertain your idea.

- I drive my car only on weekends, so Friday - Sunday

- It tends to break down every 3 months, at around $1000 a repair each time(BMWs have expensive repairs.) That's $4000 a year

- Insurance is about $1750 for a year

- Looking at rates at www.enterprise.com for my city, it's about $100 CAD for a rental car for 3 days (pick up at 7:00AM Friday and drop off at 4:00PM on Sunday.)

- $100 CAD * 4 is about $400 a month for a rental

- $4000 (repairs) + $1750 (insurance) + $120 (stickers) is about $489 for owning

It looks like using rental cars on weekends is not a great investment still and that makes me sad. I only save $89 a month and have to deal with picking up and dropping off the car and also not using it through the week. $1068 in yearly savings is not worth it!

Note: Gas is not included because I have to pay for gas for both cars, I guess it might be a little cheaper for the rental cars since they tend to be gas efficient, but I still don't think it's huge savings.

That was super frustrating, I went back a few times to see if he said it and he did not. I was just waiting for him to tell me for the rest of the video and it never happened.

If you Google 'top facebook games', and you browse to each one, you will find a majority of them use Flash. Here are a few of them:

- Candy Crush (50,000,000+ monthly users)

- Dragon City (10,000,000+ monthly users)

- Criminal Case (10,000,000+ monthly users)

- Angry Bird Friends (1,000,000+ monthly users)

I'm currently working on a Flash game with a large player base. Firefox's suggestion of adopting HTML technologies is not simple when the game is 9 years old! I think many Facebook games are going to run into a similar issue.

It's getting scary now tho, it seems like Firefox and Chrome are aggressively trying to get rid of the usage of Flash. We've essentially decided that we're going to convert this 9 year old game to C++ (via Emscripten) in the next year. Good luck to everyone else who is going through the same thing as we are.

I use Ansible with Brew and Brew Cask. I've found using Brew for everything makes it easier to upgrade all applications for security reasons and it also gives a high level view of my system. Here's the relevant config file of the things I install:

https://github.com/arianitu/setup-my-environment/blob/master...

The ansible script also links to my dotfiles, which can be found at:

https://github.com/arianitu/dotfiles

I've asked these questions in interviews and a lot of programmers seem to know the basics (what a hash is), but seem to fall short when it comes to things like what a salt is, modern storage techniques (bcrypt, scrypt, PBKDF2) and how rainbow attacks can be used to crack hashes.

It's a bit tricky to fail someone in an interview because they don't know security. I think the better way to handle security in a company is to hire a programmer that knows it and teaches it to other programmers during code reviews.

These concepts also work really well for dating and relationships. If you approach girls with a scarcity mindset, you tend to be a lot more needy, insecure and generally feel like a victim.

If you approach girls with an abundance mentality, you're much less needy, more confident and you don't really care about the outcome. You're just there to learn about her, and if she's not interested, well, there's plenty of other girls that will be.

I have not upgraded specifically because of the design of the 6, so there must be others that feel the same way.

I'm really happy about the SE and will be upgrading now.

If you're using node.js and you use these hashing methods, your entire server is going to pause for 0.5 seconds on a login because it runs on a single thread. Goodbye to all of your server performance.

You can create a worker system, or use a child process to solve this problem, but most of these articles never mention it

I'm starting to just read the comments on HN and I don't even look at articles anymore. I suppose this behaviour is similar to what I do on social media.

The good part is that I have become a significantly better programmer from the articles and comments on HN. Although, most of the improvements came from the first year of using HN and then it's started to taper off since.

I should probably use HN less, but I think it has genuinely improved my life more than any other social media website.