achiang

5 ms·

1.
by achiang 3y ago
I was a sysadmin (at uni, in the early 2000s) and I am an SRE today (at Google). The two jobs are nothing alike, at all, whatsoever. Sysadmins are support roles. Their functional role is to provide a healthy substrate to run the application
2.
by achiang 3y ago
It has been 10 years since I left Canonical (on good terms), but what popey describes (hi popey) about the intentional lack of human review in the Snap store sounds very Canonical to me. I agree with all the recommendations - add human gate
3.
by achiang 3y ago
Full body scans are a common preventative measure in Taiwan. My parents (expats, living in the US for over 50 years) flew back and got routine scans (MRI, PET, CT) in February for about $1000 USD total. Similar to this story, they found a t
4.
by achiang 3y ago
Real world usage is you only get to use ~70% of the stated range on a road trip, so we're really talking about 350 miles of range, which is, as you say, what most people actually want. Why 70%? You obviously don't run the battery
5.
by achiang 4y ago
You need to use the fully loaded cost of an employee when estimating opex savings, which includes health care costs, retirement funding, etc. Rule of thumb is that fully loaded cost for US employees is approximately 2x yearly salary (althou
6.
by achiang 5y ago
Google SRE here. Point of clarification on "losing skills" by not being oncall enough. Google designs its SRE teams to scale sublinearly to the service, which means we're often responsible for entire portfolios, not just a si
7.
by achiang 6y ago
I haven't seen anyone recommend net/http yet, but that is the library that was recommended to me to read to get a sense for modern, idiomatic go.
8.
by achiang 6y ago
As mentioned elsewhere, the worse bug was in upstream, unpatched gdm. It's been a very long time since I worked on a distro (former Canonical employee here) but every distro carries patches of some sort.
9.
by achiang 6y ago
The semantic tagging is nice, I might start incorporating that into my notes. On the overall topic of meeting notes, I picked this up as a new skill in the past year and it's been immensely valuable for myself and the people I meet wit
10.
by achiang 6y ago
The politics is exactly the point of my comment. The professional way to write a blog post like this is from your own perspective. Identify the proximate cause (the peer), name names if you must, talk about how awesome your own systems are,
11.
by achiang 6y ago
Google networking SRE here (my team runs ns[1-4].google.com among other services). Regardless of original intent, the blog doesn't land well with me. It could have provided the background on flowspec, using their own past outage as a c
12.
by achiang 6y ago
The design you propose is stateful, and if you read the chapter closely, you can see we spend a lot of effort to make things stateless. The main thing I wanted to respond to in this thread about a single bad server destroying your yearly SL
13.
by achiang 6y ago
> (You will notice that people like Google and Cloudflare skillfully respond with only one record with a 5 minute TTL. That is so the behavior of the browser is well defined, but it also eats their entire year of 99.999% uptime with one
14.
by achiang 6y ago
I don't have a platform the size that the recoil author has. That's the difference.
15.
by achiang 6y ago
So here's a nuanced view I'm sure will get downvoted into the ground: both FB and the employee were right, but along different dimensions, and this outcome was not only inevitable, but desirable. The employee, as a white male in t
16.
by achiang 7y ago
Accurate headline but incorrect analysis. Big Tech pays like sports, not because of average salary levels, but because of the spread between highest and lowest paid engineers. Let's say an entry level role in big tech pays about $200
17.
by achiang 7y ago
They are truly standard behavioral questions that you can't really prepare for, other than thinking about what you did in various scenarios. "Tell me about a time you had to resolve conflict between two engineers on your team.&quo
18.
by achiang 7y ago
I joined Google last year, hired directly as a manager. Germane to this thread, I'm in my early 40s. At Google, the bar is that you are expected to be able to contribute as an equivalently senior IC, but will be expected to use tho
19.
by achiang 7y ago
All managers in Google (engineering and non-engineering) are encouraged to take a 2-day immersive course. There's a course for "experienced manager, but new to Google" and a course for "new manager" with content tai
20.
by achiang 7y ago
Thanks, you made my day. I'm a Google network SRE, but perhaps I'll get new business cards saying "cold potato engineer".
21.
by achiang 7y ago
Nice article, I'd be curious to know if/how their engine abstracts the complexity behind multi-currency transactions, or whether they rely on the accounting model to handle multi-currency. We built our own double-entry accountin
22.
by achiang 7y ago
Google+ failed, but it begat Google Photos which is not a failure. obDisclosure: I'm a Googler, but joined way after G+ both launched and failed.
23.
by achiang 7y ago
Google SRE doesn't have magical incident response beans that we hoard from the rest of the world. What makes Google SRE institutionally strong is that we have senior executive support to execute on all the best practices described in
24.
by achiang 8y ago
The problem that gRPC solves for you is versioning your messages between your services. As your json payloads evolve, you're going to encounter pain trying to keep your services in sync, whether it comes in the form of writing parsing
25.
by achiang 8y ago
I was an HP-UX kernel engineer from 2002 til 2005, a brief interlude writing IA64 CPU diagnostics, and then and a Linux kernel engineer from 2007 til 2010, all on Itanium systems. In that time frame, it wasn't clear that horizontal sca
26.
by achiang 8y ago
The comparison table in section 2 could just as easily live in the git docs, under a page called "why use git instead of fossil".
27.
by achiang 8y ago
> "we do not break userland, period" That quote is more accurately read as, "we change things all the time, including user-visible features, and very occasionally, even in breaking ways -- but only because it's imposs
28.
by achiang 9y ago
Isn't that what MobileCoin is?
29.
by achiang 9y ago
We've avoided many of the problems (and solutions) in the link by standardizing on Ubuntu laptops for the host OS, and using vagrant-lxc to run our vagrant guests. https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-lxc At least on
30.
by achiang 10y ago
I was hired 2 years ago by Angaza to be one of their early engineers. Found the role when I was idly trawling through the massive hiring thread one evening, mildly dissatisfied with my job at the time, but not really actively looking for a

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