My wishes for 2023:

Engaygement as a business success metric.

Interview for a management role:

Interviewer: Do you have experience managing managers?
Interviewee: Yes. A few of my previous managers required careful handling to let me actually do the work.
Interviewer:

All characters in this post are fictional and any similarities to real people are accidental.

I gained a deep dislike for writing by hand in primary school, and I am immensely glad that I mostly have to use the keyboard in my daily life. Seeing posts like this makes me want to try it, but then I come to my senses and order another keyboard

(joking, I've been using the same mechanical keyboard for the last 6 years and have no desire to replace it)

https://marketplace.ultimaker.com/app/cura/plugins/Ghostkeeper/SettingsGuide2 is probably my best tool in learning 3d printing so far. All those million slicing parameters explained right in the UI. What's so great about it is that the tooltips not only explain what a setting does, but also the trade-off about using it or not.

#3dprinting

To the tune of your pager ringtone:

You better watch out
You better not try
You stop the rollout
I'm telling you why
Santa Pager is coming to town

He's watching commits
He's checking your bugs
He's gonna find out who's naughty or nice
Santa Pager is coming to town

He sees you when you're coding
And he knows what you'll break
He knows if you cause pages
So don't push to prod for goodness sake

You better watch out
You better not try
You stop the rollout
I'm telling you why
'Cause Santa Pager is coming to town

Oh, let's go
Now, he does code review
And he knows your test's a flake
He knows if you force-push
So be good for goodness sake

You better watch out
You better not try
Better stop your rollout
I'm telling you why
Santa Pager is coming to town

You better watch out
You better not try
You better log out
I'm telling you why
Santa Pager is coming to town

#oncall #sre

One of the biggest shifts in how I understand the Site Reliability Engineer role was a transition from "SREs take a product and add reliability features to it (monitoring, load balancing, failover, etc.)" to "SREs empower product developers to make their product reliable".

The empowerment comes in many forms: building tools and frameworks, contributing to the product core, participating in design process, documenting best practices and writing postmortems. But one of the most important ways is reaching out to your fellow product engineers, at individual level, and educating them about all you've learned as an SRE. You don't have to have "reliability" in your job title to understand and implement the ideas behind reliability engineering.

Developing technical credibility with your dev teams is what ultimately opens the door to your ability to educate. A few things that worked for me well: make deep technical contributions to the product core, participate in design discussions and show your interest in learning the product's problem space, don't be afraid to ask silly questions, be willing to listen and acknowledge your mistakes.

Or, in other words, if you come across as a seagull who shows up in your design doc comments, shits all over it and calls the author an idiot, people will not like or trust you even if you are technically correct.

#SRE #reliability

I have a love-hate with performance optimization. It's really fun to design benchmarks, stare at flamegraphs and RPC traces and eventually make it run faster, but waiting for a benchmark run to actually complete is the most boring thing ever.

Another federation test, pls answer the poll:

Once again joined DevZen #podcast yesterday: https://devzen.ru/episode-407/ It was a good-old 3-hour long episode :)

Hey Mastodon users, I'm curious did https://m.nevkontakte.com/articles/6fcbaeb/3d-printer-flyingbear-ghost-6-first-impressions show up in your feeds earlier today?

A few notes about self-hosting a fediverse account. I was interested in hosting a single-user instance and it seems like there are more or less three options:

• Honk - written in Go, kinda funky, no dependencies other than SQLite, actively developed, but looks like a mostly solo project. Can support multiple users, but seems to be mostly for a single-user use case.
• microblog.pub - written in Python, also using SQLite, has a bug tracker and a few contributors besides the original author. Single-user instance.
• GoToSocial - written in Go, compatible with Mastodon client API, supports multiple users, but is supposed to be much lighter weight. Doesn't offer its own management interface other than rendering profile web pages.

I went with microblog.pub, since it seemed to fit my needs pretty well and the maintainer was very responsive in the bug tracker (thanks @dev@microblog.pub!). After setting it up, it uses ~200MB of RAM, almost no CPU, and ~30MiB on disk, including the Git repo. Granted, this instance doesn't have much content to store yet. The whole setup process took me a couple of hours, including troubleshooting some chmod mishaps, not counting tweaking CSS to my taste.

The biggest tweak I've done so far is adding EasyMDE for writing. To do that, I had to add the following lines to admin_new.html template:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://unpkg.com/easymde@2.18.0/dist/easymde.min.css">
<script src="https://unpkg.com/easymde@2.18.0/dist/easymde.min.js"></script>
<script>const easyMDE = new EasyMDE();</script>

...and fix CSP in profile.toml: custom_content_security_policy = "default-src 'self'; style-src 'self' 'sha256-{HIGHLIGHT_CSS_HASH}' https://unpkg.com/easymde@2.18.0/ https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/; script-src 'self' https://unpkg.com/easymde@2.18.0/ 'sha256-x3hT41jvAyXptNPHtcnje3M0xIBPpT+PuS/HVkYn8ac='; img-src m.nevkontakte.com nevkontakte.com; frame-ancestors 'none'; base-uri 'self'; form-action 'self'; connect-src 'self' https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/codemirror.spell-checker/; font-src 'self' https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/;"

The only feature I am really missing so far is the ability to edit posts, surely ActivityPub supports that?

#fediverse #self-hosting

Today in the "blue bird has been drinking again" news is a policy change that prohibits advertising competing social networks.

I was curious about fediverse already, but this too much of a bait to pass on. So now I have this nice little instance of microblog.pub (technically not Mastodon, and so not against the policy), in addition to my main blog. I'm not entirely sure how will my activity will be distributed across all those places, time will tell.