- volkadavI saw them on the menu at a chippy food cart at glasgow comicon this summer, so they exist here. I did not order one, but they were for sale. :)
- Sorry to focus on just one aspect of your (excellent) post, but do you have recommendations for reading up on A*/SAT beyond wikipedia? I'm mostly self-taught (did about a minor's worth of post-bacc comp sci after getting a chemistry degree) and those just hasn't come up much, e.g. I don't see A* mentioned at a first glance through CLRS and only in passing in Skiena's algorithms book. Thank you!
- Trip report of size one, fwiw: I have a JetKVM device at home and it's been super handy in my small homelab (half dozen or so older dells and lenovos). I haven't experienced any problems with my device. It seems solidly built, the software works well and is receiving updates, and the price was very fair from what I recall. One feature that I thought was particularly a nice touch was that you can store OS images on it and have it show up as storage on the target machine (though some of my older gear doesn't seem to want to boot from it for whatever reason -- which I suspect has more to do with decade+ old workstations that last got a firmware upgrade when Obama was president than anything JetKVM is or isn't doing).
Overall, I'd recommend them. :)
- I can't say as to what it might've been like 80+ years ago, but years back I was with a friend on a trip through a PX and there was a rotary display (perhaps like you might see used for postcards in other contexts) with rank insignia and other small uniform bits for fairly low prices (single-digit dollars iirc, though this was 20+ years ago). Even if they had to pay out of pocket or deal with an irritable quartermaster, the urge to give a small remember-me-by token to a friendly (and let's be honest, beautiful) face when facing down imminent chaos and barbarity is probably strong. Similarly, I recall hearing of troops throwing their coins to kids along the embarkment route in the UK as they headed to Normandy; after all, where they were going they wouldn't need them.
- doctors and nurses have enough power to demand fixed professional(0) wages that "unskilled labor"(1) does not. no one _wants_ to make $2/hr(2) and to have to rely on the generosity of the general public for a living; in other words, it isn't the waitstaff having special privileges but rather the opposite case of them lacking better protections.
(0) which is to say, much higher (1) a propaganda term if there ever was one. work one shift as a waiter and tell me it take no skill afterwards! (2) $2.13 barring state-level increases over the federal minimum, to satisfy the pedants
- Location: UK/Scotland, easily commutable to both Glasgow and Edinburgh
Remote: highly preferred, inclusive of US employers (see notes below)
Willing to relocate: not at present, might be a different story in a few years
Technologies: (just some keywords for searchers, see resume) Java, PHP, Go, Python, Kotlin, C, SQL and NoSQL data stores e.g. Postgres/MySQL, backend API and scalable system design, Linux, AWS/Cloud
Résumé/CV: (us letter or a4 versions as indicated in the filenames) https://norrisjackson.com/~orion/michael_orion_jackson_resum... https://norrisjackson.com/~orion/michael_orion_jackson_cv_a4...
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-jackson-2168a71/
Email: michael.o.jackson@gmail.com
Hi, I'm Mike; I've been a backend polyglot SDE / sometimes SRE / sometimes engineering manager with around twenty five years of experience in total. I'm a pretty flexible guy; whether it's code, systems, or people I try hard to be a useful mammal. Some of the places I've worked that you might recognize: Yahoo, Oracle (at their AWS competitor), the New York Times. I've also worked at a fair number of startups and mid-size companies over the years, and spent time acting as a consultant. tl;dr for why I'm on the market is that upper management at my last employer decided to let international remote employees go (I'm a US citizen in the UK on a spousal visa; I have full right to work for both US and UK employers without undue paperwork/visa hassles on their end).
What I'm looking for: I'm happy to dive in either as a senior individual contributor or as an engineering manager. I have no strong preferences on org size; having worked at both ends of the spectrum they each have their benefits. I'm flexible on industry too (I might have to think hard about defense). I can work US compatible hours as well as UK ones. I am not a zealot about any particular technology stack or engineering process but in an ideal world I think I'd be happiest working in something like Java or Kotlin in a linux environment building things like APIs, data pipelines, etc. or leading a team doing the same. I'm open to consulting but all things considered a full-time role is more what I'm looking for at present.
Thank you for reading, and good luck to all searching for a job or a new hire! :)
- Open Maryland, Not Indiana :) (So named in this case because the company that released it, OmniTI, is based in Maryland. Source: worked there at the time) It's a good OS, as I imagine the other Illumos derivatives are, but sometimes the relatively small size of the community can be felt, e.g. in breadth/depth of available third party packages and update availability/timelines.
- tbh I was guessing Volvo 240-series. I suspect cockroaches will be driving those battleships around after the bomb/climate collapse/asteroid/big crunch.
- Kotlin? Basically the same as the Corolla but a bit more comfortable in all regards. :)
- The UK can get pretty rude, for example. ~40p/kWh is not unheard of for residential. (Natural gas price shocks, unfettered greed post-privatization, badgers in the transformers, idkwtf, etc.)
- For a long time my home server was a dell wyse 3040 that I got for £25 on flea-bay. 1.4ghz quad core x86-64, 2g ddr3 ram, 8gb emmc, <= 5w max load, fanless, runs standard, normal debian like a treat. :) Eventually I got tired of being constantly vigilant about disk space and replaced it with a more traditional desktop, but I still love that little (compute) engine that could (it's still alive as a glorified ereader desktop for the kids -- just enough muscle to run firefox and epub/pdf readers without being capable of distractions).
- Perhaps those are an essential ingredient for a full consciousness or experience of what we've agreed by consensus to call reality, but the parental part of me holds on desperately to the hope that if we create anew, those we create might have a better experience with vague gesture at everything than us. :)
- I used[1] jetbrains tooling quite a bit on my m1 air and never had problems, though I did opt for the 16gb ram version. The newer models are presumably at least as performant if not better?
([1] These days my daily driver is an m1 mbp of some whizzbang 32gb variety, which only replaced the mba because my spouse wanted a travel machine and the mbp came for the low low cost of being caught in the late 2022 startup crash. For day to day ordinary backend dev work there really isn't a noticeable difference in my experience, except I guess the mbp is more awkward when working-from-couch. arm vs x86 was sometimes a little awkward around launch, but I can't remember the last time it was an actual hassle.)
- having this open in another tab adds just the right soundtrack: http://conferencecall.biz/ ;)
- "Zabha, Svvptc, and Ziccrse"
Man, I'm sure those are important changes that mean a great deal to someone, but to my naive eyes it looks like someone's cat ran over their keyboard. :)
In case anyone else was curious:
* Zabha has to do with atomic memory operations. * Svvptc has something to do with memory management optimizations. * Ziccrse is something else related to memory. - tbh i'm just happy to see "crypto" and have it mean cryptography.
sic transit gloria mundi or something. :)
- As much as I feel joy at the discovery for the advancement of science and human knowledge, a part of me feels sorrow for the wee critter so many years ago. I feel similarly for human archaeological discoveries, the illogical desire to extend warmth and comfort to those long since departed. So it goes, as Vonnegut wrote.
- I sympathize with your concerns for stability and testing, but I think that you might reconsider things in open-source ZFS land. OpenZFS/ZoL have been merged since the 2.0 release several years back, and some very large (e.g. Netflix) environments use FreeBSD which in turn uses OpenZFS, as well as being in use by the various Illumos derivatives and such. It is true that there has been some feature divergence between Oracle ZFS and OpenZFS since the fork, but as I recall that was more "nice to haves" like fs-native encryption than essential reliability fixes, fwiw.
- 100% agreed as I can't think of any one individual since(1) who has done as much for all of science and engineering as he ultimately did; alas, they are not awarded posthumously.
(1) Newton would be a strong contender on a "for all time" basis, but even he would've probably needed to share it with Leibniz, which would have driven him absolutely ~b o n k e r s~, like wet hornet in a hot outhouse mad, LOL.
- I was with linode for a loooong time for my personal VM-in-cloud (like 15 years). But I got an itch to check around to see if there was a cheaper option earlier this year and found that Hetzner would give me literally twice the machine for about two thirds the cost. ($6/mo vs €4~/mo, 1gb nanode vs. CX22 so 1vcpu/1gb to 2vcpu/4gb and 25gb disk to 40gb)
So far I'm happy with the service. Linode wasn't bad per se, Hetzner just offered more for less. Their admin console is a bit more spartan in comparison to Linode's, but that's not a place I spend much time anyway. If Russia glasses Finland and Germany I'd have to find another provider but I'm pretty sure I'd have bigger problems at that point than where to park my wordpress blahg and irc session, lol.