• 3 Posts
  • 145 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2024

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  • I think you don’t distinguish enough between professionals and capables.

    All your points are either “sysadmin” or “complete buffoon” and nothing in between. That’s not how reality works.

    You absolutely are expected to be able to check your oil and just a few years ago, you were expected to be able to change your tires. That doesn’t make you a car mechanic, but a capable user.

    I’m absolutely not a car guy, but I know how to change a tire. Why? Because it’s necessary knowledge. I also know how to file my taxes, even though I’m not an accountant or tax consultant. Again, because it’s necessary.


  • The sentiment should rather be, that the system maintains itself. And that’s actually something I would get behind.

    Tinkering around is cool, but I’m in my 30s and when my girlfriend’s build pipeline finishes, I’ll be a father, I can’t spend 4h every week fixing stuff, I need a reliable platform to work on. Currently that is indeed a mix of Debian and Nix for me.

    At least the normal update process should work completely transparently for the user.


  • Not a sysadmin, but a capable user.

    People shouldn’t just accept technology as magic. They should understand at least the basic principles of the technology around them. Corporations want us to be dumb and incapable. Look at cars, you seriously can’t expect a normal person to fix anything on them. But that’s not because of inherent complexity, but because corporations want us to just buy new parts when they think it’s time.

    Sapere aude was true in the 19th century and it’s true today as well.















  • That depends, actually.

    In general, I try to keep everything English, since we do have some international colleagues.

    However, I work with a bunch of projects that have some legal/administrative background and certain words have very precisely defined meanings, that can’t be easily translated (at least not in one word, so that the next guy can back-translate the word). So in these cases, I sometimes write comments that explain the domain problem in German, because it’s much much easier and whoever touches that code better understand the German terms or screw everything up. Unfortunately class and method names are often a weird language mix.

    It’s not a perfect solution, but given the legal complexities behind seemingly simple words, it’s the best of the worst.