Souk's Notes - Unofficial Summaries

2023-07-17 · open the original ↗

• This post includes paid content that is not available publicly. See the original source.

2023-07-16 · open the original ↗

• Build a course on a problem you have already solved. Shoemaker, a Pluralsight author for about 15 years with about 15 active courses, warns against picking a topic to learn and then teach; instead check Reddit, Facebook and technology groups for people asking the question, then ask contacts for an hour to walk through your solution, keeping it low fidelity and "ruthlessly" applying the feedback. He says negative feedback is even better than validation, because it shows you are solving the wrong problem or solving it the wrong way. Giard compares the process to agile and lean software development, and Shoemaker accepts the comparison.
• Pre-sell a live beta before producing the recorded course. After testing ideas on three to five "pioneers", Shoemaker announces a discounted live course of three or four weeks that buyers help shape. The pioneers show whether the idea solves a real problem; the pre-sale answers whether people will pay, which he calls product-market fit. Slides or a Google Doc outline are enough at this stage, because a finished video is hard to edit.
• A launch is a campaign, not a link in your bio. Shoemaker says independent creators fail by simply announcing a course; you should warm the audience, build a wait list and keep giving value before opening the cart. A large following can be a false positive: when he repositioned his Twitter account from programming to course building, many followers left, and only a fraction of followers see any post anyway.
• Teach new concepts through metaphors for things people know. Talking to his child's fourth- or fifth-grade class, he explained strings with a letter-by-letter happy birthday banner, variables with an Amazon box and arrays with Boba Fett figurines. He says reusing these in his web development fundamentals course drew the most feedback he has had, because adults respond to them as well as children do. He now prompts ChatGPT to play a sixth grader who questions his lessons, and recalls Paul Sheriff's advice that the real demand is for beginner content, since everyone is a beginner at something.
• He now teaches course creation because technology courses age fast. Shoemaker says tech courses have a shorter shelf life than ever, so he chose an evergreen subject: helping subject-matter experts and entrepreneurs build and sell information products. He also hosts a podcast, Leverage Three, in which each guest ends with three actionable tactics.

2023-07-14 · open the original ↗

• Long-lived projects need structures that throwaway projects can skip. Eini, who founded RavenDB in 2008 and has run it for close to 15 years, contrasts a roughly six-month Israeli project around 2005 to move phone numbers from nine to ten digits, where unmaintainable code was fine because it was discarded. He says typical industry projects last three to five years before a rewrite because the maintenance burden grows, and he credits early asynchronous, email-only open-source work and Michael Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code for making him spell out how features are built and verified.
• Hitting architectural limits forced a multi-year rewrite of the core. Eini says unit tests and a proper design did not stop the original code writing itself into a corner: too many uncontrollable allocations put a hard cap on performance. The RavenDB rebuild took close to two or three years and, backed by a design document, a proof of concept and tests, has held five or six years and three major releases later.
• Competitive performance demands ugly code, so the team is organised around it. Eini says SIMD instructions can give 10 to 20 times the speed but are "utterly unreadable", and cites a recent access violation from unaligned AVX access on an old build server. His answers include specialists by area, one engineer "whose sole job is to make code ugly" with about ten lines of comments explaining why, debug assertions throughout, shallow layers from HTTP endpoint to disk, extending rather than modifying code, and a single process rather than microservices, whose interactions he finds harder to follow; new hires take six to nine months to pay for themselves, and most of his team has been there five years or more.
• Test through the client API, not internal units. Eini says unit tests hinder change by locking in implementation details, as when buffering and sorting once broke every test written for a sorted list, and that writing tests first can commit you to the wrong approach. RavenDB's roughly 25,000–26,000 tests use the client API with in-memory infrastructure that can spin up a five-node cluster in three lines, which lets customer reproductions drop straight into the test project; Giard pushes back that a failing unit test pinpoints where a fault is.
• Keep the feedback loop short by removing friction continuously. Eini says he expected RavenDB to fail and built its infrastructure gradually by automating each repeated step; pairing with a stuck developer, he first writes enough code to reach the failing scenario with one F5. When the fast test suite reaches five minutes, the slowest tests move to the slow suite (3–6 hours) to bring it back to one or two, which he says happens about yearly.

2023-07-11 · open the original ↗

• Raising 5 GHz channel width roughly doubles per-device Wi-Fi speed. UniFi and many other brands default to 40 MHz, which the host says gives about 250–400 Mbps per device; 80 MHz gives about 800–900 Mbps. In UniFi Network it is under Settings > Wi-Fi globally, or per access point under Devices > Settings. Other standalone APs may hide it behind an advanced mode.
• 80 MHz, not 160 MHz, suits most access points. Most APs have a 1 Gbps network port, so 900 Mbps at 80 MHz already maxes them out. The host says 160 MHz only makes sense for an AP with a 2.5 Gbps port on a 2.5 or 10 Gbps switch port. Wider channels also interfere with neighbours: fine for a rural house, but go conservative in a city apartment. He says that is why vendors default to 40 MHz.
• Test Wi-Fi speed against a local server, not the internet. The host recommends OpenSpeedTest (openspeedtest.com), a lightweight tool that runs in Docker or on an nginx server or VM. Testing on the LAN keeps the internet connection from being the bottleneck.

2023-07-11 · open the original ↗

• Juneteenth Conf showcases Black technologists on deep technical topics. Brown, who works at Microsoft, started it in 2020, during the pandemic and the events around George Floyd. He was marking his first year at Microsoft, and he framed Juneteenth as a time to celebrate a milestone while work remains. He contrasts it with conferences that have one or two Black speakers, often talking about DEI; his roster was all Black and covered topics from AI to UX/UI design and IP law. Giard notes it also had non-technical talks, including a keynote by Tim Banks, who described it as a conference for Black people in technology.
• The goal is to refute the "pipeline isn't there" narrative. Brown says people wrongly conflate affirmative action with lowered standards, and he calls that misinformation deliberate. He offers his own case: from a low-income, single-parent home in Chicago, he scored around the 98th percentile on standardized tests, was about third in his class and went to an elite Massachusetts liberal arts college (Williams College, which Giard finds on his LinkedIn).
• Diversity is a trailing indicator of inclusion, not a goal. Brown compares it to weight loss, which follows from a healthier lifestyle. His advice to organizers and recruiters is to be welcoming and "walk in their spaces", just as tech recruiters go to meetups. Calling around for Black speakers the week before a conference, he says, seems disingenuous.
• After three virtual years, it went in person this year. Brown kept it virtual while he did not want it to be a spreader event, and moved it to a hybrid in-person event in Chicago now that people take precautions and many are vaccinated, valuing the hallway conversations. Next year it will be on the Friday after Juneteenth, avoiding Father's Day; Giard works out that this is 21 June 2024. Brown says it will be in person and in Chicago again.
• Funding is donations and Microsoft's time-based matching. Brown says much of the money comes from Microsoft's matching program, which matches volunteers' hours as well as dollars, plus donations from attendees and partners; he hopes for corporate sponsors next year and says some have approached him. The organization is incorporated as a nonprofit in Washington with a 501(c)(3) fiscal host. Its main planned programme is a paid internship for high school students covering programming, UX design and project management, to show the range of tech careers.

2023-07-10 · open the original ↗

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2023-07-09 · open the original ↗

• HyperCLI is a curl alternative with session memory. Amundsen, an author on hypermedia and web APIs, says he built it after finding himself writing bash scripts around curl's "gnarly" syntax; it does what curl does, including headers and authorization, but can run scripts. Every successful response goes on an in-memory stack, so ten requests leave ten responses whose data can be read and then written to another site.
• HyperLang is deliberately verbose, modelled on early conversational languages. Amundsen says it is inspired by COBOL and its predecessor FLOW-MATIC. Against the trend toward terse, general languages, Amundsen designed an API-specific one whose scripts read like sentences ("call… with… using this form"), which he says can mean less typing than curl and a "conversation" with a remote server. HyperCLI is written in Node.js and is currently the only tool that runs HyperLang.
• The tool lets you explore an API without reading its documentation. Amundsen says commands such as "show links" and "show forms" list a response's links and forms and their arguments, and the tool reads the media type (HTML, Collection+JSON, HAL, Uber, Mason and others) to know where links sit in each. Plugins add industry vocabularies he names, such as PSD2 for banking, HL7 for health and ACORD for insurance, so a script could ask for health records from a given doctor.
• It grew incrementally over about a year and is now open source. Amundsen says it started as a simple read-evaluate loop that he extended use case by use case and then split into plugins; it is under the MIT licence or a variant, installs through npm under his GitHub name (mamund), and needs Node.js. He gets several downloads a day and a plugin or two from others, finds maintaining it a challenge, and plans a general library that could be ported to C# or other languages.
• He points newcomers to a written introduction and a conference talk. The Substack article is titled "Programming the Web with HyperLang and HyperCLI" and links his GOTO Chicago talk and slides; a GitHub Pages site carries the README tutorial, and a Twitter account he named showed nothing during recording. Amundsen says he is focused on updating his API design book rather than speaking.

2023-07-05 · open the original ↗

• Hardwire everything possible and home-run switches to the core. The host says a wired link always beats Wi-Fi (a smart TV streaming 4K, for example) and frees up wireless airtime. Buy more ports than you think you need: a 16-port switch rather than 8. Bring each switch back to the core switch instead of daisy-chaining, since every extra hop adds a point of failure and can cram many devices through one gigabit port.
• Uplink ports at 2.5 or 10 Gbps keep switch links from bottlenecking. Gigabit is the standard per-port speed, and the older standard was 10/100. Larger switches often have uplinks in SFP cages that take fiber transceivers, Ethernet transceivers or DAC (direct attach copper) cables. The host says most home users won't need SFP or fiber.
• Managed switches add per-port control that most homes barely need. Unmanaged switches are plug-and-play. Managed ones, through a GUI or an ecosystem like UniFi or TP-Link Omada, can toggle PoE per port, force link speed, and do port mirroring and link aggregation (four 1 Gbps ports acting as one 4 Gbps port). The host says home users will never need layer 3 switching, and most simple home networks don't need VLANs, though VLANs help in isolating IoT devices.
• Standard PoE senses the device; passive PoE can fry it. Switch ports are rated PoE, PoE+ or PoE++ in rising power, and most PoE switches now provide PoE+ (802.3at). Some point-to-point gear uses 24 V or 48 V passive PoE, which sends power regardless of what is attached. On home switches that is rare and usually has to be enabled per port.
• Buy Cat6, cheap, from Amazon or Monoprice. The host says Cat5e is rated to 1 Gbps and Cat6 to 10 Gbps over a shorter distance, and the two now cost almost the same; avoid hardware and big-box stores. He suggests cable testers from about $10, or around $50 for a Klein Tools model. For switches he suggests Netgear or TP-Link 5-port unmanaged gigabit models under $20, the UniFi Flex Mini at about $29, UniFi Lite switches at 8 or 16 ports, and managed 8-port PoE switches at $60–120 (a Netgear PoE+ model at about $60).

2023-07-04 · open the original ↗

• dotnet new mvc scaffolds a complete MVC project from a template. Giard runs it with a project name in the VS Code terminal (any command prompt works). The result has appsettings.json, a project file, a home controller with Index and Privacy methods and an injected ILogger that logs to the console by default, a rudimentary error handler with its own model and view, and views for each page.
• Trust the local HTTPS certificate before running. The template is configured for HTTPS, which he says is awkward locally; dotnet dev-certs https --trust trusts the certificate, possibly after a confirmation dialog. dotnet run builds and runs (listening on localhost 5080 in the demo); dotnet build builds without running, which he says a view change does not need but a code change does.
• dotnet publish prepares release assets for sharing. He publishes the release configuration rather than debug, to bin/publish, which he calls a logical place but optional.
• VS Code can deploy the publish folder straight to an app service. Right-clicking it and choosing Deploy to Web App prompts for subscription and an existing app service (creating one is in episode 135), warns that it will overwrite, and reports progress in the output window before offering to browse the site. Giard frames this as useful for quick tests during development.

2023-07-03 · open the original ↗

• Developers treat monitoring as an afterthought, yet it serves two purposes. Giard admits to adding monitoring only after a problem occurs. Desir, a solutions engineer at Datadog for almost two years, says her software engineering boot camp never mentioned it and that many newcomers do not know it matters. Its reactive purpose is to find what broke, when, where and from whose code change, so the change can be rolled back; its proactive purpose is to use the data to project and adjust the business.
• Logs are one part of monitoring and should be structured. Desir describes a log as a payload about an event, such as a timestamp, environment and service. She says it should reach the monitoring service as a JSON object of key-value pairs rather than raw text, so it is easier to read and to parse.
• Log only what matters to your business, not everything. Faced with all the options in Azure, such as activity logs and platform logs, Desir says logging everything is expensive. What to log depends on how it affects your business, and the list will change over time.
• Almost anything can be turned into a metric. Desir defines a metric as a data point with values or tags, for example a count recorded each time she turns on a light; Giard offers page views. She lists system, log, application and tracing metrics.
• Use monitors for urgent alerts and dashboards for awareness. A monitor alerts at a threshold, for instance 100 page views, through Slack, PagerDuty, email or a phone call. For things that are not urgent, Desir suggests tracking logs and building reports, or a dashboard: a single-pane view with no alerting. She adds that serverless functions such as AWS Lambdas and Azure Functions can be monitored too, for example to catch a slow start, and points to Datadog's Learning Center (learn.datadoghq.com), which Giard reports has full courses.

2023-06-30 · open the original ↗

• Take back ownership of your own validation and worth. Banks's keynote, "Solace of You" (named after a Living Colour song), argues that people in tech look for worth in jobs, salaries, reviews and awards, none of which they control. He says this is harder for Black people, who also carry stereotypes and expectations projected on them from outside.
• Developers need a life away from the screen. Banks rejects the view, which he sees mostly among developers, that a good developer must make coding a passion and lifestyle. He says open-source work still counts as career work, and that people need boundaries around work and some other outlet: his is Brazilian jiu-jitsu, where he is a brown belt.
• Bias and societal burdens drain capacity, and the effects compound. Banks says Black employees arrive already carrying institutional racism, health-care access, lack of generational wealth and mortgage barriers, lose more to bias at work, and are then measured against peers who carry none of it. He adds his own ADHD, anxiety, RSD and major depressive disorder as further drains. Giard compares it to his own months-long back pain; Banks agrees the difference is that it is constant.
• Those with seniority should make it safe to ask for help. With 26-plus years in the industry, Banks says he can take a day off for depression, but someone two or three years in, especially from a marginalized identity, may not feel safe to, so the senior and privileged should model it and offer time or moved deadlines without career fallout. His advice to juniors is to find a trusted mentor, build a "group chat slash back channel" network, and use communities such as employee resource groups, meetups and conference birds-of-a-feather sessions.
• When handed a microphone or platform, take it and keep it. Banks says representation matters because he never saw a Black leader in tech coming up: once you have keynoted, you are a keynote speaker, and you lift others onto the platform without ever giving it up. He frames lending privilege as handing someone the mic. Giard, who calls himself white, straight, Christian and upper middle class, says he took that message as aimed at himself too.

2023-06-27 · open the original ↗

• Cat6 can be terminated in under a minute with the right tools. The host's sequence: trim clean ends, strip the jacket, cut the rip cord and the wire separator, untwist and straighten the four pairs (an untwist tool helps), line them up in order and stretch them tight, trim evenly, slide them in so the jacket sits inside the connector, crimp, repeat on the other end, then test.

2023-06-23 · open the original ↗

• Combo routers trade flexibility for easy setup. The host's three router types are standalone (like the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X), all-in-one combo units, which are the commonest and easiest but leave poor coverage hard to fix, and managed ecosystems like UniFi or TP-Link Omada. Managed gear gives one interface for everything, at the cost of standardizing on one vendor.
• Match router ports to the connection; a cheap router suffices otherwise. He says a 1 Gbps WAN port covers typical 100–300 Mbps service, but gigabit-plus fiber needs at least 2.5 Gbps. Dual WAN allows failover, for example to T-Mobile 5G home internet at about $25 a month for existing customers. He finds a $99–139 Netgear rarely distinguishable from a $350 "gaming" router.
• NAT and firewall rules are separate jobs. In the host's analogy, NAT is the apartment receptionist that swaps each device's private IP for the one public WAN IP and routes replies back, while the firewall is the security guard checking traffic against rules; off-the-shelf routers do both by default.
• Subnet, gateway, DNS and DHCP are the core setup concepts. A 255.255.255.0 mask, or /24 in CIDR, gives 254 usable addresses; 192.168.x.x is private and the commonest default; the gateway is usually .1; and DHCP hands out leased addresses from a pool. The host swaps ISP DNS for public servers such as Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 and Quad9 9.9.9.9 for privacy and filtering.
• The Netgear's simplicity hides defaults you cannot change. On the Netgear it set up, clients still got the router itself as DNS server instead of 1.1.1.1/9.9.9.9, with no visible setting to change it. The roughly $59 EdgeRouter X needed a static laptop IP, assigning eth0 as WAN, and editing an odd default DHCP range to .2–.254. On both he changed default passwords and updated firmware first.

2023-06-16 · open the original ↗

• The host found the Alta AP6 Pro on par with Ubiquiti's U6 Pro. In his LAN tests (OpenSpeedTest on a Synology NAS, one AP broadcasting, both at 80 MHz), speeds matched on Windows PCs; on Apple devices upload was slower on both, but much slower on Ubiquiti. NetSpot heat maps showed near-identical range, Alta slightly ahead. Alta supplied the units free, without other compensation or review approval.
• Alta management is cloud-only for now. Alta's CTO, in a statement the host obtained, says an on-premises controller is on the roadmap with no ETA. The host does not mind the cloud but expects it to be a non-starter for many viewers, and notes Alta then sold only APs, with switches coming, so there is no single pane of glass.
• The dashboard's real-time views and multi-password SSIDs impress him. He praises per-AP, per-device and per-application live traffic, very fast adoption, updates and reboots, and one SSID with several passwords each mapping clients to a network type, VLAN or throttle. App filters apply to the whole SSID, though, and the "always on" broadcast-without-internet option is off by default, which he thinks is wrong.
• A gigabit uplink on a 5.8 Gbps AP is his main hardware complaint. His tests touched about 900 Mbps at 80 MHz, so 160 MHz would bottleneck on the gigabit NIC; he also found the bracket awkward and the heat sink up to 128°F (53°C), close to a U6 In-Wall's 125°F. List prices: AP6 Pro $179, about $20 above the U6 Pro.
• The host is replacing his home Ubiquiti APs with Alta. He calls the software beta: the mobile app breaks with enlarged fonts, and a manual 5 GHz channel killed 5 GHz entirely until set back to auto. He judges good hardware the better half to have right, says it is too early to call it a "Ubiquiti killer", and asks installers to test it themselves.

2023-06-13 · open the original ↗

• A campground runs a large all-Ubiquiti point-to-multipoint network. The host traces it from the main office, which has a pair of PrismStation ACs with 60-degree antennas plus a UniFi Mesh Pro AP, out to cabins with point-to-point links, poles carrying what looked like Flex HD and Mesh AC APs with directional antennas, and a rare IsoStation AC.
• The standout pole carries a full stack of gear. The host spotted a Mesh Pro AP, a NanoStation, three bullet cameras, a Nano switch and a large dish antenna that appeared to point at towers across the river; these identifications are his from sight, several hedged as "what looked like".

2023-06-12 · open the original ↗

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2023-06-08 · open the original ↗

• Internet speed is bandwidth in megabits, mostly sold as download. The host separates Mbps (rate, cars on a highway) from MB (size, cars in a parking lot); ISPs advertise download speed, upload is usually far lower because most data flows inward (his own line is 600 Mbps down, 40 Mbps up), and symmetrical connections match the two.
• The host recommends fiber wherever it is available. By his figures ADSL runs about 1–20 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up depending on distance to the exchange; cable typically 60–400 Mbps, up to 1 Gbps at a steep price; fiber 100 Mbps to multiple Gbps, usually symmetrical, but mostly in denser areas, whereas cable is available almost everywhere.
• Wireless options trade stability for reach. He puts 5G home internet at about $50 a month or less bundled with a phone plan, capable of hundreds of Mbps but only as good as the signal at the modem (place it in a window); legacy geostationary satellite like HughesNet at 12–100 Mbps down, fit only for light use; Starlink at 50–300 Mbps down, 20–40 Mbps up; and WISPs as sometimes faster than big ISPs.
• Keep the ISP modem simple and put it in bridge mode. ISP combo units are convenient for small, wireless-only homes but low quality, hard to extend and often leased at $10–20 a month; bridge mode lets your own router hold the public WAN IP, which is usually dynamic unless you pay monthly for a static one, with dynamic DNS as the workaround.
• Troubleshoot by pinging and by removing hops one at a time. If ping 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare) answers, the internet is reachable; if a site answers by IP but not by name, the fault is DNS. For slow speedtest.net results, retest wired to the switch, then directly at the router or modem, and call the ISP only if it is still slow there.

2023-06-06 · open the original ↗

• A well-designed home network is one you never think about. The host frames the goals as reliability (like plumbing, noticed only when it fails), getting the full speed you pay for, security against outside threats, and future-proofing for devices not yet imagined; slow sites, Wi-Fi dead zones and buffering are his signs of a network needing work.
• IP addresses work like postal addresses for data. The host's analogy: every device has a unique IP address, and data is delivered to a destination IP the way a letter reaches a street address, whether the destination is in the next room or a website server across the world.
• Every home network has four core components. They are the modem (the ISP's hand-off between home network and provider), the router/firewall, network switches (more wired ports) and wireless access points (Wi-Fi clients); the host stresses that consumer gear often combines two or more in one box, so knowing each role separately is the key to understanding any device.
• A router moves traffic between networks; a firewall filters it. The host likens the router to a highway interchange between the private LAN and the public WAN, and the firewall to a border checkpoint; home routers ship with default firewall rules blocking unsolicited inbound traffic, which is why the terms get used interchangeably.
• Buy Cat6 or better Ethernet cable. The host says Cat6 with RJ45 ends is now the most common type, the category is printed on the jacket, and it is rated for gigabit or higher up to a maximum run of 100 m (328 ft).

2023-06-05 · open the original ↗

• The greenhouse runs off a shed solar system. A 400 W panel feeds an MPPT charge controller powering a 2200 W inverter and a 12 V fuse box; a 3 A fuse feeds a 12 V DC to 5 V micro-USB converter that powers a D1 mini ESP8266 Wi-Fi board with a soldered-on BME280 temperature and humidity sensor.
• Home Assistant reads the sensor and drives two automations. Through the ESPHome integration the D1 mini's readings are graphed, and automations switch on a seedling heat mat when it is too cold and a fan when it is too hot, both via TP-Link Kasa smart switches.

2023-06-05 · open the original ↗

• Each added nine of uptime cuts downtime tenfold, at rising cost. Huang puts 99.9% at roughly eight hours of downtime a year, 99.99% at 52 minutes and 99.999% at about five minutes. He says higher targets are complex and expensive because they mean more zones, regions and instances, so the target should fit the business: an education app might take its downtime when school is out.
• Resilience comes from distributing, retrying, queuing and scaling horizontally. Huang, a cloud solution architect on Giard's team, describes running the application in several regions behind Azure Front Door so traffic can be rerouted if one region fails (East US to West US). He adds retries, message queues, and horizontal scale-out with VM scale sets or Azure Functions for spikes such as Super Bowl Sunday, Black Friday or a "Reddit hug of death".
• Load and chaos testing should run like experiments, not at maximum. Huang says to state a hypothesis and step up from normal load, for example a usual 10,000 users a day, then 20,000, watching whether performance holds. Azure Chaos Studio, an Azure service he calls "our", injects faults such as Chaos Mesh pod failures, CPU pressure, killed processes or denied Key Vault access. Mature teams can "shift right" and test in production, which he does not recommend on day one.
• An application should degrade gracefully rather than fail outright. Giard raises the idea and his consulting work for an electronics retailer whose stores had to take the customer's money even with no connection to the data center. Huang agrees, ranking checkout and add-to-cart above a wish list, and says an unbearably slow site feels down to users.
• Testing needs monitoring to show what actually happened. Huang says monitoring is how you know whether injected faults are causing problems, and lets you compare performance with a week ago, a month ago or the previous release. Giard adds that customers report things "feel slower", and that measures such as page load time are what let you fix it.