#random (2021-01)

This community is vastly different than any other Slack channel or Discord that I’ve been a part of. Eric and other contributors respond quickly and provide very useful feedback. I know if myself or someone asks a question an expert will typically chime in with a coherent response instead of a meme or halfway thought out answer.

While Reddit and StackOverflow have a means of searching via Google or Yahoo if the internal search fails - a lot of the content goes stale fast. I typically don’t want to see an issue someone ran into more than a month or a year ago. If you do a Google search for site//Reddit.com) + keywords and filter on the last year, it will show you threads that were created several years ago.

If we turned 1/10 of these channels into subreddits they’d all die IMO

good thoughts. I don’t know if I’d agree about a month ago, but yes I’d normally look for stuff in the last year too when it relates to terraform etc.

Yeah, it really depends on the problem. If a new version of Terraform drops like going from 0.11 to 0.12, then I only want to keep up with what’s going on right now which I’ll typically find within these slack channels.

Overall though, I agree with a lot of what they’re saying about writing blogs, attend meetups, make videos, etc… A lot of people learn better by teaching others, plus it helps people get feedback. I personally do not do those things because they’re uninteresting to me and I don’t like my info being in public. I’d rather work with folks on an individual basis to give and get direct feedback.

Thinking on this, the whole recent thing is actually easier/same in forum based approach anyway, as you can archive /lock and stuff like this:

“depends_on” - by latest

GitHub is getting into this game too (fyi @Erik Osterman (Cloud Posse)) with their new github discussions feature. This could be enabled on a repo for general discussions and they have some primitive stuff like “marking as answered” for things that end up being classified into a question.

not sure if anyone here as tried it but it’s a step in the right direction to make issues focused on work/code and not general discussion

Here’s a pretty active one as an example. This is free and included in open source projects to be enabled now. Can easily flip to an issue if required.

Might check it out sometime.

https://github.com/vercel/vercel/discussions

the private thing …. i guess I look at it differently. Anything you say in here is actually not private. Even here there is a public archive and you’ll show up in search results in google even with it. I think for that private chats are ideal.

Anyway, monologue done. Just been thinking about this as while this is seriously the best organized and context driven slack group, it still seems like this type of communication would be best served in something like discourse. That’s my unasked for opinion as I’ve been considering communication methods on various tools.

I would love to build up the discourse forum, but it’s been difficult to get traction. Chat vs Forum are 2 very different mediums and attract different users for different reasons. Slack was chosen because of the critical mass, not because of a features/requirement evaluation. It’s much like the reason we use GitHub for source control. Critical mass. As for github discussions, I think it’s great they rolled it out, but doesn’t fit our organization with 300+ repos. Just discovering which repo would be difficult. I really would like to foster converstations on Discourse.

ask.sweetops.com

Our archives are just a stop-gap measure for all the inadequacies of using slack for support (as you mention). archive.sweetops.com

discuss.hashicorp.com and https://github.community/ are really successful

Useful to know! Basically you’d have to deal with loss of many people if you shut this down.

I’m curious if slack analytics show you average truly active users vs signed up.

It would decimate the community. Most would not move over to discourse because that not how most want to interact. We’ve naturally selected for people who want to chat vs discourse.

got you. thanks for the insight!

That sso.tax man…

It’s gonna getcha

This is real. Last year I helped two students improve their Python skills. One knew a little, wanted to study for three months then get a job with Google/Amazon, since they were the biggest they pay the best and they treat their people well. I… I didn’t really know how to let him down gently Fortunately my other student was also mostly self-taught, knew a LOT of stuff, and was struggling to find her first job! She was able to give my other student a clearer picture of the long, bumpy road ahead of him.

Me right now.

me all the time

Could also be the “pile of PRs I need to review and merge” for me.

Me, if the storm is too big

I messed up the first one apparently as it stripped all the cool articles I found because I ran a publish for myself so it’s barebones.

Here’s the links I shared for those interested: https://blog.rakhim.org/standardization1-is-impossible https://twitter.com/vTimShipp/status/1307400181151825921 https://cloudsplaining.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-2UM_YWmpWE

https://duffney.io/youre-an-engineer-be-an-engineer/

Learned the curation piece meant if I sent a summary of those to myself that it removed from the newsletter for others so I fixed

58m51s elapsed only took an hour

I’ve waited an hour and 40 minutes before.

I do not know what they’re doing behind the scenes that could take that damn long.

Man, ElastiCache same thing

it takes 15-20 minutes to provision 2 redis nodes

deployed this week single-node ES in ca-central and it took ~17mins

btw. what were your instance sizes?

I doubt if it creates a support ticket in background and one of aws support person creates the cluster with cloudformation/cdk + ansible

… and I thought EKS is bad

@newbieCpo we do not have any quickstart documentation to follow at this time. We’re actively working on documentation as part of our Q1/Q2 priorities. Keep in mind that our primary focus is on paid engagements, from which all of our open source is derived from.

Here are some notes we’ve shared in the past. https://cloudposse.com/faqs/what-is-the-best-way-to-learn-the-terraform/

Hey Bro, thanks for these notes

I’ve been looking this https://docs.cloudposse.com/geodesic/design/ and the github repo https://github.com/cloudposse/geodesic

I’m getting to know Cloudposse so I can implement it in my work, but I’m still not very clear about what it is.

the docs site is out of date. next week we’re going to archive/hide the out-date-date pages (Which will be a lot)

I can give you the low down on how to get started and walk you through all the repositories. https://calendly.com/cloudposse

Whoa — Scary. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for this. Did you consider the Linux Foundation training course at all? I’ve been trying this and found it a mixed bag (mixture of videos, and text to read, plus links to external sites to read, plus PDFs with steps to follow) - feels a bit disjointed and you’re left feeling “OK, how much of the external information do I need to understand/learn?”

I’ve seen other recommendations for Mumshad’s Udemy course, so am considering whether to switch.

Hey Andy, Yes i considered it, and actually brought it, it was a big mistake, and ended up ditching it for Mumshads Udemy course also, as it is very important to get the hands on labs!

@Brad McCoy BTW what made you decide to do both qualifications? Do you think it’s worthwhile from an employability point of view? It seems like a relatively easy win as there is common ground between the syllabuses, I guess it’s just whether it’s worth the extra certification fee

I signed up to Mumshad’s Udemy course - it’s very well laid out and the included labs are a bonus - great recommendation

The reason i did both qualifications is because I wanted to do incremental learning as CKAD was easier, so I did that first, and it was a good milestone, and a-lot of that content was in the CKA anyway, its worth doing both as it makes you fully across everything and there are not certain things you miss out on. I would also never worry about cert fees as this is a great investment into your career and it will pay itself off over and over again, and you can normally claim it back on tax depending on what country you live in!!