Video walks on Youtube. If you haven't heard of them before, they're simple first-person videos where the filmer walks around some area with a stabilized video camera - no talking, just walking. I've really missed traveling and watching video walks while exercising has been a great way to satisfy that travel craving a bit and also trick my brain into experiencing some semblance of normalcy (not sure I could remember what a crowded street feels like otherwise haha).
I'm partial to Japan so my favorite channel has been Rambalac [1], and I recently also started watching another channel with the very creative name JAPAN 4K [2]. There are tons of other channels and places too, for example I recently watched a few in Lisbon [3] and Seoul [4] and Copenhagen [5]. They're very relaxing and fun to watch and going from place to place with no cuts captures the usual tourist experience quite well. If you like traveling you can probably find some that are interesting to you!
Alright, all you brave people who run databases in docker: where do you store the actual data?
- Host mounts? So what happens when a container gets rescheduled to another node?
- Docker volumes? What happens when a container gets rescheduled to another node?
- External SAN? Congratulations on your budget. That's not easily doable in public cloud I guess?
- Shared filesystem like NFS, or Ceph? How's the performance for you? And the filesystem itself runs outside of your docker cloud I guess?
- In the containers themselves? So you probably run some clustered database. So what if disaster strikes and all your containers go down? And get moved around?
Also, databases in many cases need to be tuned for performance. How do you do that in a cloud?
Maybe most of you are not running container scheduling. Which really is only taking containers half way.
(3) As you work for clients, keep a sharp eye for opportunities to build "specialty practices". If you get to work on a project involving Mongodb, spend some extra time and effort to get Mongodb under your belt. If you get a project for a law firm, spend some extra time thinking about how to develop applications that deal with contracts or boilerplates or PDF generation or document management.
(4) Raise your rates.
(5) Start refusing hourly-rate projects. Your new minimum billable increment is a day.
(6) Take end-to-end responsibility for the business objectives of whatever you build. This sounds fuzzy, like, "be able to talk in a board room", but it isn't! It's mechanically simple and you can do it immediately: Stop counting hours and days. Stop pushing back when your client changes scope. Your remedy for clients who abuse your flexibility with regards to scope is "stop working with that client". Some of your best clients will be abusive and you won't have that remedy. Oh well! Note: you are now a consultant.
(7) Hire one person at a reasonable salary. You are now responsible for their payroll and benefits. If you don't book enough work to pay both your take-home and their salary, you don't eat. In return: they don't get an automatic percentage of all the revenue of the company, nor does their salary automatically scale with your bill rate.
(8) You are now "senior" or "principal". Raise your rates.
(9) Generalize out from your specialties: Mongodb -> NoSQL -> highly scalable backends. Document management -> secure contract management.
(10) Raise your rates.
(11) You are now a top-tier consulting group compared to most of the market. Market yourself as such. Also: your rates are too low by probably about 40-60%.
Try to get it through your head: people who can simultaneously (a) crank out code (or arrange to have code cranked out) and (b) take responsibility for the business outcome of the problems that code is supposed to solve --- people who can speak both tech and biz --- are exceptionally rare. They shouldn't be; the language of business is mostly just elementary customer service, of the kind taught to entry level clerks at Nordstrom's. But they are, so if you can do that, raise your rates.
I'm partial to Japan so my favorite channel has been Rambalac [1], and I recently also started watching another channel with the very creative name JAPAN 4K [2]. There are tons of other channels and places too, for example I recently watched a few in Lisbon [3] and Seoul [4] and Copenhagen [5]. They're very relaxing and fun to watch and going from place to place with no cuts captures the usual tourist experience quite well. If you like traveling you can probably find some that are interesting to you!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Rambalac/videos
[2] https://www.youtube.com/user/keikaikeikaikeikai/videos
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXlFDpaQ1ec
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqj7l0Xk0Ho
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl69sN5PtgM