Same here, gource did help to visualize a complete revamp / refactor of a software, from the current mess by that time, to the final, pratically complete rewrite it was (through a process, since keep it working was mandatory). Really interesting to see the "mess" mutating into a more organized file struct, etc.

Well, in my particular experience with juniors, it's astonishing the so many ways they have to make any code run slower than it has to be (besides the network and database queries), just by thinking 'nah, this is a computer and it can do millions of ops by second'. And that's why I always take the "premature optimization" dogma with a grain of salt while my life's miserable enough having to accelerate some other's stuff.

I don't think that tools like ReaR (Relax and Recover) would agree with retiring ISOs..

Same here on using lsyncd and restic. Curious about the LVM+rsync method for nightly? My two cents: ReaR (Relax and Recover) for Linux for raw moving servers has saved me a couple of times.

>Skip low level and go as high as you can. Ditch C, assembly, hardware. Take python, ruby, js. Never touched C++ cause it’s awful? Good.

In my personal experience, I think that having to work on different high AND more low level programming languages over time is what sets me apart from people/coworkers with low basic knowledge of computer foundations (the order in my case being Basic, Pascal, C, Perl, C/C++, PHP, JS, etc). Also it depends on the projects, but just my two cents.

I'd rephrase it as "know both high level and low level and use high level as much as possible".

Knowing the low level will prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot with the high level.

I think you’re right, I should have separated it in two parts. First is learning low-level “how it works, exactly” — that is useful. Second is writing actual low-level code — that I’d advise myself against.

So, I guess:

- Learn how sockets, filesystems and processes work, read apue, learn how jits/compilers work. But don’t write serious C, that’s a waste of time even if you’re smart enough.

Come to Spain. We haven't everything, but our optic fibers and internet plans are top notch ;P

Those comments are nice to read. I tried, but my coworkers are too "young" or from other generation, I guess. The response [about simply buying a book] was "Oh, another person said it wasn't needed [to buy a book about that] since it will always be behind newer versions coming"...

A bunch of the people in my groups have been college students fwiw. It's been a complete mix of young people and experienced people. Doing it over the internet helps you cast the wide net. When you do it with only your direct friends or coworkers it can be much tougher, or hit or miss.

Same here, we've been using HAProxy for years now and only gets to improve

At my office I'm one of the more valuable employees, being diabetic type 1 or not, and my managers know that :)

Yep, I acquired the habit to write var names like "cur_thing" for "current thing", you know.