Building a shed gives you a comprehensive understanding of the whole setup, which helps with building up a better mental model and intuition for the construction of a skyscraper. Otherwise it's easy to get lost with following standard procedures in building a skyscraper without understanding why certain things are done a certain way.
Protect your shed
71–80 of 89 posts
Re: Protect your shed
#72What is the great attraction in software occupations to appropriate terms from the practice of architecture and structural engineering?
I dunno, but it does seem a time honored tradition
Maybe because buildings are easy to describe the surface concepts to people without deep understanding of civil engineering or architecture or whatever, compared to other engineering disciplined like mech or chem or electrical.
Everyone knows what a building foundation is and why it's important, but if someone starts talking to you about negative roots being necessary for a stable linear time-invariant system, most people's eyes are going to glaze over.
Re: Protect your shed
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
How’d you get out? For the many over-specialized readers like myself…
Surely step one is psychological. I feel like being able to accept a lower paycheck is critical to leaving tech if you’re at the over specialized part of your career
Psychological in the sense that my kids will need to psychologically accept that they now live under a bridge?
Re: Protect your shed
#74OP sounds like the ideal employee who works 8 hours, then spends 4 more hours/weekends learning and working at home. For people who like doing other things, work already takes up most of their time and energy 5/7 days, and there doesn't seem to be much time for much else.
Yeah ideal employee indeed. Learning things at home to add value to the employer.
But the skill and experience stick with you for lifetime.
Re: Protect your shed
#75I have a shed, and I agree with the broad thrust of the argument. During lockdown I worked in there professionally, which was a mistake. It turned what was a creative space into something that had the emotional stick of a bad workplace. However. I have mostly overcome that now. If you want to see how I built it: https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/house/shed/ my most recent "finished" project is this: https://www.secretb…
Really cool project! Bookmarked for further inspection and future inspiration :-)
Re: Protect your shed
#76> That’s taking the structural discipline from the skyscraper and applying it to a space where I had total freedom. Yeah, nah. When I take my learnings home with me, it fails every time. Usually, the scale of work necessary to maintain an enterprise-grade system rapidly outgrows the time I can reasonably allocate to it. In other cases, I lose interest because it's boring corporate crap. I don't known how all of you "…
I have a professional 'homelab' and a personal 'homelab'. You're 100% right, they can be a time sink. The important bit is to make sure the time is setup not 'maintenance' time. The trick is twofold: if it isn't 'declare and deploy' don't run it. If it isn't in your backup/restore pipeline don't run it. Pfsense and Home assistant are huge pains in the ass. Everything else is easy breezy. Proxmox/pbs/truenas/talos/lin…
Out of curiosity, what makes Home Assistant a pain?
Re: Protect your shed
#77OP sounds like the ideal employee who works 8 hours, then spends 4 more hours/weekends learning and working at home. For people who like doing other things, work already takes up most of their time and energy 5/7 days, and there doesn't seem to be much time for much else.
> OP sounds like the ideal employee who works 8 hours, then spends 4 more hours/weekends learning and working at home. Be careful of calling this an ideal employee. I, for example, tend to have a little bit of such a schedule, but what I work on at home is so much more exciting, making the job much more frustrating in comparison. Also, one is typically not allowed (or it is not possible) to apply all the really good…
Wow, this sounds familiar. The quality of work that can be done at home is often not realistic at work... and vice versa. I've learned to separate work and play pretty well and have enjoyed both worlds.
The next step is keeping the homelab at arm's length from stuff you actually depend on. My pfsense router Just Works with tons of cool stuff on it but if I get the itch to push it a bit further... walk away and make a VM in the shed!
Re: Protect your shed
#78I did this for ~10 years, and absolutely no regrets, it was a lot of fun and the side projects gave me energy. Nowadays it's hard though, learning a new language, with a gf and a full-time demanding job, I don't have a lot of time to be tinkering. I do feel a bit sad about this but just assumed it's just life, and cannot imagine with kids how impossible this'd be. I did look at doing some basic housekeeping with LLMs…
There’s this special feeling when you can sit down later in the evening to tinker for a couple of hours, or read a challenging/inspiring book in peace. But when I don’t have time and frankly energy, then I still try to do _some_ minutes of this kind of thing daily. I feel like there‘s a big difference between 0min and 15min for anything (also includes exercise, meditation etc.), and while it’s great to have more time…
Yep, beyond 30 minutes or so I'll just switch rooms and watch a hockey or baseball game. I'm at the "done that" phase now. Not much excites me in the computer space.
Re: Protect your shed
#79I have a shed, and I agree with the broad thrust of the argument. During lockdown I worked in there professionally, which was a mistake. It turned what was a creative space into something that had the emotional stick of a bad workplace. However. I have mostly overcome that now. If you want to see how I built it: https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/house/shed/ my most recent "finished" project is this: https://www.secretb…
Your shed saga is a fantastic writeup, thank you for sharing.
Re: Protect your shed
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely step one is psychological. I feel like being able to accept a lower paycheck is critical to leaving tech if you’re at the over specialized part of your career
Psychological in the sense that my kids will need to psychologically accept that they now live under a bridge?
Callous, but that’s your fault for building a life that requires tech money to maintain. I don’t get the point of comments like yours, just to make one feel bad for escaping the golden handcuffs.
There are plenty of people that have children and live decent lives earning less than $200k/year + benefits.