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Ben Halpern
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What's the best career advice you can give in ten words or less?

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Ben Halpern

Sleep and tackle the problem tomorrow with fresh eyes.

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edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

A colleague's eyes are always fresher than your own.

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AlysCole

Too many times has a colleague been able to immediately pin down a problem I'd been pouring HOURS into.

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Thomas H Jones II

(More junior) teammates often wonder why I'm so verbose with my status-reporting. I can't count the number of times where I've sent out a "I've been banging my head on , here's everything I've done - did I miss something trivial" only to have a reply, a few minutes/hours later, saying something as simple as "line 24 of your problem-description".

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Brian Hanna

Doing this one right now. Completely borked the local database for one my apps today. Shut down my machine and went home. Going to play some video games and deal with it in the morning

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Thomas H Jones II

That's why I love doing infrastructure automation: something's gone completely sideways with a system or an entire architecture? Punch a button to deploy a new, functional copy in a few (or few tens of) minutes.

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Brian Hanna

I would love to but we're in feature factory mode so not a ton of time for that level of automation 🙁

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Thomas H Jones II

Yeah. Automating deployments is definitely a time-suck, but it's a time-suck that, once done, quickly pays for itself by freeing you up to do other thing more quickly and easily. Unfortunately, many organizations that love to say "we want to do devops" or "we want to do infrastructure automation" don't seem to understand that you have to allocate considerable time to getting there. That it's an investment to reach the point where you replace broken systems – or even just do regular patching – with "lemme launch a new copy". Then again, there's a lot of shops that think that re-hosting into a CSP and/or switching to containers magically impart capabilities they never designed into their solutions.

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Periklis Gkolias

Second that

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Damien Cosset • Edited

Don't worry, nobody knows what they are doing.

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Ben Halpern

Can confirm. Don’t know what I’m doing.

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Thomas H Jones II

Always amazes me when I run into people that claim to know, with absolute certitude, that what they're doing is the correct, best way to do a given thing.

Usually, such certitude does not bear up under even the most casual of scrutiny.

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Avalander

How comes you can only like a comment once?

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edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

Some people do, learn from them.

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Sinuhe Jaime Valencia

I know what I'm doing: trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do

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Nadine M. Thêry

If you are not happy, do something. Life is short.

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Ben Halpern

That’s how I felt after I got my first job my degree trained me for.

I sort of knew how to code and that looked like a lot more fun so I quit and figured out my happy path.

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Rizwan⚡️

+1 Yes, life is too short to be in a crappy job. You can be a team of one but be realistic as well and explore your options. There comes a time when all your pleading and convincing will go to waste if the executives/management don't value your opinion. You deserve to be happy! :)

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Russell Ormes

Maybe life is too long to be unhappy.

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Gift Egwuenu

Never stop learning.

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𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐝𝐞 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐝

Just ask the bloody question!

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Jaimie Carter

Haha .. yes! Just ask, already!!!!

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Ben Halpern

Good one

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Scott Yeatts • Edited

Don't be afraid to admit when you're wrong.

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Luke Westby

Technology is ephemeral; people are not

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edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

I have a bad feeling some COBOL code is going to outlive us all.

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Ben Halpern

Love that

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C.S. Rhymes

Drink less coffee, drink more water

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Ben Halpern

I really want to give up my coffee dependency

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Sam Ringleman

I don't.

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Avalander

Heresy!

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Ken Bellows

😱

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Cécile Lebleu

Don’t go to bed if you haven’t learned something new today [repeat every day]

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Oleksii Holub

Depending on what you consider as "learning something new", you may ruin your sleep really badly :D

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Cécile Lebleu

"Get enough sleep" would be my no. 2 advice!

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gabriel-viviani

while(isAlive())

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Cécile Lebleu

That's why programming is so great. Two paragraphs of explanation condensed in one function! Awesome! Thanks 😄

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Ben Halpern

Any tips on keeping up this discipline?

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Cécile Lebleu

One and only, IMO: Link this question to an action you do every evening!

For example, washing your teeth, changing clothes, taking a shower, or when pulling the covers on to sleep. Select one action you do religiously every evening, and whenever you do this action, ask yourself the question, "have I learned something new today?". If you can honestly say "yes, I learned something useful today", then sleep sound, you earned it! But if not, then get up and do something, or read something useful on your phone using the DEV app :), etc.

Back when I was around 10 years old, I heard somewhere that the Japanese did this every night. I thought it was SO cool I decided to make that a part of my life. I don't even know if it's true from the Japanese! Also, I thank to my dad, who I saw learning and working really hard every day and night from home, to build his own thing. I learned that, even if all goes south, I can still learn something new every day, and what I learn, I can use to improve my life.

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Ben Halpern

Nice!

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Molly Struve (she/her)

Ask the question, someone else is probably wondering it too.

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Ben Halpern

Definitely!