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for devops I highly recommend Davide Bianchi's "tales from the machine room".

https://www.soft-land.org/cgi-bin/doc.pl?mode=setpreferredla...

> At that point, the telecom carrier's representative intervened and bluntly told the set-top box representative to just shut up.

This got a laugh out of me. The whole scenario was both hilarious and surreal from start to finish. It's a wonder what people get hung up on sometimes, even if getting hung up on it makes them look bad.

> The installer, written in Python, often failed because of incorrect assumptions about the target environment and almost always required some manual intervention to complete successfully.

Nothing ever changes. I spent half a day just getting some SDR development stuff to work just now, long live Python code with baked in hard dependencies on particular versions of obscure libraries... In the end it worked, but what a mess.

> With a single jump to the processor's reset entry point, I had somehow inspired someone to step back from academic competition in order to have more fun with learning.

Seems like it wasn't just the processor that reset.

These were great. It’s certainly a blessing and curse to no longer dazzle people when solving a tech puzzle as a middle-aged person. I’m hoping I’ll become impressive again if I can still do it when I’m elderly. :)

working in software before LLMs, you had to be there.