I wanted to join the army as a kid, was infatuated by the forces. I had memorised spec-sheets, obsessed over the operations and used to be awestruck everytime I saw someone in olive green. Tried out a couple of times in college and was deemed medically unfit. I tried again last year but didn't make the cut either. Now I have crossed the age limit and will remain a code monkey for the rest of my life.
Nothing too bad. The life I live now is so much contrasting than the life I promised myself as a kid. I still have other hobbies and I still read a lot about the forces.
At university I started down the path of joining the infantry as an officer. At first it was great fun - getting paid to go camping on weekends away from university. But when the political side began being pressed home more and more, it didn't sit well with my beliefs. Oh, and I met my now wife at that time, and didn't want to go disappearing off.
I ended up getting a PhD, doing academia for a couple of years, then moving in to industry. Some of it was fun, but the itch for proper adventure has never really left.
Now with a young daughter, we have mild family adventures, which are fun in their own right, but I do hope to have bigger adventures one day. Hopefully with my wife and daughter.
You can find that in many sports communities. Not everywhere by default, but folks are pretty open everywhere once its clear you have something in common.
You can get as much travel and adventure as your mind and wallet can handle, without strict orders that prevent you from actually having fun, without risk of being killed by some drone from above. Or killing another human being just because you were told so, maybe a father defending their village and family from invading forces.
Nah, you can do much better than those guys, and not lose your humanity and happiness in the process.
Thanks for sharing! This all sounds good, but like another poster said, most of it can be experienced without killing other humans / oppressing other countries. Seems like a huge sacrifice just to have fun.
Two years building observability infrastructure at current startup (YC 23). Built a Go library for zero-code OTel auto-instrumentation that scans 1000+ processes via /proc, shipped 7 production OTel integrations (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Nginx, RabbitMQ and more), and architected backend systems for dynamic integration lifecycle management across databases and streaming services.
Also built internal tooling: an InnoDB metrics parser that doubled metrics output, and a DataDog-to-OTel metadata transformer. CI/CD pipelines, multi-platform builds, the whole thing.
Before this: FastAPI microservices at a startup, and facial recognition infra at Infosys with FAISS similarity search under 50ms for 100k+ images.
All good! I wish it was still in the model picker control too, would be much easier & clearer. But at least this way you can choose any Claude still available and turn off the 1 Million token window if you prefer.
Backend engineer with 4+ years building distributed observability and data systems. At my current workplace, I built a CLI tool solving OpenTelemetry service-name collisions, architected 7+ production integrations increasing telemetry 2x, and designed type-safe config systems that eliminated biweekly crashes. Previously built large-scale facial recognition system with <50ms FAISS similarity search on 100K+ images.<p>I love building developer tools and infrastructure that just works. Passionate about open-source observability and making complex systems simple.
Our manager comes every 3-4 months, and assigns a ticket. Literally the only TEXT in the whole damn ticket was `Auto discovery in host and k8s`.
Auto discovery of fucking what?!!!
He writes in the message "IMP: we have a month so lets try to push to stage/BETA in 2-3 week and test it for a week and make it live before end of month."
mw-injector[0], it's a WIP project. It detects what Java, Node, Python or Golang services are running on a host and instruments it with Opentelemetry APM. Inspired by Otel-injector[1] but it automatically selects service names for each service so you have service level segregation.
Nothing too bad. The life I live now is so much contrasting than the life I promised myself as a kid. I still have other hobbies and I still read a lot about the forces.