Where have I been these past few years?

[eachro]

Can someone give me some context? Who is rachelbythebay? I gather she is probably someone well known for her writing on software, tech culture, etc in the HN community, but I am not that immersed in the community(hence my ignorance). Thanks!

[arjie]

If you think someone is a bit of a local celebrity on HN, you can click the domain name on a story like this and see what their blog was submitted for. Usually useful information.

[lvh]

She's Rachel Kroll, a veteran sysadmin now at Facebook.

[jaegerx]

I had the pleasure of working with her at Rackspace before she moved to Google. Easily the smartest Linux tech I've ever met.

[x0x0]

She has lots of fascinating debugging stories; I spent a Saturday years ago reading most of her blog. It was well worth it.

[vinnymac]

'Rachelbythebay' is Rachel Kroll. She is currently an engineer at Facebook.

[prontoClod]

https://medium.com/wogrammer/rachel-kroll-7944eeb8c692

https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon16/speaker-or-organi...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf4RwlOdppg

[downer72]

https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon16/speaker-or-organi...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf4RwlOdppg

https://medium.com/wogrammer/rachel-kroll-7944eeb8c692

[thaumaturgy]

In case Rachel's reading this: I've missed her posts. I'm getting out of the troubleshooting part of the industry because it sucks (or rather, it's not where I want to put my energy anymore), but her stuff has always been a real treat to read and a reminder that no matter what's in front of me, someone's probably got a much tougher problem in front of them.

[erikpukinskis]

Always sad to be reminded how many good people get their careers swallowed up by a corporation. The public sphere suffers.

I have a lot of anger towards Google in particular, who seems to relish in having private resources, secrets, learning and technology that only the annointed may access. I should probably talk to my therapist about that.

[microcolonel]

For what it's worth, Google is one of the places which is less likely to swallow your work whole. At least it isn't Apple.

[rachelbythebay]

Honest question: how else do you pay the bills?

[pxlfkr]

Damn, how did you survive the 80s/90s!

(I think I can guess the answer).

Things could always be better, but at least it's routine now for stuff like Swift, GoLang, Rust, Protobufs, Cassandra, etc. to get built for internal use and then shared with the world. A far cry from software's dark ages.

[Santosh83]

But that's capitalism in practise.

[rachelbythebay]

You know what, the whole grenade metaphor? I don't need it. It's just a damn web site. People _do_ sometimes use it to communicate in critical situations... but none of us working there are ever in any risk of bodily harm because someone pushed a bad config.

Given that people are dealing with actual wars, I can lose it. It's easy to lose sight of such things when you're sheltered from them.

Updated.

[dfcowell]

I'm in a similar field (surprise surprise) and the most impactful thing someone has ever said to me is that we're making websites, not curing cancer. Respect for making the change.

[noonespecial]

Misbehaving binary and no source?

xxd -> vi -> xxd -r

Fierce. Love it.

[uiri]

It isn't even that there is no source - the code is available (upstream is here: https://people.freebsd.org/~abe/ ).

She figured that since it was a 1-bit bug, xxd -> vi -> xxd -r was going to be quicker and simpler than downloading, modifying and recompiling the source.

[matt_wulfeck]

Where does she work now? I can't tell from the post

[ikeboy]

Google suggests it's Facebook

https://facebook.com/wogrammer/posts/1748187012080407:0

[z3t4]

you get less and less productive the more experiense, as you can think of more and more stuff that can go wrong. Im glad she found an employer that put use of her experience

[blauditore]

Ah, "heisenbugs". I'm glad there's another person on the planet using this term. :)

[di4na]

Nearly all erlang devs knows it. It is the class they try to get rid of by using erlang.

[Terr_]

I didn't think it was that uncommon.

[ianai]

It's a reference to the principle right?

[robertk]

What was up with the non-sequitur bags of water link?

[wanderingjew]

I haven't read the article, but I would assume any mention of 'bags of water' would be a reference to a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. Specifically, the episode where the crew of the Enterprise encounters a silicon-based life form capable of communication with humans. Humans are three quarters water, so the silicon lifeforms (rightly?) refer to the humans as 'ugly bags of mostly water'.

To put this into context, it's not uncommon to have the set of people who use and work with technology overlap with the set of people who are sci-fi fans. This is prevalent enough that the culture itself overlaps. Here, I would guess a non-sequitur referring to 'bags of water' is a form of signalling; 'I'm one of you', or something to that effect.

I would go so far to say that knowledge of certain sci-fi tropes, plot lines, and even quotes is a requirement for working on certain teams. At the very least, active displays of ignorance of sci-fi culture should be avoided.

But then again, I haven't read the article linked to by the OP. It's just a guess.

[rachelbythebay]

Sometimes I hide things in my posts that I hope someone will find amusing or interesting. Some are obvious. Others? Not so much.

[whyileft]

I know its a common phrase like "hair on fire", but seriously, "jumping on live grenades" is super gross. That probably happened last week in Syria.

I get it, its just an expression we use in the industry. Its all good to hear it, but lets maybe stop using it.

[throwaway21888]

And what do you do about Syria? Politically correct language on an Internet message board achieves exactly nothing.

[rachelbythebay]

Yeah, I don't need it to make my point.

[paulddraper]

hang out to dry

beat a dead horse

bang for your buck

pull X out of your a--

cut off at the knees

sweat bullets

squeeze blood from a turnip

[lapsock]

i'd rather kill myself than work with c++

[zaphar]

That seems rather extreme. Although I suppose refusing a job that offers C++ could in very rare circumstances result homelessness, hunger, and finally death.

You'll find that gratuitous hyperbole with no actual content in your post will get you down-voted pretty fast here. The community has developed a pretty aggressive immune system to the typical reddit post.

[sean_patel]

Who is rachelbythebay?

(Don't expect an answer. This is a rhetorical question)

[imron]

In this case you can literally type:

whois rachelbythebay.com

And get the answer :-)

[teach]

Does it matter? It was an interesting read full of neat debugging war stories.

[winteriscoming]

>> And oh, please stop using the war metaphor. You are bringing in way too much aggression into something that can be done with a lot more calm and composure.

Agree with you on that part. However, this specific article wasn't aggressive at all.

[emarthinsen]

Have you been by the bay?