I retired last summer at the crusty old age of 38 and have been dicking around with my home lab ever since. I've decided that computers are much more fun as a hobby than as a job.
I retired from the US Air Force, where I served as a sysadmin for 20 years. With my pension and disability pay, I'm able to live comfortably without work now. I could go back into the field and easily double or triple my income... but then I won't have all the free time to enjoy my life like I'm doing now. So, retired life is good enough for me.
Damn, 38 is pretty young. I guess that goes to show the importance of getting started on retirement early
38, retired, live comfortably without work, enjoying life
👍
So is there a contractual obligation in the military to use the word "cyber" 42 times a day?
When I joined back in 2002, we were known as Communications, or Comm. The Cyber thing is actually pretty new. In the last few years, I was still calling us Comm guys. I had a new Airmen ask me why I didn't call us Cyber guys; apparently, they finally started teaching that in our tech school. Our squadrons are still called Communications Squadrons, though.
Living the life. Enjoy it!
Saving up everything I can for this.
I take what I learn home but it can only get me so far without the proper hardware.
Working on retaking my online life through a combination of switching to self hosted solutions and Foss.
So fucking sick and tired of this cloud shit and the constant erosion of privacy and control. I've had enough.
Same here
It is a journey not a destination. Trust me haha.
Yeah it took a huge amount of effort so far, but I'm about 80% through. It helps that I have been using Linux and Foss in general in work and play (but rarely desktop) since the 90's. I realize I won't get to 100%, for example email is way too much hassle to self host for me personally. Protonmail has been a solid middle ground for me coming from Gmail. Some accounts I simply can't change the email so those are going to stay forwarded for now.
The biggest outlay so far was switching from Evernote to Joplin, as I had over 12 years of history (270 notebooks, 12,000 notes). It took me something like 4 full days of effort but feels glorious now that it's done.
Preparing to talk with my boss about my pay and seeing if there's a 5 year plan for our department. Also brushing off the old resume/LinkedIn in case needed.
Good luck!
Last couple of weeks has been preparing for a PEN test. I'm so tired of finding things that my predecessor didn't do.
Hating my current job, that was once the job of four people, with the passion of a thousand suns while I wait for my final offer letter after I countered. A job that pays more and has a set list of responsibilities and allows for creativity.
It's like the worst case of senioritis I've ever had.
I got a bunch of heads this year to double our team footprint.
I'm using those guys to bring 1mm/month of aws cost back onsite into a kubernetes cluster as well as moving existing on prem services into the same kubernetes and a few other clusters.
I think we've decided the sweet spot is that we build fast with AWS and bring the winners home to lower our opex. Its a relatively nuanced look at how we build and support our products.
So, I've got a few heads on managing legacy, a couple on migrating legacy to on prem k8s, a couple on just managing k8s and physical host lifecycle.
And I'm just kinda floating just helping people out as needed. And I'm not a manager so I have full ability for direction setting and task creation and I don't have to do any reviews or expense reports.
So as a systems eng, this is the best gig I've had in 15 years.
Kubernetes in my spare time, azure in my work time.
And by spare time I mean time not spent working for pay or playing baulders gate 3.
Living the dream brother.
Sitting through meeting after meeting about compliance.
I moved into presales, so now I pretty much eat lunch and do solution architect certs for a living.
Migrating Bareos Backups to a new storage node.
writing unholy terraform-helm-kustomize glue
its what the business and customers want, and its better than what used to be there
and at least im not graphing dependencies between literally thousands of terraform workspaces anymore
oh and fighting with a dreadful cloud peovider that pretends to be tier 1, but is more like tier ♾️
gods i want out of this industry
Nifi, kafka, waiting on management to figure out what they want. Slowly turning into a data engineer, not sure I like it to be honest.
Brushing up on my ospf and some vtp testing in my lab.
