My Cousin Vinnie is an example that holds up still. No current events, no racist jokes, just typical social interactions that are still relevant.

I had a co-worker describe it as a giant Linux playground.

Another as ETL nirvana.

I wound up having a script for users on a jump host that would submit an sbatch job that ran sshd as the user on a random high level port and stored the port in the output. The output was available over NFS so the script parsed the port number and displayed the connection info to the user.

The user could then run a vscode server over ssh within the bounds of CPU/memory/time limits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jiPeIFXb6U

And the slides; https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1n2RlMdmv1p25Xy5thJUh...

I think you just described most people who aren't SE's. The only difference is that they can't land better paying jobs.

As a backend guy who considers himself extremely fortunate that nearly all of his users/customers are technical, this got an audible chuckle out of me.

This, with the sections, is INI. Duplicate keys included. Loosely defined spec, but INI none the less

> I don't know why you'd be parsing unit files or serializing something else to unit files. Just drop them into place

It's common to store information in a DB, or some other format that is easy to merge/override programmatically. Even configuration management tools like puppet, salt, ansible do this with JSON/YAML

I totally get avoiding systemd, I don't myself, but I get it. The author on the other hand talks about the problems doing this in a professional setting. This I do not get. As far as management of large fleets of servers goes, systemd is quite nice. Yeah, it's odd for some things but as far as automation is concerned it's the way to go.

With systemd the same file syntax and management works for services, timers, mount points, networking, name resolution, lightweight containers, virtual machines. You literally have to write one parser and serialize to ini. Then you get distribution generic management. Upgrades? No problem? Moving to CentOS to Debian? Ubuntu? arch? Whatever? No problem. It. Just. Works.

Yeah, if you're in the know you can do better for specific circumstances, but in this day and age OS's are throw away and automation you don't have to refactor is paramount. For professional work, this flame war is over.

Funny, I've seen a fair number of job postings that require this exact thing

I had never heard of them until I was _years_ into software engineering. I think this is more common than you may think. I had never dealt with linear algebra in a formal setting, despite leveraging a lot of the concepts, until then.

When it's integrated into a product people are more likely to use it. Lowering the barrier to entry so to speak.

You wind up having to use things like tls fingerprinting with other heuristics to identify what to traffic to reject. These all take engineering hours and require infrastructure. It is SO MUCH SIMPLER to require auth and reject everything else outright.

I know that the BigCo's want to track us and you originally mentioned tracking not auth. But my point is yeah, they have malicious reasons for locking things down, but there are legitimate reasons too.

I've always been a "stuff it", sort of guy. Not wanting to bother people with my problems. It turns out sharing the good and bad moments of your life with others not only is liberating, but it's an excellent way of showing others that you trust them. It's not all roses though, I've noticed that it's pretty easy to come across as a negative person when you first start doing this.

Also, I've observed that frequently, when doing the right thing while supporting someone, you can still hurt them immensely. Your perspective and their perspective can be so wildly different that it's almost like two entirely different realities exist. I don't know what to do about this one, but I'm going to be sinking considerable thought into it.

Honestly, when I type that out it seems like this shouldn't be a revelation to me. That these are things that most well adjusted normies "just get', but hey, I'm just a neckbeard. Better late than never. Perhaps I'm not the only one.

If it's another Cmake project, that's the happy path. Easy peasy. If it's not you still have the ability to run ./configure && make or evoke whatever incantation is in the dependency's requirements. I'm not the hugest fan of cmake, but I've worked with it quite a bit and it's a much more pleasant story than other languages I've used a lot like python, JavaScript, OCaml (which I love), etc.

I do find rust and go dependency management a little simpler due to the prescribed nature of them, but once you get off the happy path, the flexibility of C land is tough to beat. It sort of matches the language stories themselves; you have more control and have to do a bit more yourself. It's all about trade offs.