Week 28, 2024 - Riding the Heat

It’s another crazy hot summer here, like at most of the northern hemisphere I guess. What do you do when you’re stuck in a big city on days when the temperature is nearing 40ºC? Well, we went to a museum to cool down and watch a photo exhibition of the works of Kertész, Moholy-Nagy, Capa, and others — Hungarians who made it big in the US.

📋 What I learned this week

A month ago I posted small snippets of takeaways from the Craft conference to my LinkedIn. I scheduled these posts to go live every day at 1 PM CET, and each post contained one of the takeaways from my article. Wherever possible, I linked the speaker and sometimes I added extra illustrations (photo or a link with preview) to the posts. Now enough time passed that all the activity died down on these posts, so I went back and checked what performed well on LinkedIn.

To simplify things: I only considered impressions as the metric to optimize for, because my goal was to be visible and have my content reach more people. None of the learnings are surprising, they are common sense, yet it’s interesting to see them confirmed by data.

• I had only two cases where I had an illustration attached to the post and tagged the speaker, who ended up interacting with the post (liked, commented, or reposted). These two posts where all these checkboxes were checked brought in 75% of the impressions of all the materials I posted in these two weeks.
• Posts going live on weekends performed far in the bottom.
• The strongest correlation with impressions was if the speakers themselves interacted with the posts. (Though careful with this: I heard that if you tag the author and they don’t interact, LinkedIn punishes you by showing your post less. I couldn’t confirm this because there was only one item where I tagged the speaker and they didn’t react — but while that post was underperforming indeed, it went live on a Sunday, so hard to tell what had a bigger impact.)

It’s interesting to me how long content “lives”, gains attention and engagement on LinkedIn compared to other social networks. It’s much less ephemeral than Facebook or anything else I’m familiar with: I’m still getting engagements on some of these posts that are more than a month old now.

Mostly note for myself: the lvm-thin storage under Proxmox keeps growing even after deleting files in the VMs / LXCs. To solve it, for VMs the “Discard” option should be enabled for the respective drives; in LXCs, running fstrim periodically can keep things at bay. I managed to bring down my file system usage from 99.8% (😱) to 67.5% (😌). Relevant documentation and forum thread.

🎯 What I want to try next week

It's another slow summer week, but I would like to wrap up the Getting Hired series with a summary post and add the relevant The Retrospective episodes to the articles in which we discuss the content with Jeremy. We also have two episodes in the pipes almost ready to launch, hopefully we'll be able to publish them too during the week.

🤔 Articles that made me think

A Eulogy for DevOps

Interesting rant from a DevOps engineer. While I think the article’s diagnosis about the death of DevOps rather illustrates the symptoms of a misunderstood or badly implemented philosophy, it’s still an interesting read, especially for companies who went faster than needed in adopting the latest trends.

My hope is that we keep the gains from the DevOps approach and focus on simplification and stability over rapid transformation in the Infrastructure space. I think we desperately need a return to basics ideology that encourages teams to stop designing with the expectation that endless growth is the only possible outcome of every product launch.

Arguably, this is indeed what’s happening now in the post-ZIRP era.

🚵‍♂️ Something cool: Reasons to Ride

This short film on the Silk Road Mountain Race just premiered yesterday. The SRMR is an unsupported, long-distance biking competition through the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. Unlike similar events like the Transcontinental or Trans Pyrenees, the route of this race is fixed from start to finish, taking contestants through abandoned Soviet military roads, gravel tracks, mountain cols, beaches, and some hike-a-bike sections. It’s hard to grasp why people do brutal challenges like this, and I can’t say I got closer to finding a logical explanation. But watching scenes like Sofiane Sehili’s relentless leadership grab from a roadside struggling Justinas Leveika, or Quinda Verheul fighting her tears contemplating whether to go on or give up, was an emotional experience — which is taken to another level by the breathtaking Kyrgyz scenery.

If you liked this, there’s a similar, slightly longer movie from last year called How to Bikepack the Silk Road Mountain Race. This year's edition starts in a month.

That’s it for today, overcome a challenge this weekend,

Péter