Week 36, 2024 - Photos and Fires

Yesterday I published the first non-hiring-related Engineering Leadership article since May: How to Lead Your Team when the House Is on Fire. I felt the desperation in discussions with various peers, especially line managers, about the pressure of the current wartime climate in tech companies, so I spent a day addressing the topic and trying to give some context and advice to those who haven’t been leading through similar periods earlier.

I also dug into moving my photos and videos from iCloud to self-hosted. The trigger of the idea was Immich, but I quickly realized I needed more than just an interface over my photos. I planned a storage strategy, a process to structure and migrate decades worth of old media from various sources, and then a backup solution. Only when all these are done can I think about a “frontend”. As of today, I’m happy with the following setup:

• I exported all my pre-2023 iCloud Photos stuff — I kept recent ones to have native multi-device access to them. Starting 2025, once a year I’ll export a year’s worth of media.
• Photos and videos are stored on an external USB drive, mounted under a VM in Proxmox on my old Mac Mini, and made accessible through SMB via an OpenMediaVault VM. While there, I centralized important data storage to this same place, which included moving our Paperless-NGX family document archive too.
• Daily offsite backups are done to a B2 bucket via Restic. I fell in love with Restic, it seems amazing: multi-platform, fast, secure, versatile, low footprint, with a user-friendly CLI. Guides I used to set it up with B2, and on MacOS. I haven’t used any wrappers, just cron with simple bash scripts.
• Remaining steps:
  • Automatic synchronization of photos on my phone to a temporary directory on the server so I have everything in one place. PhotoSync and Möbius Sync seem solid options.
  • Immich or a similar frontend to access the photos.
  • Optional: similar setup for the whole family — not pressing now.

📋 What I learned this week

Lots of random learnings tied to the above project.

• Moving files is slow. (duh!) Despite all the gigabit internet and WiFi 6 stuff, I struggled to move my photos from my laptop to the Mac Mini in the other room. I needed to transfer around 40.000 files, adding up to 180GB. I considered plugging the destination USB drive into my MacBook Pro but didn’t want to research how to access both ext4 and APFS partitions at the same time, on Apple silicon. In hindsight, I should’ve tried that, learn something, and be done in a few hours. Instead, I started with SMB, but it was slow and unreliable, and then scp, which was also slow and unreliable. I realized the slowness might be due to the large number of items, so I used tar to create a few big files instead. Better, but still super slow. Finally, getting inspired by IPoAC, I grabbed a USB stick and did the copy in 3 rounds. Phew!
• The collective internet wisdom advices requesting a copy of your data from Apple instead of exporting photos manually. I asked for it a week ago, but it still hasn’t arrived. Meanwhile, I just switched Photos to Download Originals to Mac and manually exported the items once the sync was done. It was a bit tedious (I went year by year), and the filenames are all over the place, but I’ll rely on EXIF data anyway. I’m curious when / if the takeout will arrive.
• By now, I moved most of my LLM activities from ChatGPT to Claude AI. I like to collaborate on artifacts, having a single document constantly shaped and improved based on my instructions and feedback. See this simple example of a checklist we created during the Paperless-NGX migration — it only took a few minutes and the results were covering all aspects necessary to pay attention to. I have had similar experience working on different types of documents, from articles to code.
• This is the most obscure learning, more like a note for myself: unprivileged LXC containers under Proxmox can’t mount SMB shares permanently(!) — but there’s a workaround.

🎯 What I want to try next week

Moving forward with the photo project and progressing with the job search are the two main items on my agenda. If the former feels like a procrastination of the latter, you might be on to something.

🤔 Articles that made me think

The Art of Finishing

Procrastination is a nice segue for Tomas Stropus’s post. He does a great job capturing the familiar symptoms, feelings, and their causes while working on multiple half-finished things at the same time. The context is hobby projects, where this is more common than in a work setting, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who witnessed the exact same pattern in engineering teams. This article will be a great source of inspiration next time I see it occur.

How AI Disrupts Tech Investing

This article was the missing piece for me to fully understand the current tech climate. Sure, high central interest rates are drying up investments, but this never fully explained the whole picture: VC investors must be much more risk-hungry than parking their funds in state bonds! Thomes Pueyo does a great job explaining the other ingredient in the sudden disruption shocks across most of the tech sector: the AI boom, with all its consequences, and the fact that some successful companies don't even need external funding.

Founder Mode

While the post doesn’t mention it explicitly, I think it tells a lot about the zeitgeist that this topic is coming up now. In short, the talk in Paul Graham’s post argues that the usual advice for running large companies often harms founders instead of helping them. Brian Chesky believes that founders need a different approach, called "founder mode," which contrasts with the typical "manager mode." Founder mode refers to a more hands-on, engaged approach to running a company, where the founder actively participates in various aspects of the business rather than delegating tasks to others. (In contrast, manager mode emphasizes a more modular management style where leaders are advised to hire competent individuals and give them autonomy.)

This article was another source of inspiration that motivated me to write about line management in companies operating in wartime. What can seem like micromanagement and lack of trust for line managers might simply be a CEO or CTO trying to switch to Founder Mode — so I wanted to help EMs to be more resilient in these times.

💿 Something cool: bootable multi-OS USB stick

Despite being an old project, I was today years old when I heard about Ventoy! If you’re familiar with the frustration of having to reformat your only USB stick when switching between hosting a recent installer and moving random files between two computers, then I have good news for you. Ventoy allows you to do both: store files as usual on your pen drive, and when you plug it into a computer and boot from it, it searches the drive for any .iso or similar disk image files, and displays a menu that allows you to boot any of them. Genius!

That’s it for today, go out and enjoy the cool early-autumn winds over the weekend,

Péter