The Internet is a series of tubes

I see we learned nothing from the "just learn code" blowback and are trying to make the industry even more barren.

I can’t tell you the number of devs I’ve met that know jack shit about infrastructure and networking. Even simple questions like understanding their subnet or how a load balancer works.

I'm a principal engineer making a killing and often feel like

Look I'm mostly in infrastructure and I don't know much beyond core principles behind software development, I can't really cast stones. But yeah they can be surprisingly ignorant sometimes.

I’ve been developing for decades so obviously I know that the subnet is where the Lord Marshall went and returned with powers beyond mortal comprehension.

It's not something you just dump stuff on. It's not a big truck!

The subwhat?

..well I don't have to know that because AWS is like, serverless, dude.

Not just your industry. Every industry is like this.

You keep what you kill.

It's the water based version of skynet.

I'm a principle engineer, I'm broke as shit and I can see everyone else being incompetent (and outsourcing their brains to Claude) all day.

Gimmie one of these 130k jobs where I don't need to know anything, I'm sick of BS infra and k8s and shitass applications made as zillions of fucked microservices written by people who already bounced.

That's because they're back end devs. There is one way to do things, you learn the one way to do the thing, you do it that way, you're done.

The fun is in front end, there is 15 different ways of doing things, but you don't like any of them, so you develop a 16th way, eventually you get bored of the 16th way so come up with a 17th way. Eventually you get sick of all of this and go back to SSGs as God intended.

It's in the cloud

Knowledge without networking: low pay

Networkung without knowledge: hi pay

This was from 2023. Where is anon now?

The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material

The normies have swapped a meritocracy for a kakistocracy.

that’s the rub, it doesn’t

How the internet works would be more so an IT thing than a backend developer thing at least on a high level. Setting up a database doesn't mean one knows networking well in the same way they probably don't know cpu logic gate design well.

The black box people entrust their secrets to? (TPM, encrypting disks, cloud, AI)

Also goes for socials.

Arguably an engineering (hardware) or systems programming issue, too. How many IT people (even the highly competent ones) could design a router, wifi chip etc.? Or know in detail what's going on in an internet exchange point?

You are not a real dev unless you can build your own CPU atom by atom

True and how many of those guys are well versed in fiber optics at IXPs. Maybe with like 20 dudes you could get an extremely in-depth snapshot of how the internet works from transistors to transformers and everything in-between.

I’ve heard this before, not everything has to become a microservice rather it’s okay for some aspects to be a monolith.

It was a regrettable trend 10 years ago and when your team contracts from 60 to 6 its an unmaintainable shitfest. I'm trying to coax them into merging them into a monolith with multiple entrypoints/builds so I have one set of dependencies to deal with.

Laid off and back into NEETdom

Hiw did you get that? Put it back ontop of big ben!

Came looking for this. Was not disappointed.

No, this, Jen, is the internet.

Ooh, that one!

Btw, i'm not Jen.

You don't need to know all the details, but I think you should understand the basic network concepts way before starting your first job as a developer

At least TCP/IP, DNS, and similar things, yeah. Maybe not so much the intricate details of the wifi6 or Bluetooth protocols.

The worst part is when you do finally understand the protocols and standards, you still have to follow different procedures depending on where you work.

Yeah, but why is CIDR notation like that? You put a bigger number at the end and your subnet becomes smaller? Why would you want that?

ngl this got me wondering what kinda jobs are fairly easy to enter (not too difficult or not too few availability), have good job prospects (salary, labour terms and conditions)... like how do i even learn how to do front/backend, etc., if i am bad at math?

When you translate it out it bits it’s the number of bits that are active in the net mask

0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 is a /0

1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 0000 0000 is a /24

1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1100 0000 is a /26

And since it’s used for matching, it follows how many there are.

Edit: typed that quickly, but to expand it further, take a /24 subnet, that is 255.255.255.0, if you look above each group of 8-bits can cover 0-255, so you in essence by having 24 bits turned on that’s what you want for an exact match. You’re basically saying “the first three octets need to exactly match”

You don’t need math at all.

How to learn it? Think of a project you would like to tackle, and just start on your pc. Ask ChatGPT for a starting point

Bugger off, i'm not going to use aislop. blocked

then follow youtube tutorials

Well thanks to you too for that constructive comment…

They got a point, the amount of bs I have to deal with because of people using slop is unbearable.

Please don't be a part of encouraging this kind of LLM applications

To anyone feeling like this, nobody understands fully how computers work. You find your niche and you do your bit.

I don't think there's anyone alive who understands it all.

I said to use it as a starting point, not to solve all issues.

I am not a professional but coding is more holding logic paths in your mind and translating large concepts into bite-sized steps.

In my (extremely amateur) solo dev project this weekend - a card game, I needed a trap that's invisible to opponents but visible to the player.

So we create an (invisible) control node with an (optionally visible) animated node with a text label that inherits the visibility of the immediately parent.

Then the top level node needs a "when I give you a place to be, animate appearing then animate moving to that place function" and it needs to respond to the card_played signal, and it needs to check the logic to see if that's the time to trigger, and if so which functions it needs to activate (the board, the "umpire" node, the opponent hand) in which order, then call the dialogue system to display dialogue, then query the dialogue database for which message to show, in which language (currently only English) which in itself has a controller that forces the order of animations and turns on/off clicks to various functions while this function resolves...

The only math involved is "how fast should the node move" and "if this trap blocks face cards, then block anything with a card value over 10" (jack queen king)

You don't what to know how the internet works.

It's boring and it's complex and it's fragile and basically dependent on corporations and nations being nice to each other.

Much more exciting to agonize about your self hosted DNS server.

I mean the basic principles are very simple.

It's the scaling and the speed of it all that you can't really understanding. Also all the hackneyed unoptimized solutions that hold it all together that we're totally dependent on to this day.