For a more baby-steps approach to resiliency, one might start running software on less-virtualized computers, creating a small home-lab, running software on bare-metal hardware that you actually own.
Also related though maybe not resiliency-focused: It's quite easy now to download all of Wikipedia and all of Project Gutenberg to a hard drive, so that whatever problems you have in the post-apocalyptic hellscape, boredom won't be one of them.
Kiwix is the best software I have found for this and they make an extensive library of materials available for download themselves, which includes the aforementioned but also many other resources that would be helpful in a disaster scenario: https://library.kiwix.org/
Many people already do that (e.g. I use Linux on a Laptop- I consider this bare-metal).
The way I read this, it's more about what is needed to get services back up after a large scale loss of critical infrastructure: communication to other network/internet/infrastructure professionals.
Fun fact: At least one ham radio store ran out of walkie talkies during the power outage in Spain, also there was plenty of chatter on 446 when it's normally quite quiet.
I spent the weekend moving all my personal projects away from github & AWS to to dedicated hardware in the EU, still not in my own home, but I'm toying with the idea of purchasing some hardware to run gitlab etc from my home network.
Renting dedicated hardware is expensive though. I'm taking a financial hit for my paranoia.
It makes the most sense (to me) for app platforms like Firebase to invest deeply in the AI application development wave. Creating something from scratch with prompts is impressive but the gap between something that works locally to something that people can use is still large enough to require some dev & ops expertise.
Even though the aim here is different, sustainability through repair and reuse is uplifting. It's also a reminder that 10-year-old computers can do a lot and most of us may not need the latest shiny laptops.
Firstly, upgrade from HDD to SSD. For random access, these are commonly 100–500× as fast, and even for block I/O 10–30×, and that will concretely speed up startup by a large fraction of that ratio, quite apart from speeding up other things later.
Once you get used to modern SSDs, as almost everyone on this site will be, I think you lose track of just how bad HDDs are, to run the OS from. My wife’s ten-year-old work laptop takes well over five minutes to boot up, log in, start a browser, load something like Gmail, and settle down so the disk is idle and it’s running as smoothly as it ever will; and sure, the aging i5-4300M CPU doesn’t help¹; but I suspect spending less than a thousand rupees replacing its HDD with even the cheapest and smallest SSD (acceptable capacity, in this case) might cut that to a minute, and spending a few thousand for a faster one would speed it up to below a minute.
(One fun thing about SSDs is that, overall, bigger is faster. At some points in history, for some makes, it’s been almost as simple as “twice as large, twice as fast”. This is, of course, a gross simplification, but I think not too far off.)
Secondly, if you have less than 8GB of RAM, get more. Beyond that it varies depending on what you’re using it for, but up to at least that point, it’s just an unconditional improvement.
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¹ PassMark lists single/multi scores for the Intel Core i5-4300M of around 1,700/3,000. Some units in recent generations from approximately the same segment: the Intel Core i5-1334U scoring 3,350/13,400, and the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H scoring 3,450/21,500. This basically means an absolute minimum of 2× speedup on any workload, and for most it’s more like 3–4×. There’s a lot of difference in ten years of CPU.
An Amiga or PC running Windows 3.x would be quite capable to handle the word processing and spreadsheet related activities I do at home, and from the Amiga side I dare say I would still enjoy more many of those games than the 80 € AAA graphics pumped games that come out nowadays with their 60 h gameplay and 120 GB disk space.
I agree with the team-size aspect, but the age argument won't always hold.
Junior folks bring their own energy, flexibility, hunger for learning and the resilience to unclear future. As folks get more mature, growing egos, stability expectations, tendency to settle down can get in the way.
Overall, this boils down to the fact that teams and people are not just head counts and there's a factor of chemistry need to be considered depending on the culture, founders, geography and the business itself.
... arrogance, hunger for prestige and one-upmanship which leads to fixation on irrelevant outcomes, laziness in learning "old things", and rejection of instructions.
Thanks for creating this content, this looks pretty good and it was a good time for me to refresh my basics about computer networks.
I tried checking the content with my kindle (a Kindle Touch paperwhite 6 inches) and the first chapter rendered pretty good, with images and text aligning as intended. However the second chapter did not render the first figure and beyond. Chapter 3 rendered OK, similar to Ch 1.
A few more feedback if that helps for enhancing the format even more:
- Colors, and references to those do not work on a kindle. I only saw one minor use of colors (red, green) in Chapter 1 so that's not a blocker.
- For some reason, the kindle browser doesn't put left and right margins on the page, so the text uses the full length of the device.
- Links are rendered with a pale gray, sometimes hard to distinguish.
- Figuring out why the Chapter 2 did not render would definitely help.
