Hey Linus, you're a great boss.

asquirrel · September 18, 2019

I watch LTT videos in spurts. I just finished the 3 videos from Jan 2019 where you upgraded to 10G internet. I work with enterprise hardware/software setups, so it's a roller coaster of 'haha' to 'oh god no' (horror, not judgement) to watch how you guys go about getting your servers and networking configured. But it was actually the Gamer's Nexus coverage around LTT that made me realize how good of a boss you are Linus. I've worked for a lot of bosses who...weren't good humans. And you, Linus, are a good human. You care about your people and you help them grow. The meetings where you help them cope with youtube feedback, and essentially act as a form of therapist for them...just the fact that you care enough to do that means the world to me. You also have the self awareness to hire people you at least think you can improve -- you know you can't fix everybody, so you don't try. That is...so fucking rare. So indescribably rare. I am not a writer, but I want you to know how happy to makes me to see you showing people how to be a good boss. Even when you get angry, even when you are dealing with an employee who puts out a flippant attitude to cover up their crippling self-doubt. You remain a good boss.

Ok, I'll stop gushing over Linus. Any more and it'd get weird. I'm not Canadian, and that alone means I'll never work for LMG. I...have no desire to relocate. Anyway, I was super happy to see you guys using 45-drives boxes. I got in touch when them when I was working at a former employer and they were great people. And yea, the boxes have their quirks, but that's what happens when you push hardware past the point of what it was designed for! Out of curiosity, what drove you guys to using Gluster? I had better luck with Hadoop personally. Specifically, it was more robust (if I shut it down badly, it didn't delete all my data!) and around the same speed for sequential monolithic files (I was storing ~10GB files @ ~1GB/s on 16 drives). It may be that I'm assuming there was a testing phase and there wasn't. Or maybe I just haven't found the video where you guys tested object storage systems.

One other thing I've been curious about for years. Have you ever tried reaching out to Xilinx (or a smaller competitor) about using an FPGA in place of your transcode server? (one 40W FPGA would make the current transcode server look like a tree) They have FPGA solutions pre-built for video encoding. It may not support all the formats you need, but, well, that's what engineers do. They build stuff that doesn't exist yet.

The part of me that loves helping would love to help fill in gaps on things like VLANs, command line switch config, and whatever else I could offer. You guys have passed me in terms of ZFS/commodity storage troubleshooting. The rest of me knows I'd need to be there to be of any meaningful value. Can't help everyone right?