I love grammars. It’s like an API or a data schema, but for a language. This would be very cool and I would love to see it!

You’re out here solving impossible problems. You’re “The Fixer” from Pulp Fiction. Fools look at story points. Pros see an unsolvable story that languished for years until you came along and defeated it. A single point for you is an entire epic to other teams.

Everything is a differentiator that can be spun to your advantage. The points aren’t accurate, and you’re the only one with enough guts to step up to the plate and finally work these neglected tickets; even if it won’t “look good” on some “dashboard” - that’s not what’s important; you’re here to help the organization succeed.

If the system doesn’t make you look good, you have to make yourself look good. If you weren’t putting in the effort, it would be hard - but as you say, everyone who takes a deeper look clearly sees the odds stacked against you, and how hard you’re working / the progress you’re making; despite those odds.

Don’t let some metrics dashboard decide your worth, king!

I’m very flaky here, as rust is the big one, but I think zig and/or nim might be

This is pretty huge. Rust support is one of Pulumi’s most requested features. Hopefully azure follows suit.

I recommend 3.5s - they’ll be a little cheaper and a little more readily available. It’s also worth noting that sata drives can plug into your SAS controller, so you can use any and all 3.5” drives that you can find :)

You’ll want to learn the difference between SAS and SATA connectors. You can very probably use either. 3.5 inch is the “standard” size, while 2.5 inch was more popular for laptops. However, in the interest of density, servers started accepting 2.5 inch drives to fit more drives per rack.

You can get great deals on used sas drives on ebay, but if you don’t know how to monitor s.m.a.r.t. data / rebuild a zfs array, that can be very very risky. You need to be able to survive concurrent disk failures.

Honestly your best bet is brand new western digital or seagate drives. Buy them on amazon, but double check that the seller is legit. That’s it.

Networking is super simple - or at least it started out like that. Then we ran out of numbers, and had to invent nat. Then we invented ipv6, which has lots of numbers, but is unfathomably complicated.

I recommend learning about NAT / network address translation. NAT is not a stateful firewall, but acts kinda like one.

You can understand a stateful firewall by understanding the tcp handshake. TCP is hugely important. Don’t worry about fin_wait_2 and that nonsense, just get syn/synack/ack down.

People will brush off udp because it’s easier, but it’s also important.

Once you get NAT/stateful firewalls, I would look into wireguard. That’s the protocol underneath tailscale. Know that it wraps your tcp packets in an encrypted udp datagram. Then find out how tailscale sets up your wireguard connections without port forwarding - or don’t, as webrtc-style signaling is famously impossibly complicated.

Here’s what you should do - spin up all the services you want, but put them behind an nginx reverse proxy. Then put that behind a WAF. Getting those layers aligned will teach you a huge amount of useful stuff.

In general, don’t worry about hackers unless exposing a port to the internet. Then worry. Your router’s stateful firewall will do a good job until you poke holes in it.

If you want a cool side project, listen on port 20 and dump the characters that the web scanners send to you. If they don’t send anything, send a username prompt after the tcp handshake - the robots will give you the login creds that they try against weak boxes :)

I’m here to throw Inconsolata into the mix, though I use Fira more frequently now from a compatibility perspective.