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20+ years in tech and these days, the first thing that comes to my mind is usually, “Can I walk out of this?” :-)

The idea is to be able to use any computer/system/devices easily instead of one perfectly.



I strive to speak multiple languages, but I think it still worthwhile to be really good at my primary language of English.

Same with computers and servers. I interact with a lot of them, but my primary computer that I use >80% of the time is worthwhile to optimize with some tooling that's not available on all the others.


Gosh, I couldn’t think of anything worse than having to optimise myself for generalist systems


Might be a generational thing.

Some folks grew up on systems that could fail at any time and leave them with nothing but the tools in /sbin to fix it with. No /usr, no bash/zsh, just sh and vi if you were lucky. You learn to love the cool new things, but you still have a mental bag packed with fsck and ed in case you need to bug out.

It's silly, really because no systems are like that any more, but the things you learned at 2am when you were 22 tend to stick with you.


Perhaps, I’ve been in tech 18+ years though. Cut my teeth on Solaris, AIX, Unix, Linux etc… the good old days!




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