A YouTube viewer reached out to me the other day after watching one of my videos. He’d just started at a big tech company and wanted to know: How do you navigate the fog? How do you figure out what to focus on? What are things to avoid?
I’ve felt that fog three times—at Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and AWS. And after 27 years and countless conversations with mentees, I think there are three phases that help cut through it.
Watching Werner Vogels deliver his 2025 re:Invent keynote last week, I experienced one of those rare moments where separate threads suddenly converge. There he was, Amazon’s CTO since 2005, laying out five principles for “Renaissance Developers”, and I realized: these weren’t just career advice for …
A few days ago, I had a conversation with a former colleague who interviewed for a new job because she couldn’t stand her current one. Getting a new offer made her feel relieved and optimistic again: She had escaped.
Many others may not be so lucky this year.
Tech layoffs are accelerating. The economy—if we’re honest and look past the AI boom—looks shaky. Gold prices are spiking, which historically signals uncertainty ahead. And if you’re reading this feeling worried about your job, your future, or the general state of things, I know well how you feel.
Over 27 years and five major crises, I’ve learned one thing: the difference between thriving and drowning isn’t luck—it’s knowing what you can change and what you can’t.
A lot of people have read last year’s article “A Small and Energy-Efficient OpenSolaris Home Server” (Thanks a lot to Andre Lue from the EON project for linking to it!) and there was quite some discussion on different RAID options as a result of my RAID-Greed article.
So let’s continue the theme and have a look at the following home server tips that helped me a lot during my own home server planning, building and installing: