viertaxa

I've recently found myself finding it very difficult to answer the question of "What do you do?", even among technical folk.

A bit of background, I was not fortunate to come from the right environment to have a formal CS type education.

I started my "real" career in tech as an entry level implementation specialist at a medical software company.

I ended up working for a bit as a "Systems Engineer" at a MSP, but found that that life was just not for me.

I ended up re-joining the medical software company in my old position, moving to the Eng. team as a "DevOps Engineer". I did a ton of automation around Windows/Azure there.

About two years ago I was approached by a local recruiter with an opportunity to connect with another local startup, my current employer.

I was hired on again as "DevOps". The SW team manager actually had a really good definition of what that meant, but the org as a whole had really latched on to the term "DevOps" to mean basically "Ops, but an engineer does it".

Over the past few years I've worked on everything from our AWS infra, K8s, Cellular LTE connectivity, Device/IoT fleet management, internal and external service management, and I'm sure 100 other things that aren't coming to mind.

In short, I've found myself with an incredibly wide breadth of experience.

At the same time, I feel like I'm siloed into a specific type of company, namely IoT or IoT tangential companies big enough to be able to hire a generalist, but small enough to not hire for a rigid set of duties.

So, my question is: What have I become? What sort of engineer am I? If in the future I need to find employment elsewhere, how do I market myself when the best description I can come up with is "other duties as assigned, but that's my whole job"?

Thanks for (possibly) taking the time to read this, I am looking forward to any thoughts, commiserations, or advice you might have.

I just launched a part-time consulting business that I'm hoping to grow.

I'm currently working my local contacts, but I'd like to expand my reach to non-local entities.

Ideally, I'd be working with smaller teams, helping overloaded dev teams make decisions about DevOps, automation, product architecture, etc, along with then implementing those decisions. I'm also definitely open to working with larger orgs, but in my experience, they are less likely to be open to the part-time consulting option.

My question is: where do I look? Most job boards are FTE only, and the consulting business seems to rely a lot on "I know a guy who could help with this." type references.

I'm located in VA, USA, so I'm a long ways away from the typical Silicon Valley startup scene, although we do have a nice little niche here where I am.

Thanks for any advice or stories you might have!

With the recent Slack outage, I've been thinking about back-up team-wide communication systems.

What would your preferred system be to revert to? Keep in mind that whatever you pick, you're going to be paying for, or putting in the effort to host.

I'm interested in writing a utility to assist with scheduling un-conferences. Lets take the following situation for an example:

* 4 conference rooms across 4 time slots, for a total of 16 talks.

* 30 proposed talks

* 60 total participants

Each user would be given 4(?)votes, un-ranked. (collection of the votes is a separate topic) Voting is not secret, and we don't need mathematically precise results. The goal is just to minimize conflicts.

The algorithm would have the following data to work with:

* List of talks with the following properties:

     * presenter participant ID

     * the participant ID for each user that voted for the talk

I'd like to come up with an algorithm that does the following:

* fills all time slots with the highest voted topics

* attempts to avoid overlapping votes for any particular given user in a given time slot

* attempt to not schedule a presenter's talk during a talk they are interested in.

* Sugar on top: implement ranked preferences

My question: where do I start to research the algorithms that will be helpful? I know this is a huge project, but I have a year to work on it. I'm also not overly concerned with performance, but would like to keep it from being exponential.

Thank you for any references you can provide!