I had no desire to make friends until college. I was so content with just hanging out by myself that I didn't even realize that other people were making friends. When I got to college I finally realized that I was so different from everyone else.
I basically had to start from zero social skills and work my way up which is/was extremely painful.
Can anyone relate? I think it has something to do with my parents because they aren't social at all.
My experience is that having friends to hang out with was “easy” through high school, because you’re basically “stuck” around a fairly small number of peers in your neighborhood and school. In college there was still some of that, with dorm mates and classmates in your major. After that, it’s really only coworkers that you are “automatically” going to spend a lot of time with, and it becomes much more important to have the social skills to actively find friends. As everyone says, hobbies and social groups (like religions and clubs) are probably the best way to do this.
That’s precisely my experience. To be honest, after college I’ve found that hobbies are not that great for finding very close friends. Shared interests are certainly great for meeting people, but just because you occasionally make pottery or hike with someone doesn’t mean you’ll connect on a deep level.
This is an insightful observation that I feel is worth unpacking further. I've had similar experience when attending interest-based meetups, which I thought would be an ideal place to make friends (which I've never been any good at), but I found that was not the case at all.
Thinking back, I recall feeling uncomfortable commenting on or diverting the conversation towards anything that was unrelated to the prescribed topic of the meetup. It felt rude to divert time away from the topic that everyone there had specifically chosen to allocate their time to, otherwise they wouldn't be there in the first place.
With places like school, even college, there's still a general feeling that you have to be there, and so diversions from the topic at hand are more welcome.
To put it another way, interest-based groups seem to be about the interest first and the people second. The people there are compartmentalized away as being related to the specific topic, and not generalized friends. In this way the group lacks that crucial idleness factor that others here have mentioned, since everyone is there with a purpose to fulfill that they don't want to distract others from.
That’s precisely my experience. I have “hiking buddies,” but they remain just that unless I make an effort to connect more (which I’m generally not great at). It’s not that we never talk about things other than hiking—we certainly do, but the fact that the group is assembled for the purpose of the particular outdoor adventure still prevents there from being much organic significant friendship building.
It probably doesn’t help that a lot of my hiking and camping trips are a few hours’ drive away from home and thus tend to draw people who live fairly far away from me.
> the fact that the group is assembled for the purpose of the particular outdoor adventure still prevents there from being much organic significant friendship building
I'm of the belief that you don't "create" close friends as much as you "discover" them. So the purpose of going to meetups, events, parties, etc. is to just cast a wider net.
Sure by socializing more you become a better conversationalist and can carry them on better with strangers, but at the core, close friends are like significant others--special just they way they are.
Yes, same experience and timeline. I tried improving my social skills to catch up, and I did, but years later I realized that all I needed were a few (or one) good friend. That's where the value is at, although I suppose having many friends helps you get to that point.
What if I don't want to be who I am and I want to change myself?
Apparently I am a very feminine man and I don't want to be like this at all. I can't stand how people treat me. When I am being myself I'd much rather not socialize at all than try to meet people.
I share in your pain. This world is openly cruel to men that don't follow gender norms, and we often have to wear uncomfortable masks to keep ourselves safe from all the jerks out there. It is exhausting to wear those masks all day, and sometimes we just can't take it anymore and have to withdraw from everyone.
But there are also lots of people out there that know better than to mistreat someone for their gender expression. There are people out there that even find it worth celebrating. If you there is a community of nonbinary/gender nonconforming/genderqueer organizers near you, that can be a good place to start looking. And maybe someday, with enough help from your community and possibly therapy, you can learn to celebrate yourself for how you express yourself too. You are worthy of it.
> If you there is a community of nonbinary/gender nonconforming/genderqueer organizers near you, that can be a good place to start looking.
I think this is completely the wrong advice for who you're talking to. From the sounds of it he's complely, unquestionably a man who wants to present as completely, unquestionably a man too, but doesn't for whatever reasons.
It seems like you're saying "yeah you're a girly man, that's what you are now, better learn to embrace it" rather than "learn to express yourself how you want".
> It seems like you're saying "yeah you're a girly man, that's what you are now, better learn to embrace it" rather than "learn to express yourself how you want".
It's true, I am saying that. I think the root problem is how the parent comment author is being treated, rather than how he is acting, since his main motivation for changing how he acts is to be treated differently.
He's free to reject my advice, but I know that when I was a younger person going through the same thing, it was exactly this advice that helped me survive after many years of only being ineffectively told that I needed to "man up."
Same, to some extent. It helped that I have a lot of queer friends and did when I was a teenager too. Some things I don't like about my expression but can't (easily) change, I've learnt to accept. Qualities which I once thought of as feminine, such as emotional expressiveness, I now see as gender-neutral and they fit a lot more comfortably into my masculinity... but I have also cultivated a lot of traits that are seen as traditionally masculine as I've grown into my 20s.
I did "man up", just in a very positive way aided by having a lot of female and queer friends, rather than the regressive 4chan way I was told to when I was a teenager. Your comment read not as encouraging that, but as, "you might as well accept your fate now and start wearing a dress."
I think it depends a lot on where you live. I live in a bigger city and, while I don't personally act in an overtly out of the ordinary way, there are tons of people here from all walks of life acting in all sorts of ways who are generally accepted by society. Of course there will always be the occasional asshole, but it certainly doesn't stop most from being the person they want to be.
I had the same problem for about 20 years of my life until I decided being alone is actually ok if you're ok with it. Have realistic expectations of yourself. If you can't stand people, then just don't. This doesn't mean you have to isolate yourself. You can still work, and if you find the right person, you can have one or two friends.
Replace "being yourself" with "being your best self". You can still try to improve according to your own values, but don't change who you are just to please others.
Being your best self has nothing to do with socializing by the way, hopefully you would be doing that even if you were alone in your room.
The other reply about "best self" is apt. It is perfectly reasonable, and at times even necessary, to not want to be yourself.
For example, if the OP advice of "let your inner person go out in every occasion in order to immediately push away people that don't like you" leads to a bunch of mean shit that alienates women, that's probably a thing worth changing.
The advice in that sentence is more for people who have fears like "I don't want to talk about my hobbies because I'm scared people won't respect me". All advice isn't right for all people, here's one of my favorite articles about that: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery...
My advice is to examine why you don't want to be yourself: if you're living in a way that's incongruent with your values, or values that you want to have because you believe they would make your life and the world genuinely better, then yeah, start making changes in pursuit of those values.
If people are treating you badly for ways that you are, and, were you not being mistreated, you'd be okay staying the way you are? And nobody claims to be harmed by the way you are (highly unlikely, from the sound of it)? Stay you. Find new people. It is crazy how varied, and how sandboxed, groups of people are. The subculture switching cost is very nearly zero, and you'll never bump into the last batch once you make the jump.
Feel free to email me if you ever want to chat, it's in my profile.
Remind yourself that you deserve to take up space as much as many people. Confidence and owning your space are some of the most manly traits. When you're confident, you can also be ok with whatever amount of alone time you need.
I am interested in people's opinion on the "break even point" between using Kubernetes and not using Kubernetes. Let's pretend that the only options are Kubernetes and something substantially less powerful.
What is the simplest/easiest personal project where using Kubernetes might be justified?
I am a junior software engineer trying to figure out how to contextualize all of these container/container management systems.
This is a little bit negotiable, but it's where I'd start considering Kubernetes:
1. at least six independent twelve-factor-app services with their own datastores and a need for high availability across all of them and a near-complete understanding of the high-availability interactions between instances of your services
2. an inability to predict ahead of time where your system's hot spots are, necessitating rapid scaling of different parts of the application
3. a willingness to overspend on capacity to be able to respond to scaling events or deploys in seconds rather than minutes
4. an code-focused ops team (as opposed to a mouse-driven ops team) with extremely strong diagnostic skills and the bandwidth to babysit a service with a potential pain-in-the-ass ceiling around that of a Cassandra cluster
Without #1, you don't have enough variation in systems to benefit; just stick a monolithic application in an autoscaling group. (Most people should do this.) Without #2, you can lean into the hot spots of your application by scaling them horizontally--bear in mind that you'll be paying for capacity you don't use with k8s in order to get that environmental reactivity, so you could just spend that on making your hot spots faster. Without #3...well, that one's pretty obvious when you look at things like EC2 instances, which are more easily partitioned, can be spun up in smaller/cheaper groupings, and their primary downside is that it takes longer than deploying a container. And without #4, you're gonna go off the cliff.
Reasonable people can nibble at the edges. But to answer the thrust of your question: it's probably never reasonable to design a personal project around k8s unless the point of the project is to be done on k8s.
> 4. an code-focused ops team (as opposed to a mouse-driven ops team) with extremely strong diagnostic skills and the bandwidth to babysit a service with a potential pain-in-the-ass ceiling around that of a Cassandra cluster
Here it is running fine... running fine.. running fine... aaaaand there's a compaction-and-gc cycle of death and fire and lost data and tears. Thank you for this terrible memory.
I was going to say "we've all been there," but we haven't, and that's the deceptive thing about the five-minute-demo culture that a lot of "devops" has gotten into.
Everything is easy when it has nothing riding on it. When it isn't is where the value of a tool comes into focus.
I've been recently asked why I'm extremely restrictive and careful with our primary production cluster. Well, we got 20k+ full time employees of our customers depending on this system for their everyday work. An hour of downtime of this thing will cost our end customers 20k man-hours of work done in a worse way.
We're not touching the tooling this system sits on without good reason and a lot of testing. And even then I'll be bloody scared. Sorry modern world, but in this case, I'll be wearing my hard ops hat.
IMO, Kubernetes is one of those things where if you have to ask, you don't need it. It's only really "justified" if you're actually using features like:
- High availability services (more than one copy running at once).
- Service discovery (services talking to each other in a resilient way).
- Ability to automate operational tasks.
- Rolling deployments of services.
Very few personal projects will tick those boxes -- by the time they do, they've usually evolved into a full-on "real project".
Doesn't mean you can't mess around with Kubernetes for fun and learning, of course. But from a purely practical perspective, it's overkill unless you have all of those requirements above. (If you just have one or two of those needs, there is usually a simpler tool to fulfill it with less overhead).
If you need high availability, you get into the second order effects: consider the risk from the complexity of the HA setup, your lack of experience with its failure modes, and lack of low level access to the managed kubernetes service?
If you are not a seasoned SRE, there are a lot of "unknown unknowns" for you waiting around the corner.
Yeah, great point. Kubernetes done right can help with these things, but done wrong, it can cause more problems than it solves. Of course, for a personal project, hitting those "unknown unknowns" is all part of the growing process, but in a business context I would be even more hesitant to adopt K8s unless you already have an ops team that's ready to support it.
Like with anything, it should be evaluated based on what your needs are.
For a simple deploy you probably don't need Kubernetes or even containers.
If you are running containers, you'll need a mechanism for running them. And maybe at some point you want something to recreate them when they die or become unhealthy. Maybe you want to run multiple containers, and you want to do rolling deploys of them. Maybe you want to run them on multiple hosts and network them together. Maybe you want to be able to attach a persistent disk to some of them, or interface with some secrets management software. And maybe you want a single, well-supported API for doing all of the above.
There's a lot more that can be said about Kubernetes; it offers a lot out of the box as well as an API for extending it when you need behavior it doesn't provide.
I basically had to start from zero social skills and work my way up which is/was extremely painful.
Can anyone relate? I think it has something to do with my parents because they aren't social at all.