Ethical question: would you work for one of the tech titans for the money they offer? Remember they're involved in lots of shady shit ;)

Is anyone here into trading?
I'd like to learn but every resource seems either too basic or too technical, I might use a tip or two! :)

> New colleague in the team who's also young (mid-20ies)
> He's been here before and knows the system to a decent extent
> Kubernetes integration in a large scale system project pops up
> The same day a 2-days Kubernetes seminar is announced
> We're now the duo who will have to handle this big thing - game on!

Here's the story of my first month at CERN :) But first, a little premise...
Before arriving, I expected to be scared, alone and unguided in most of my experiences: after all I was a simple 19 year old about to leave home and friends for 3 years heading out in the world with zero experience on stuff like banking, taxes.. let alone working in a huge environment! The impostor syndrome was at an all time high on that front.
Then, I had the luck and pleasure to find an extremely competent and helpful plethora of people, ranging from my team to other CERNies (yes, that how we're called :P) who took me under their wing and introduced me to all the key aspects of living the place. When the initial stress finally soothed down thanks to this, I finally started to manage focusing more and more on my work, by following day-by-day my teammates who taught me the core aspects of the system and the many projects that are in progress during Long Shutdown 2. Within a couple weeks, I already managed to grasp various concepts that got me quickly on track, and now I managed to develop and integrate new temperature monitoring scripts into a system checking on hundreds of Single Board Computer-based servers :) It's a real rollercoaster of learning and applying under all fronts and so far I'm not regretting my choice of departing.
Luckily I've also discovered I'm pretty efficient and good at my job, which surely boosts my morale :D
Keep you updated as usual!

Today I closed my first support ticket! :D
It feels fucking good!

Today I attended the first half of the WhiteHat challenge at CERN :) one more to go to be a certified pentester! I expected lots of learning, and my expectations were not let down, game on!

Today I started my first machine in a data center after configuring it :) It feels awesome to contribute in an awesome place like this! Lots of projects ahead of us during Long Shutdown 2, including OS transitioning, hardware upgrades, updating config managers to newer version and so on! I've learned a lot in a week and my confidence is slowly but steadily building :)

You know you're in the right place when you're given a 2k$ laptop for free 😎

First day at CERN: done!

Nothing to rant about :) The place and the people are beautiful, lots of support and it's easy to navigate through things even for very young people like me! Couldn't ask for better stuff.

The welcome event in the Globe of Science and Innovation is already an experience on its own :) so many people to meet and share words with! Later on one of my senior colleagues showed me around the surface datacenter of ATLAS, as well as its control room and a (physically) separate computing testing environment to run simulations and software on to later be deployed at Point 1 (ATLAS). I am stunned, humbled and excited to say the least! More to come soon! Post your curiosities below and I'll gladly answer!

Italy:

"Here's your collective contract, you get paid like everyone else in this job regardless of your experience or proven skills"

Can't blame anyone for getting out of that hellhole

Hello from CERN :D Starting soon!

After 18 months of failures and frustration I finally got a driving license... damn it feels good :)

Starting at CERN in 45 days :D Can't wait!!!

Tomorrow, my last high school exam awaits.

Tomorrow, I will be free...

age += 1

:)

Highschool culture...

Here in Italy we run a few exam simulation in order to prepare for finals in June.
One of the two categories of simulations, one of which revolves around the core subjects of our technical course which in my case is CompSci and Networking.

"Sounds good!" one would say.
And I'd agree, if only our CompSci professor graded solutions in a sensate manner.
If one does not exactly copy and paste the solutions we repated in class 100 times (which, by the way, are all EXACTLY the same solution but with different data in diagrams and other sections), the grade WILL be insufficient: no but's or why's.

This is only one of the prime examples of what school revolves around. Sometimes it just feels like we are trained to be sheeps in a world of wolves. Rinse and repeat over and over. No technical competency is (almost) ever valued or allowed to be expressed and is often looked down upon by old school professors who literally care about everything but their subject, students and school in general.

I'm glad this is almost over, and that greener pastures are ahead :)

My face is gone :(

Made it!!! Starting at CERN on September 1st! :)

A big thank you to you guys for the support in my previous posts!

Failed my driving exam for having turned right instead of left.... FYI this examiner always fails 90% of students for minor mistakes like this... wasted money and time but oh well, new chance next month!

Skype interview for CERN: done!
Interviewers were very nice and professional :) If all goes smoothly this adventure starts in September!

Just got a job offer for a SysAdmin job at CERN! :D

A big fuck you to the italian philosophy of hiring newly graduated students with shitty contracts and a big win for a simple student that wants to learn from the best :)

Fucking Nvidia updates continuously breaking shit... I wish I could play normally but NOPE! Let's make my high end PC freeze midgame!

PC just crashed midgame amd started to bootloop afterwards... i guess my 1070 is not so stable :/ not even getting video signal anymore..

Approaching the end of high school is really harder than it seems before you actually get to the last year. So many possibilities ahead!

Fucking Windows 10 entered an infinte reboot-BSOD-repeat loop after a failed upgrade... I JUST WANTED A FUCKING GAMENIGHT ON A SATURDAY YOU UTTER COCKSUCKING ABORTION

!rant

Heyo ladies and gents :)
Due to a personal project I have in mind I'm looking for a body camera that permits to upload recorded videos to a personal server. Does anyone have any reccomendations?

It arrived! :D Time for a good read!

Finally ordered "Hacking: The Art of Exploitation" from Amazon :) Really looking forward to this new read!

Jesus fucking christ.. calm the fuck down!

So, I departed for a month long Erasmus in Portugal and got to work for an education related business. From day 1, all my tasks consisted in transcribing data from paper to excel sheets, and then using that data for various different tasks. It became obvious that I wouldn't have had much programming to do by default, so I started creating a series of Python scripts to automate part of my work or aid me in some bothersome areas of it, and what at first seemed a grueling series of boring and repetitive work soon actually became fun. From this point on I challenged myself to make the scripts better and better under as many aspects as possible. I eventually ended up concluding all my daily tasks in a matter of 15 to 30 minutes everyday, as that's the time it took to adapt the scripts to the new document formats of the day :P Jokes aside, this truly proves a point though: small businesses like this one, that very much depend on manual labor for tasks that can easily be automated by 50 lines of code, truly would benefit from a prepared IT and development team, and it shocked me to see how little these guys know, and are even afraid at times, about innovative techniques to speed up work substantially. Truly a great and humbling experience for very young devs like me :)