Pablo Fernandez

Month: February 2023

  • inside an open hard disk drive

    Generating an all-files file in Windows, to verify backups

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    When I was 16 years old or so, one day, my computer didn’t boot. I got a blue screen with some white text-mode error. Something was broken with the file system. This was after being utterly disappointed by Windows 95 and before I became a Linux person, so I was running Windows NT 4.0. I was the only person I knew running that operating system, and thus the only person I knew with an NTFS partition.

    What to do now? That was my only computer, thus I couldn’t get online, smartphones wouldn’t be invented for another decade, I had nobody to ask for help and no tools to run checks on an NTFS partition. That filesystem was quite new back then. I could just blank the hard drive and reinstall Windows NT and all the software. But what about my data? my data!!!

    At 16 years old I learned the lesson that the data is the most valuable and important thing inside my computer. Everything is replaceable. I’m sure if I could see that data now I would life, but for 16-year-old-me, that was my life. I started making backups and since that day I had a personal backup strategy that’s more robust than 90% of the companies I talk to. I have yet to lose a file and I hope to keep it that way. My ex-wife recently recovered from a complete computer failure because she’s following the backup strategy I set up for her.

    One of the things I wonder is, should I have to do a total restore of my data, how do I verify it? I have more than 2 million files. Big chunks could be missing and it might take me years to notice. Because I have so much data to backup, keeping my 3 backups all up to date is hard, so it’s possible that I may have to reconstruct my information piecing things together from the 3 of them. Technically my backup software should be able to do it. But… I’m skeptical.

    This is why every night I have an automatic script that generates a list of all of my files in a text file. That text file gets backed up and unless that files gets permanently and historically lost, I can use it to verify a backup restore. I think my friend Daniel Magliola gave me this idea.

    Since I use Windows (shocker, I know, but try building a Mac workstation with 6 screens and play video games and report back to me), I wrote the script in PowerShell, but since I couldn’t find anything like Linux’s find, the script invokes wsl. Here it is, normally I put it in c:\Users\pupeno\.bin\filelist.ps1:

    echo "Creating list of all files in C:"

wsl find /mnt/c/Users/pupeno -type b,c,p,f,l,s > C:\Users\pupeno\.all-files.new.txt

move -Force C:\Users\pupeno\.all-files.new.txt C:\Users\pupeno\.all-files.txt

echo "Creating lists of all files in D:"

wsl find /mnt/d -type b,c,p,f,l,s > D:\.all-files.new.txt

move -Force D:\.all-files.new.txt D:\.all-files.txt

echo "Creating lists of all files in E:"

wsl find /mnt/e -type b,c,p,f,l,s > E:\.all-files.new.txt

move -Force E:\.all-files.new.txt E:\.all-files.txt

    And this is how it’s configured in the Task Scheduler to run every night. First run Task Scheduler:

    Once it’s open, create a new task:

    I hope it helps.

  • red apple

    The ultimate developer perk that’ll let you hire anyone you want

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    To convince people to come work for you you offer them, aside from compensation, perks. And you try to have better perks than your competitors (other employers). Brainstorming with my friend Justin a few years ago I came up with what I believe is the ultimate perk and since then I’ve been desperatly trying to find a place to deploy it. I haven’t found a place where I feel even comfortable bringing it up, that’s how far I am from deploying it, so I’m sharing it with the world. If I was running my own company, I’d deploy it in an instance, not giving it a second thought.

    This is the perk: every developer gets a confidentiality-bound personal assistant. There wouldn’t be one PA per developer, because they don’t need nor have enough work that can be delegated to keep one person fully occupied. Instead there would be one for all of the developers (or two, or three… or whatever you need depending on how many devs you have).

    First, I don’t think this would be a very expensive perk, because actually delegating work to a PA is a skill that you have to learn and most developers will not have it. Most developers will not know where to start. But most developers will likely enjoy saying “I have a PA” or “I have a secretary”. Having said that, I would actually run courses for the developers to learn to delegate because…

    It’s a perk that pays for itself. You might think you are paying for extra employees or contractors, but your developers are likely the most expensive salaries in your books. So if they can pass a task to someone else, you are saving money, not spending money. Let’s say a developer needs to arrange a call with a vendor to discuss a technical mater. They have to search for the right person, their contact details, go back and forth over emails. Imagine if the developer just tells their PA “Can you arrange that call?” over a Slack message and that’s the end of it. Back to coding!

    Think about making reservations, making doctors appointments, running errands, making phone calls in general (this is why they should be confidential). Developers tend to hate phone calls. Imagine if they could delegate to someone complaining about a flight ticket that got canceled! I once had a coworker who spent half a day on hold while pretending to code.

    It’s a perk that generates retention: you know why Google pays for food, haircuts, laundry, doctors on-site, etc? It’s because that generates a lot of retention. When you quit Google, you not only need a job, you also need to find a hairdresser, a place to clean your clothes and make doctor’s appointments. They treat you like children and you became as dependent as you were on your parents. I’m not exactly sure where the ethical boundary is here, but offering a free PA feels on the good side of things.

    It’s unique: nobody is doing and I bet nobody will start, even after it’s been proven successful. It’s like private offices: we have the studies to prove that developers need silence to focus and yet we cram them in open office buildings. Private offices, and PAs, are for the three-piece suit executives, not for the lowly developer, so it’s not a perk likely to get devalued when everybody picks it up, because nobody will.

    It’s loud. Imagine when the developer is hanging out with other developers and jokingly says

    Have your people call my people to arrange it

    Oh… you don’t have people? I do… this email address and phone number is my PA, just call them… and if you want a PA, come work for us.

    I’d love to try this some day… 

  • woman with hands on her face in front of a laptop

    You should not send rejection emails to job candidates when…

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    You should not send rejection emails to job candidates when there was no interaction. For example, in the case of rejecting someone just from the application, without a screening call.

    There’s a mantra that good recruiters and hiring managers take on the difficult task of sending rejection emails instead of just ghosting candidates. But I don’t think this should be a black and white decision. Do you agree? Disagree? Please leave a comment with your point of view, I’m intrigued.

    When you had a screening call with the candidate, then the candidate will likely be wondering about the next step, so if the rejection happens at this or any other later stage, then yes, ghosting is extremely rude and you should always send a rejection email and possibly some feedback for the candidate to improve. More on that later.

    If there hasn’t been any interaction, you shouldn’t have your only interaction with the candidate be a rejection. The reason for this is that most of us have, at some point, been desperate, and started applying to lots of jobs hoping that someone would pay us some attention, hoping we may accidentally open a door, and because being homeless is worse that shotgunning job ads. And actually, when the job ads are anonymous bland indistinguishable walls of text, there’s not a lot you can do other than hit apply and move on, so don’t hold it against the candidate.

    The problem is that then this candidate might have hundreds of applications that result in tens of rejections emails. Rejections for roles the candidate forgot about 10 seconds after hitting apply (how long can you remember a non-descript job post about an anonymous company anyway?), so all you are doing by sending the rejection is reminding the candidate that they didn’t get something they forgot they tried to get. When you get tens of these, one after another, it’s emotionally debilitating. It’s no wonder that a candidate might snap at one too many rejections.

    Oh, and about feedback: if you have nothing to say, don’t say anything. If you are going to give feedback, give actionable feedback. Giving someone impossible feedback is a slap in the face. For example, for a few years, I’ve been wanting to have an engineer manager position at a big scale-up or at a big company. When I get rejected and I ask for feedback, most of the time it boils down to “You haven’t been an engineer manager at a big company before”. What am I going to do with that? They might as well tell me “Have you tried being a different person? Have you tried having been born in a different country?” It’s useless and infuriating.