Happy National Day I suppose?
Niceties aside, welcome to Tuesday in SIN city, which also happens to be a public holiday.
Bah... both attempts at openers ring hollow, because I really just want to mouth off on something completely unrelated to those two things.
So the thing about hitting middle-aged in life, and hitting ``lead engineer'' level in professional terms is the gradual realisation that these changes in epoch also mark the change between ``one who follows orders'' to ``one who decides the orders'', or to paraphrase, from being a mere follower to being a leader (not manager!). The unsubtle difference between a follower and a leader is that the follower is almost always assured of safety guide rails to keep them in spaces that are well-trodden, with mostly understood risks, and clearly defined activities that obviously needs doing with little to no argument, while the leader is often operating in a mostly unstructured space with some sense of a framework (moral, ethical, budgetary, woolly ``strategic concerns'') and a need to make decisions on how to carve out that safety space for his/her team of followers to operate in.
That last bit on decision making is truly what makes the role of a leader a more difficult one than a follower. Managers are not the same as leaders despite their equivalent superior status as compared to followers---while managers make decisions as well, often their decisions are more towards that of the management of people (hence ``managers''), and less about some of the harder abstract technical engineering parts. Leaders cannot operate alone inasmuch as managers cannot operate alone---both have their roles to play within an organisation, and they must communicate with each other to keep in sync on what they are doing so ensure that the net direction of the organisation is ``forwards in the direction of the organisation's vision''.
It's a tough role to play. The mentality required to be a leader is quite different from that of a follower. For the sake of proper debate/discussion to rationally determine the overall best outcome given the environment and resources available, a strong sense of rationality (i.e. objectively defensible decisions) is required, though a large part of the decision's progenition lies in the murky world of experience-driven intuition. The leader needs to have at least two minds at once---on the one hand, the need to have one foot within the technical engineering parts to ensure currency of knowledge to keep abreast of what is available in the field, and on the other hand, to have one foot firmly within one's experience to make sense of all the information that is coming in to continually update and strengthen the correctness of one's intution to avoid the dreaded ``analysis paralysis'' or its counterpart of ``extinct by instinct''.
Some say that leaders are born, not made. I say that the predilection towards being a leader is correlated with certain character traits, but there is definitely a path of training that can take such people and fashion them into future leaders. And funnily enough, it requires such people to learn to make decisions from as early an age as possible to increase the number of decisions (and associated consequences to learn from!) that they make so that they become effective leaders.
Am I a leader? Never thought of myself that way, though I will admit that I am thrusted into that position in almost everywhere I go. I suppose it's not that I am a leader-type, but that circumstances often end up with me being a strong candidate for taking on a leadership role.
The sooner I embrace this, the happier I will become as I continuously make decisions and learn of my consequences to further inform my future decisions. Can't keep resisting what keeps coming my way. I suppose God has His way of making us realise certain aspects of ourselves that becomes hard to dodge.
I mentioned two things though, so let's talk about being middle-aged in life. Being middle-aged shares similar trajectories as that of being ``lead engineer'' in professional terms in the sense that the number of frameworks that constrain and control us in life are much reduced. When younger, the education system acts as the safety guide rail of what is permissible; the discriminative (in the technical sense!) laws for minors act as society's trade off between punishing bad behaviour against the fact that younger members of society may not have a well-developed sense of ethics and control. As one steadily progresses in age, other forms of safety guide rails fall into place: student loans start to constrain one's decisions on what to study (need to get a good enough job after studies to pay back said loans), giving in to one's libido eventually leads to wed-lock that further constrains what one can do (generally don't do things that jeopardises the family), having children further guides one towards making decisions that prioritises the children/family over other activities that contribute less to personal values.
That's for normies. (=
For single middle-aged men like me, we... don't really have such constraints. By now, all student loans (and their equivalents like scholarship bonds and what-not) are settled, one's general career direction is more or less on a known trajectory (known does not mean permanent), and there's copious free time compared to those who are running their own families.
In a way, we are the free variables in the equations that govern society. This is a very strange but strong power. If we choose to, we can be movers and shakers of societies in ways that cannot be beat, because we can reduce the attack vector surface against ad hominem more readily than someone with a family in tow.
Or we can realise that the world's fucked because the vast majority of normies don't give too much of a shit of anything that is beyond a two-year time horizon and/or affects themselves or their immediate relatives and let them all face the consequences of their own hubris, leading to us just doing whatever the hell we want that makes us feel not-too-bad, and let the damned be damned.
I wonder where on the spectrum I am.
As to why this rant came about, check out this video from Veritasium about becoming an expert.
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In other news, I've been experimenting with fail2ban, an intrusion detection system (IDS). It operates through analysing logs of several net-facing services, and then automatically manipulates the firewall rules to block/unblock IP addresses according to search patterns that are defined as ``bad behaviour''.
I was getting sick of watching my server logs being filled up with many exploit attempts. So it was time to experiment with this. As to which server this is running on, I'm not going to talk about it. Suffice to say, the list of IP addresses is steadily growing. Hopefully I don't have to worry about seeing these exploit log entries/attempts.
Till the next update.
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