Kuala Lumpur

A little bit about Malaysia and my work

Posted by Dmittr 14th Sep 2022

I moved the block about work to the end of the text, because I'm not sure about such tedium. I tried to tell you in my own words what and how.

Why was it necessary to leave the gardens of paradise in Kazakhstan in the first place?

My working day (night, shift, etc) starts at 22 UTC. That's 8 am in Vladivostok, 5 in Thailand, 4 in Almaty, 3 in Tashkent. So the more eastern the more convenient.

Why Thailand?

Direct flights from Almaty. Plus there are many opportunities to stay for a long time. Another plus - I have good friends in Phuket, who helped me a lot in many everyday matters. I would like to thank them somehow, but they have everything they need.

Where are you now?

Now in Malaysia. Thailand suddenly stopped extending visa-free stay on covid stamps, so every 30 days we have to make something up or get some kind of visa. Just ahead of the 30 day deadline, we decided to live in Kuala Lumpur.

Then what about after that?

Back to Thailand for a month and then we'll see. But the plans are fucked. An intrigue, with a very long and expensive flight.

Any pictures of Malaysia?

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Industrial zones of Kuala Lumpur suburbs

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Old city center

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Also old downtown, near Chinatown.

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Chinatown, though more like a Chinatunnel.

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Overall, the old city center looks like some kind of India

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Everything is very high in the new neighborhoods

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And very bright

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and very high again.

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Well, it's a classic.

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And the people are sometimes very colorful )

What about work?

My probation period is over, so now I'm a "full-fledged" sre-engineer, though still L2. To make it clearer, I'll explain it by the example of evolution.

Mesozoic - dev writes code, rolls it to the server himself

paleozoic - dev is tired, now admin reluctantly rolls the code to the server and silently hates dev because the code has bugs.

post-ozoic - dev trains on test-cat before feeding prod-cat. The admin grows a mouth for coffee and normal conversation with dev, so devopus is born.

Middle Ages - the world is flooded with fantastic creatures from the middle class of managers, so dev spends almost all its time fighting them in negotiation and videoconferencing. The admin branch finally disintegrates. devopus does its magic with blue-green branches and makes the code roll its own dice. infraopus feeds on the remaining services. Some admins live in cold serer rooms and eat iron, some weave networks, and so on.

Nowadays - such diversity makes the world very complex and any dog can fail an important service by its action (or inaction). The service itself is also complex, a bunch of dev divided into teams with different dependencies.

And that's where the srepus comes in. He wants instrument readings from every service and hardware to make all sorts of dashboards and attach all sorts of alerts. Either like Dore the Explorer or like Vanga the Crier, srepus tries to figure out where something can go wrong and report it in advance. The main task can be described as - to make the service work well and not fall down, and if it does fall down, it will rise quickly.

How's work going?

It's good. The discovery of the year is blameless culture. It's very unusual, but very cool. The team is cool too, although I only know them from calls and chats. Salary drops through deel service, further you can swift or crypto. Everything else is NDA.

What about benefits?

Vacation is about the same as in ru, the rest on average is the same - insurance and medicine standard for modern IT. For remote - they reimburse the purchase of a laptop and monitor, business trips to Cyprus, gym and co-working. Benefits are not the worst)