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Alex Elliott Profile picture
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1 Jan 20, 29 tweets, 8 min read
A tweet thread of my tweet threads (we must go deeper!) 😎
What it was like working in anti-spam circa 2002 and not knowing much about regexes, database design or Linux ://twitter.com/alexpotato/status/1208948480867127296?s=21
How traders feel about ssh’ing into a host to debug errors they are having with the trading system https://t.co/lANW5pN1jN
Things I wish someone had told me earlier and other people probably should hear: https://t.co/leAOtSmFZZ
How my great-uncle’s love of math almost killed him in World War 1: https://t.co/21nLCIuwlZ
Ideas for future tweet threads https://t.co/EHyXINRfN3
Crazy things I’ve seen working in #fintech https://t.co/thqT9KaRgv
Using persuasion and influence at work. https://t.co/hmihVuv8Ej
Intro to tournament paintball https://t.co/G2TGXj34Ci
Intro to college paintball https://t.co/57NazkpkUc
How to make things better when you are at the bottom of the food chain:
How to get better #documentation and how it can make your life better. https://t.co/I1hYGnP0Cv
Can humans handle remote work and going to Mars? Like, totally for sure: https://t.co/yBUX8hAIat
My thoughts on handling big outages: https://t.co/A0y0UVxg8X
Bash tips and tricks:
What I’ve learned about using hashtags correctly on Instagram. https://t.co/LcNWD6Bd7t
https://t.co/lyr0E2bX0k
What it was like fighting satellite TV hackers in the early 2000s
https://t.co/OWxzjPmxBn
How to build an Amazon Mechanical Turk army of top quality people.

How to hack corporate time tracking systems for fun and profit.

Crazy times listening to salary negotiating advice, believing head hunters and wasting my time:
Selling stuff on Craigslist and FB
How I learned so much about computers
Tips for running a global team (and having people enjoy being part of one):
Sometimes you fail at the thing you love to do and it's worth it to keep going.

Make vs buy with zero data, a paintball story:

Useful information I wish I had before and after I bought a new mechanical keyboard:
Teaching people to play paintball by taking away their guns:
Writing Rosetta Stones to make other people’s lives easier.

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Alex Elliott Profile picture
25 Feb
A tale of of the benefits of aligned incentives

aka

"Teaching people to play paintball by taking away their guns.

A thread.
Many years ago, I used to coach college paintball.

If you have no idea what college paintball is, below is a thread I previously put together which you might want to read before you continue.

Back to the story, so there are several very hard parts about coaching college paintball:

1. Paintball is a sport that rewards things that go against human nature
2. Very few people have played organized, well coached paintball prior to playing in college.
Read 17 tweets
Alex Elliott Profile picture
24 Dec 20
How to do a "make vs buy" decision when you have zero data.

aka "What running professional paintball tournaments at Disney World taught me".

A thread.
So back in the mid 2000's, I was the General Manager for a professional paintball league called Paintball Sports Promotions (PSP).

To give people a sense of scale, here is a picture of our biggest event in 2006, the World Cup:
Some other numbers:
- 10 fields
- 200 teams
- 3,000 players
- 200+ referees and part time staff
- Estimated 40,000 spectators over the course of a week
- The parking lot on the right was 1 of 3 of the available lots
- Total budget for the event was north of $600K
Read 20 tweets
Alex Elliott Profile picture
6 Jul 20
How to build an army of top quality people via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Yes, you read correctly, Mechanical Turk (henceforth referred to as MT).

A thread.
Most people think of MT as "that thing Amazon offers where you have a lot of work that you need humans to do where you pay per task and it works out to be below min wage".

Because they have that mental model they automatically equate MT to "low quality" which is wrong...
What most people don't know is that MT gives you the option to save and rank how the people (aka Turkers) performed when doing your tasks (aka HITs).

You can also offer up HITs to your saved Turker lists as well.

Given the above, I'm going to lay out how to build your army...
Read 11 tweets
Alex Elliott Profile picture
9 Jun 20
Back in the early 2000's, I worked for a firm that was responsible for investigating TV Smart Card hacking for a major satellite provider.

Here are some of the highlights of how we tracked and caught some of the hackers.

A thread.
So for those of you not familiar with how satellite TV worked back then here is some background.

- The provider would "beam" a stream of data (e.g. TV channels etc) from a ground station up to a geosynchronous satellite
- Geosynch was important as you target a country/region
- The satellite would then take that data & "beam" it back down to the area below it (b/c geosync)
- Individual subscribers would have both a dish & a decoder box (dbox) since the stream was encrypted
- The decoders would have a Smart Card(SC) that could decrypt the stream
Read 26 tweets
Alex Elliott Profile picture
14 Feb 20
So wanted to do a thread on using #bash on the #linux #cli .

Bash often gets ignored in today's cloud centric world but there is a lot of cool stuff you can do just with basic commands, the switches on those commands and piping things together.

To the command line!
So I'm going to start out with some of the more basic commands and some switches that people aren't familiar with and then rapidly get more advanced in both usage and stringing commands together.

Never done this on Twitter before so should be exciting!
Let's start with: ls

# show files in a single column
ls -1

# show files with detail
ls -l

# show files in reverse time order
ls -ltr

# show all hidden files
ls -a

# show files with human readable size and sorted by size
ls -lSh
Read 19 tweets
Alex Elliott Profile picture
21 May 18
Inspired by @patio11 @RachelTobac @HydeNS33k @holman @sehurlburt here is a list "Quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already" aka "Things I wish someone had told me earlier"
I've often heard that #DevOps is all about #empathy and I agree.

As an operations person, the most helpful empathetic developers I ever saw were the ones that were told: "20% of your bonus depends on a rating of you from the Operations people"
I didn't believe this for a long time but you can 100% start a blog, write interesting posts and get people to pay you money to tell you more about what's in those blog posts.

Put another way: there are videos of people putting together Duplo on YouTube with MILLIONS of views.
Read 14 tweets

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