Talofa reader,

I often tell the story of what first got me into thinking about tech, so for this edition, I thought I’d dive deep into what made it such a life-changing point in my life.

Without a doubt, it was getting "hacked" by a high school friend over ICQ late one night while chatting.

That opened my eyes to what was possible with a little knowledge and skill with tech.

From then on, I was hooked.

I couldn’t wait to get my course costs from my university loan to buy my own, very first computer, an Acer laptop.

Real hackers run Linux, so I installed RedHat 5.2—no dual boot, just deleted Windows.

Linux straight, no chaser.

For the next, what seemed like ‘always’, I would battle it out with device drivers, getting my sound card to work, getting my video card to work, learning how to configure, compile and install my own kernels to ensure things worked.

My obsession with getting really good at wielding the power of computing, networking, and programming drove me to learn anything and everything from the hardware up through all 7 OSI layers.

I can’t even hazard a guess at how many hours all up I spent on learning, breaking, and fixing computers, how many all-nighters, weekends, and public holidays I spent just hacking on things.

I thought I just wanted to be a 31337 hax0r, and that was my obsession…

But it wasn’t until I came across a piece of writing, iconic in hacking culture, that I realised hacking was more than computer tricks for me…

That piece of writing was the hacker's manifesto.

TheHackers Manifesto1is a short essay written Lloyd Blankenship aka"The Mentor"of the infamous hacker group"Legion of Doom".

It featured in Issue 7, of equally infamous Hacker Magazine “Phrack” in 1986, and has been cited in popular culture, like the movie Hackers, The Social Network and in Edward Snowden’s autobiography.

You can read it yourself, but it’s the perspective of a smart kid, misunderstood and dismissed by his teachers, bored and unchallenged at school, who finds a world that challenges and teaches him, whereinformation is free.

Sure- if you're familiar with the manifesto- you might think it's cheesy, a bit cringe, “of it’s time” etc.

But I can’t deny the sentiment of"The Mentor"vibed somewhere deep in me.

Why?

Good question.

The manifesto sounded like it was written by a palagi kid, from the U.S., I’m going to go out on a limb here and say probably from a decent home (one that had a computer at least).

So what did we have in common?2

Talofa reader,

This edition I’ve got a bit of a bee in my bonnet, so bear with the “tone” of this one 😂

I'm listening to the Lex Fridman1Podcast with Mark Cuban as the guest, and they’re talking about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programmes.

Mark’s been in some back-and-forth’s on social media with folks who believe DEI programmes are a big scam perpetuated to allow “under qualified”2people to get hired.

Despite Mark's anecdotal evidence to the contrary-

That he has asked around corporate America to understand how real this claim is, and he's only been met with business leaders admitting it's not happening at their company, but that it "does happen" and point to a news article out on the interwebs-

So, no first-hand experience of this major DEI boogeyman that seems to have corporate America in a death grip.

Mark, again, is backing his understanding and experience of these programs as a business leader.

He takes DEI as part of good business practice and sees no problem with it.

Mark goes on to explain each letter's meaning brilliantly:

• "D is diversity, and means you just expand your pool of potential candidates to people who you might not otherwise have access to."

• "E in Equity means when you hire somebody, you put them in a position to succeed."

• "I, Inclusion, means you hire somebody and they might not be typical, right? You show them some love and give them the support they need. This way, they can do their job as best they can and feel comfortable and confident going to work."

So, DEI, gets the thumbs up from Mark “Dallas Mavericks Owner” Cuban.

Which makes me think - if this Billionaire gets it, and he's a businessman who loves capitalism, so he is definitely no left-leaning liberal shill.

And he's saying it's good for Business…

If Mark Cuban gets it, then why do a lot of people find it hard to park the few examples of badly implemented DEI programs in favour of the majority of great outcomes for the rest of the programme?

Rhetorical question.

Asked and answered, because we all know why, and that shit is not only exhausting, it means we're not going by facts and statistics anymore, we're going by people's "feelings" - wasn't this what those folks most upset by DEI say we shouldn't do? Go with our feelings over facts?

In the podcast, Mark points out that a lot of folks who get let go were actually not good at their jobs - where have we heard this before?

Mediocre people who think they're great and refuse to accept the objective feedback that they really are not good at their jobs. You know these types of people; they blame everyone but themselves.

Diversity hires are under-qualified and taking jobs of much more qualified "people"!

For the "facts, not feelings" crowd, let's do some quick research and find out what evidence there is to back all these DEI claims being made on social media.

Talofa Reader,

In my career and in life, the following statements I've heard repeatedly make me want to headbutt a brick wall to save me from a lawsuit:

1. "Don't bring politics into x, y, z!"

2. "I don't do office politics."

3. "I don't care about politics, I just want to write code!"

Sure, they're all worded differently but essentially all say the same thing, which is, "I don't understand how society and human beings work and I'm basically an underdeveloped human being."

I mean, even look at the recent uproar over a women's rugby team doing a Haka that was critical of the government.

"Keep politics out of sports," scream the same crowd that tells everyone else to "harden up, change the channel if you don't like it".

Weakest demographic of human beings to ever exist.

Politics is in everything because people are in everything and people are inherently political beings shaped by the ideologies, values, and power structures around them.

This is just a fundamental understanding ofpeople, so it pains me to think this is missing from anyone's consciousness.

In terms of technology - not just the way people who work in tech think about politics, but just how anyone views technology, the most dangerous misunderstanding about technology is thatit's not political.

People think the technology is objective; it's just doing what it's programmed to do, abdicating it of any responsibility.

But the truth of the matter is, technology is very much political - in how it's created, developed, by whom, for whom, and why?

Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum.

It's developed within socio-political contexts that influence how it's designed, where it's deployed, and how it's used.

A great example of this is the development and debate around encryption technologies.

You have governments and law enforcement agencies on one side arguing that encryption helps criminals and that there should exist backdoors in the technology.

On the other side, you have privacy advocates and technologists counter that backdoors in encryption technologies inherently compromise the security of the technology, thereby making them vulnerable not just to law enforcement agenciesbut to malicious actors as well.

Here we’re talking about the mathematical algorithms that encrypt and secure data, how it's developed (with or without backdoors) and who it's developed for and against.

It’s very much the proverbial football being kicked between two sets of political ideologies.

The encryption debate has raged on for a long time now, but a lot has developed and evolved for tech over the years, and in the exact same way, the same political vulnerabilities for encryption are there for these new topics as well.

Let’s have a look at some of these topics shall we?

Talofa reader,

I don't know what made me think of this the other day. I mean, I work in cloud, so naturally, I'm going to think about cloud infrastructure.

I think about how it works and who it benefits.

But recently, I started wondering why some people don’t want to move to the cloud. I even wondered about those who tried cloud services, gave them a fair shot, and then concluded, "Nah, this is a scam. Everybody needs to get OUT!"

I guess, as an AWS Solution Architect, I'm expected to be gung-ho about the cloud. This enthusiasm is more or less a given.

Even before joining AWS, I had very few complaints about the technology. It’s always been the front-runner in my experience. However, I believe it's crucial to challenge our own arguments and beliefs and ask the counter questions:

Why even go to cloud?

As soon as I starting thinking about arguments "against" cloud computing DHH’s controversial "cloud exit" article came to mind!

What am I talking about?

In June 2023, Daniel Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH) famously wrote a post titled"We have left the cloud". He detailed1migration off public cloud infrastructure.

He also discussed the reasons, benefits, and advantages they gained from the move.

Cloud computing offers many benefits, including cost savings, operational excellence, and security. However, if it's not meeting your needs, it's necessary to make a change. Right?

In his piece, DHH talks aboutBasecamp'sdecision to leave cloud services behind. He highlights the cost savings, the improved performance of their workloads, and the operational simplicity they achieved by using their own hardware. Basecamp's workloads were mostly containerized already, which made the transition smoother. They used a special mix of tools and techniques to manage these containers. This approach allowed them to “avoid the complexity of Kubernetes2.”

While I think that’s great and the reasons DHH has laid out seem sound, we all know that each situation is unique.

Still, a few points from the post seemed to me like they should be taken with a generous grain of salt.

Talofa reader,

I was actually working on another piece about how AI and it’s practical implications in the ‘hood, but got stuck having to hand wave off a concept of how I live in two different worlds at the same time, all the time.

I figured it would just be easier to write this one first, and then I can refer back to it anytime I have to run scenarios that require the reader to “get where I’m coming from”, essentially.

Let’s begin.

ShareIn my reality, I've always known I live in two worlds simultaneously.

The non-brown world, the one I experience with everyone else who's white basically.

Let’s call this world, “tech world”.

And the "brown" world, the one where, y'know, I'm a brown Pasifika guy.

We can call this “home world”.

Talofa reader,

Last week's newsletter kicked off with a history lesson and went "mask off" on the actual world we live in. It unveiled the imperialist hegemonic powers, the facade of international law, and the democracy scam used to invade and subjugate nations since forever ago.

The genocide in Gaza highlights the absolute failure of the Western world to even pretend to give a shit when human lives are being annihilated daily.

The precious international laws and standards they impose on all their "enemies" suddenly become “not applicable” when it comes to Israel.

Civilian populations have been bombed and massacred for over 129 days. Hospitals have been rendered inoperable, universities systematically demolished, and, as of today's count, 85 journalists killed.

These acts are all considered war crimes, yet we hearnothingfrom politicians in Western power.

There has been no ceasefire, humanitarian aid’s a joke.

In fact, aid has been sent with one hand and taken away with the other. This includes the suspension of UNRWA funding based on a claim with zero evidence. And then the Zionists go and blockade aid trucks, preventing them from reaching the starving people of Gaza.

Children make up50%of the population in Gaza.

Israel, the United States, and the rest of the so-called Western world are complicit in this atrocity.

Our Western systems of politics, economics, security, technology, and law have led to the annihilation of a people. This occurs even as we witness these very crimes with our own eyes, with evidence recorded for everyone to see.

When you combine these systems with the worst flaws of human beings, the outcome is a Gaza genocide 100 out of 100 times.

"The system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets."

Talofa reader,

It's been quite hard watching the state of the world at the moment with respect to the genocide happening in Gaza at the hands of US-backed Israel.

There. I said it.

As of writing this, the UN puts the number ofpeople in Gaza killed, injured, or missing at 100,000.

My first sentence shouldn't even be controversial, as we're now at 122 days of relentless bombing of a civilian population.

Yet, here we are: story after story of denial and justification, deflection, and whatever word you can use for what I can only describe as deranged self-righteousness by those defending these atrocities, in the face of over11,500 children murdered by Israel.

These kinds of atrocities, against anyone, are abhorrent, and my only consolation in the face of these events is that there will be justice.

That the systems we've put in place as a society will come to the rescue and make right where humans have wronged each other.

Don't worry, I'm not that naïve.

I don't expect the world to be fair; I haven't had that expectation since I was in primary school. I've always known that there exists a different world for different people and that the systems we live by in society were created for specific sets of people and not others.

We live in an age of information, of declassified top-secret government files, of tell-all memoirs of people who would know how the world actually works. Books, biographies, documentaries, and Broadway plays, all doing the same thing—telling us what we may have suspected, even had an inkling of, but were never too sure—was, in fact, true.

Enough time has passed, and the atrocities of the past are just cold facts in a file online, on Wikipedia, in a press release; it's just accepted now.

This is the way the world actually is, so let's just humour ourselves and set the self-preserving delusions aside for a moment and just stare at reality for a second, shall we?

Sorry, I don't mean to sound as sarcastic as I probably do, but anytime I've had to pull the veil off and reckon with "reality", it always pisses me off.

Talofa reader,

I’m often asked by young people wanting to get into tech, "I want to break into tech, what would you recommend I do?"

They ask about Cloud, CyberSecurity, and whether DevOps is the way to go.

Over the years, I find I'm doing two things over and over again:

1. repeating myself in terms of certs and skills I’d recommend,

2. and not providing information that, in my opinion, would be more valuable than certs and skills recommendations.

What’s more important than what certs and skills?

Understanding the corporate game.

The certs and skills you need for roles—that information is all out there on the internet.

What newbies don’t tend to get a heads-up on is the environment they will need to navigate through in order to “have a career”.

A lot of people don't understand the corporate game.

Pasifika, more so, because most of our parents didn't come up this way, so weren't in a position to pass on any knowledge. This perpetuates the trend of very few people from my community venturing out past sports and music careers into the tech world, and so the cycle of limited career and future-proof opportunities continues.

For the few Pasifika that do make it into the tech space, we’re out there individually fending for ourselves. If we’re lucky, we may come across a colleague willing to impart their wisdom of the corporate game to help us out.

Otherwise, we’re destined to learn those lessons the hard way.

I’ve learned a good number of lessons in my two decades working in tech, both nationally and internationally, as a contractor and an employee, in the office and as a fully remote engineer.

I did all that as a Pasifika person (can’t really change that, to be honest), so the lessons I learned, I’d say, are fairly unique in the tech context.

In this week's newsletter, I wanted to share those lessons, all in one place, so I don’t have to keep repeating myself—or at the very least, I know I have these receipts.

Some of it might be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but rest assured, I mean every word.

Walk with me now...

What’s Stopping Us Building the Life We Want to Live? Let’s Do That in 2024.

Talofa, reader,

Happy New Year, or as we say in Samoan: Manuia le tausaga fou!

As my end-of-2023 post laid out…

…it was a year of firsts.

I’m nothing if not regularly trying new things.

Which is why the start of this year (most years actually) has me always feeling some type of way.

The new year often brings with it a sense of renewal, of energy, of conviction, and focus.

We get to planning everything and mapping out calendars and other planning notes.

When you've done as many cycles around the sun as I have, finding goals to achieve every new year is the easy part; there's a literal "whole world" of things to choose from.

The problem is paring things down to a few and driving those to a level of quality or success to be happy with.

Easy right?

There's the saying we often*"overestimate what we can achieve in a year, and underestimate what can be achieved in ten years."*

Over the years, I've often thought the problem was time management and employed all manner of technology and tools to help me achieve dozens of goals, each with their list of sub-goals.

FromToggltoNotionplanners,Todoist, and various Chrome extensions for clipping and saving websites, images, multiple Google calendars with reminders, all in an effort to achieve a bunch of goals that realistically should have spanned several years, not one.

I learned about creating “systems” instead of goals, and atomic habits fromJames Clear.

I even started usingZettelkastennote-taking and learning about a second brain because I thought maybe if I got smarter more efficiently, I could use the smarter brain to work out why I wasn’t super fulfilled with the things I was doing.

It took a long time to come to the following realisation, and not to get all "zen" on us here for the start of 2024, but I think even practically in many other respects,thisis the core reason for our lives going in the wrong direction:

If you don't know who you are, how will you ever know what you (the "real" you) want?

Obviously, the answer to that requires things way outside the scope of this newsletter (or any of my qualifications), but suffice to say, this point is central for directing you at least towards where you'd be happy.

Some call having this knowledge their "north star," or the thing that guides and keeps them on track.

When we don't have this north star, we run into trouble, even if we don't know it.

Talofa reader,

I didn't plan on an "end of year" or 'wrap-up 2023' edition for the Uncommon Engineer.

That seemed like too "common" an idea 😉🥁

One of my younger brothers turned 40 today (Boxing Day), and all five of my brothers got together for lunch. We reminisced about life growing up together and all the life events that have happened from then until today.

So, I thought, why not review the year?

Why not cast my mind's eye back 12 months and play my life forward like a fast-forwarding VHS tape to see what's happened in my life this year.

I've been around the sun for 40+ years.

I've seen this Christmas and New Year combination so many times now, it's become a sort ofGroundhog Daydéjà vu. Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever wake up and it's the next day.

I've lived a semi-charmed life.

I wouldn't have thought so at any point in my life, but there's no denying, looking back, that a) I should be dead, given some of the stunts I've pulled and the trouble I've dealt with in my life, and b) I've done some pretty cool stuff that I can honestly say not a lot of people can say they've done.

Maybe that's why, once you've done most things at least once and you've done one thing for a long time, you find yourself doing something for the first time, several times, in one year.

This year was a year of firsts.