Millenial Men not joining the Labor Market

Just stumbled upon this Bloomberg article via LinkedIn

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-02/millennial-men-leave-perplexing-hole-in-a-hot-u-s-labor-market on the mystery of Millenial Men nog joining the labor market.

 

Basically seems like Millenials are pickier. A lot of them got stuck in so so jobs and then lost these during the crisis. And a lot of them like Nathan are now trying to upgrade their perspectives in college and elsewhere.

Worrisome though as they may really enter the market at 30 years of age or older and wind up having a tough time getting the job they finally have the education for. Then again if a large part of their counterparts do the same they will not be alone out there and may be setting a trend. Only the future will tell.

A Printed Laravel Magazine?

Eric L. Barnes

For the past few years, I’ve been on an analog kick and I’ve been loving printed magazines like the ones in the photo above. These aren’t traditional magazines like you find at the newsstand, instead, these are made out of high-quality materials, over 150 pages, and about a quarter inch thick.

I’ve been internally debating for months if something like this would work for the Laravel Community? Because I’d want it to stand the test of time it wouldn’t focus on the code or tutorials that can be obsolete in a very short time. This would focus more on soft skills, interviews, and the community.

I’m estimating it will not be cheap to produce with the overhead will be printing costs, shipping, and paying contributors. As such, this will need to be priced on the premium end, around $40 per issue and maybe more after I’ve researched and went through all the logistics.

If…

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Serverless Architecture

Met a DevOps guy on the last meetup and he was into Serverless setups for web and mobile applications as well as Vue.js . The meetup was about Laravel and Vue.Js, but as things go often we talked about more than that. Than my French partner came up with Serverless Architecture by Aerobatic. So what is serverless architecture and what are our options these days? And more importantly, should we move into this new field?

Serverless

Serverless setups just means basically that you do not need to worry about your servers and that you can set them up automatically and that they work out of the box for you. It also often means that they are like functions and each server is a microservice doing a specific task for you. See AWS Lambda for example.

Here is a good quote from Twilio

Serverless architecture (also known as serverless computing or function as a service, FaaS) is a software design pattern where applications are hosted by a third-party service, eliminating the need for server software and hardware management by the developer.

Why Serverless?

Most developers prefer to go without DevOps or System Admin work and prefer things to just work. They need to keep track of a lot of programming languages, browser issues and prefer to stick to the app, not what it has been running on.

DevOps Streamline Options

Been dabbling in Laradock / Docker / Terraform and Ansible a lot over the last couple of years. Latter two allow versioning of VPS setups and complete source control of server setup. This is nice as you will be able to produce  the same setup with ease and on the fly. The former is for working with container architecture.

Trellis

For WordPress Ansible means something like Trellis and for Laravel I made my own basic package Stedding. Tibbets is working on a Laravel Trellis package called Anstead, but that is not done yet.

Laravel, Docker and Terraform

Also read on a Docker, Terraform, Laravel stack written by Lionel. It works with Docker, Terraform and he explains how to automate a Laravel app deployment with this stack on Amazon. It uses Terraform instead of Ansible to provision the server and Docker for the server containers. FYI for many Docker setups are considered serverless setups as well, but here as you can see I put Docker in a separate box.

Laravel Forge

Forge we also use for Laravel server provisioning and basic management. It can also be used for WordPress. We love it for our Laravel apps, but for WordPress we have not felt the need.

Current Server Setup & Management Issues

Issue with all these tools is that they still make you dependant on DevOps Skills for when things go wrong or simply when you want to extend the package. That and the need for YAML or Ruby or Bash for the provisioning and server architecture packages.

Serverless Options

So what are the serverless options out there? Here are a few I know

• AWS Lambda – Laravel Package here
• Google Serverless
• Aerobotic as mentioned by Philippe but unknown to me

 

• Serverless – using Node.js for helping orchestrating microservices mentioned above

User Case – Contentful, Lambda, Gatsby, S3, Serverless Setup

Read the story by Antonio who did his own serverless setup. He compares pricing to WP Engine at $999 a year. He seems to think if it is more than that or more than $2.7 USD a day with

• Contentful – Content Creation
• Serverless – Everything you need to operationalize serverless development
• Cloudfront – Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN)
• Lambda – lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers.
• S3 – Amazon Storage Buckets
• GraphQL – provides an alternative to REST and ad-hoc web service architectures.
• Gatsby – site generator for React ,
• Styled Components

things are expensive though he calculates things should be cheaper than that. I prefer cheaper than WP Engine still, but I enjoyed the article and learn about this setup and fees involved.

To get to $2.7 USD a day with Lambda you would need 4.5M requests or 100K views a day. The sites I run often get let than that a day, so I could probably work with $1 or less a day for Lambda. Which is good as I prefer something like 0.5 USD a day to get to about $15 a month for Lambda fees.

Cloudfront is 0.68/m (still working out my own calculations) so that is peanuts for a CDN for the traffic Antonio was estimating. Costs for S3 are not mentioned which is at least $0.023 per GB for the first 50 TB / Month  in the Ohio region. Dirt cheap indeed. Nor are the costs for Contentfull or Serverless mentioned yet. Contentful has free trials but is $39 a month for their basic package.

Monthly costs

Let’s say we have Lambda 50K views or 2.25 M request sa day * $0.0000006 = $1.35 a day or $40 / month. That is too much for most of us. But then again we would probably get less still so let’s go for 5K views a day or $4/month

• Lambda 5K views       $4
• S3 5GB data or             $0.0.46
• Cloudfront                    $0.68

—————————————————— +

$4.7 a month with 5K views a day with 43 requests on one load.

The reason I do not like Amazon that much is that these calculations are always painful and really depend on your site, requests it needs, images it has stored and how much traffic it gets. I prefer Digital Ocean with a Droplet, Spaces (w/ built in CDN).

If it would be only $5 a month it is like the fees for running a Trellis Droplet and hopefully without much maintenance overhead. As I have not yet worked with Serverless, Lambda nor a setup like Gatsby I am not likely to get started with this any time soon.

Costs Excluding Contentful

Now this is excluding Contentful and unless I do a lot of sites content wise with it this is not worth it.

 

Serverless Issues

Serverless setups are quite early stage and as Digital Ocean mentioned not many developers know how to manage serverless stacks and debug issues using this new setup.

The issue for me is that Docker is still relatively new and offers many options already and there is still so many things to learn in the container space. That is besides improving upon my Virtual Private Server skills and skills working with tools such as deployer and Ansible as well as Terraform. Makes me feel like I do not want to move on serverless architecture just yet.

Even the Docker, Terraform Laravel setup by Lionel I have been postponing though it looks cool. I feel like I want my Laradock setup to work first well locally where I am having HTTP response 201 issues and have it secure on production before I move onto something else.

So, should you go for it?

So should you jump on the serverless train like you did moving onto stuff like Webpack, Yarn, Babel , JavaScript framework Z and such? Or should you stick to what you know first and then move on? I am sticking to my guns for now. Only considering Lionel’s stack as Terraform is like Ansible and I am using Docker already. But Serverless with Lambda or Google Serverless? Not just Johnson, not yet.

Just Ask

Eric L. Barnes

Today my friend Mohamed Said wrote on his blog about putting fear aside and reaching out to people, and he included the following video from Steve Jobs:

As I watched this what really stuck out to me is how Steve asked. In his example, he called Bill Hewlett and asked for a very specific thing, frequency counters, which made it easy for Bill to say yes and got him a foot in the door for a summer job.

I know many people that are crazy busy but if you reach out and asked something specific they would love to help you. Even if it’s a programming problem, as long as it’s not something vague like, “I get a white screen can you help?”.  Or something generic like can we schedule a phone call or grab a coffee. I archive those emails immediately, but if you said want to meet up and go…

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Benevolent AI or Matrix

In answer to Ameen’s question “Do you endorse automation at work? Or are you’re all against it? Let me know what you think.” and blog post A Feud to Settle: Automation against Jobs .

I think at the end of the day it depends on WHO will manage these useful machines/AI and profits from it. And so quickly this debate will be turned political / philosophical and cannot remain just geeky or technical. Here is my take.

Post Automation / AI World

Let’s say you are no longer needed as a driver or cabbie because of Uber and Elon Musk (automated Trucks), no longer needed because Amazon manages to get rid of the need for human beings in their distribution center (imagine Bezos dancing happily in an empty building filled with machines and PCs), lose your postal service job because mostly is done online what will you with low/basic education do?

Get more indebted to get a college degree or vocational papers that may or not may help? This could or could not work and depends on you managing to do this (money and capabilities wise).

Find another non related low level job that may hopefully still exist for you such as cleaning streets, house renovation..? Cleaning Jobs will probably be out soon enough too. Others will follow suit sooner rather than later.

And you with a degree in economics might not want to go for a cleaners job just because an algorithm has taken your career. Wasn’t AI supposed to work for us instead of against us forcing us to do jobs we do not want to do? Conservatives will say a job is a job but a newly graduated your man or woman may beg to differ.

Education / Re-Training

Who will re-train people losing jobs because of it and what income will be given to them until they are re-trained? Education is becoming more and more expensive, not cheaper despite all the world’s progress. I do not recall any famous Toyota/Ford/Chevrolet programs that re-trained people for free when they replaced a lot of them by mechanical arms, but do let me know.

Education globally is getting pricier and more and more for people who can afford it. Fox News was ridiculing Denmark as one of the last bastions of 5-6 years of free education the other day. Which is mind gobbling as this is sadly one of the last places where anyone can get a nice education for free. One to arm you against the more and automated and or unequal world.

Crisis Time AI

If you are in a crisis period – 2008 global crisis as an example here – and besides general layoffs more layoffs are being made because of new inventions things can be very tough. Even when you work for half pay they often won’t hire you. If the employer can avoid hiring you at all because of AI he will be able to get rid of you period. And again doubtful he will foot the education bill for you to get another job.

During the last crisis caused by banks and the stock exchange, run by mainly rich individuals and businesses using AI  and or algorithms it was mainly the poor that paid the price. Most banks except for in Iceland were bailed out with taxpayer money.

Can I talk to a human please?

Automation at the work place like at a bank ING in Holland has caused many layoffs and has forced people staying to work at more and more flexible hours. It has made it more and more difficult for customers to get service by real people who care about your needs. For blabla please dial 1, for credit card related questions please press 2, for reporting a stolen card dial 3,..,.., . Did you know our website has excellent information on.. All thanks to AI and automated systems. Were the people laid off happy? Are the ones staying working late afternoons or weekends happier? Is the customer for whom it is increasingly harder to get his problems solved by a human happier?

Benevolent AI or Matrix

Will AI work for all for free and will wealth be shared equally for all to enjoy? There is a fine line between Star Trek and The Matrix or Elysium. With all the progress in the last 70+ post WWII years we have been forced to pay more for education, work longer and see purchase power shrink every year. The top 1% has become extremely wealthy and they certainly have benefited from automation and or AI. The others not so much.

Will AI turn all this around? Or will AI work only for a chosen few as in Elysium or even worse take over the food chain in The Matrix, I would prefer a Star Trek scenario, but I worry more and more about something at least like Elysium. Let’s all not just automate, but also make sure it is for the people and for all equally to enjoy.

Twitter Sends A Eulogy to 3rd Party Apps

Eric L. Barnes

I’ve always heard, “never build your business on something you don’t control” and those words have never been more accurate for 3rd party Twitter apps. Of course, this is nothing new as Twitter has crapped on developers a few times in the past and now they are continuing that trend by removing API that my Twitter client of choice, Tweetbot, relied upon.

Rob Johnson, head of product at Twitter, shared some of the reasoning in a thread and then ended asking this:

We’ve heard feedback (#breakingmytwitter) from our customers about the pain this causes. We’re committed to understanding why people hire 3rd party clients over our own apps, and we’re going to do better with communicating changes

I want my feed in chronological order, I want to use a desktop app (not the browser), I want my likes to be my likes, I want to utilize lists…

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Mean Arms MA Loader – Suck it Liberal Lawmakers!

This Mean Arms MA Loader option / type of gun was brought to my attention by a former student on Facebook who showed the video on his own Facebook post with the caption “Suck it, liberal lawmakers!”. This new type of rifle allows US citizens to circumvent California law by using 10 bullet loaders max that can be replaced rapidly after emptying them by hand. This so the chamber does not have more than 10 bullets which would be illegal in California. A law or set of laws put in motion to prevent the use of semi and or automatic rifles in this state. Well this is for all of you in favor of this latest invention.

With what Aim?

With what aim did they create this new MA Loader? So we can all still gun down burglars in California with one 10 bullet mag “refills” one after another? Would you keep one in your bedroom with some mags just in case someone sneaks in? Or in a safe you have to open first so your children cannot by accident play with it? You may say it will only be used on the gun range, but what guarantee is there it will not be used on unfaithful wife or ex husband? We have seen in the past time and again that things can and will get out of hand. Permissions given to the wrong people, children who were able to gain access to guns and play with it.

Part 1: Assessing Ireland’s Open Library Initiative

“Why spend all of this money when access to the information in the library can be provided so cheaply by creating a job for a young newly qualified librarian? ” Why not indeed.

informationnarratives

This is the first of a 6 part series on Ireland’s current Open Library Initiative….

In principle, I am not necessarily against having open libraries in our communities. We live in a very diverse society in which people have all kinds of different lifestyle patterns and needs. Having our libraries open 24/7 in this context can only be a good thing. The core function of a library is to provide access to information and if open libraries provide greater access to information then they may not be all doom and gloom. However, a serious and considered examination needs to be undertaken in order to assess whether the current open library initiative in Ireland is a  positive or negative move by the government. In order to achieve this, some questions need to be asked and answered.

Is the open library initiative cost effective in its current guise?

The current plans are…

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Never confuse Education with Intelligence

Found a great meme a few weeks ago stating: “Never confuse education with Intelligence”.  One of my former bosses  – whom I like and respect a lot – asked me what I thought the relationship between the two was then. And that is a great question.

I have spent a big part of my life studying. I went to kindergarten, primary schools, middle schools (multiple ones due mainly to my parents’ divorce). Then I attended the University of Amsterdam where I got a Masters of Arts in European Studies. I participated in the Student Association of European Studies where I co-managed the journal and helped with excursions to the EU institutions in Brussels, Dublin and so on. I studied at Paris XIII for  6 months. A wonderful time in a very international and ambitious environment with great people from all over Europe. And also got my propedeuse of Law at the University of Leiden.

So I would say I considered my education useful and enjoyable and also a great way to meet a lot of smart – read intelligent – people. I also had a tough time passing certain subjects and realised that certain topics like physics and or medicine are pretty high level topics that require a fair amount of intelligence. Because of this all I also used to be impressed when I met people with doctorates in their pocket. And also with those who passed tough studies.

However, over the years I have come to realize that education is not all and that you cannot judge people by the amount of education they have had. Education does not equal intelligence.

One article I found that discusses the differences between education and intelligence well has been published on the website Difference Between. Let me quote one important paragraph from the article here:

The difference between education and intelligence is that intelligence is internal, they are skills and abilities that we have naturally in varying degrees and education is given to us externally through teachers, books, parents and so on. Intelligence is the material that teachers use to educate and shape us and develop our natural intelligence.

Read more: Difference Between Education and Intelligence | Difference Between http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/difference-between-education-and-intelligence/#ixzz4J4KDvSaM

There is also a nice quote mentioned on Quora with unknown origins that states:

Education is learning that a tomato is technically a fruit, intelligence is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.

As the Oxford dictionary states intelligence is about the ability to acquire and apply knowledge. Knowledge can be obtained through education. What I have seen though over the years is that there are a lot of educational institutions that are of poor quality and a lot of well educated people applying their knowledge the wrong way or not at all.

A lot of schools simply do not teach the right way or not really at all.  They just force students to follow certain social rules and to learn things by heart. To follow a certain order.They do not open their eyes to the world and guide them to grow and apply new knowledge. And facilitating students to think out of the box, to be creative is now needed more than ever in this world where so much information is already at our fingertips.

Two, I have seen many highly educated people applying their knowledge in a non-intelligent way. Because they are held back by dogma or beliefs implanted in them long before education could reach them. People who went in closed minded and came back with a degree and zero newly obtained knowledge. They went to Ivy League Universities, but came back unchanged.

Three, sometimes you meet people with great degrees, doctorate degrees, only to find out later on they are fake degrees or degrees that do not really mean anything. And it often will show. It may give that person access to certain jobs, but it did not give that person any knowledge nor polished his or her education.

There you go, this pretty much sums up the reason why I think you should never confuse education with intelligence. Education can help bright minds flourish and can open people’s eyes to new things and make them thrive. It is up to us though whether or not we are open to this new knowledge and whether we want to use it wisely. Never confuse the two.

Featured image by Simpleia

 

Wisdom from an Old Father: “Mind Time”