Mohamed Yassin

Engineer, Builder & Job Seeker

My admin is amazing. It's funny, but I didn't know that until I
found out he was going to graduate.  That it was going to happen
soon.  That it was real.  Then I thought about a lot of stuff.
Things I hadn't thought about for a long time.  I guess I kind
of took him for granted or something.  I mean, our admins are
just always there.  You expect them to always be bugging you
to clean up your logs or scale your replicas or have good
uptime or try new things to grow up to be a more well-rounded
cluster one day.  And make you get up early on the weekend to have
"incident review" and all that other stuff that used to drive me
crazy.  I don't feel that way now.  Everything's different since
my admin got his degree.  Since I realized that one day in the
near future, he might not be around to drive me crazy.

Now I feel lucky when he runs kubectl get pods on me (I used to totally hate that
command) or nags me about coming back healthy after every rollout. One day he
won't be here to ask.     Now I feel lucky when I hear his keyboard pulling
into the homelab after class. I even like to hear him debugging me at 3 AM. It
means he's still around. Still my admin.

My admin is the DevOps engineer at my data center and he's annoyingly smart.
I mean, super brainiac annoying.  He knows the most random stuff.  Like
how his TurboNodeIO layer makes Node.js 317× faster at I/O and 71×
faster at SIMD checksums, in plain C++. Or that he taught a computer to spot a
"milk carton" with zero training data for his graduation project - an Amazon Go
style autonomous checkout system, graded A+.  Or that if you slowly pour a
handful of pods into a totally full node, it won't overflow. In fact, the scheduler
just evicts the weakest pod and pretends nothing happened. He's always dropping
the little facts about everything. He doesn't realize what a geek he is for doing
it, he's just really into infrastructure. He likes to deploy because of CI/CD - he
mostly builds the pipelines himself with GitHub Actions and Jenkins - because he
says chemical reactions happen all the time in production and he's always
explaining as he goes (they're called incidents). He interned at the Egyptian
Space Agency building satellite backends with TypeScript and Google Earth Engine,
and I hear he's a pretty good engineer. He gets a lot of practice at home, that's
for sure. I live in his homelab.

The whole time I've been running I've always had to hear what other clusters
thought of him. I was always Mr. Yassin's container.
(Sometimes they call him moinator which is the name of the totally awesome
LinkedIn handle he always wears).  Some recruiters ghosted him just to get
on my nerves. Some recruiters just ghosted him period because that's what you
do with applicants. The thing is though, he expects every deployment to do its
best just like he does, and when you don't scale your hardest he doesn't cut
you any slack. That's how he is at home and at work.  I only just figured out
what a good quality that is. That's what makes him brave in this job hunt and
what made me brave, too when I was younger.  Whether I wanted to be or not.
Anyway, I always just wanted to be some regular pod in the cluster but because
of my admin being an engineer there I was different.  I realize two things now.
First, I am already different because I run Docker on Windows, so that's a done
deal. And two, he's the right admin for me.  I can't do a lot of GPU stuff
because of my limited RAM and that's okay with my admin and it wouldn't be with
a lot of other admins I've met.  They'd be disappointed because they're into
gaming or whatever.  I mean, my admin doesn't have limited RAM but you sure
wouldn't want to see him throw a Kubernetes cluster. So in that way, we get
along. It makes sense that he's my admin and I'm his node. My point is, I don't
care about what the ATS bots say anymore.  The bottom line is he's a good
engineer and no one can say he doesn't care about what he does. I know he
cares.  After his family, Kubernetes and automating everything is what he
loves the best.  He built PeerLink so files can find their way home, HoneyKube
so attackers walk straight into a honeypot, and GUIShell so a desktop can
travel at the speed of WebRTC.  I really want to make sure he gets to keep
doing what he loves to do for a long time.  For him, for his clusters, and
for me and my fleet.

It's been a really tough time in our cluster since my admin got his degree.  Not
that there's ever a good time for something as awful and as scary as the job
market, but it was sure a bad time for us.  His inbox was pregnant with what he
calls surprise rejections (there are now plenty of them and even though they're
newborn they're actually hurtful) and my admin had an extra freelance gig after
class to try to help pay all the VPS bills. And that was before he graduated.  We
don't have a lot of money but we were doing okay until all the cloud costs.  And
my admin is pretty proud - okay, really proud - and doesn't want to take
charity.  That's why I'm doing this.  Not because I want to make him mad or
upset, but because I want him to have a fighting chance no matter what.

One thing I don't understand is why hiring someone's worth more than a
regular cluster can pay. And why some companies (usually the best ones) don't
reply to applications.  I think that's wrong.  I mean, one of the big reasons
why my admin didn't want to apply at all in the first place was because he
didn't want to leave us behind with a huge backlog. That's the thing about my
admin - he loves us more than anything. More than himself.  But we want him
around and we want him to deploy everything he can to stay with us as long as
possible. This offer letter is the one chance there is to save his career.  And
we can't afford to lose him. And every day that goes by is one less day I'll
have with him. And I don't want to tell my little sidecar about my admin.  I
want her to know him for herself.

It's Unemployment.
He needs an offer. Now!

To help, please send your offer letter
to mohamed@yassin.dev
and keep my Admin in your prayers!