Along a similar vain to making a git friend, buy your sysadmins/ops people a box of doughnuts once in a while. They (generally) all code and will have some knowledge of what you are working on.

As an ops person I disagree! Our arbitrary changes are documented in a jira ticket in the ops project. If you can’t view the ops project fill free to open a ticket in ops and we will triage it when we feel like it.

We found an use case with Page duty and it’s ical feed already…

First off, aiming to start in security is a fools errand. Security is one of the many paths that your career might take after you gain some knowledge.

Some more random thoughts before real advice. The two hardest things in IT are getting into help desk, and getting out of it. The reason is two fold: 1) help desk is the great entry point for the greater IT industry, and 2) one person in a help desk role is fairly similar to another when it’s time to move out of help desk.

Now: If you have the time, go to your local community college and take their it/networking/security program. The degree will help - you won’t skip help desk (unless your lucky), but you are better equipped for getting out of it. You will also learn a bunch of stuff, get some projects to stick on a resume, etc.

If you don’t have that time you can go the cert route. Be warned however - certs do not substitute for real experience. Do not fall for the trap of thinking that getting X cert is your ticket to Y job. You will be in for a ride awakening when your sitting across from someone like me that only asks situational, hypotheticall questions with no correct answer ( I care about how you think and approach problems over book smarts).

Ok. Last bit of advice: the 10 things I look for (in order) when interviewing entry level help desk.

1. customer service skills,
2. ability to learn,
3. customer service.
4. some mild interest in tech.
5. customer service.
6. the ability to learn troubleshooting.
7. customer service.
8. the ability to admit you don’t know…
9. customer service.
10. not being an asshole.

I can teach you how to fix a printer, design a network, or spin up infrastructure in the cloud. I can’t teach you how to act around people.

It’s $100. In 2023 that does not even cover groceries for a middle class household of four for a week.

If you want to advocate absolute austerity to someone who has no expenses yet - go for it. Me? The world is shitty enough as is - of something’s going to make you happy, and you have no other expenses, go for it.

Don’t spend your money because it’s a " good deal". In theory your guardian(s) are covering the expenses the rest of as as adults just accept. Therefore take advantage and spend your money on what brings you joy.

Just use npm to install all the dependencies. What’s the worst that can happen.

Telecos make minimal amounts on the hardware - its all in the batshit insane service costs. To give an (out of date ) example, back when ATT was getting rid of contracts I talked with some people who knew the ins and outs. On the contract model, the first 6 months paid for the device subsidy and the network, the last 18 months was pure profit. They where all super excited about the financial gains of no longer needing to do phone subsidies, but still have the customer locked in for 2+ years.

Yep c flat or b sharp. If the octave has a half step between notes (a full step is A to B, B to C, etc), then a sharp/flat is created. The octave dictates if we call it a sharp or flat, but from a mathematical perspective they are the same tone.

Let’s take this one step further. I should be able to get the core ideas in your code by comments and cs 101 level coding (eg basic data structures, loops, and if/then).

Yes? If you don’t like your clutch? Mid 30s in the PNW. Now to be fair, one of my cars is an ev, the other is a cvt transmission.

I don’t know what part your unaware of - so let me do the ELI5. They (HashiCorp) created a tool called teraform which is used for defining what servers/other infrastructure you use in places like AWS. Up until recently this was open source under the Mozilla license to something that’s not quite open, but not fully closed source (yet).

Fyi. If your IT department is remotely on top of things - they know. They just might have larger fish to fry.

We can see all kinds of things about any devices that log on to check email, connect to the VPN, etc.