Someone posted a link to ServerFault’s ‘magento’ tag, which drew me in and I answered a few questions to boost my (pathetic) karma on the StackExchange sites.

The magento tag and varnish tag have some great questions, and after several years of dealing with both, I’m equipped to give some good answers (IMHO), but then after cruising through the new questions for a while I start to feel a bit sad.

There’s lots of people just trying to solve their problems and getting help, and that’s great, but sometimes you come across a question and you think “this question comes from a really weird set of values / a sad situation / some horrible condition placed on you”. It’s kind of a culture shock maybe, and not just limited to technology sites.

This question on Bicycles StackExchange, “Can a bent hub damage my fork?” is the latest in a series of questions which could be rephrased as “How dangerous does my bike have to become before I fix it?”. To their credit, the community does jump in:

“If the axle is bent, the fork would only be my second concern, right after my teeth.” — arne

I think ServerFault gets me the most, because, as a system administrator and a programmer, I feel that there’s a higher bar (or that there should be) to looking after servers than for running code, in the level of experience you should have before doing important things.

Not to run down programming, because experience is super important there, too, but with administration you’re one rm away from a very bad day, at all times.

Here’s a few choice bits, with not much digging:

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