alicorn

We are designing a fairly complex application where we strive to achieve as high availability as possible (99,99 is the current target) and want to try out some things that our organization does not have experience doing. I am expected to have one of the leading roles in designing it, but I find my knowledge very lacking in the networking / traffic management aspects. I am superficially familiar with BGP and load balancing, but as soon as we dive deeper in the details on how, let's say, load balancing meshes with Kubernetes, I find myself completely out of my depth. Are there any good courses or books that could help me get up to speed? Strong preference for material that explains things from the ground up, with as little magic as possible, and not cloud-provider specific, since we use on-premises internal infrastructure and AWS / Azure etc is out of the question.

In light of the recent TikTok privacy discussion I had a conversation with my kids about privacy where they said, basically, 'we don't care, we want shiny' (they are 9 and 11). They know to not reveal their location, age or send private / embarrasing pictures to anyone, but the finer details of privacy are completely lost on them. So I have been pondering about how to make them really experience the hazards online that arise simply by not taking care of where you click, what you download, what information you share actively and passively and so on. My best plan so far is to make a fake website (with credible name and content, but accessible only from our public IP), send the oldest an email supposedly originating from the site and promising free tickets to their favorite band concert. Then go from there, asking them to create accounts (to log passwords), answer all common bank security questions and maybe upload a picture with location data in it, all in the name of getting the free ticket. I observe if any of this ever gets discussed with me and then have a reveal where I show what data I have gotten from them and what i can do with it, as well as discuss telltale signs of scams / unsafe online environments, alternatively reward them for bringing it to my attention in time. It feels a bit a-holeish, but I think it will be illuminating. What do you think? How do you educate your kids about privacy and taking care online (if you let them online unsupervised at all)?

Those of you, who have been promoted from senior dev / architect roles to team leads or product owners - can you point me to some good resources or give some experience-based advice about how to successfully lead a dev team, and how to stay on a good enough level of technical knowledge to evaluate solution proposals while retaining sanity?

Background: I started at my current job 2 years ago and quickly moved up from dev to architecture. As time goes by, I get more and more involved in high level discussions about our products and need to delegate almost everything that is not talking, listening and doing powerpoints to 'my team' (I decide what they are doing day-to-day, but I do not have recruitment or budget responsibilities) which currently consists of 10 people, but will soon double in size. I am not overexcited about this, as I would have liked to spend more time understanding nitty gritty technical details, poc coding and having fun with solving problems, but in our current situation there is nobody else who can take my role.

Problem is, I consider myself to be bad with people. I am female (my team is exclusively male), and neurodivergent, and while I have reasonable general social skills, I feel like I need a lot more data to know how to handle various situations, especially not-happy-path. I understand that nothing replaces hands-on experience, but any advice is highly appreciated.

We are being pitched BMC Software stack for our private cloud, and I wanted to know the HN hivemind opinion about their products and experience when working with them as a company. To me it looks like vendor lock-in for the ages, but I might be biased. I am not the decision maker myself, but my opinion will carry some weight in the discussion. Please advise? Not sure if the question is against rules, if so, delete it ofc.