since i actually love the act of solving real-world problems by building programs (and not the act of programming itself), writing specs and shepherding robot monkeys with typewriters is an acceptable means to an end
I think you need to manage a real (and large) network that's connected to global internet traffic in order to "play" with BGP. Well, you can tinker with it at home, but only by using a network simulator.
I worked an internship where I spent the summer setting up new equipment for a large corp that was replacing everything that AT&T had installed and managed with their own stuff. Nearly every office had their own ASN, everyone else got regular broadband or just a box of aircards depending on the number of users. I knew nothing about networks other than setting up my own consumer router at home so it was a pretty fun learning experience. I always got a smile on my face when I finally got vRouter to peer with our dummy AS in the office then we'd pack it all up and bring it out for installation over the weekend. I got offered a job to come back after I graduated but turned it down for something that paid better and was a lot more interesting. Honestly, I probably would be making more money as a network engineer now if I stuck with it.
You can set up local BGP routers and peer them and play with it.
Another fun thing is to log into publicly available looking glass servers. Most ISPs (including very, very, very large ones) operate routers that have their full view of the BGP routing tables. They either run web interfaces that let you query those tables (more common) or make public ssh or telnet credentials to log in with roles that have very limited access to the available commands, but have read rights to those tables.
I've used BGP internally at my company for a decade, using AS65xxx range. At home I use BGP between the house, garage and shed, I much prefer it to OSPF.
Same! At previous company I worked at we used BGP for all internal/external routing about 15 years ago despite all the poo-pooing by using BGP as an IGP. It was nice having no route redistribution and one command to monitor sessions.
Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is an "internal" routing protocol. Basically, it is a protocol for routers to share routes when all routers are managed by the same organization.
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) has the primary purpose of sharing routes between routers managed by different organizations. It can be used within an organization too. It has a lot more control over how and which routes it sends and receives.
Depends how much you want to know about how networks work. Never ceases to amaze me how ignorant modern software developers are of the underlying technology, I guess that's because I'm from the pre-2010s when "Information Technology" was a general field.
I took some comp-sci and majored in "IT" in the 2000s. Lower level CS did not go over routing protocols, and the IT side never got into compilation, linking, state machines, or pointers.
In the 2000 my team had to deal with everything from compilation problems to hardware answering arp answers with fake mac addresses. The team consisted of a wide range of skills and abilities and information obviously leaks. While the DBA didn't need to know anything about OSPF, just by being in the same team as the network person they pick up how things work.
Now it seems that teams seem to be far more specialised and there's less cross-specialist learning.
I have trained people on network technologies, including the younger generation. It never ceases to amaze me how much they can get done without a clue about the underlying technologies. Sometimes it feels like they have some super power, because I can't operate without that knowledge.
You don’t need a large network to participate to BGP. You just need a /24 (IPv4) or /48 (IPv6) allocation, AS number, and a business class Internet connection that can do BGP. Might be out of reach for most hobbyists but not impossible.
One of the biggest caveats of citizen participation programs like this is that, surprisingly, there's a subset of people who don't want to participate in the hassle and simply want to be served quickly. It really depends on how the majority of people in a specific area think about civic participation.
People have lots of things to do in their life. That 10 minutes to use the app is 10 minutes I can't spend on my wood carving (random made up hobby). This is why I'm against these programs - statisticians know lots of better ways to get data that is less biased to people who feel like making the time to submit information. (Statisticians can also tell you what biases they were unable to account for so you can make decisions on if you need to collect more data).
I thought "Personal Interlude: Lessons From My Quant Trenches" was just another business book title ready to be criticized. I wondered why the formatting was different on this one, then I slowly realized it wasn’t a business book title at all.
Sometimes, good writing is like an NP-complete problem, hard to create, but easy to verify. If you have enough skill to distinguish good output from garbage, you can produce reasonably good results.
> Sometimes, good writing is like an NP-complete problem, hard to create, but easy to verify.
Doesn’t this match pretty much all human creation? It’s easier to judge a book that to write it, it’s easier to watch a rocket going up in the space than to build it, it’s easier to appreciate some Renaissance painting or sculpture than to actually make it.
So, how do I add a new public transport route (so it can be indexed in Farebox)?
I tried entering some coordinates as input, but it returned an empty array instead. I’m wondering if this means there’s currently no public transport route added around that location.
That's a recent regression, thanks for mentioning that. We'll get that fixed ASAP. I should also mention that the brush tool isn't well-supported and will be fully rewritten early next year. It currently has some quality and performance issues because it has to generate a texture on the CPU of the width and height required by the entire stroke bounding box, which quickly hits a performance wall.
