Eric the IT Guy

I’m Eric “IT Guy” Hendricks, a Technical Product Marketer who turns open source, Linux, and infrastructure work into stories people actually understand.

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

If I were in charge, any politician who says anything negative about another candidate in a political ad would be immediately disqualified from running…
If only I could unsubscribe from anything delivered to my physical mailbox.

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

Friday question: what's the least justifiable thing running in your homelab?

Mine is a whole VM for game servers. Valheim, Palworld, Starbound and ARK, plus Foundry for tabletop nights.

#homelab #selfhosted #gaming #Linux

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

I love that I got to talk #DnD with @TStashwick because it cracks me up he always plays bad-ass jerks (#StarTrekPicard and #VisionQuest) but is the nicest guy in person. lol!

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

#TechTipThursday: stop re-running the same command to see if something changed.

watch -n 5 'df -h /var'

It reruns every 5 seconds and updates in place. Add -d to highlight what changed. Ctrl+C to stop. Your up arrow and Enter finger can take the afternoon off.

#Linux #SysAdmin

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

@YarivFosbury Thank you so much!

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

A MONTH into the new job and I’ve finally stopped hearing Slack notification bell in my sleep, lol!

That first stretch where your brain keeps running after hours can be rough. How long did it take you to feel settled somewhere new?

#NewJob #WorkLife

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

Hello world? (Testing out my self hosted Postiz server!)

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

Nobody wants to explain to the security team why critical vulnerabilities shipped in a package. Fedora Hummingbird tries to make that a solved problem. New Fedora Podcast with @fatherlinux and Jorge Castro: https://t.co/1zaFMNoynd #Fedora #Linux #OpenSource #Hummingbird

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

#TechTipThursday: stop stashing every time a hotfix lands.

git worktree add ../hotfix main

Checks out main in its own folder, same repo. Fix the bug there, come back, feature branch untouched.

Your stash was never meant to be a filing cabinet.

#Git #DevOps #CLI

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

Started blocking 15 minutes after every customer call.

Used to stack calls back to back, then reconstruct notes at 5pm. The offhand comment that was actually the whole deal? Gone.

Now I write them while I still remember. Boring fix.

#Productivity #PreSales

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

Best thing I ever learned to say on a customer call: I don’t know, let me find out.

Spent years scared of that sentence. But a confident wrong answer is worse, because engineers can tell when you’re guessing.

#PreSales #SolutionsArchitecture

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

Friday question: what was the first Linux distro you ever installed?

Mine involved a burned CD, a weekend-long dial-up download, and four hours of fighting X11 for a graphical login I broke again immediately.

Distro and roughly what year. Go.

#Linux #OpenSource #SysAdmin

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

There’s no fate but what we make.

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

#TechTipThursday: let git find what broke it.

git bisect start
git bisect bad
git bisect good abc1234

Test the commit it hands you, say good or bad, repeat. 200 commits takes about 8 rounds.

Binary search doesn't care how long you put this off.

#Git #DevOps #CLI

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

A video is a wall. You can't skim it, can't search it, can't tell from the thumbnail if it's worth your afternoon.

That's why every episode gets a short companion post. Not a transcript. The spine, plus the moments worth showing up for.

https://t.co/zmu7z9mHIj
#ContentCreation

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

Monday: let's not deploy on Friday.
Friday at 4:47pm: it's a one line change, what could possibly happen.

#MemeMonday #DevOps #SysAdmin #Linux

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

Two weeks back at GitLab and my brain is full.

That specific new job tired where you did nothing physical but you're wrecked by 5pm.

Weekend plan: dice, a game I'm bad at, no Slack.

What's your reset after a heavy week?

#NewJob #WeekendPlans

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

#TechTipThursday: stop committing five unrelated things at once.

git add -p

Git walks the change hunk by hunk and asks about each one. y to stage, n to skip, s to split smaller.

Two minutes, and your history stops reading like a diary.

#Git #DevOps #CLI

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

@CubicleNate That sounds amazing, though, I am very anti-winter, haha!

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

Been a rough couple of years, and lately I've been daydreaming about relocating.

Can't move for about a year, so this is the research phase. East Coast hours means geography's open: walkable, live events, minimal winter.

Ever moved to start over?

#Relocating #RemoteWork

[Eric the IT Guy @itguyeric]

Productivity tip that holds everything else together: the weekly review.

Thirty minutes, same slot every week. What did I say I'd do and didn't? What actually matters next week?

Every system drifts. This is what catches the drift.
#Productivity #WorkSmarter