rdoherty

It's not just the untyped problems, the runtime definitions of functions, properties, etc make it nearly impossible to debug unless you have the state of your production data locally. (Or you ssh into your prod server and open up a REPL, load the state and introspect everything there). Good luck debugging locally in a nice IDE. It's a horrific nightmare. I use to love Ruby until I had to debug it live.

Skimming the list, looks like most extensions are for scraping or automating LinkedIn usage. Not surprising as there's money to be made with LinkedIn data. Scraping was a problem when I worked there, the abuse teams built some reasonably sophisticated detection & prevention, and it was a constant battle.

This is probably one of the best summarizations of the past 10 years of my career in SRE. Once your systems get complex enough, something is always broken and you have to prepare for that. Detection & response become just as critical as pre-deploy testing.

I do worry about all the automation being another failure point, along with the IaC stuff. That is all software too! How do you update that safely? It's turtles all the way down!

I'm a HOA president and while HOAs can be very extreme, the flip side is if homeowners are breaking rules designed to protect property or common areas (pool, lawns, playground, etc) a $100 is not enough to stop people. Thankfully our HOA focuses on our common areas and is responsible for all exteriors and lawns (it's all townhomes), so the lines are a bit clearer.

We've had all sorts of wild issues such as building scaffolding on top of balconies (not attached), ripping up common area plants, parking issues (we all have garages, street parking is guest only), drying food on the pool deck (really), dumping garbage bags outside in the common area and more. If we can only levy a $100 fine there's little incentive for some people to stop doing things that impact the community.

I do cringe when I hear about these crazy HOAs of what are usually a collection of single family homes. I think a better approach would be some kind of limitations of the what HOAs can have rules about vs the penalties. Interiors of homes should be generally off limits (aside from townhomes that are all technically 1 building, so you should not be doing anything structural without approval). For single family homes with private property surrounding them I'd rather there be limits that are purely for safety, legal reasons or impacting common areas.

I took a Waymo that drove on an 'expressway' which had a speed limit of 40mph and it was definitely a different feeling. I did feel a bit scared, at 25mph it feels like a gentle theme park ride, at 40mph it's beyond that and feels dangerous.

Not explicitly, but there were rumors a few days before. Also the signs were there: every single meeting room was booked, meeting rooms all had water & tissues, etc.

I worked at Yahoo in 2008 when they laid off thousands and yes every single person got a calendar invite and met in a meeting room 1:1 with a manager. It was difficult but they did it. Times definitely have changed.

I agree, I've been at places that can tie alerts at a host level to an automated task runner. Basically a workflow system that gets kicked off on an alert. Alert fires, host is rebooted or terminated. Helpful for things like this.

Sometimes I forget, sometimes I need to run an errand or take the kids to school or any number of things happen.

It will hold my coffee at the perfect temperature all day. Also if the battery runs out I can put it on its charger and after ~5 mins it will start heating my now cold coffee back up to temperature. I thought it was kinda gimmicky too before I bought it but I am surprised at how great it is to have perfect temp coffee all the time.

I mean washing pots & pans and things that can't go into the dishwasher and loading and unloading the dishwasher.

Under $100 - Ember mug. No more reheating coffee a few times/day or trying to drink cold coffee. I was surprised at how much I enjoy it. A nice napkin holder that is easy to pull napkins from. Vertical magazine/tablet organizer. Whiteboard next to my desk. Anything simple that makes a frequent chore or task 50% easier.

Under $1000 - Twice/week 'house helper' who does dishes and laundry. My wife travels a few weeks/month and we have 2 kids. Having someone do all the dishes and laundry saves me at least 5hrs/week.

I've ridden a few times and their prices seem close to Lyft. I would happily pay a premium for the service they are providing right now. New, clean cars that drive very smoothly and lower rates of accidents than an 'average' driver. No weird smells, distracted drivers, inexperienced drivers, etc.

I think in a few more years with the amount of training their AI will have Waymo will be a truly incredible taxi service. It can only get better!

I hate DMs in Slack for this and many reasons. One thing I do try is to ask people to move to a public channel unless it's a personal issue. Copy/paste their question and cc their handle.

Me too! I did it so I wouldn't take the codebase I'm working on so seriously :)

Cosmetically maybe, but Hertz has very good incentives to do minimal maintenance and only fix things when very broken. The renter has little incentive to report issues like weird noises or anything mechanically broken, especially if it may have been caused by them.

I'm not the OP but a few things:

* Reading/fetching the data - usernames, phone number, message, etc.

* Generating the content for each message - it might be custom per person

* This is using a 3rd party API that might take anywhere from 100ms to 2s to respond, and you need to leave a connection open.

* Retries on errors, rescheduling, backoffs

* At least once or at most once sends? Each has tradeoffs

* Stopping/starting that many messages at any time

* Rate limits on some services you might be using alongside your service (network gateway, database, etc)

* Recordkeeping - did the message send? When?

If you read the article it says exactly why:

In the 1950s and ‘60s, as Hong Kong grew as an industrial hub, many people migrated to the rapidly expanding urban centers for better working opportunities. “It’s hard farming and fishing out there in these remote areas, so a lot of people moved to the city to work in the factories,”

At least around me in CA I see folks every day looking at their phones while driving. I believe license requirements and overall driving safety is much higher in Europe vs the US. I have friends from Europe who are shocked at how easy it is to get a license in the US.

These are great tips for load testing any web service. Don't forget that you can also saturate memory, disk or network too, so watch those graphs too. I've seen load tests unable to saturate CPU because another resource was limited.

Also don't forget that you are load testing all the dependencies of your service. Database, caching tier, external services, etc. Make sure other teams are aware!

Also nothing beats real world traffic. Users' connections will stay open longer than a synthetic tool may hold them open due to bandwidth, they make very random, sporadic requests too. Your service will behave very differently under large amounts of real world traffic vs synthetic.

Other options if you are running multiple web servers is to shift traffic around to increase traffic to 1 host and see where it fails. That is usually a very reliable signal for peak load.

And don't forget to do this on a schedule as your codebase (and your dependencies codebases) changes!

Good on the author, but using a Virtual Private Server skirts very close to not self-hosting. When I read 'self-hosting', I imagined buying/building a physical server and either putting it into a datacenter or running it in your home.

Lately I've been thinking of creating a bare-bones HTML website of my own and maybe I'll run it on a Raspberry Pi at home. I think that would qualify as 'self-hosting'.

That would be really cool! Kinda like Super Paper Mario.

This reminds me of the book Flatland which is about what a 2 dimensional universe would be like and the experience of a 3 dimensional entity visiting it. Great read! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland

The real learnings of this incident is how to handle incidents effectively. The author cites ones that I use every time I manage one:

* Centralize - 1 tracking doc that describes the issue, timeline, what's been tested, who owns the incident. Have 1 group chat, 1 'team' (virtual or in person). Get an incident commander to drive the group.

* Create a list of hypotheses and work through them one at a time.

* Use data, not assumptions to prove or disprove your hypotheses.

* Gather as much data as you can, but don't let a particular suspicious graph lead you into a rabbit hole. Keep gathering data.

If you don't do the above you are guaranteed to have a mess, have to repeat yourself over and over and waste time.

Yeah tbh after working with Ruby for nearly 2 decades now and with a handful of other languages I think Ruby could use some parentheses and other common symbols. It really is too easy to create what are DSLs which requires learning another language and layer of abstraction.

When I was there it was in the low hundreds of thousands. Probably more as growth was still in double digit percentages per year of user base.

For great sci-fi, definitely review The Hugo Awards (and previous awards) https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2023-hugo-awards/ and the Arthur C Clarke awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke_Award . I found many great authors and series there.

I highly recommend anything by Adrian Tchaikovsky. His themes and ideas are deep and fascinating. https://www.amazon.com/stores/Adrian-Tchaikovsky/author/B002... (Children of Time Series, Dogs of War and City of Last Chances are great). Him and Dan Simmons are my favorite new(ish) authors. If you haven't read the Hyperion quadrilogy, it's my favorite sci-fi series ever.

I hate to be that guy, but I find Andy Weir's books to be very simple and 'light' sci-fi. Fun reads but usually suffers from the protagonist being a genius and smart aleck. No deep themes or characters. I never understood the crazy appeal after reading all of Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. Personally I want giant themes, huge space operas, complex characters and long storylines!

Once your schema changes take more than a few minutes, yes. There's a lot of toil and burden if you need to take down your application every time you need a schema change. Announcements, coordination with internal teams and customers and then coordinating with other engineers.

We aren't talking about zero downtime here, but continual, recurring downtime due to schema changes. Once you have beyond a few million rows in a normal RDBMS, schema changes can take minutes to hours depending on the type. Do this a few times per month and you now have 'lots' of downtime and you are blocking other engineering work from happening. It eventually becomes so much of a hassle that engineers don't want to do schema changes, blocking feature work. The more seamless and painless you can make them, the better.

2 months + 1 week per year at LinkedIn. Not good based on my experience with tech layoffs over the past few decades.

Grafana seems to be an option? Handles metrics, logs and traces. I don't know what storage costs look like though if you are self hosting.. https://grafana.com/