If a tree falls in the woods…

That’s the strategy, yes

“I think the existing, altruistic, free version of Reddit will continue to exist and grow and thrive just the way it has,” Huffman said.

There’s nothing ‘altruistic’ about reddit

Haha yep. Not the support process you want. Glad you managed to let them eat some humble pie at least.

The support process you want is this: “We’ll make you a channel on our Slack, if you’ve got any issues you can talk with our devs direct!” - yes please!

Any company that hides their documentation has an awful product that they are actually embarrassed about, from a tech perspective. They are hiding it because they are afraid to show it.

I’ve seen this so many times, and it’s a big red flag.

These companies work on the basis of selling their product the old-fashioned way, directly to management with sales-people and business presentations and firm handshakes, and then once you’re sold then developers (which management doesn’t care about by the way) have to do the odious task of getting everything working against their terrible and illogical API. And when you need help implementing, then your single point of contact is one grumpy-ass old dev working in a basement somewhere (because they don’t care about their own devs either) and he’s terribly overstretched due to the number of other customers he’s also trying to help, because their implementation is so shitty.

Conversely, public documentation is a great sign that companies took a developer-led approach to designing their solution, that it will be easy to implement, that they respect the devs within their own company, and they will also respect yours.

When I am asked to evaluate potential solutions for a problem, Public docs is like the number one thing I care about! It’s just that significant.

Side story - I once worked with one of these shitty vendors, and learned from a tech guy I’d made friends with that the whole company was basically out of office on a company-paid beach holiday - EXCEPT for the dev team. Management, sales, marketing, finance, they all got a company trip, but the tech peeps had to stay at home. Tells you everything you need to know about their management attitude towards tech.

You’re right of course and that should be on Microsoft to better implement their driver loading. But yes.

If I send you on stage at the Olympic Games opening ceremony with a sealed envelope

And I say “This contains your script, just open it and read it”

And then when you open it, the script is blank

You’re gonna freak out

You, SubjectNameHere, must be the pride of SubjectHometownHere

It’s good practice to run the deployment pipeline on a different server from the application host(s) so that the deployment instances can be kept private, unlike the public app hosts, and therefore can be better protected from external bad actors. It is also good practice because this separation of concerns means the deployment pipeline survives even if the app servers need to be torn down and reprovisioned.

Of course you will need some kind of agent running on the app servers to be able to receive the files, but that might be as simple as an SSH session for file transfer.

Yes, exactly that.

That’s probably okay! =) There’s some level of pragmatism, depending on the sort of project you’re working on.

If it’s a big app with lots of users, you should use automation because it helps reliability.

If there are lots of developers, you should use automation because it helps keep everyone organised and avoids human mistakes.

But if it’s a small thing with a few devs, or especially a personal project, it might be easier to do without :)

Sure, but having a hands-off pipeline for it which runs automatically is where the value is at.

Means that there’s predictability and control in what is being done, and once the pipeline is built it’s as easy as a single button press to release.

How many times when doing it manually have you been like “Oh shit, I just FTPd the WRONG STUFF up to production!” - I know I have. Or even worse you do that and don’t notice you did it.

Automation takes a lot of the risk out.

I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with the program at all =)

Modern webapp deployment approach is typically to have an automated continuous build and deployment pipeline triggered from source control, which deploys into a staging environment for testing, and then promotes the same precise tested artifacts to production. Probably all in the cloud too.

Compared to that, manually FTPing the files up to the server seems ridiculously antiquated, to the extent that newbies in the biz can’t even believe we ever did it that way. But it’s genuinely what we were all doing not so long ago.

Haha yeah, fair enough. Applogies for turning your deserved whinge into a serious question.

Wrangling annoying customers is always the most annoying part of the job isn’t it. How nice it would be to spend more time programming…

Technical requirements are often ambiguous when written as free text, the way someone would speak them, because as you have discovered the free text fails to capture where the linguistic stress would be that disambiguates in speech.

Instead, I suggest using a format that is more suited to text.

I would recommend a table. Email the customer back with your current interpretation of the requirements, with a column for outcome and a column for value. Ask them to check and sign off on the table, or to correct the table where it is wrong.

Example:

There are edge-cases with if outcome can be "Complete or Cncelled

Yes, it absolutely is automated.

There are bots running constantly looking for things that match patterns for exploitable credentials in public commits.

AWS credentials

SSH keys

Crypto wallets

Bank card info

If you push secrets to a public github repo, they will be exploited almost immediately.

That Cloudflare were justifiably unhappy with the situation and wanted to take action is fine.

What’s not fine is how they approached that problem.

In my opinion, the right thing for Cloudflare to do would have been to have an open and honest conversation and set clear expectations and dates.

Example:

"We have recently conducted a review of your account and found your usage pattern far exceeds the expected levels for your plan. This usage is not sustainable for us, and to continue to provide you with service we must move you to plan x at a cost of y.

If no agreement is reached by [date x] your service will be suspended on [date y]."

Clear deadlines and clear expectations. Doesn’t that sound a lot better than giving someone the run-around, and then childishly pulling the plug when a competitor’s name is mentioned?

As someone who now prefers digital, but grew up with mostly analog, I think I can understand what your teacher was trying to say, and it’s really a difference in how the brain is interpreting time itself.

When your internal mental state of time is represented in numbers, then analog clocks feel awkward and clunky, because to use them you have to look at the clock, think “okay the big hand is here, the little hand is there, so that’s 7:45. School starts at 8, so 15 mins to school”. It’s like having to translate through a foreign language and then back to your own.

For people who use analog clocks almost exclusively, as I did in childhood, then your concept of time actually begins to become directly correlated to the position of the hands themselves. Not the numbers the hands are pointing at, but the shape the hands make on the clock face. I think what your elementary teacher was trying to say is that the clock itself becomes a direct physical representation of the ‘size’ of time.

Someone whose brain is working like that looks at an analog clock and immediately thinks “It’s quarter to school” - without any numbers being involved at all. In fact you could completely remove all numbers and markings from the clock face, and the physical comprehension of time would still function equally as well for that person.

So yeah, I understand why analog is bad for people who don’t like it, but I think I see the appeal for people who do.

I think you are due for a re-watch! It’s great when it’s been a few years and you can enjoy some of the bits you forgot about.

The answer is in the movie. When explaining the Matrix to Neo, Morpheus says: “There are fields, endless fields, where human beings are no longer born, we are grown.”

https://youtu.be/IojqOMWTgv8

Doesn’t specify the exact how, but it’s strongly implied that it is through either cloning or artificial gestation.