Viewing profile — gav

For those that want to travel light the Panasonic MultiShape[1] is great as you can share one rechargeable base with multiple tools. It is annoying as it's not USB, but inexpensive…

The desired result is a 500 so it's possible to audit. As much as this is a pain, the alternative can be more painful. I used to have a client that would forward me an email from t…

It's more so that Cloudflare has a WAF product that checks a box for security and makes people who's job it is to care about boxes being checked happy. For example, I worked with a…

To paraphrase a previous employer's strategy: fixed fee projects are for ones you plan to do over and over where it makes sense to invest at getting good at them. The first one you…

One example is LookML, which used to build semantic data models in an analytic layer: https://cloud.google.com/looker/docs/what-is-lookml

Dijkstra was talking about Dartmouth Basic in 1975: - Variables: Single letter, optional digit. - Control flow: FOR loops, GOTO for others. - Subroutines: GOSUB line, RETURN. - Par…

When I had a blue collar job, my coworker used to divide jobs into "shower before work" and "shower after work". It's perhaps less relevant now that a lot of people can roll out of…

You need to treat any animal bite seriously. I had to convince a coworker to go to the ER to have a cat bite looked at, and she ended up spending a couple of days in the ICU with t…

There's a risk for wooden ones that are glued, specifically bamboo, or finished with something toxic. You should probably stick to ones made from a single piece of hardwood and are…

I imagine that it would be along the lines of: If you are a service worker earning less than $44,725 (the Federal 12% bracket) your first $10,000 of tips are tax free. This would m…

See Living Worlds: http://www.effectgames.com/demos/worlds/ There's a iOS and Android app: https://pixfabrik.com/livingworlds/

You can use MJML - https://mjml.io/ - which abstracts away a lot of the ugliness and Outlook hacks.

At some point there is a physical limitation, there's no passport in the world that accepts a 666-character name. The US only gives you 21 characters on the DS-11 for a surname.

I make heavy use of Slack's Later feature as due to timezone differences the first half of my day is significantly busier than the second. Asking people to move to email feels like…

In a previous role I was responsible for developing architecture that supported a bunch of different teams, so I started being pulled into a lot of meetings as the easy option for …

As much as I agree that 98% of the conversation on Nextdoor is worthless, it was invaluable to me one day when a stray dog showed up on my doorstep and I had to track down their ow…

Recently I had to support a client who had a "no CVEs in a production deploy, ever" policy. The stack included Linux, Java, Chromium, and MySQL. It took multiple person-years of pl…

One interesting read on the topic of near misses and High-Reliability Organizations is the paper "Going Solid", which has a great summary here: https://cohost.org/mononcqc/post/888…

The last time I ran into a similar thing I solved this race condition by not erroring out on an invalid lookup until a reasonable number of seconds to allow the backend to catch up…

I assume there's some point where they will start declining transactions and it could be some fixed number or some complex calculation based on all the data the bank has about my f…

When it comes to this topic, almost all examples don't match how things work in the real world where they are eventually consistent. For example, my bank lets me go negative and th…

Optimistic locking is a great solution to avoid holding a lock for an indeterminate period of time as you wait for a user or external system to provide updates.

To generalize that idea a little, I think about technical debt being the accumulation of less-than-perfect decisions, if you consider the decision you made against the best possibl…

Steinway & Sons piano company built a company town, which is now part of Astoria, NYC. I lived for a few years in a house that was for factory workers, streets west of me were bigg…

> * If you use a rental car, Factory Reset the head unit when you leave. If I rent a car, I won't pair my phone at all, even going so far as to use a car charger instead of the pro…