Viewing profile — markplindsay

Two jobs. One in 2014 (at a YC startup), and the second last year.

It really is so much cheaper. After dropping S3/RDS/ECS for OVH bare metal running Proxmox, my costs decreased significantly. I still use Route 53 and back up to S3, though.

Using hooks to integrate 3rd party libraries is so much cleaner than using HOCs. The magic (and the learning curve, which I think is where much of the pushback on hooks comes from)…

My "one weird trick" for spotting this behavior is using my middle initial on LinkedIn. LinkedIn stores it as a part of my first name, so their spam always starts off with "Hey Mar…

Before purchasing and installing your own server, I would try out a bare metal server from a company like OVH for a couple months. You'll get a better sense of the additional setup…

Remaining airlines with 747s in passenger service: - Air China - Air India - Asiana - China Airlines - Korean - Lufthansa - Rossiya - Thai

This reminds me a lot of PARKROYAL on Pickering[0], a very cool-looking hotel in Singapore. It's probably much easier to pull off this look in a tropical rainforest climate, though…

The PRC's pressure on Muslims is hardly limited to Uyghurs. Please consider this recent NPR report ("'Afraid We Will Become The Next Xinjiang': China's Hui Muslims Face Crackdown")…

This morning I'm finding out just how many of our supporting services rely on Cloudflare as well.

I'm pretty sure I tried this—I think the prompts were even in English, if I'm remembering correctly. However, I gave up after several tries of it looking for a taxi and not finding…

Can you set up Alipay with a non-Chinese bank account or card? It works great for Chinese people and foreign residents of the PRC who have a bank account. However, my experience as…

I was in China (Beijing and Wenzhou) in April. I had NO success finding a taxi in Beijing—the only way to get a ride was to use an app like Didi Chuxing. I was able to install and …

What does the employee's accent have to do with it?

Just because it isn’t kitschy and filled with over-the-top praise of the Dear Leader doesn’t mean it isn’t orchestrated. I think it is a mistake to believe the DPRK isn’t capable o…

I haven’t used ECS scheduled tasks, only the Elastic Beanstalk equivalent (which I don’t like very much). For my “worker” ECS containers, I set them up to run their tasks using an …

Yes, academics who (generally) started their careers in the 1990s and are used to listserv-style communication. They kept wanting to interact with Discourse through email, but it w…

I had a lot of trouble keeping Discourse running on my own. There are a lot of moving parts and a ton of configuration to keep track of. Making changes or even updating the instanc…