You’re describing proper incident response but I fail to see what that has to do with the status page. They have core metrics that they could display on that status page without a human being involved.

IMO a customer-friendly status page would automatically display elevated error rates as “suspected outage” or whatever. Then management can add more detail and/or say “confirmed outage”. In fact that’s how the reddit status page works (or at least used to work), it even shows little graphs with error rates and processing backlogs.

There are reasons why these automated systems don’t exist, but none of these reasons align with user interests.

Looks like that works but my bookmark is on https://teams.microsoft.com and there’s no redirect whatsoever. Hopefully they’ll get there in a few months’ time.

They got the .microsoft TLD a while back specifically for this purpose. Supposedly they want to migrate all their cloud services there, but I learned about that a year ago and I’ve only seen it in use once since (IIRC on Loop…)

And let’s not forget about facebookmail.com, the official mail server for Facebook login notifications since 2004.

The tech is here, the risks are enormous, but the corpos don’t care because they don’t bear the costs of phishing attacks and governments are too impotent to enforce minimum standards of cybersecurity.

To be annoyingly nitpicky, how is “unnecessary” defined in this context? Whitespace is usually “unnecessary” but I quite like it for readability.

I broadly agree with you though, the W3C spec changes things.

> Clicks on <br>
> Example is <br />

The actual thing that matters is that the / is ignored so (unlike with XML I believe) you can’t self-close a non-void element by adding a trailing /. But “void elements should not have trailing slashes” is extrapolation on your part; the trailing slash improves readability and is kosher since it doesn’t act as a self-close.

The kind of farming that makes any money isn’t slow work.

It is, however, tangible work with tangible results. Unlike spending months changing the polarity of nanoscopic silicon structure for the non-appreciation of an utterly clueless salesperson whose braindead ideas will have left the world in a worse state than you found it despite anyone’s best efforts.

I should seriously get into woodworking. Kidding. Sorta.

Hahaha that’s what frontend devs think, but the backend requirements are just as vague: “Just make this button work”. In my example all the requirements would actually be figured out bit by bit over months, nevermind the prescience required to foresee future architecture-breaking features or scaling requirements. At least you can make a mockup and get instant feedback, flawed as it is.

On either side it takes experienced engineers to suss out actual requirements from customers/PMs. The main difference is that the backend (especially on the infra/devops side) is only accountable to itself if everything goes well, but ironically that means no-one knows or cares about the amount of engineering that goes into keeping PMs blissfully ignorant of the risks and complexity.

I love shitting on Fullstack devs as much as the next guy. However, sometimes it really just does make sense for an (often internal) product maintained by a one-person team, and it doesn’t have to mean that the organization doesn’t value them. I’ve seen it happen.

However I would not recommend it as a career path because it’s essentially impossible to tell what you’re getting into when you get hired. Could be what I just described, could be that you inherit the full responsibility for a 20 year-old perl+php5+xhtml+angularJS mess.
I think it can only truly make sense if you work independently and get to build projects to your own quality standards, assuming you manage to find a “scope is small enough that specialization doesn’t make sense” niche. This is very hard which is why in practice “full stack” tends to mean “master of none but good enough to get a product out the door cheaply”.

Real back-end requirements: when x, y goes in (in JSON-as-an-XML-CDATA-block because historical reasons), I want you to output x+y+z+æ+the proof to P=NP.

æ will require you yo compile x+y in CSV, email it to Jenny, who will email back the answer. She doesn’t quite know how to export excel sheets though so you’d better build a robust validator. No, we don’t know what æ is supposed to look like, Rob from Frontend knows but he’s on vacation for the next 8 months.

The request must be processed under 100 ms as the frontend team won’t be able to prioritize asynchronous loading for another 10 sprints and we don’t want the webpage to freeze.

And why does your API return a 400 when I send a picture of my feet? Please fix urgently, these errors are polluting my monitoring dashboard and we have KPIs on monitoring alerts.

COL is not anywhere near $50k/y ($4100/mo!) except maaaybe in some very narrow parts (basically just SV an Manhattan, assuming you want a decently large apartment). But in either of those places an engineer makes up for it by making $150k/y instead.

Also rich Americans have good insurance, I’m sure you could find an example of someone who had this happen but it’s basically a non-risk.

And if healthcare was the only problem, then Canada would be an option as well. Engineers there still make a shitload more than German engineers. Watch out for the real estate market tho.

Even then it’s a pay cut. I know some people who moved to NA, and egotistically it’s a sound decision because engineers there are on the right side of the wealth disparity ravine. Money’s good enough that you don’t need social safety nets. And if push comes to shove, someone making $100k/y can definitely afford health insurance and the occasional trip for medical tourism.

Now personally I believe in income redistribution so I’m happy to pay a lot of taxes in one of the most income-egalitarian countries in the world. But I’d make a shit-ton more if I lived&worked in Luxembourg or Canada.

The fact that you had to explain this is the reason why tabs are inferior in practice. People just don’t get it and then in collaborative projects you get a completely misaligned mess because not everyone has the same tab size.

Of course it’s possible to do. We’ve already done it for physical mail.

If (enormous if) the EU or FTC cared to issue a digital signing certificate to legally registered companies then this would basically solve the problem of trust. Now it’d be up to the government to deal with fraud cases, which would be much more manageable since spam offenders would necessarily have a uniquely identifiable certificate with a literal physical address attached (yes, fraud exists there, but the barrier to entry is orders of magnitude higher).

Plain SMTP’s trust model is broken but only legislative apathy enables Google to position themselves as the internet watchdog/bouncer.

It’s already a thing with near-zero delay. MS Teams does it (dunno about the translation) and the QSMP Minecraft server has a bunch of livestreamers from different countries who use it for realtime translation.

[EDIT: Live demo from today. Shit’s impressive.]

What actually happens is that the current sentence gets “corrected” several times as you keep speaking. It’s a bit jittery and if the word order differs significantly then the translated sentence might be a bit wonky for a few seconds, and there are a few misses but overall it works really well; at least well enough that people who don’t speak each others’ language can have a conversation in their native tongues with essentially no more delay than reading speed. I can easily follow a livestream in a foreign language with the live subtitles (which was not the case a mere 6 months ago for any language other than English).

They were talking about consistently heating a whole room though. I guess there’s a case to be made if the thermostat for the central gas heating is in another room and can’t be moved… But you should probably organize your heating so that this is a corner case (which is why the thermostat is typically in the living room in detached living. Other rooms don’t usually need to be kept particularly warm).

Of course if you have a badly insulated house and no way to properly distribute the central heating or to pay to heat the whole space to 18 °C, use resistive if you must. But that goes against everything that central heating is supposed to be for.

Also you really should not let a building go under 15 °C. It depends on the specifics (insulation, ventilation), but you’re liable to get mold or other kinds of water damage due to condensation.

Carbon monoxide too… and chimney fires… don’t forget about indoor emissions with open stoves… Even if you don’t care about the environment, electric wins the health&safety race by a landslide. Forgetting to do the maintenance on a heat pump doesn’t exactly carry the same risks as with a wood stove.

Heat pumps are expensive and electricity can vary in price (who in their right mind opts in to spot pricing without on-site power generation tho, what the hell). Still, it’s not hard to see why everyone who can afford it is electrifying.

Bruh, a space heater is the least efficient way to heat a space, unless electricity somehow costs less per MWh than gas (that is insanely cheap and only true in a few key places in the world).

Also dehumidifiers… don’t do what you think they do? They are basically an A/C unit, that dump the hot air in the room they sit in. Literally worse than nothing.
*Re-*humidifiers have marginal benefits in (very) dry weather as evaporation is endothermic. As soon as the air is even somewhat humid though, they’re literally worse than nothing again.

HSTS + HTTPS redirect is the answer. It’s industry standard for a reason: it’s just as safe as pure HTTPS since you can’t get anything other than a redirect over HTTP, and HSTS protects your users from future attempted MITM attacks. The MDN page for HSTS explains it all very clearly.

Any other implementation is an immediate audit fail in my experience.

There’s no tangible security benefit to fully disabling port 80, and if anything depending on the service it may just drive users away to shadier alternatives.

Subtitle are like 1h worth of content, why even download more than 10 a day?

They could make it 20 and it wouldn’t change much I guess, 10 does seem a bit low, but if they make it 1000/day (which you could argue is “no heavier than one JPEG”) they’ll have Kodi addons or whatever attempting to auto-download an entire library’s worth of subtitles. It’s not about the throughput, it’s about the processing time of establishing connections, negotiating cyphers, processing a request, hitting a search indexer, etc. All those small costs add up if every day you have thousands of users downloading hundreds of file without giving anything back.

The only valid regex is (.+). Maybe add a separate country field (especially because some Americans wholeheartedly believe that the entire world should understand that “foobar, TX” means “foobar, Texas, United States”) (don’t get me started on states whose abbreviations are also ISO country codes).

Unfortunately I guess business people only care about getting fewer support calls for missing shipping details, not correctness or a couple of calls from customers who live in the boonies. Then the proper answer is a form with a bunch of fields… which Americans will inevitably fuck up by making the “State” field mandatory despite most countries not having an equivalent.

What I’d really do is use one of those services that automatically fill on the address using google maps or whatever. Not perfect, probably not free, but a whole lot less work for presumably way fewer PEBCAKs from customers.