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dfcowell

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The day I locked everyone out of the company intranet

dancowell.com
175 points·by dfcowell·3 anni fa·125 comments

Software engineers hate code

dancowell.com
369 points·by dfcowell·3 anni fa·220 comments

comments

dfcowell
·3 mesi fa·discuss
This is solved by the agent having its own identity and credentials. Why would you share your login and identity with your AI agent?

Access control and permissions should be handled on the backend by enforcing IAM on well-defined principals, not with MCP middleware. Claude can already bypass MCP and call APIs or use CLIs if it runs into blockers using MCP, so it’s not an effective point to implement the control.
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
I’ve solved this by keeping my laptop keyboard uncustomized, while using Colemak-dh and home row mods on my desktop split keyboard.

I’m proficient enough that I can work on anyone else’s machine well, and I have the comfort and speed benefits on my main workstation.
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
If your scale is large enough and you don’t care about identifying individuals, synthetic data does this fairly effectively.
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
Vietnamese also has it.
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
The spec requires negotiation between the devices to deliver any nontrivial amount of power. A data connection is necessary to enable charging.
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
Author here. I agonized over the dates in the post when I was writing it. It’s correct to the best of my knowledge, but details fade with time.

I’m glad you had an easier time than we did!
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
Author here. At the time, Angular relied a lot on the AOT compiler and tree shaking to keep bundle sizes down. No idea if this is still the case.

If we built the app with the stable branch the bundle size was orders of magnitude smaller: less than 200kb. Still a bit of a chonker, but more reasonable than the ridiculousness the experimental SSR branch spat out.
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
Author here. That’s the takeaway I was going for.

It could have been any technology. The silver bullet is choosing the right tool for the job.

I don’t have an attachment to any particular tech. At the time React was what I knew, and I was coming off the back of building a server side rendered React site when I joined this company. I had a team of JavaScript-focused engineers to work with.
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
Author here. It’s actually my Dad!
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
Author here. It was a gamble, but I was fighting against a very strong sunk cost fallacy in leadership at the company at the time, and there was a general lack of trust in the entire technical team. I *would not* recommend this approach as a typical way of doing business, and maybe I didn’t do a good enough job at communicating that in the post. This is the only time in my career I’ve delivered this kind of ultimatum.

Everything about this particular situation was exceptional. I focused on the decision to do a rewrite in the post because I thought it was the more interesting part of the story. In hindsight I might have gotten that wrong.
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
Author here. This was a key element of our success. The team knew exactly what they had to build, because they had already built it once.

We wouldn’t have been able to hit such an aggressive deadline under different circumstances.
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
This was 13 years ago in a small business with no significant investment. No “cheap money” was involved, just the realities of a small business with chronic NIH syndrome.
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
Ha, no, that was a far more mundane issue. The CMS I'm using requires double opt-in to subscribe, meaning you need to enter your email address and click the confirmation link.

It also apparently requires double email configuration, meaning it has two places where you can configure your mailer. I had only set it up in one place, meaning the confirmations never got sent.

Bit of a facepalm moment.
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
1Gbit symmetrical. That’s the standard residential connection in my part of Japan.

In theory I could get up to double that with a different ISP, but my router doesn’t handle those kind of speeds.
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
I’m reminded of PGP signing parties where people built a web of trust via key signing.

There may be a resurgence of this kind of thing as people use social heuristics to decide if any given creator is likely to be producing generative content or not.
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
Ghost is ridiculously good out of the box. Part of that comes from the opinionated stack it demands - support for only one database server, very specific and minimal config options.

I self-host Ghost and Plausible Analytics (along with several other services,) on an Unraid box at home, fronted by Cloudflare, and it holds up well to load. Costs next to nothing, too, since it inherits hand-me-down parts from my main desktop PC.
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
This is a really good addition, and something I wish I’d thought to cover. I’ve added a link back to this HN thread to the post so that people who find it from other sources can benefit from your perspective!
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
This is a really great point, and it’s awesome when a team strikes the right balance. In my experience these engineers tend to be rarer than the group I talk about in this post, but when you find them they’re worth their weight in gold!
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
That’s a false dichotomy. You can absolutely have two ISPs, one of whom is CF.
dfcowell
·3 anni fa·discuss
I’m not the author, but I’ve gone down the same path as them (Plex + ripped CDs.)

My breaking point was when - as a premium subscriber already - Spotify insisted on promoting their family plan, Taylor Swift’s new album and whatever the flavor of the current week was via full-screen modal popups in the app with no way to prevent them. I asked support several times and was told they didn’t have a toggle.

I tried moving to Apple Music, but the discovery patterns in that app didn’t align with what I was looking for, and offline play has been nerfed so hard I can’t find any way to do it any more.

I’m now on Plex + Plexamp for music and happier for it.