A friend’s son used Lyft, and had his phone stolen. My friend had (and is still having) an extraordinary amount of hassle trying to get it back.
There’s no word yet on whether Lyft will do anything about this. Maybe they don’t care much at this point because they have their money.
This is a cautionary tale of the times. It’s the way of the “sharing economy.”
An update on our plans to cut the Satellite TV cord:
I contacted Dish to cancel their service. Their web site doesn’t have a link for doing this, so I e-mailed them. They replied, asking me to speak with a customer service rep to, “finalize the cancellation request.”
This was a little bothersome.
I called and got the, “Why are you canceling?” routine. I explained nicely that we watch only five or six channels. “Which channels do you watch?” I deflected that line of questioning, and asked again to cancel the service. She offered a discount on our monthly bill. I said no thanks. She then had to speak to her manager.
My spouse traveled to Canada for a few days. She just went a few miles over the border into Vancouver, BC.
She neglected to add an international data plan to her mobile number before she left. Because of this, she racked up $300 of data charges in 24 hours.
Every wireless carrier has at least one, and you have to add it to your account before you travel outside the country, and then delete it when you return home. But, why? My carrier knows when I’m out of the country! In fact, multiple systems between my cellphone and my account know it!
We had more fun with a vendor today.
We license a vendor’s services for corporate information, like annual revenue and office locations. Their name shall be kept confidential. I’ve written about them before.
About two weeks ago, we noticed a slowdown in our API calls into their system.
We asked them about it, and they replied that they would take a look. A bit later, they said they had found the problem and were working on a solution.
Today, after working on new code, I ran my unit tests. A few tests make calls to this vendor. (Yeah, I could have mocked out the calls. But there are good reasons to not mock out calls in unit tests.) I was surprised to see those tests now fail.
Curiously, they failed because the API calls returned the response, “Customer Disabled”.
I switched to a browser window and tried a part of our product that used their API. I found that our product now failed with the same error. Uh oh.
I e-mailed the vendor and asked what’s up. Their answer:
We found that our service was being slowed down by your API calls. So we disabled your API key.
I am not kidding. Continue reading after you’ve caught your breath.
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At IP Street, most of our technology stack is open-source. Something happened last week that threw our components’ different design philosophies into stark relief.
We use Solr (with Zookeeper) for many of our search and pivot tasks, and Redis as a Swiss Army Knife. They do different things and have different consistency requirements. You can easily critique any juxtaposition as comparing apples to oranges. I think it’s instructive, because Solr and Redis are both high-performance, production-quality, and powerful tools.
Working on them within the same day, I experienced exact opposites in configuration philosophy!
Solr is a powerful search engine. Their Cloud feature lets you shard and scale your index, and Solr will do the internal shard and node routing. Or you can direct your queries to the appropriate node for a small performance win. Being short-handed understaffed frugal with our peons worker bees people, we let Solr do the routing. “Here’s a document, store it.” “I want this document.” “Here’s a pivot within a search, do it and assemble the results for me, pronto.” Etc.
Solr nodes are peers, though internally there are leaders and replicas. Solr uses Zookeeper, an Apache technology for distributed persistent configuration. Nodes do the right thing when other nodes come and go.
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We license a vendor’s services for corporate information, like annual revenue and office locations. Their name shall be kept confidential in this story.
We access their API via http calls. They call it a REST API. But like 95% of the “REST” APIs in the world, it’s not REST at all, and in fact nowhere near REST. The term “REST” has been corrupted to be become synonymous with, “web API”.
But whatever. It’s an API accessed with http calls.
One of service calls has a parameter called, “countryCode”, which was documented as an ISO 3166 country code.
My friend Kirk has run his dev team in a mostly Agile system. Code sprints, agreeing on tickets for the sprint, declaring victory at the end of the sprint, etc.
But now Kirk’s boss says:
I need you to commit to achieve certain goals by various dates over the next year. Once you agree to them, you need to commit to delivering them on time.
How is this situation silly? Let me count the ways…
