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 … Continue reading Yet another Lyft crime
Tag: badness
Canceling Dish is a PITA
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 … Continue reading Canceling Dish is a PITA
Mobile phone international data plans are moronic
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 … Continue reading Mobile phone international data plans are moronic
How to hose a customer with your API
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 … Continue reading How to hose a customer with your API
Comparing two technologies on their configuration style
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 … Continue reading Comparing two technologies on their configuration style
How not to maintain an API
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 … Continue reading How not to maintain an API
Development commitments have two edges
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 … Continue reading Development commitments have two edges
How not to determine a raise
A friend, whom I'll call "Kirk," works in a startup. A really good developer, whom I'll call "Amy," reports to him. Kirk lobbied his boss for a big raise for Amy. He thought about this the right way: I've researched the current market rates for developers of Amy's level and abilities. She's very good, she's … Continue reading How not to determine a raise
The one where I jumped the gun re: Rackspace
I talked with Erik Carlin of Rackspace about last week's Rackspace post. He explained that I experienced a bug in their dynamic image configuration. When you instantiate a VM, a number of things happen behind the scenes to the base server image. It's not as simple as copying a directory tree from A to B. … Continue reading The one where I jumped the gun re: Rackspace
Screwed again by Rackspace changing a published image
Once again, Rackspace has changed the contents of an already-published server image without any notice to its users. 22 days ago, I provisioned a staging system with Ubuntu 11.10. In upgrading from 11.04, I had the typical difficulties — e.g., removing 11.04 package workarounds, and upgrading some software that we built from sources. When I finished, … Continue reading Screwed again by Rackspace changing a published image
Seek Nuance 