Fixing your code before the weekend is like cleaning your house before you go on vacation. So much nicer to come back to. 😊

Me: I dislike that the usual software engineer career path is to move into management. I just want to write cooode!

Also me: (leading standup today, being taskmaster, making sure we capture details into tickets, unblock people, shuffle priorities from Product Mgmt, volunteering to help other devs w/ something they're stuck on) I am actually quite good at this.

😑

YAGNI

YAGNI. AIYAGNI,YWKWYNUYNI.

Not (Yet) Banned: FeoBlog

So Twitter came out with a great new feature today: You're not allowed to link to other social media web sites.

What is a violation of this policy?

At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:

• Prohibited platforms:
  • Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr
  • 3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio

It's a laughable attempt to stop the bleeding of people fleeing to other social networks, and it's going to Streisand Effect itself into the (figurative) Internet Hall of Fame. Most of the point of Twitter for many is finding and posting links to interesting stuff online.

What's next, a ban on "free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party news sources" that point out what a ridiculous policy this is? (Though, I suppose that's not far from what they're already doing -- banning reporters who unfavorably cover Musk.)

FeoBlog is not yet banned, of course, because it's not on anyone's radar. What can I do to get some more users and get it noticed?

If you want to give it a try, it's open source software, so you can download it and run your own server. Or, if you don't want to bother with all that, ping me and I'll get you set up with a free "account" on my server. :)

AWS Lambdas: WTF

I've used AWS's SQS at several companies now. In general, it's a pretty reliable and performant message queue.

Previously, I'd used SQS queues in application code. A typical application asks for 1-10 messages from the SQS API, receives the messages, processes them, and marks them as completed, which removes them from the queue. If the application fails to do so within some timeout, it's assumed that the application has crashed/rebooted/etc, and the messages go back onto the queue, to be later fetched by some other instance of the application.

To avoid infinite loops (say, if you've got a message that is actually causing your app to crash, or otherwise can't be properly processed), each message has a "receive count" property associated with it. Each time the message is fetched from the queue, its receive count is incremented. If a message is not processed by the time the "maximum receive count" is reached, instead of going back onto the queue, it gets moved into a separate "dead-letter queue" (DLQ) which holds all such messages so they can be inspected and resolved (usually manually, by a human who got alerted about the problem).

That generally works so well that today we were quite surprised to find that some messages were ending up in our DLQs despite the fact that the code we had written to handle said messages was not showing any errors or log messages about them. After finally pulling in multiple other developers to investigate, one of them finally gave us the answer, and it came down to the fact that we're using Lambdas as our message processor.

So here's the issue, which you'll run into if:

• you use a lambda function to process SQS messages
• you set a reserved concurrency to limit that lambda's concurrency

Whatever Amazon process feeds SQS messages into that lambda will fetch too many messages. (I'm not sure if there's a way to tell if it was in a large batch, or lots of individual fetches in parallel, but either way the result is the same.)

Every time it does this, it increments the messages' receive counts. And of course when they reach their max receive count, they go to the DLQ, without your code ever having seen them.

This happens outside of your control and unbeknownst to you. So when you get around to investigating your DLQ you'll be scratching your head trying to figure out why messages are in there. And there's no configuration you can change that fixes it. Even if you set the SQS batch size for the lambda to 1.

If you think you might be running into this problem, check two key stats in the AWS console: the "throttle" for the lambda, and the DLQ queue size. If you see a lambda that suddenly gets very throttled which correlates with lots of messages ending up in your DLQ, but see no errors in your logs, this is likely your culprit.

It seems crazy that it works this way, and seemingly has for years. AWS's internal code is doing the wrong thing, and wasting developer hours across the globe. Ethically, there's also the question of whether you're getting billed for all of those erroneous message receives. But I'm mostly worried about having a bad system that is a pain in the ass to detect to work around.

Time Travel

Me, minutes before a meeting: Just one more line. One more line of code.

(15 minutes later, seeing a clock): Dangit, I'm late for my meeting.

Habits

Me: "Why do I put the cap back on my water bottle after every sip? This is annoying even to myself."

Also me: Knocks over the full bottle I just minutes before had placed between me and my keyboard and yet had somehow forgotten existed.

(Thankfully, the cap was on! 😆)

FeoBlog & Deno

For a while I'd been maintaining 2 versions of the FeoBlog TypeScript client:

• The "main" one, in Node.js, used by the web UI.
• A port of that code to Deno.

But maintaining two codebases is not a great use of time. So now the Deno codebase is the canonical one, and I use DNT to translate that into a node module, which I then import into the FeoBlog UI, which you are probably using right now to read this post. :)

A Phone Number is a Liability

Is it weird that I'm starting to feel like having a phone number is not worth it?

First, I use actual phone conversations VERY rarely. If I'm home and want to have a voice conversation with someone, I usually use VoIP (usually: FaceTime Audio) because it has higher quality than cell phone calls. If I'm out and about and want to communicate meeting time/place with someone, I'm going to send (or expect) a text message. So there's the question about whether it's worthwhile continuing to pay for a service that I don't use.

But the real problem is that modern apps and online services use your phone number as if it's a unique ID. If you give some organization your phone number, they'll definitely use it to uniquely identify you. Possibly to third parties.

And, even if you don't give them your phone number directly, since apps can slurp your contact info from any of your friends' contact lists, they've still got it.

And if companies can store this data about you, that data can get hacked and leaked. "HaveIBeenPwned" recently added phone numbers to their search because it's become such a concern.

If you worry about giving out your Social Security number, you should probably worry just as much about giving out your phone number. To companies or your friends.

This doesn't even touch on the problem of spam/phishing/fraudulent calls, which is another real problem w/ the phone system.

So, despite having the same phone number since 1998, I'd love to get rid of mine. Unfortunately, I can't yet because so many systems (ex: banks, messaging apps) do use it to identify you.

Plus, imagine you give up (or just change) your phone number. Now your old number is available for re-use. If someone were to claim it, they could then use it to impersonate you on any systems that haven't been updated with your new (lack of) phone number.

Happy Thanksgiving

I’m thankful for when the cat comes and gets me to come to bed, as if to say: “uh? Hey. I’m sleepy and I need some warm legs to curl up on. Can you get in bed already?” ❤️