Monday, May 13

[soid]

 Woke up at 7:10 – seeing some vivid dreams (something stupid that I told myself to remember, but forget as I got up), then slept till 8. I had insomnia the night before night. So, I hardly got up by 8. Coffee, cookies, and running to the train. The train was pretty packed, but I could sit after the 96th, and read Maslowska’s “Polish-Russian War”. 

In the office by exactly 9:30; just enough time to open my laptop and join the standup. Abhi was showing his platform drawing screens. That looks pretty cool. Sunny is working on the real-time buses API. I work on emailing receipts. Then another standup at 10. That went not as lively. 

Then I tried to run the existing Lambda locally, with Gateway API, and SNS events. Abhi suggested just making another Lambda in AWS and uploading and debugging there. That suggestion I didn’t like – there must be a way to run it locally, debug, write tests, etc. So I spent a few hours trying to make this thing called SAM work, but it was showing key auth errors. I changed the configs, trying various options: so I try some bullshit config from the web or from ChatGPT, and it runs, and the API says key error when I make a request. Then I realized I just misspelled my request URL. Dang. That must be from not sleeping enough.

Another thing I’ve done was to file a "Statement of Financial Disclosure" which is due on May 15. As state employees, we are required to file these essentially anti-corruption forms for the "New York State Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government". It was mostly about income, assets held, debts, property value, and associations/previous employers. I didn’t figure out if the information was going to be publicly available. It seems on their website they ask to file a request per person to access the disclosure. I wonder how easily they approve those requests, and how easily this financial info is accessible about any state employee.

And one more thing updated: late last week Sunny found some config in Firebase, disabling “localhost” domain somewhere, and suddenly last week’s SMS spam just stopped. It looks like the spammers exploited this debug/developer configuration leftover in production. So, now Sunny started unbanning those countries, gradually, and we don’t see the abuse anymore. This makes me somewhat sad and dissatisfied with myself: it was not exactly my fault, but I was assigned to it, spent some time trying to understand the problem, but came up only with the dumb banning countries solution; I didn’t get deep enough into Google’s long Firebase FAQ, where they mentioned that “localhost” problem. Finally, I’m making silly typos in simple URLs and then troubleshooting it for hours. What am I even doing with this dumb tech? What do I want to be doing and what should I be doing? An easily spent life on dumb tech. It’s so important to find worthy problems. Mess. So, I was feeling moody.

Back home by 7. It was B’s first day at her new job. She’s fully remote now. She says she hardly got up from her desk between 9 and 6. So we talked about that.

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

Do I understand it correctly that with a "localhost authenticator" people can "authenticate themselves"? Cool. I saw this implementation of OAUTH, with credentials looking like "I solemnly swear it is me".