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Monday, June 10
At the standup, I was slow and barely understanding anything. Then I worked, drinking coffee and slowly waking up. By noon I really wanted to cancel my poor's people health insurance; it was just too hard to figure out how to cancel it. I went to their website; and called, navigating the voice menu, – to no avail. Then turned out there was an easy button on the 5th tub by clicking change the plan. I felt dumb.
The spammers were back again. Now they spike one day from one region and then disappear again. Like $300 in one day, and gone. This time Sunny proposed to whitelist instead of blacklisting. Picking the "good" countries instead of waiting for the abusive countries to show up. That sounded too much for me – all the regions that we see we had previously seen abusing. Sunny just unblocked them because of the cricket concerns. And now he wanted to block almost all unless they bought a good number of tickets from us. It didn't make much sense to me. Maybe I was too sleepy.
I also looked at the cost of SMS to foreign numbers. Turned out Russia is on top of the list with 45 cents cost per message. Basically, for $10 ticket it's almost 5% cost just for a message of 160 characters. Many countries have similar 30-40 cents per message costs. What a great economy on top of an outdated technology from the 20th century.
After 1pm I watched WWDC while working. ChatGPT and Midjourney will be everywhere in the OS, they say. The work was gaining traction after drinking a can of mate. I was into the work, and WWDC was playing in the background. Was it even worth listening to it? I didn't catch much of what I'd find interesting what is gonna happen. Lots of ML, it seems, and running LLMs on the device – that is cool and worth looking at more carefully.
What I was working on: Ryan told me on Friday that it'd be cool not to block moving between screens while waiting for the REST request to finish; and that is fine. But also we want to show a spinning loader on the next screen. And the spinning loader on top of native Apple Pay/Google Pay buttons. Those spinners and propagating events between screens – consumed most of my day.
In between, Will asked me to look into the costs of Netlify. That is some kind of cloud solution that looks like a nicer AWS. "Run Lambda from the command line locally with this command, deploy with this command," it said right on the first page; not like that piece of shit AWS SAM that can't even report errors properly. Anyway, I looked and found one of the websites, away.mta.info, taking most of the bandwidth. It's a beautiful website about various getaway locations on Long Island reachable by train. Many pictures, beautiful articles, etc. So, what – media-heavy, – I told Will, – the cost rose by 1.5 times from April to May, but it makes sense since tourist websites are more popular in the summer. Then Sunny chimed in and asked the team that makes the website to look into cutting on the bandwidth. They could remove old content, they said, but that sucks cause it's all beautiful content, even if outdated.
Only in the evening, I thought of looking more closely into the website. Large images are thumbnails, lots of strange duplicate requests to JSON. So, I wrote an email to the team telling them how much I like the website and that I'd hate to see any kind of lowering of the quality, but that we could optimize without compromising quality. That made me happy about myself. Then I continued my ReactNative adventures. Callback passing callback to another screen that waits for the callback to finish, – sounds easy; turned out, it's not serializable, and it has to be serializable. That kind of things.