soid

The train was crowded; I got to sit only by 96th Street. Trying to read Kleppmann’s book, but in fact, sipping coffee, biting the cookie, and looking at the girl dressed in an all-black business suit and white socks with straightened black hair. It was about 28th Street when I realized I had only read about one page of Kleppmann. I tried to focus and read something about conflict resolution during replication. 

The plan was to test all my new UI on physical devices, so I happily put three of them in front of them and started clicking them, then I realized it would be better if I also deployed the Lambda change, so I tested all together. 

And so I spent all day with this lambda. First, needed to upgrade nodejs from 14 to 20: is it possible that something breaks after, before I upgrade the code? I don’t know. So spent a couple of hours googling it. Apparently, it may work just fine, despite the major version upgrade. So, I messaged Will telling him I thought this risk was okay, but there was a small chance of things going bad. Two or three hours I spent overthinking it? Anyway, it went unnoticed. Everything was just fine.

Then, my new API still didn’t show up. That I spent the rest of the day trying to understand what was missing in API Gateway.

By 4pm I remembered that the evening plan was the concert. Bad thoughts were coming to my mind: why did I even start all these upgrades? What if something I touched breaks tonight? Will I go back from the concert and troubleshoot it until fixed? And if I don’t figure out API Gateway it will be bothering me all evening. I should take control of my mind, – I was telling myself – I will be careful not to break anything tonight, and I will forget everything and enjoy the concert after, and I will be there if something breaks, – I was telling myself.

I talked to B about planning for the picnic: she was excited. Concert, picnic, whatever – planning is exciting for her. Picnic planning is a challenge; we gotta bring the lights, two blankets, a scarf in case it’s cold, etc. She was in planning mode excited how cool she planned everything.

Luckily by 5, I figured API Gateway: there was one permission and one route missed. Finally, it worked. It gave me some peace of mind for the evening.

The concert in Central Park was scheduled for 8pm. We got to a grocery store by 6, grabbed some Rosé, cheeses, and sausages, and then headed to the park. By 7 the park was pretty full already. We hardly found a spot for our blanket, pretty far from the stage. L&M couldn’t come cause of baby Ann, but R joined us. We chatted and listened to Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Rimsky-Korsakov, and some young local composers, the younger of whom was just 8 years old. B’s light on our picnic blanket was very charming when it got dark.

Note for next year: get to the park by 5:30 to find a better spot, just hang out there for the evening, bring a ticker blanket or a pad cause the ground is still cold, and don’t go to the bathroom right before the fireworks.

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.

I was two minutes late for the standup. After the standup, Abhi introduced me to PageDuty. My shift starts on Thursday morning. I had never done this; I’ll see how it goes. The last outage was just last Friday when he restarted one of the servers cause it became unresponsive for an unknown reason.

Kenny says he likes paper books cause of the annotations. He says he likes writing notes while evaluating code. Interesting use.

I was working on the Google Pay button on Android, and my trivial changes were not working, then I realized it was not properly reloading my changes. Sometimes it would not reload at all, and sometimes it would just make the button stop responding to my clicks. No, all other changes were reloading just fine, but the changes around this damn Google Pay button were wonky. Painfully, I figured out the steps to make it reload my changes. Here’s an excerpt from my notes

1) stop npx expo on Mac 2) kill the app on device 3) start npx expo start --dev-client on mac 4) start the app on device 5) Shake the device for dev menu 6) "Change Bundle Location" menu item (clicking "Reload" won't work) 7) type the mac IP address:port 8) the app may crash and ask you to clear cache, do so 9) start the app again and type mac IP address:port

That took the day. I also ran some data analysis on the ticket purchases and figured my change would save us about 90% on the SMS costs. Not bad; we will see.

We took the train with B to Boston at 7:45pm. She had a business trip, and I was tagging along. We couldn’t figure out how to meetup at Penn Station: she says she’s by Dunking Donuts; I am standing by Dunking Donuts. We don’t see each other. She says she’s in a nice hall, I say I’m in a nice hall. She sees the track escalators, I see the track escalator. Et cetera. Then we realized her hall was round and my hall was squared. That was how we figured it out. The new Moynihan Hall at Penn Station is nice: modern as a Chinese airport, but it has its character too, and it’s not filled with cops and all security checks like the airports. The food sold is just great, Manhattan quality restaurants that make it right in front of you, and not the sad cold sandwiches typically sold at train stations.

On the train, I tried to work on my Android app, but no, I was not in the mood. We ended up gossiping about work almost all trip. So I tell her all the gossip, then I don’t have the energy to write my diary. That’s how it happens.

We got to Boston by midnight. At first, the people looked quite different, but the same people. Take a New Yorker, wash them, clean their clothes, iron the pants, put an edgy ring in the ear – you get a Bostonian. We took a Lyft to our Airbnb, and driving in Cambridge I saw no single pedestrian on the street, and cars passing with loud music from their car window – late-night people heading home, driving alone and listening to music. That all looked familiar – American suburbs as I remembered them. We slept by 2.

Abhi was in the office already: we chatted about my picnic in Central Park and his Ikea wardrobe assembling over the weekend. During the standup I demoed my recent work, email receipts UI, which is almost done except for the Android. The change may sound weird at first: for the first five tickets we don’t ask the email (to avoid “cognitive overload” for new users) – we just send SMS; on the fifth ticket, we ask for an email for receipts and stop sending SMS. It sounded strange to me the first time I heard of this flow, but now I like it: we don’t bother new users with everything on the first step, and then we do gather emails for more accustomed users. Sunny said it wouldn’t save us money if we asked for the 5th ticket cause most people buy just one ticket. We argued for a bit, and then I promised to gather some stats on this question.

Meanwhile, our SMS spammers are back, despite disabling the developer configuration (“localhost”). XK is at the top now; turned out it’s the code for Kosovo. And Sri Lanka, again; Sunny said we can’t ban Sri Lanka cause of the cricket World Cup taking place in NYC. India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka – that is where cricket is super popular. I ran my script and showed we sold 0 tickets to Sri Lanka phone numbers. But Sunny said no, still no, it’s cricket world cup. We’ll ban them in two weeks.

Then I was just getting started with Android. Fighting IntelliJ, then turned out I needed Android Studio – I thought those were the same things.

Kenny started. They put his desk somewhere far away on the other side of the building; but on the first floor. We chatted with Abhi and him for a while. He saw my book "Designing Data Intensive Applications"; he's reading it too. He seemed cool: communicative and geeky too in the right balance. I'm increasingly liking my team.

In the evening we were buying tickets to Boston for Wednesday.

Then worked all week

• Tuesday: Making a new screen in React Native, the receipt options selection
• Wednesday: AWS SAM broke again, and I spent a day recovering, ended up making a new lambda in AWS
• Thursday: Working on the new screen
• Friday: Finished the new screen

Thinking if I should plan some time on Sunday and make another screen, so I can focus on new things on Monday. Why? It should be easier and now I can finish it in a few hours. And it'd feel good to finally finish something coherent and moving on Monday. I can commit on Monday morning so nobody thinks I’m trying to get ahead of anyone working on the weekend.

Redux is a quite interesting framework for storage. Combined with React – such a nice decomposition of problems. There is an immutable storage, a state, then pure functions called reducers take state and action and produce another successor state. That state is global, and UI components are state machines reflecting that state. Finally, hooks allow interested components watch state changes and render and re-render. Interestingly, they are pushing against templates, those from MVC pattern, saying that “templates separate technologies, not concerns”. So they are not shy of mixing JS with HTML tags as far as those are both used for rendering Views.

Getting up from the subway on the escalator I realized it was heavily raining outside. Pouring, with thunder. I didn’t have an umbrella, but even with an umbrella it’d be hard to stay dry in this rain. Good I didn’t bike – my guts were right this time. I read the emails; “Severe Thunderstorm” was delivered around 9:20; whoops, the weatherman got caught by surprise, again. What’s the weatherman gonna do now? The weatherman is already too noisy mispredicting the rain; should they start mispredicting more heavily? It’s better mispredict the rain than mispredict the sun after all.

The office seemed empty. The chat was quiet too. So, I just focused on my work. Wiring Redux, and making the UI display my states. Four states I counted. Not too bad, but those states are a bit tricky.

In the afternoon I ran into that lady, Olga, whom I saw spoke Russian to someone another day. We spoke; turned out she went to the same school in Moscow as me. Twenty-seven years she worked in this place, and next week she retires. Olga didn't look that old at all: she was thin and wearing stylish dresses and makeup. She introduced me to the other four guys: they all worked together for over twenty years, old-timers. They worked in Brooklyn before moving to the current downtown office. They dislike how everything changes these days. "We were just young," – Olga says. Ed recommended a bunch of food places around, though they are not as good as in Brooklyn; but the thing that he liked Old Xi'an while I thought Famous Xi'an was way better.

I worked till 7 trying to finish that Redux to UI states mapping.

Recovered my setup in the morning. I configure something neatly in the office, then I have to redo it at home. Makes me keep good notes. Good notes are hard to keep, it turns out.

M replied in the morning about AWS SES validation. Says we should not send emails from the root domain, only from a subdomain. And some reasons for that. Not sure about it, but it's noreply@ email anyway, so who cares. I should be fine.

Then I went for a run during lunch. It looked sunny and pleasant outside. 70ºF – how hot is it? Seems borderline hot for running. No, too hot. I cut it at 30 minutes, not finishing 5K. Too hot. 

Listened to the New Yorker podcast; they invited Robert Kennedy, Jr. He can barely speak; his voice is rough and breaking up. He is running for president this year as an independent. They ask why won't he condemn Trump if he disagrees with him; he says cause at the mental support meetings for heroin addicts they tell them not to hate people. He was addicted to heroin for 14 years and still goes to support groups many times per week. And then another Russian podcast about how Putin's propaganda exploits Western democracies' processes to discredit the ideas of democracy in Russia. Presidents elected by minority vote, etc. Putin is supported by the majority and leads the majority, and thus is the best democracy, – in this view. It's the understanding of a majoritarian democracy. Latin America has many of them, that converged to dictatorships by the way of populist rise. Western democracies are liberal democracies – the majority cannot go against individual liberties.

Then I met with Ryan in the afternoon. He was very helpful in my UI adventures. This thing called Redux, a local store from React Native: I had to make a few objects, then define mappings, then loaders and "reducers". Then Ryan said I can figure out the rest. Okay, I surely can. Then Ryan came up with the idea of another screen inside the profile screen. Alright, I'll practice my UI skills.

And then I troubleshoot the margin, and padding, and animation, and I seem to be getting better at it.

I decided to check out Apple News trial. It's not too bad actually. They recommend me stuff about the office. 5-to-9 replaces 9-to-5, they say in WSJ. People get up early at 5 to get to the office early and be ahead of everyone in the day. The boss notes when someone is in the office before anyone else, they say. Ah, what BS jobs people work, whose purpose is to get ahead of anyone in the boss' eye. But it actually did inspire me to come to the office early, maybe by 6 or 7 sometime. Bike at sunrise, then plan out my day and do most of the work before lunch. I will try.

Она тогда говорит: Алиса, и подает мне руку с золотым колечком, которое я сразу замечаю. Она учится в экономическом институте, говорит Каспер и кладет ей руку на задницу с таким видом, что я даже удивляюсь, как это он не спустил от удовольствия. Она мягко, но решительно снимает его руку и говорит: но параллельно я заканчиваю курсы секретаря со знанием немецкого. После таких курсов меня возьмут на работу везде, в любую контору, в любой секретариат, везде. ...

Выглядит она примерно так: первым делом глухая водолазка с намертво закрытым горлом. Волосы серые, мышиные, заколотые на макушке заколкой с надписью «Закопане 1999». На шее золотая цепочка с крестиком поверх водолазки, на что я еще перед этим обратил внимание. Дальше она выглядит так: штаны от брючного или летнего костюма, книзу суженные, плюс ортопедические сандалеты. Девица из разряда: домашняя курица. Уберет, обед приготовит, вернет в лоно католицизма.

At work, I was trying to make the client UI. Simple things: a button, an input box, some sliding-down animation. I'm debating on asking Ryan to help me with the UI, but then, say, it'd be good to understand the client a little bit with this fairly simple UI work. So, I almost finished the client by noon, except for the animation. The animation didn't work: I started monkey-coding various attempts before I decided to stop and do something else.

There was an end-of-spring demo meeting after lunch. One demo, second demo, then calling for more demos – everyone silent. I thought I'd show my buttons and text boxes. The other ten people didn't show anything. Seems like people don't really like this demo meeting and rebel against it. I'm still clueless; and I don't want to care about office politics.

In the afternoon I went for coffee, and then sat outside the building in the garden; it was cloudy but warm. The cafe was crap, called Grumpy Cafe; but their $5 coffee is a way-way better than the coffee from the deli for $2.50. Dang! I figured out the emailing lambda. Turned out AWS SAM worked fine, just shows the OOM message on every request. But things are done; updated. Hell with this OOM message – it's just for testing.

Randomly, I learned about Ezra Meeker who traveled the Oregon Trail on an ox-drawn wagon while young, and then wrote extensively about that trip all his life. Makes me feel better about my China diary that I couldn't finish for almost a year already. 

In the evening we grabbed a pizza and watched the movie recommended by Gandhi called "Shortcomings", a light comedy that turned out deeper than it seemed at first, about the Asian-American identity crisis and inter-racial relationships. The scriptwriter is the protagonist, basically, as I understood – he's the 4th generation Japanese-American; his parents grew up in Japanese detention camps during WW2. I think the story makes more sense placed in the 2000s. America changed since then. Maybe I'm wrong about it. It's also interesting how gay identity is normalized in the movie mirroring the straight identity, but the race race is a source of problems. Except for the parents.

Slept late by 1am.

In the office by 9. No meetings were scheduled, and not many people around. Except Paula – she’s back, running meetings all day; so I listened to a lot of music. Turned out Wax is Shed. Wax is his creative pseudonym, among others. But Shed is Rene Pawlowitz from Berlin. Shed’s music was inspiring; so much so that I played with Logic Pro a little bit after work.

For work I read a bunch of pages about AWS SES, that is email sending service. Learned about DKIM – that is domain signature for emails. So why does the spam still exist; why do I still receive emails from Amazon about clicking to refund my mistaken expensive purchase? I guess those do not fake the domain anymore – they just look like an authentic email from the company. Domain in email is now somewhat reliable, if it supports DKIM.

Finally, installed CoPilot. I’m late to this game. A bit disappointed at first – it doesn’t exactly read my mind and knows what I wanna do.

By 6:30 I was running to Apple Store to fix the cracked screen on my phone. The guy told me to just upgrade my 5-year-old phone, but I explained that there was no way I was gonna be giving it away – I’m passing this phone to the next generations, kids, grandchildren, etc. Then, he explained, that they actually were gonna replace the screen and not swap the phones as they used to do, and it was not gonna help with the battery life unless I asked to replace the battery too. Then, he told me my battery was probably drained because of all the background app refreshes that I never disable. I got so sleepy – it must be from the second coffee in the afternoon – I thought fuck it, I’ll keep going with the cracked screen. What’s up with Apple Store these days – they just convince you not to pay money.

I thought I’d stop by Trader Joe’s since I was in the hood. Picked up some Ube cookies – they are back on the shelves. Omg I love these cookies! – the cute cashier girl said. Yeah, they just stashed them for a while and didn’t sell anymore, I said. They are seasonal, and now they are back, she explained. What are you listening to in your headphones, she asked. Oh, my, what am I listening. War and scare and blood in faraway countries. A podcast, I say. No one tells me just a track, she says, nobody listens to music anymore. I listen to music all day at work, and a bit tired of it, just now I wanna hear someone’s mumbling. Oh yeah, music at work, do this, rhythmically do that, she plays a robot. She tells me about a track called Kambuforia, it’s cause she likes Kambucha, which is what relaxes. Have a good night, honey, she says. Honey? Is it cause I shaved this morning? Or the cause of my cool long raincoat?

Haha, you look like shit, B says when I get home. She worked from home all day, while outside it was raining pretty much non-stop all day. I definitely looked a bit like a stray dog left alone in the rain. We ate comfy tofu Korean soup with rice for dinner. I love eating Korean soups on rainy days.

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.