Woke up at 7:10, then 7:30. Monday is hard to get up – get up earlier, to get to that stupid standup at 9:30. Yogurt, strawberries, granola; instant coffee – cause we ran out of good coffee; omega-3. I was on my way by 8:30.
The train was easy: half empty, on time. I started reading “Польско-русская война под бело-красным флагом” by Masłowska – that Magda recommended me; Magda said it’s a brilliant modern Polish novel – but most of the greatness comes from its language, and it’s totally untranslatable to English, she said. I said perhaps it’s translatable to Russian cause those are related languages. So, I’ll read it in Russian; I will see.
Тут она мне и говорит, что у нее для меня две новости: одна хорошая, другая — плохая. А сама через стойку перегнулась. Какую, значит, я хочу сначала. Я говорю, хорошую. А она, что вроде в городе польско-русская война под бело-красным флагом. Я говорю, откуда ей знать, а она, что слышала. Я говорю, ну, тогда плохую. А она вынимает помаду и говорит, что Магда сказала, что между нами все кончено. И мигнула Бармену, чтоб подошел в случае чего.
Reminds me of gonzo fiction on first look, but I've read only twenty pages. The protagonist is a mess: I used to like that kind of characters. Not anymore. But I will probably sympathize with him later.
9:30 standup. Not many joined. Everyone is busy, somehow. I took the opportunity to ask Ryan to show me around Jira. Jira's editor is like from 2005. Outside was drizzling, or just foggy; the Statue barely seen in the fog.
Then I realized I was signed up for another standup at 10. That was a bigger group; Jessica was there – she’s in LA; jeez, it was 7am on Monday for her. Glen was leading the standup. And others I’ve seen before, but barely understood what I’m doing. Sunny repeated his two sentences from the previous standup. I repeated mine.
Then I went back to my SMS scammers investigations. Joined the purchases table with the SMS billing, then made the script to read directly from BigTable. I like Kotlin Notebooks so far; even though it’s probably not a full Python replacement – but I’m just learning Kotlin, I tell myself. The idea anti-spam metric was to combine how much we get paid from the country and subtract how much we spend on the SMS to the country. I was careful and proposed a threshold well below negative, just to ban the top abusers. I still wanted to be careful with banning, after being too quick about it on Friday. Then, Sunny looked at the numbers – and he was a bit shocked: he said we should ban 30+ countries. So we did that. And then I wrote another query to catch the users from the banned countries who purchased the tickets. Then we sent them to our support, so they will try to reach out to those supposedly real users and refund. That was pretty much the day.
I liked working on this small project for the last few days – to learn about and play with the data available; it was fun. Still, need to make the script send notification alerts. And we have an adversary on the other end, which may act unpredictably. We will see. What a job for someone writing those bots.
Left the office at 6:40 and back home by 7:30. Dinner with B. Seems we’re going to Boston in June. Enough for a Monday. Feeling sleepy.