soid

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.

I worked from home before lunch cause I needed to pick up a paper for DMV after 10. I released PDF Owl in AppStore at 11:58am. Let's see how it goes. Then went for the paper.

The assistant working at the optometrist's office calls me "young man". Another man in his 60s walks in, limping, he calls him "young man" too. "Have a seat, young man!" – he says to the barely walking old guy. He speaks Spanish to another client: obviously joking but also to the point. He tells me to send the note to DMV, but takes another copy; he tells me if they mess up my mail, I'd have a copy. He is bald, with two rings in both ears and a grey goatee beard. He's around 50, maybe? A happy man in his 50 running the office. "Hey, Grigory, why are you not wearing your glasses?" – he asks me. My glasses; he remembers my glasses. "I'm not used to those glasses yet, I don't need them too often," – I say. The prescription glasses take time to get used to, he explains; especially first prescription glasses. 

I got to work by 1:30. The office was empty. I tried to think of Lambdas and SNS, but, somehow, fruitless. I was thinking I needed to learn React Native. That is where it is all going. I step into the territories when Abhi says he doesn't know what's going on there with the client. And I don't wanna bother Will with that. Basically, I need to understand a little bit what are the flows of the client, and nobody around seems to be able to help me with that. I clicked the links around; when was the first time I had heard of React? 2016? 2017? It's been around me but always passed by my side. Not exactly where I'd like it to move. Will said, "it's up to me". Maybe I'm actually interested in the front end, am I not? 

Unable to settle my thoughts, I decided I'd do at least one useful thing – finish signing up for the pension. VDC it is called, and it's one of the plans for State employees. -6% of the salary contribution from me, +8% contribution from them – not too bad. Vesting is just one year. For the alternative, signing up for 10 years minimum service on NYSLRS I'm not ready yet.

News arrived from the SMS spam meeting with the diversity team. It all went well – we are green-lighted on banning abusing SMS countries. Just asked to keep them updated on how it goes. I also read some more on the problem and discovered that Google before October 2013 offered the Firebase identity service for 6 cents per sign-up. But then due to "significant changes in market conditions require more granular and variable pricing" – they started charging one cent per sent SMS, essentially dumping the spam/verification problem on the clients. I'm surprised Google's muscle couldn't deal with the abusing carriers and filter it somehow more meaningfully. They just deferred it to the clients to decide to ditch certain countries. Something smells fishy in this story.

I went back home by 7. Stopped by Trader Joe's and bought goat yogurt – accidentally – no idea what it is like. I will try another morning.

Woke up at 7:10. Coffee, cookie. Good coffee – the beans have finally arrived from Bottomless. 

Let it be the bike day! The day was gonna be warm and sunny. Omega-3, L-Carnitine. Then what. Replied to a couple of messages, pumped the bike tires, prepared a change for the office, and it was almost 9 already. 

The bike commute was pleasant: happy people biking, jogging, walking their dogs, playing tennis at Riverside park. To the right – Hudson River, to the left – Riverside park trees, then Upper West Side Art Deco changing to the midtown all glass skyscrapers. 65ºF/18ºC and sunny morning. It took 46 minutes – exactly the same as the subway. 

I got to the office by 10:15; I changed my bike clothes and then discovered that Abhi was back in the office. He was good, nothing bad happened; good. Then we talked with Abhi for another 20 minutes – he’s a talkative dude. I realized I was getting lonely in this office last week when he was out. Hanif is quick to the point, and somewhat shy, like myself, but also not sharing much; he asks something on his mind and listens, but is too shy to engage and tell me what he really thinks about the bullshit that I’m telling him. Paula, sitting just across the aisle from me, is rather talking non-stop – on the headset, but not with me. She asks me about my weekend, but before I even open my mouth she tells me she’s gotta run to another meeting and runs to her desk before I close my mouth. Her life looks fast; I’m just too slow for a conversation with her. Then there is the invisible man: he’s a chameleon in his cubicle. He either works from home too often, or his sweater is of color of his cubicle. I never heard a sound from him, and I don’t know what team he is from. There are of course more people not from my team on the floor.

I started to work on a new small project related to cost reduction from sending SMS. As it turns out it’s quite pricey sending those SMS. One cent per message, multiplied by millions, go figure. So I will need to change some flows to send emails instead. Ask users in the app for emails when we don’t have one. I looked into SNS queues, Lambda, and TypeScript Lambda scripts that use DynamoDB. Not too excited about this project but alright.

I biked back home by 6. Downtown was gorgeous: everyone was outside. On the street: poor people trapped in their Ferraris and BMWs moving 3 miles per hour on average. On the bike lane: crème de la crème, the best of society, – models, ballerinas, politicians, power-hungry Wall street guys biking in suits, actors, athletes, designers, entrepreneurs, – happy and moving bike lane.

No surprises on the train this time. I sat on the chair and read another paper about Argentina’s welfare offices. From the same author. He just goes there and describes everything in detail. And then analyzes.

Then in the office, In the morning, I made some changes to the screens API: don’t include trains arriving later than 45 minutes. At night the headways are 20 minutes. This will show the next two trains. No need to scroll the screen with the trains for the next two hours. That is what Sunny told me to do. So many nuances – so cool.

Another thing I added was to limit the number of trains returned. I filter the trains; I sort them by estimated arrival time; I take top K. Is it O(N) or O(N log N)? I suspect the latter. But perhaps it is smart enough to consider both sortBy and take and not sort everything filtered? I don't know yet.

trains
    .asSequence()
    .filter {
        // apply filter
		currentStation in it.stops
    }
    .sortBy { it.estimatedTime }
    .take(2)

Then I got a new task. I feel like I'm in the Disneyland of cloud infrastructure: every day I get a new task learning a part of an interesting piece. This time I looked into Google Cloud. The task: the costs rose N times in the past months – what's the hell with that? It feels like a game, a puzzle. I quickly discovered this was a fraud scheme called SMS pumping. Bots generate login requests via SMS. SMS goes to the countries where the scammers take a cut from the network carriers making money from receiving the SMS. 

I went to Google Cloud metrics. I figured out that most of the spending was on the SMS to Togo and Sri Lanka. The proper way to measure this would be to look at the ratio of login requests (that send SMS) and successful logins. Then I fought Google Metrics to compute these metrics over the last couple of weeks. What the fuck is this system. It has a whole new language for querying the metrics, and nothing really useful. It shows the sent SMS count; it shows successful signups. Divide them by one another over the window of two weeks – nope, it shows me per-second rates instead. As their tutorial popups kept showing, I realized this metrics analytics system was complete crap. 

I told Will. He said: "i defer to you on recommendations for moving forward". I thought – alright; what would I really do if it was my system? I think I should just go ban Togo and Sri Lanka phone numbers for a start. This is New York local service – those are the top spenders from foreign countries; it's obvious they are the main source of the fraud. Then, we can re-evaluate the long-term strategy. I told Will. He took a pause, then said that he was "not comfortable blocking African and Middle Eastern countries" just because there were too many login requests coming from their area code. I realized I forgot to tell him the main part – that it was the common fraud; with a link. That was kind of funny. But yeah; maybe I was too quick. It's not my own service, after all; we make a public service in a large metropolitan area. I should think twice before giving such recommendations.

Then Will told me about the accounts dataset in BigTable, and I wrote a script in Kotlin Notebooks joining that with the billing costs, and then tried to think of some more arguments of when the benefits of the country phone code go below the cost of the fraud. And I thought that was the topic to think about for Monday, or maybe to puzzle it over the weekend.

That was pretty engaging; I realized it was almost 7. B texted. I went back home. We cooked soba together, with salmon, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, and sauerkraut.