soid

Caught the empty train at 9:06; drank my coffee and browsed the phone, as everyone else on the train, instead of reading a book. I couldn’t read books for the past week; too much going on in my head; my mind is craving short attention span entertainment. Looking forward to my life back to normal. I get contended and bored; I open a book and focus on the line; the line follows a line, all becomes a melody, rhymed with the sound of the train, drawing a story, as I become engrossed in the book on the busy subway train, where everyone is sleepily looking at their phone. But not now: now I’m looking at my phone.

10am usual weekly standup. The big one, which is actually when everyone sits around the table. I said I’m waiting for code review. Will said why don’t we set a deadline for the first deployment for this on Friday. I said why not; it’s mostly ready. 

Then another standup, where I explained some intricacies with the GTFS-RT feed, when the train is removed too early, before it even arrived at the station.

Then an hour of work and we had a big team lunch with burritos. I ended up in the middle of a hot conversation about old computers like Atari and Apple 2. I brought up ZX Spectrum and turned out Ken has one. Ken is 22. He’s obsessed with old computers and programs for Spectrum on the weekends. He told me there is reversed reversed-engineered Spectrum from Russia called Pentagon that he wants to get in his collection. I said Russians now trying to acquire any chips from the West will be very surprised if he’s trying to ship Russian chips.

Then another standup with Sunny, Glen, Dave, and Ken. The agenda was to figure out how we deploy by Friday. Well, I don’t exactly get it: it’s mostly ready. If we fail, we should plan for failure, plan how we debug quickly and fix, and iterate. Everyone seemed too nervous. Was I too naive?

Then Sunny reported to Will, and they discussed it. They then invited Ken and me. Will was all over, gave Ken a test plan for 3 weeks at least, then jumped to discussing memory and CPU. Ken just nodded and said sure sure. So that was the fourth meeting in the day about the same thing. But I only got it the next day. The elections anxiety. I get it.

I worked some more, but not much with all the meetings. In the evening I went to watch some trains. Recorded the signal and the timing for stop and start. Then headed home.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5

I thought I’d go to the office on the election day since I voted early anyway, and since staying home on Wednesday after a sleepless night is more convenient. Will and Sunny were in the office, and T and S, and most people out. 

I focused pretty well during the day. Trying to set up a test bench with my recorded signal from another day. That’s a lot of data massaging. Claud.ai is so smart and helpful. Writing me scripts that I used to spend hours on. 

Around 3 Will came by and asked me about my conversations with EE last week. Then he just called him and invited me, and then he didn’t know what exactly his asking. I went to his table. Sunny showed me a diagram with plans. That looked like a great plan. Replacing GTFS. Feeding Itrac. Wow, that’s great. And then Will said: “We’ll place our system in the center of everything, so then we get a …” – he couldn’t find a word – “then we get …” – he pointed to me – “What do we get?” I said: “we get leverage.” (Only later I thought about the more interesting answer to this question) Will took a moment to think: “Yes, leverage. We get leverage.” But before that, we have to replace the beacons. Sunny was complaining about Cuomo: this stupid push to place displays at every station before the elections; it had cost this organization so much money, and so much tech debt. We started drawing trains on paper; trains arrive, there are trains behind, so many combinations. Will gave me a pencil and paper too and asked to take points; then he realized he didn’t have another pencil. I went to my desk and picked up a pencil. We drew a bunch of test cases; Sunny was good at it – what if there is a train behind and the train ends the trip and stays at the station, not leaving, and there is another one on the middle track. We came up with a bunch. I said that I’m thinking differently about it; I’m thinking in principle: a train, it can move, a track, it can hold one train, a signal, can come from anywhere. Then Will took away my page and said he had to think about it. I left and heard him cursing reading an email from Br. For months they delayed the project and couldn’t make buses send the pings every 5 seconds instead of every 30 seconds. We ask them for an update every couple of weeks. This time Br said they overloaded their inference servers and needed to test ARM-based AWS servers to see if it’s cheaper to maintain the load. Will was mad. What a boloney, indeed. 

In the evening I grabbed a wine and prepared for the election results. Everything was crazy outside. Lots of homeless out of nowhere. Lots of crazies. Is it what Pueblo excitement looks like? B was at home watching everything on YouTube. I said she needed to save the energy for late night. But she dozed off by 11. I stayed watching the nytimes indicator moving from pink to pinker. I was in denial. It was exactly like 2016. Dejavu. By 3 I finished the wine and watched Trump’s speech. I didn’t see him for at least four years. I watched the speech entirely. It started quite lively. Turned out this guy Vance is married to a desi girl. He pointed to his family and friends and put some of them on the spot. And then he started telling stories; those stories felt like an old man that gets you trapped and tells you stories, and you want to escape, but you can’t escape; but I could just stop watching YouTube. But I kept watching. Did it look like 2016? No. He sounded older. He sounded tremendously boring. They played YMCA. I went to bed.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6

Woke up by 10. B was up talking to her manager. Something about China and Texas, and she was talking and talking, and I thought wtf is she talking about it. I put my headphones in and looked in the chat. The chat was empty. 

It was empty until about 11. First Glen asked to confirm deployment on Thursday. It’ll be fine, I said. We’ll fail; we’ll fix it quickly; we’ll iterate. It’s fine. We’re not sending man to space, I said. Though I could send one man to space, I was about to say, but it was so-so kind of a joke and I skipped. Then nothing. I was talking to Claud.ai to make Python scripts, then opened them in Cursor to modify even more all the shit that Claud wrote. It’s like programming by code reviewing.

By 4 I got more than upset – I got hungry. The chat was still empty. I talked to AI. I finally decided to go eat something. The street was gorgeous. Nobody cared. It was 78ºF and sunny. Lots of people on the street. Life goes on. Is it always like that, or am I just noticing? Lots of kids running, lots of beautiful people. I walked back and forth. Ramen was closed till 5. I didn’t know what to eat. I ate a sandwich.

Then worked on a bench. Made my test replay all the signals and compute the error. That took twice longer to implement than I thought. Not too bad.

Then on the bench it finally hit me. All the doubts; all worries. Was it even worth it? Did I make a big mistake somewhere? This country is about simplicity. They want simple things. They will not understand anyway. It is all a waste. And why am I even bothering anyway.

I called G from the same bench. It was nice hearing him. He said if you know a person when they are 13, they don’t really change by 40; it’s funny – they are just the same as when you knew them when they were 13.

I went home and worked till 10, until I finally fixed the beacon sensitivity issue for tomorrow’s deployment.

Standup at 10 with everyone. Sunny was there; on his first day. Now the dilemma is how do we distinguish two Sunnys. I turned the last name "Ng" which is normally pronounced as "ein", but in Cantonese it would sound more like "uhh" as in an interjection.

Then meeting with Ken. I showed him how to run our project in IntelliJ, how he can debug his first project with tests, etc. He wrote a bunch of Python so far for exploring the data; now needs to bring the Python algorithm to Kotlin backend. We discussed a bit how to bridge those two works. In my mind I think of "converting," of course, Ken to Kotlin religion. But no rush on that. He's doing well.

Then lunch with the new Sunny and our team. We can't agree on where to eat anymore: some want to eat outside, for others, the weather in the 50s is too cold, for others the food court is "too bougie" (I simply say it's overpriced and not as good). We ended up grabbing food from different places and going to the tip of Manhattan overlooking the rivers and the helicopter landing spot. I always remember "Succession" when see those helicopters. But nobody watched it besides me; it seems nobody watched even "Game of Thrones."

After lunch, I tried to catch up on home tasks. B was finding us an attorney covered by her legal insurance, and a house inspector. The agent SH was freaking out saying the seller thinks we're having second thoughts and asking why we still didn't send an attorney, and that they may change the price unless we sign in soon. That didn't make sense to me: if we can't agree on the price and hold on to it for a few days, how can we trust each other to go through the whole deal? B suspected SH was just rushing us to go with the attorney she recommended. That guy gave us a quote of $3K for processing the deal; it was worth trying to save on it. So I called SH, and told her we needed to find an attorney; she tried to push this guy Sergey again, but I said we wanted to save money by using an insurance-covered attorney. She was telling me the seller will raise the price; if it happens the extra saved money won't matter. Saying things of that sort. I said if they're rushing us into signing I start suspecting what's going on; we still need to check a bunch of things and take our time looking into it. I told her firmly that we were talking time till 2pm the next day. She finally calmed down and said she would let the seller know; that she would do what I say, that she's just warning me.

Then B arranged a conference with an attorney from the insurance, Paul. He was chill; told us that everything was covered by the insurance and that we should send his contact to the seller, and then he would get a bunch of financial documents and review them. He said that kind of buildings are often financially weak, so we should set our expectations pretty low; that may result in maintenance rise or extra fees. Everything took 10 minutes. 

Then I was coding for a couple of hours. Productionizing my debug tool. I didn't expect to use this code at all, so I wrote some shitty code, and so I was prettifying it now. Pretty chill and satisfying task; if it was someone else's shitty code it wouldn't have been as satisfying, but cleaning up my own spaghetti was fun. 

Danny, the loan guy, got back to me after I sent him the address and asked to confirm: he said the rate would be 5.75% instead of 5.25% as we discussed a month ago. Why, I asked. The Fed rate hasn't gone up since September 19, why did they raise it? He said we could bring it down to 5.5% if we use "credit points." What does it mean? He promised to explain in a call on Wednesday.

I left the office by 5:30. I was thinking of watching the trains for some time, but I was too tired. I went back home. B cooked Kung Pao chicken from Trader Joe's. In the evening, I meditated on the numbers and applied to two more loan providers to see their rates. Came to thinking of Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich; how he and his depressive family were moving to Petersburg, furnishing the new apartment, being busy it made them happy. A bright spot in his life before another depression.

    И теперь, когда все устроилось так удачно и когда они сходились с женою в цели и, кроме того, мало жили вместе, они так дружно сошлись, как не сходились с первых лет женатой своей жизни. Иван Ильич было думал увезти семью тотчас же, но настояния сестры и зятя, вдруг сделавшимися особенно любезными и родственными к Ивану Ильичу и его семье, сделали то, что Иван Ильич уехал один.

    Иван Ильич уехал, и веселое расположение духа, произведенное удачей и согласием с женой, одно усиливающее другое, все время не оставляло его. Нашлась квартира прелестная, то самое, о чем мечтали муж с женой. Широкие, высокие, в старом стиле приемные комнаты, удобный грандиозный кабинет, комнаты для жены и дочери, классная для сына -- все как нарочно придумано для них. Иван Ильич сам взялся за устройство, выбирал обои, подкупал мебель, особенно из старья, которому он придавал особенный комильфотный стиль, обивку, и все росло, росло и приходило к тому идеалу, который он составил себе. Когда он до половины устроился, его устройство превзошло его ожиданье. Он понял тот комильфотный, изящный и не пошлый характер, который примет все, когда будет готово. Засыпая, он представлял себе залу, какою она будет. Глядя на гостиную, еще не оконченную, он уже видел камин, экран, этажерку и эти стульчики разбросанные, эти блюды и тарелки по стенам и бронзы, когда они все станут по местам. Его радовала мысль, как он поразит Пашу и Лизаньку, которые тоже имеют к этому вкус. Они никак не ожидают этого. В особенности ему удалось найти и купить дешево старые вещи, которые придавали всему особенно благородный характер. Он в письмах своих нарочно представлял все хуже, чем есть, чтобы поразить их. Все это так занимало его, что даже новая служба его, любящего это дело, занимала меньше, чем он ожидал. В заседаниях у него бывали минуты рассеянности: он задумывался о том, какие карнизы на гардины, прямые или подобранные. Он так был занят этим, что сам часто возился, переставлял даже мебель, и сам перевешивал гардины. Раз он влез на лесенку, чтобы показать непонимающему обойщику, как он хочет драпировать, оступился и упал, но, как сильный и ловкий человек, удержался, только боком стукнулся об ручку рамы. Ушиб поболел, но скоро прошел. Иван Ильич чувствовал себя все это время особенно веселым и здоровым. Он писал: чувствую, что с меня соскочило лет пятнадцать. Он думал кончить в сентябре, но затянулось до половины октября. Зато было прелестно,-- не только он говорил, но ему говорили все, кто видели.

     В сущности же, было то самое, что бывает у всех не совсем богатых людей, но таких, которые хотят быть похожими на богатых и потому только похожи друг на друга: штофы, черное дерево, цветы, ковры и бронзы, темное и блестящее,-- все то, что все известного рода люди делают, чтобы быть похожими на всех людей известного рода. И у него было так похоже, что нельзя было даже обратить внимание; но ему все это казалось чем-то особенным. Когда он встретил своих на станции железной дороги, привез их в свою освещенную готовую квартиру и лакей в белом галстуке отпер дверь в убранную цветами переднюю, а потом они вошли в гостиную, кабинет и ахали от удовольствия,-- он был очень счастлив, водил их везде, впивал в себя их похвалы и сиял от удовольствия. В этот же вечер, когда за чаем Прасковья Федоровна спросила его, между прочим, как он упал, он засмеялся и в лицах представил, как он полетел и испугал обойщика.

    -- Я недаром гимнаст. Другой бы убился, а я чуть ударился вот тут; когда тронешь -- больно, но уже проходит; просто синяк.

    И они начали жить в новом помещении, в котором, как всегда, когда хорошенько обжились, недоставало только одной комнаты, и с новыми средствами, к которым, как всегда, только немножко -- каких-нибудь пятьсот рублей -- недоставало, и было очень хорошо. Особенно было хорошо первое время, когда еще не все было устроено и надо было еще устраивать: то купить, то заказать, то переставить, то наладить. Хоть и были некоторые несогласия между мужем и женой, но оба так были довольны и так много было дела, что все кончалось без больших ссор. Когда уже нечего было устраивать, стало немножко скучно и чего-то недоставать, но тут уже сделались знакомства, привычки, и жизнь наполнилась.

Woke up at 7:30 – easily, then I snoozed the alarm for 10 minutes, then for another 10, and it was 8:20 already. I brewed some coffee, picked up a cookie, then headed to the train. As it turned out there were delays on the subway; the wait for 8 minutes, then getting on the crowded train. The train was crowded, but some seats are still empty, with inconsiderate people taking more space. I kept standing for another couple minutes, then squeezed in on a seat between a relaxed dude and a lady in a dress without sleeves; backpack put on my knees, finally, trying to to bump people with my elbows, I pulled my iPad from the backpack. I continued reading Kotlin in Action; not much new in the book, but refreshing Kotlin idioms, and somewhat enjoying the structure of the book; it’s a good book.

By 9:25 I realized I’m not making it to the standup at 9:30. So I got off Christopher St, exited the subway and ended up on a bench at Stonewall park. I called to the meeting. Everyone was working from home, it seemed from the videos. I promised to get started on reading the bus GPS feed. The temperature was about 65ºF, nice and sunny, I didn’t wanna leave the bench, dreaming of how cool it’d be to live in downtown. I went back to the train.

In the office I started reading the code related to buses; a few data feeds, a few components parsing and merging it. What were I gonna do there I still didn’t know. 

At 11, I got invited to a meeting about project transfer to our team; the beacons train tracking on the B division. That went pretty interesting. The train on Flushing and Canarsie lines are tracked with inches precision (great), but the servers that push the data to us are old and do it only every 30 seconds. They were telling us we have to wait till those servers upgrade next year.

We went for lunch with Kenny. Talked about projects, bus tracking – he works on the buses tab on the client, gossiped a bit about Sunny. Sunny is a character; the way he speaks can feel at times offensive. But knowing him – it’s just Sunny, – that’s how he speaks; that is nothing personal. 

Then I read some of the bus existing code, gathering questions for Sunny. Sunny was interviewing someone. I couldn’t tell if it was going very good or very bad. Turned out it went very well. 

Then I talked to Sunny about my bus tracking project. Take the GPS coordinates from the queue, updated every 30 seconds, and merge with the slower feeds, so we get more fresh locations on the client. The plan is for the buses to send us pings every 5 seconds, but the team that is working on it says it’ll run only next year. How does it work now? Now, it turns out, it’s the same 30 seconds + refresh within 20 seconds, depending on how lucky it gets. So I’ll get read of those random up to 20 seconds delay for now, and later the queue will be more frequently updated. Okay, seems fair; that is not as much work as tracking the trains underground. 

Then worked on the parsing part. Cursor didn’t work with Kotlin that well, so I switched back to Intellij; CoPilot was too dumb compared to Cursor, so I ended up just coding myself. I went home by 6. Kenny was still in the office; it was unusual. I forgot to ask him how 1:1 with Will went.

At home, we warmed up our moghrabieh, and ate it with salad, drinking tomato juice. B had some good news about their film script with Y. Then I read something light (wars, word affairs, Indian trading sanctioned tech to Russia [another day YouTube was recommending me something from WION, Indian television – the picture they paint there is only comparable to Russian propagandal showing bravado about big bombs, etc]).

Then worked on merging GTFS-rt and CBCT sources. Most of the time spent on the test: I tell it to ignore the estimated time, but it won't. Ended up just removing it from the objects before comparing. AssertJ, this thing is called, compares deep objects; otherwise, pretty nice library.

In the evening we watched "The Sound of Silence" (2019) on MUBI. I think it's full of very subtle and hard-to-trace humor, but most people probably don't get it – the rating is below 6 on IMDB. The guy's invention is to tune the ambient sounds of houses, which he tries to publish as a PhD thesis, but fails – cause he's a musician and not a scientist. The authors imply, that if he wanted to make it a commercial "product", he'd be rich and successful, but the guy hates the word "product," hates commerce, and ends up in depression instead of being rich and happy. Very real story, it seems, if read between the lines. I gave it a seven.

Then played Panzer Corps 2; still trying to understand the war – on the tactical level. I was never curious about it, but now the times are calling for it. The battle of Paris; (my) German Panzers capture Paris and its surroundings. I thought it was easy – I just had to be swift. Somehow, it's not. French tanks are just too powerful, and my artillery seems completely useless. I thought war was dumb, is it now? I should probably read something about the tactics. Somewhere I read recently that what Hitler had done on the western front took a militaristic and diplomatic genius; was it indeed? 

Slept by 2.

Lunch with Angela. She stays so positive; I feel like me and Kenny are damaged whiners compared to her. I thought the shorts incident was funny, but distressing too. Angela changed to wear pants too – I don't know if cause of solidarity with us. 

Then the plan was to make a broker from ZeroMQ to ActiveMQ in Kotlin with Spring Framework – easy? I took the spring connected, and that was a rabbit hole: turned out I had to use producers instead of consumers for reading ZMQ, cause I guess it produces messages in this thing called Reactive Project, and then I went on trying to make my Reactive code and stumbled on it, and went on reading what that was – quite exciting SPI introduced in Java in 2019 making robust asynchronous streams, and I called the day puzzled whether I should just write my own dummy broker in two threads threads, or learn these reactive streams API.

What makes Spring terrible? I think stupid things like these: it will complain about unrelated shit that is hard to understand why without reading a stackoverflow thread (example); I will follow the doc precisely just to find out that they renamed a stupid thing and forgot to change the doc; the doc will provide you all conceptual understanding in 20 pages with little examples and no working example to point to; the docs will throw a whole big concept at you and will make you fill bad as if you're supposed to know it already – here, ZeroMQ Support, as they just tangentially mention it involves the reactor framework.

About 11pm Sunny messaged on Slack saying the support called his phone about some users not able to make purchases. He told them it's not too many users and can wait till the morning.

I started searching various keywords in Confluence from yesterday's meeting: ATS, PLC-A, PA/CIS, CBTC, etc. That's a rabbit hole, of curse. I skimmed a manual for train operators and similar documents. As I understood ATS-A is what people call internally CBTC – a train control system developed by Siemens. It includes equipment on the train (on-board), equipment in the tunnel (wayside), various servers gathering the signals from both, a control center operated by dispatchers, and various automatic systems like automatic train stop to prevent collisions. PA/CIS are the monochromic arrival displays on the A division stations. Those displays are hooked directly into Siemens' control system via separate network, and somehow it's hard for us to get access to that information. And then all that can be complicated by different systems used on different lines. ATS feed has sub-second latency and goes to some other old subsystem that provides public GTFS-rt feed used by Google Maps and other companies – that feed in turn has 20+ seconds latency. Plus it's a pull based feed. In general mood, the feeling about this Google's GTFS-rt format is not very positive.

So, my next project is to tap into that low latency ATS-A feed and try to re-create the system state for better quality data in our app (better than GTFS-rt). I say we should fix GTFS-rt so everyone benefits, but that might be too heavy a project for now. We will see. And then comes another strange requirement from Sunny: we actually don't want to be inconsistent with PA/CIS displays; that may cause too much confusion even if we predict better arrival times. This curbs my ambition of making seconds precise arrival times; you know, like in Europe, they have those countdown clocks counting seconds: 15, 14, 13, .. and you see the train arriving. In New York, we say arriving in 1 minute, and then "Arriving". I will see.

At home, I checked the mouse traps that I installed in the morning with cheese on them. All day I was afraid of finding my friendly mouse smashed by one of these traps: with blood, the mouse perhaps still alive, you know. I was amazed to find the traps empty without the cheese. I put another cheese, then looked at the traps more carefully, and realized I had to put the cheese on a hook; I did so. I found the cheese gone in two hours. Amazing. Either this mouse is smart, or my traps are no good. I put some more cheese for the night.

Localized all new interfaces in 6 languages. How did I do it? I typed in Google Translate something like:

In the application on the left tab click the “Send receipt” button

So to give it more context around the short phrase I was translating. And then looked at what it told me in the quotes in Italian, or Chinese, or whatever, and copy that, and crosscheck with deepl.com. 15 or 20 UI elements had to be translated this way. I showed B what I did in Chinese and surprisingly it was all good. I assumed it was alright for other languages as well.

Then Will asked me to research SMS pumping and figure out what to do. Sunny says we should just block everything except the US. He’s probably right, but I was still trying to find a way to keep international numbers. It makes tourist’s life so much easier. On the other hand, it’s just a suburban train – not that many tourists ride anyway. So I googled, ran some queries, computed some numbers, and made a proposal on what to do – I feel like an analyst at times. I like it. I have to think, have to write, have to use data in my thinking and come up with creative decisions. I sent the report and called it a day.

It got too hot, we realized with B in the evening, and we installed AC.

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.