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ValCanBuildon How I learned about corporate firewalls

Hah, of course!

ValCanBuildon How I learned about corporate firewalls

Thanks, appreciate the advice!

ValCanBuildon How I learned about corporate firewalls

Oh god - I hope I don't have to write a follow-up to this. There's probably a bunch of hidden other firewalls I don't handle but most often I've found 403 and 503 to be the most common.

ValCanBuildon How I learned about corporate firewalls

Hey, OP here - I'm open to advice about how best to handle this! I'm currently just opening a new window and writing the HTML to it.

What's the safest way to handle this? Open it in an iframe?

ValCanBuildon How I learned about corporate firewalls

OP here - I'm open to advice about how best to handle this! I'm currently just opening a new window and writing the HTML to it.

What's the safest way to handle this? Open it in an iframe?

ValCanBuildon How I learned about corporate firewalls

I've found often in my career that, sadly, learning things the hard way is usually the best way to remember the lessons.

ValCanBuildon How I learned about corporate firewalls

Oh god this is horrible!

Yeah, I can't believe how stupidly locked down some of these networks are.

I once had an employer said they needed a "whitelist" of websites we wanted to visit instead of a "blacklist" of ones we shouldn't. That was an interesting day...

ValCanBuildon Adapt or die – the aftermath of losing $3000 to card fraud

I agree, it's not great but I guess it's the price we pay for how easy it is to take money over the internet nowadays.

ValCanBuildon Forgot to nest a query – or “how we ended up email spamming our users”

I recently launched a product, called Thankbox.

Product idea is really simple - you can set up a Thankbox (like an online card) for someone and share it within your group of friends to put messages, images, gifs and cash in it. You then send it to the recipient.

We wanted to add a feature where the recipient could respond to everyone who had left messages on their card - a kind of "Thanks so much for your kind words" type thing.

We rolled it out to production. The first time it ran it spammed everyone who had ever left a message on any thankbox with the response. Luckily we just launched and we didn't have that many users.

I thought it'd be a learning experience worth sharing, though, so I wrote up a Twitter thread about it to share my embarassment as a learning experience.

ValCanBuildon US Secret Service: “Massive Fraud” Against State Unemployment Insurance Programs

Same thing is happening with the UK furlough scheme. Government is paying 80% of people's salaries while they're off work but some employers are actively defrauding the scheme and telling those people to work...

ValCanBuildon Show HN: Thankbox – collect messages and cash for team occasions

>And welcome to the frontend Thanks! I can't believe it took me so long to embrace it haha.

Yeah, so anyone that adds a message to a Thankbox can leave their email in order to get a link to edit their message before the box is sent. This is optional - I really only aim to collect data that's necessary.

I'm currently working on a feature to allow the recipient to respond to everyone who contributed (if they left their email) which I think would address what you mention.

ValCanBuildon Show HN: Thankbox – collect messages and cash for team occasions

Hi HN,

Thankbox is idea I started working on last year but had to park due to other commitments. At the start of March, when I realized that everyone is going to be working remotely, I decided to dedicate to it completely and get it out for teams to use.

The idea is super simple - it's a better, online alternative to the paper card + envelope collection that you'd have for a team member occasion. It's also great for remote groups of friends.

In 2 minutes you create a Thankbox for someone, share a link to your team to add messages, gifs & (optional) money contributions. Once it's done you pop in the recipients email and they get a secure link where they can see all the messages and claim any money as a gift card to whatever merchant they want.

On a technical note, this product has forced me to learn frontend coding, as I've been a pure native mobile engineer for ages. I've done this all in Vue.js (with Laravel in the backend) and have been having so much fun. Definitely more enjoyable than working on apps - the iteration cycle alone is incredible.

ValCanBuildon Show HN: Product Hunt for Niche Podcasts

I used the ListenNotes API for a previous startup idea I had and it was great. It's amazing how few (if any) podcast search APIs there are and ListenNotes is definitely a good example of one.

Wenbin also had a great blog post on "Good enough engineering" that deserves linking to: https://www.listennotes.com/blog/good-enough-engineering-to-...

ValCanBuildon Show HN: I compiled lists of book recommendations from people we look up to

This is an awesome idea! I've been thinking that a product like this should exist and have long been wondering how you could automate it. But maybe in the end you can't easily...

ValCanBuildon Show HN: Retool Templates – Custom internal tools with drag-and-drop components

Wow, this looks amazing. I might give it a go and see if I can replace my own internal crappy admin panel with this. Kudos for supporting GraphQL!

ValCanBuildon How do not disturb day can improve your productivity?

One of my previous jobs was at this company which was very inefficient with people's time. Everyone had access to everyone elses calendar and they'd keep booking your time in meetings so your calendar ended up like Swiss cheese - lots of 30 minute holes that were absolutely inadequate for getting any work done.

What I started to do was doing what this article mentions, but just for me - blocking out 2hr meetings every other day "with myself" in my calendar weeks in advance just so I can have a dedicated time to work.

ValCanBuildon Dependabot is joining GitHub

Massive congrats to the team! Well deserved, Dependabot is an awesome tool!

ValCanBuildon Why Do Hospitals Hate Sleep So Much?

I've been unfortunate enough to have my 2 year old daugther hospitalised 4 times already and every time, in every ward, she slept very little.

Constant sources of lights, machines that beep. I get they're serving a purpose but an oxygen monitor going off at full volume every 20 minutes, really? You're telling me that cannot be replaced with a smarter machine that just sends a signal directly to the nurses instead of beeping up the place?

After every hospital stay she fell asleep immediately when we got home and slept for over 12 hours just to recover.

ValCanBuildon Show HN: Curated – Find, share and discuss great content with friends

Hey everyone,

I'm one of the cofounders of Curated and I am happy to announce that we have just launched our app as an Android open beta.

It's an app where you can discover, share & discuss awesome content you find. We have support for books, podcasts, articles and videos.

We made this app because we believe the best way to find something you enjoy is to have it recommended to you. With Curated you can find out what your friends are reading, watching & listening to - giving you a fresh stream of content suggestions that you're likely to be interested in.

You can also use it as a reading or watch list to save things you want to look at later.

You can access the android beta from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rockspin.w... We're currently working on the iOS version.

We're also one of the companies in this year's Startup School - being there has really motivated us and helped us reach this point, so shout out to anyone who's part of it as well!