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askbill

24 karma · joined June 17, 2011

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/askbill; my proof: https://keybase.io/askbill/sigs/pK6j8fH3bvJY4vRgIgNuDt9AVdYoKOvD0zpq0CqOapY ]
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askbill··on The complicated futility of WordPress
We’re a custom dev shop with expertise in WordPress. Our biggest clients are ones that built a substantial business on WordPress then outgrew their site / dev / hosting and came looking for us. Gutenberg will never stop that evolution.

I’m thrilled they’re lowering the bar to manage sites and stay competitive in the marketplace. It’s enabling new businesses and filling a fresh pipeline for us.

WP isn’t limiting us at all. Build pipelines, bundlers, edge workers, js frameworks. It’s all the same. I don’t have to try to sell the advantages of a new CMS. And as a bonus, we already speak the same language as I’m building them a tailor fit WP that they’re already familiar with.

askbill··on The complicated futility of WordPress
We use WordPress with the Gutenberg editor and Gatsby Cloud. It’s been very nice to work with and the Gatsby Cloud team seems to pay a lot of attention to the editorial and deploy experience. We’re happy and this is how we’re building things today.
askbill··on Problems with low DNS TTLs
>The urban legend that DNS-based load balancing depends on TTLs (it doesn’t - since Netscape Navigator, clients pick a random IP from a RR set, and transparently try another one if they can’t connect)

That's just not how this works at all. While you could use RR records for this purpose, I believe the author is suggesting that load balancing will happen automatically when the client simply can't connect to one of the addresses. That's not load balancing. That's failover.

Additionally, most of the use cases for this that I'm aware of are Cname -> A record. This is to say, this method is being used with precision rather than RR.

I agree that running 60 second TTL's regardless of need is inefficient, but at a fast glance, the full argument doesn't hold up for me.

askbill··on Falcon 9 telemetry decoded by amateur radio group
Scott Manley has a pretty good video overview of the whole thing if you want a boot up: https://youtu.be/74_N163HyhA
askbill··on Mmhmm
I've tested it as well (seeing it on the latest Apple keynote) and have been having quality issues even when sharing slides via share screen, which is what they recommend if there's quality issues. Submitted a ticket around a week ago and haven't heard back yet.

Really excited at the possibility here. Staying tuned...

askbill··on Cloudflare was down
Felt like a BGP issue.
askbill··on YubiKey – Making secure login easy
The 2FA interaction from Duo is superior here.
askbill··on AOL To Lay Off 150 People, Mostly In Sales; Folding Joystiq, TUAW Into Engadget
Chris Grant left Joystiq to start Polygon shortly after Topolsky and team went to start The Verge.
askbill··on Checkr (YC S14) raises $9M to provide an API for background checks
Accurint, TLO and the big folks already all have API's for these. The tough part is getting access. The compliance checks are rigorous and typically it's not worth it for them to do this for people with low volumes.

It creates a nice gap in the market for someone like Checkr. As their volume grows, there's a great opportunity to shop around and even build your own.

In the TC article, Vince Wong mentions that the industry hasn't changed in several decades. The whole industry has really only existed for about 20 years, thinking back to Database Technologies and AutoTrack which was a pay by the minute dial up product into the 2000's. If he's referring to the innovation in terms of productizing an API, it's really the risk involved that's the challenge here.

I feel like it would be a lot easier for folks like LexisNexis and TransUnion to sell to someone creating this market than for them to manage the compliance that comes along with building it themselves.

askbill··on Amazon, in Threat to UPS, Tries Its Own Deliveries
I think this will happen, but with autonomously driven vehicles.

While you're at work, your car will leave and drive through an amazon warehouse at 1mph. Someone picks your order, loads it into the trunk of your slow moving vehicle which then returns to your office. End of the day, your goods are there.

Lots of problems to solve between where we are and there, but I do think that's where we're headed.

askbill··on Technichi: Macbook Subscription Service
The 30 seconds I spent thinking about the possibilities of laptop as a service were perhaps the happiest seconds of my day.
askbill··on Uber Increases Fares 2x in NYC
In NY, the governor must declare a state of emergency. This happend on Friday before the storm had hit.
askbill··on Lessons Netflix Learned from the AWS Storm
It sounds like they detected it but since so many components failed at once, the action was to page someone to have a look. I'm not convinced they can't actually do this, but rather were gun-shy about programmatically pulling the trigger.

Back to AWS, the control plane failures are concerning, killing the ability to deploy new resources. It's expensive to have this kind of capacity pre-deployed and I'm sure it bit many folks.