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beny23

577 karma · joined June 6, 2020

Pragmatic software engineer with lots of hats
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beny23··on Webbol: A minimal static web server written in COBOL
Love this!!! Any tips for learning cobol?
beny23··on A 2FA app that tells you when you get `314159` (2024)
Giving a random app your 2FA secrets? Raises eyebrow…
beny23··on JavaScript in SVGs
Sounds like an attack vector
beny23··on Will Cyber Security Be Replaced by AI?
Betteridge’s Law in action ;-)
beny23··on The legend of the ten-times developer
Really liked Jon talking about the importance of experience in development. I just wanted to add that it’s also important to consider experience on the system. Even the most talented developers will need time to find their feet if they’ve only worked with a system for a few months.

So don’t treat developers as replaceable resources! If you fire an experienced team because you found some cheaper bums on seats elsewhere, you’ll usually pay the price!

beny23··on Show HN: Merge to earn – reward system for open source development
Of course nobody would exploit this by submitting a PR that just deleted the failing test…

Adding money to the mix or automating rewards is asking for abuse and would decrease the quality of the software.

Also, which open source project is awash with money that could afford to pay out?

I think this (monetisation/crypto) is a solution looking for a problem and open source isn’t it…

beny23··on Jetstack Paranoia: A New Open-Source Tool for Container Image Security
I feel a bit conned by the headline, it would be better to say "verifying CA certs in images"
beny23··on Ask HN: 'If found, please return' on phone lock screen?
And if it gets stolen, the villain knows where you live and can rob your house too…
beny23··on Less is more agile
The problem is that all too often do customers think they know what they want but actually have NFC what they need.

Unless there is a constructive dialogue between the people who build it and the people that want it, it will end disastrously. Just think of all the failed white elephant projects that get “negotiated” on the golf course.

Until there’s an acceptance that being agile isn’t just something developers do but has to be adopted by the whole org, it’s not going to work. I know it sounds a bit dreamy but I’ve worked in big orgs that did agile rather well, so it is possible…

beny23··on Less is more agile
I used to work in banks where you had teams of architects create high level design (HLD) docs that get turned over to the design team to produce low level designs (LLD) that the get turned over to developers how are meant to write the code, then to be turned over to the testing team. With massive handover meetings at every stage and forests of paper for milestone documentation that had to be signed off.

Never had my soul be destroyed as completely and I seen such a massive waste of time and money.

beny23··on Less is more agile
Sounds to me that the artificial crunch is the problem. And if you have the capability to deploy quickly, I don’t see any value in sprints they tend to artificially delay deployments, reviews or retrospectives. If something needs talking about, don’t wait for a ceremony in a week and a half when everyone has forgotten about it.

I’ve been part of teams working this way without sprints and artificial crunch on mature and large scale services, so it really isn’t a MVP/startup only deal…

beny23··on Less is more agile
I think Martin Fowler said it best: SAFe is “Shitty Agile For enterprises”
beny23··on Less is more agile
I’m not a fan of ceremonies/rituals and always have to laugh when looking up the dictionary definition of ceremony/ritual which implies something that gets because “we’ve always done it” but is actually pointless. Pretty much on the nose. If something is useless, then change it!
beny23··on Less is more agile
The worst thing about Agile is the commercialisation that came with agile training coaches and certifications. It always boggles my mind when realising how many people think “agile” means sprints, backlog grooming, Fibonacci sizing or planning poker and not what’s in the manifesto.

When you take it back to its roots and cut out all the Scrum or SAFe nonsense and adapt it to your team it can really work.

Note, I’m not saying estimates are bad per se and can imagine teams for whom it does work, but it would have to be something that the team is happy with not an impose-from-above methodology…

beny23··on Less is more agile
I think the main thing about agile is a plan-do-study-act cycle than can be adapted to anything even project management. The trick is not to think I can just adopt a process and will then be agile. It always has to be adapted to context and what works for you.

As to CI/CD pipelines: I think a centralised devops team that blocks everyone is as much an anti pattern as a wild-west approach where 3 teams operate 4 different CI/CD tech stacks. There is much to be said about building a platform (when the size of the operation is big enough to warrant it) and using golden paths or paved roads.

beny23··on Denial of Service Vulnerability in Envoy Proxy – CVE-2022-29225
Looks to be only impacted if using decompressors. Still TIL 5GB of zeros compress to 4K using brotli, that’s impressive
beny23··on GitHub: Head no longer resolves to the main branch?
I suspect this will break a fair amount of Infrastructure as Code pipelines
beny23··on NCSC – Protecting a country for fun and profit
From a security point of view it is absolutely heartwarming to see such an open, no-nonsense advice by NCSC. Security responses should NOT be running round like headless chickens driven by fear and the latest blogpost with cool logo and "the world is going to end" advice from security snake oil merchants. And I'm still laughing at "Adequate Pernicious Toerag".
beny23··on Something New Is Brewing
Oh god no

> relax, we’ll use a low-energy proof of stake chain

But someone will need to put up stakes. How long before you can bid to buy “is-odd” and everyone wanting to use it paying you a small fee. Crypto style libertarianism and open source freedom are not compatible….

beny23··on On the Weaponisation of Open Source
I’m afraid I don’t know either - it came up on a google image search for the terms “software war” and was marked Creative Commons…
beny23··on On the Weaponisation of Open Source
Hello, author here. I do think the open source licence is framed to be non-discriminatory and I think that’s not a bad thing. Discrimination lends itself to politicisation and in turn division. And I think an ecosystem where we have lots of division is not good. What would happen if two interdependent projects suddenly had conflicting political requirements?
beny23··on Terraform-AWS-modules/Terraform-AWS-eks transitions to non-free license
While I completely abhor the invasion, I can't help but feeling that the licence (and equally important) accompanying code change - https://github.com/terraform-aws-modules/terraform-aws-eks/b... - feels like a weaponisation of open source, and I think this is a dangerous thing to do. I do think that with change of "additional terms & conditions" to "additional information", it still feels an ethically dangerous place to be.

I would not be happy if a library codifies political statements. What could be next? Conditions that state you agree to vote for/against Trump, that you disagree with homosexuality or are against transphobia. Note, I'm not accusing anyone of having those views neither am I commenting on them, they merely serve as an example of the dangers of discriminating.

Dependencies and supply chain attacks are the big thing - and while dependency scanning and pinning are an important component, but I don't think it is possible to use open source libs at scale without a certain amount of trust. I work on a platform where there are hundreds of teams and thousands of microservices. I'm now trying to think how we can assess the risk of thousands of dependencies and millions of lines of code. Without trust, the only way that's possible is to fork all libs, prevent open source and generally kill off any agility and velocity. My problem is that this weaponisation is killing off trust. It's not about sitting on the fence or taking sides in a war. It's about what open source has achieved over the last 30 years and I think that's now more at risk than before…

beny23··on Terraform-AWS-modules: Made it clear that we stand with Ukraine
I don't think it can call itself an open source licence anymore, because isn't there a part of OS that says a licence is only open if it isn't restrictive?
beny23··on Terraform-AWS-modules: Made it clear that we stand with Ukraine
I think weaponising open source, however well intentioned sets a dangerous precedent. Where will it end? Would we exclude political parties or religions? I think it is dangerous…
beny23··on OpenSSL security advisory: Infinite loop reachable when parsing certificates
I wouldn't have thought this an issue if you're behind an AWS WAF or LB? (and assuming AWS is patched already)
beny23··on Piercing the Cloud Armor – The 8KB Bypass in Google Cloud Platform WAF
Don’t know about google but in AWS the equivalent rule only looks at the first 8k of the body. There’s a separate rule for the header and another rule to block requests with header size exceeding n KB. If you allowed large headers then you could prevent the header rules too, but IIRC by default it doesn’t. Besides most web infrastructure would barf at huge headers…
beny23··on Piercing the Cloud Armor – The 8KB Bypass in Google Cloud Platform WAF
Typically query string sizes are limited to 2K
beny23··on Compromising Angular via expired NPM publisher email domains
Would be interesting to draw up a list of package registries and whether they require MFA…
beny23··on Alfa Romeo thinks attaching NFTs to cars can improve resale value
I guess I’ll sell the NFT and keep the car as a cheap alternative to making car payments.
beny23··on Will Web3 reinvent the internet business?
Seems a candidate for “Betteridge's law of headlines”
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