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mlakewood

46 karma · joined December 10, 2012

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mlakewood··on Trying to find a blog series on company strategy
Found it! just in case somebody else is yelling into the void

https://medium.com/wardleymaps/on-being-lost-2ef5f05eb1ec

mlakewood··on A Child’s Garden of Inter-Service Authentication Schemes
FYI: The article seems to make a comment that implies that SPIFFE is only available to Kubernetes, this isnt the case and SPIFFE is explicitly designed for heterogenous environments.
mlakewood··on Securing Microservices
Thats the primary motivation and main focus for SPIFFE. Providing service to service identity. However because its not breaking any of the standards its potentially applicable in other contexts. The SPIFFE SVID (the certificate standard) doesnt do anything wierd or different with TLS certs (which is actually a strength) it more sets out a way to use the current existing cert infrastructure to provide identity.
mlakewood··on Securing Microservices
There is a new standard forming for providing identity with this kind of architecture called SPIFFE. Check it out at https://spiffe.io. Its basically mutual TLS but with identity baked into the certificate. Along with what the certificate looks like, there is a reference implementation called Spire, to generate and distribute the certificates.
mlakewood··on AWS Organizations: Centrally Manage Multiple AWS Accounts
This is also big as a lot of account limits are on a per account basis.
mlakewood··on A tool for thought
I think comparing the compilation of a C hello world program to a web-project, with inbuilt test scaffolding, serving of generated content, communication across a network and safe multi-threading of the network stack is a little bit of a mismatch. If you build a C project with all of that in it, I think that it would be a bit more than a 1 liner, and it would take a little while longer to compile. Sure not as long as the clojure project to compile but not 3 milliseconds.
mlakewood··on Tesla Beats Delivery Forecast with 52% Quarterly Surge
I think the real question is why would it want to? Ferrari is a specialist marque that, like most other super luxury brands, the parent company (in this case Fiat I believe) keeps around for the glow it gives its cheaper cars. There really isnt a lot of money is super expensive cars compared to the mass market. Have a look at the history of all the expensive car companies.. none of them are still standing.
mlakewood··on Sim-Template – A Clojure Template for Simulation Testing
Simulation testing using simulant is very intriguing to me. But up till now its been pretty impenetrable. Glad to see somebody picking up the education baton.
mlakewood··on Old New Jersey Factory to House Earth’s Largest Vertical Farm
There was an article I read a little while ago about urban/vertical farming in Detroit. It was saying that traditionally, like you say the economics of cost of transport vs cost of land has meant that farms are placed further out where land is cheaper. In Detroit, apparently the land in inexpensive enough in the inner city that the economics dont work out that way. I think its interesting to think in a macro scale what a might higher prices of oil will do to those economies.
mlakewood··on Unit tests fail when run in Australia
I think the Sillier one is Broken Hill. That although its in NSW is on the SA Timezone.
mlakewood··on Ask HN: What's left for early startup engineers as the company grows?
In my experience, what other people thought you communicated and what you thought communicated are often very far apart. Its an amazing thing, Humans are so good at communication but also so bad. I know with my significant other multiple times we have both got upset with each other for actions/inaction that we thought we had communicated with the other, when either we hadnt or hadnt clearly. We have been together for 10 years, and it still happens.

Communication is possibly the hardest thing to get right between two people, because it seems so effortless.

mlakewood··on Show HN: Damocles – An Erlang library for distribution testing
Ahh I see. So all the connecting up of what listens on which interface is done somewhere else. This just created failures at the network level in some scriptable manner. Everything else is up to you.

Makes sense.

What I was thinking about was actually setting up a proxy so you could mess with or record specific requests, and then if all the services in a system were wrapped like that then you would be able to do some really cool integration testing.

mlakewood··on Show HN: Damocles – An Erlang library for distribution testing
I've been thinking of doing something like this for a while. However I want to be able to get datapoints on all the requests going though the proxies so that I can run integration tests on a bunch of distributed systems working together, and then be able to induce failures as well.

The other thing that I think would be great would be to add generative testing to this, to help with testing. Although im not sure how you would model the system, as I havent done much generative testing.

mlakewood··on HN Salary Survey Results Visualized
I think some of the data in here is not quite accurate. Apparently there is a lead software engineer on $750,000 USD which doesnt seem right.
mlakewood··on Replicated PostgreSQL with pgpool2
AFAIK the only solution to this in the MySQL world is MHA. And that seems not that much better than the way Postgres does it. Which Relational databases are you referring to that do have this?
mlakewood··on Make pull requests easier
Oh awesome! thanks for the links!
mlakewood··on Make pull requests easier
I think at some point it could be. At the moment im trying to make it work for Github pull requests as thats the need I can see.

In the future working for something like bitbucket or arbitrary git repos I think would be a feature that could be added.

mlakewood··on Make pull requests easier
Hi! that sounds awesome! Email sent your way!
mlakewood··on Make pull requests easier
Thanks! I think what you're saying is the details about the side-by-side view should be further up the page and the idea's around context should be more fleshed out?

I'll also work on some better screen shots!

Thanks once again for taking the time!

mlakewood··on Make pull requests easier
As a mac and linux user those would be my first targets. Im planning on writing it using clojure and embedding webkit in it (as im a web guy first) ala light-table. So moving from one platform to another should be trivial.
mlakewood··on Make pull requests easier
Email sent! Thanks!

For the other readers.

First up. I find inline diff's really hard to comprehend once they get past a few lines changed here and there. This might be just me, but anecdotally I've found other devs to also feel this.

The better context and navigation is all about seeing the change in the context of the code-base. Small code changes can have large effects. Indifference will allow you to navigate the whole code base rather than just the single change set +/- a few lines. In this way you can get a better handle on what has changed and how it will effect the rest of the codebase.

mlakewood··on Make pull requests easier
Thanks for the feedback! I'll work on some better screenshots.

Is there anything from the content that you dont understand, that I could make clearer?

Is this something that you would use?

mlakewood··on Make pull requests easier
Reviewing pull requests in github with the inline diff is a pain. You also don't get enough context to do a correct review. This app is a way to fix that.

At this point I want to validate the idea. If you're interested in this please leave your email address. or a comment below. Any feedback would be great!

mlakewood··on Ask HN: How do you transfer money internationally?
I've found citibank, apart from thier not great website, have a pretty good deal. I have a US account and an Oz account and transferring between then is instantaneous. The obviously take a cut on the exchange rate, but its been pretty good IMHO.
mlakewood··on Rabbit-proof fence
ahh... there wasnt a lot of people to need to get through there.
mlakewood··on Packaging a Flask web app
Although this is one way of packaging a flask app, there are quite a few others that I want to go into in later articles. comments below if there are any you would like to know about specifically. I was thinking packaging in a .deb file, pure source deployment, and perhaps source deployment with some configuration management, perhaps Salt?
mlakewood··on Ask HN: Webdevs, designers: what devtools should we (Mozilla) build in Firefox?
After having to hunt in google chrome dev tools for memory leaks from a single page JavaScript app, memory dumps with a separate tool that can give you a really good insight into what hanging around would be great. I found that if you were doing snapshots of website states and the memory footprint was significant then the browser just wasnt able to handle displaying all of them at once. I know this is an issue kinda for chrome, but I figure Firefox might have a similar problem. And single page/MVC javascript apps are only going to get more demanding.
mlakewood··on Covering the whole country with Google Fiber could cost $140 billion
Australia is in the midst of doing pretty much exactly this. Called the NBN. One of the main political parties who are in their second term started it, and hopefully they get a third term so they can finish it. The other Political Party has said that if they get in they will stop the rollout. It's been budgeted at approx $40 billion+ to do.

Hopefully it will complete as at the moment we dont have any data guarantee's for the last mile. In fact if you can get a dial tone on the 100 year old copper, thats good enough for the old telco(which was privatised about 10 - 15 years ago).

My opinion (and its different in australia due to our different views on private vs public investment, market size, country size, population etc) is that most large infrastructure just cant/wont be built by private investment, because it just isnt profitable. Diving into it I would say that most power plants, telecommunication, water infrastructure, roads etc are mostly funded by the government even if that is through tax breaks etc. So if the citizens want infrastructure the govt needs to pony up the cash.

It also hasnt been lost on a lot of people here, that we sold off our government owned telco 10-15 years ago, only to create a new one not to long after. Ahh The cycles of govt.