smugworth

The risk of counterfeits means I will rarely buy anything electronic from Amazon.

On the other hand, take a category like pet toys. Cheap plastic things where I'm not concerned with getting the genuine article, like a collapsible dog bowl. There are dozens of identical "brands" with thrown-together phonetic names for an entirely identical product with slight price differences. How do I began to choose? And who's to say any of them are produced with safe materials?

I'd really like to know how well Amazon's "put anything on the digital shelf" strategy works over a curated product inventory. Exceedingly well, I suspect, but it seems like the blowback over poor product will continue increasing.

If the tire had closed sidewalls, you'd never know someone had the new tires without obtrusive labelling. Open sidewalls market themselves, not only do you see it's a different tire, you see it's an entirely different tire design that's relatively easy to comprehend the benefit of even if you know nothing about them.

I love F-strings, my only gripe is the chosen syntax for invoking them. For starters, F may or may not be capitalized, so these two lines are identical.

  F"My string with {interpolated_value}"
  f'My string with {interpolated_value}'

Like using apostrophes or quotation marks to enclose strings (or F-strings), I find myself wasting time questioning the trivial notion of whether to capitalize or not.

I think Groovy's syntax is great, where quotation marks denote an interpolated string, and apostrophes denote a plain old string.

  "This is my ${interpolated_value} string"
  'This is my plain old string'

But these are nitpicks, and it's really too late to implement something like that.

Funny you should mention Kafka. Jay Kreps, Jun Rao, and Neha Narkhede, formerly of LinkedIn who worked on Kafka, left to form Confluent. They provide support, managed cloud, and licenses for their own flavors of Kafka and ecosystem add-ons, and recently made license changes to their open source add-ons to block providers like AWS from offering them as SaaS as well.

It always seems to me like security solutions rarely take into account usability and user experience. Even something which should be simple like configuring a client to use SSL over plaintext can block productivity for a multitude of reasons until you finally put all the pieces together correctly.

Maybe it's out of necessity, because convenience features would be less secure. Maybe there's not much overlap between those concerned with security and those concerned with ease-of-use, except for cases where companies can develop tools that encourage good security practices while exposing the end user to other risks (e.g. password vaults with one entrypoint).

So what you end up with is people gravitating towards bad security practices and using shortcuts because it's a PITA to maintain the good ones. Let's skip using SSL because we need to get work done instead of troubleshooting the dozen possible misconfigurations. I'll use a really short password for my AppleTV account because it's too hard to type the damn thing with the on-screen remote. I'm tired of getting a 2FA code 50 times a day to get work done, so I'll implement a hot key to generate it from the command line.

Seems like ease-of-use for security solutions should be almost as much of a priority as the security implementation itself in some cases.

> I love the concepts Kafka defines so clearly, but the software is too complex and have dozens of knobs you have to adjust.

This is one of our biggest headaches, and it's not even that a Kafka server itself is so configurable. We have hundreds of teams writing client applications, and jumping on bridges because Kafka clients have poor configurations is getting old. Too many knobs to twiddle, but I guess that's what happens if you're expecting to be able to tweak for high performance.

I think the strategy of "monolith first" isn't a poor one, but it is a little humorous to see someone who makes part of their living helping companies break apart their monoliths advocate it.

I'm working on a team for a platform built on open-source software which actively replaced a previous IBM solution, and there are more services from other vendors being phased out in favor of internally developed tooling.

Seems like a good long-term investment, in an era where people are constantly criticizing CEOs for short-term cash-grabs. Why shackle yourself to a vendor if you plan to be around for awhile.

C'mon man, I hadn't had my coffee yet that morning.