Category: Technology

Bunq freeloading: joint accounts now cost at least 59.9% more, your privacy doesn’t matter either

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 4 April, 2020

My wife and I joined Bunq a couple of months ago. Bunq is a fairly new European bank, based in the Netherlands. It’s one of the new breed of mobile-first banks that offer a more modern experience. It has a neat mobile app with some clever features like dynamic sub-accounts, spend tracking, better credit card control and more.

Their slogan is “bank of the free”. Whilst other banks might not charge you to open an account or use it, Bunq actually does charge for its account. However, the “free” part, as far as I understood it, is that by paying bunq, they can provide a service to you, rather than find ways to monetize you (e.g. by advertising, selling your data).

As you can see from the marketing spiel, they value transparency and don’t do any dirty business.

Until they do…

Technology work

Who DOESN’T want to be hired?

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 29 February, 2020

There’s a famous thread on Hacker News called “Who wants to be hired?” once every month on the 1st day of the month. Well, famous amongst HN readers I guess. It usually features hundreds of job ads for mostly tech-related jobs.

The common climate seems to suggest that it’s a sellers market. i.e. companies are chasing job applicants, who can pick and choose.

It’s largely true for lots of people with great skills that are high in-demand. But it’s not like the market is completely bone-dry from candidates. Companies might try to “head hunt” some select few people, maybe those already working at the top tech companies (meaning, they at least managed to get through the hard screening process). Otherwise, it’s not uncommon for companies who post job ads to get dozens, hundreds or even thousands of applicants.

Now, I’m not an authority on hiring. I hired only a handful of people so far. But it’s a mind-blowing eye-opening experience to hire even for the smallest freelance jobs.

From my standpoint, it’s shocking how many candidates can (and do) get eliminated within a few seconds.

If you’re applying for a job. Any job. Your chance of getting screened-out within seconds is extremely high, unless you follow some fairly basic rules. And trust me, these are BASIC. Dumb. Simple. Stupid stupid simple.

privacy Security Technology

Does Apple care about your privacy?

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 23 February, 2020

I’ve been an Apple user since 2005 or so. Well, unless you consider my Apple IIc, in which case I guess I was a customer since 1987. I managed to negotiate with my parents to bundle two birthdays (my 12th and my Bar Mitzvah, that’s a big one) to get one of those. It was a turning point in my life… But I digress.

I really admire Apple’s push for security without compromising convenience, with Touch ID and Face ID making things safer. Apple’s touting their efforts to reduce web tracking, and Tim Cook publicly stated that “We at Apple believe that privacy is a fundamental human right”.

But when it comes to their own backyard, does Apple even meet the requirements of the GDPR? (The European privacy directive). I don’t think so.

coffee marketing Technology

The cup-of-coffee pricing fallacy

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 2 February, 2020

If you’re lurking on HackerNews, or are interesting in entrepreneurship, you might occasionally bump into something like this

Starbucks coffee is $2.45 + taxes. $100/mo is less than a cup of coffee a day.

And it’s very tempting — and somehow logical — to consider how much money we might spend without thinking too much about, and conclude that we should be willing to do the same with online services.

This coffee costs just like a cup of a coffee

And for some services, we might actually think in similar terms. Hey, my Netflix is only 4 cups of coffee per month. Amazon Prime maybe 2…

But why aren’t we spending it just as easily on other online services, software licenses and apps?

Technology UX

Remember me

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 12 August, 2019

No, it’s not about the song …

It’s about those tickboxes we’re all so familiar with, and yet, are we?

Remember me. Keep me Signed-in. Keep me logged in.

Some people always tick them. Some people never tick them.

Most people haven’t got a clue what they do.

docker hosting Security Technology

envwarden and kubernetes secrets

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 21 July, 2019

envwarden is a simple open-source script that lets you manage your server secrets with Bitwarden.

Introducing envwarden – manage your server secrets with Bitwarden

hosting-compose (or) the sad buyout of Webfaction

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 24 May, 2019

docker-compose is one of those essential tools that make working with docker so much better. I do use docker directly occasionally, but anything non-trivial, I’d reach out docker-compose immediately. It allows you to “glue” things together and describe the stack in such a neat way.

I currently handle my dev environments with docker-compose, and even some live and staging deployments (like thumbor). I also manage remote database backups with it (using restic, postgresql, stunnel, redis and rdb-tools). In the latter example, it saves me from installing different versions of the database clients and connectors. I am able to instantly upgrade them, and then connect to the remote databases and back them up or restore. It makes the backup system itself immutable and disposable.

Recently however, I started using docker-compose for something that I haven’t considered before: a replacement for shared hosting.

a snippet of my hosting-compose docker-compose.yml

Why?

marketing optimization Technology

SEO optimization for suckers

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 18 March, 2019

There’s a famous Jewish, Yiddish phrase:

Man plans and God laughs.

I think the same applies to SEO and Google nowadays.

Man SEOs and Google laughs.

I was always a bit suspicious of SEO, and let’s face it, the sea of snake-oil SEO salesmen doesn’t help to establish credibility here, does it?

But I think that I’m becoming even more cynical of it every day.

The problem with getting good advice for SEO is that there’s no money in telling you “Don’t do anything”, “It’s a waste of time”, or “Focus on valuable content for your audience”. But there’s tons of money in doing a site audit, in telling you about best strategies to extract link juice, or why alt tags for images are important.

But it works

rails Security Technology

simple and secure cron using AWS Lambda

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 13 February, 2019

Many apps require some tasks to execute on schedule: cleaning up inactive user accounts, generating daily, weekly or monthly reports, sending out reminders via email, etc.

cron is a simple and trusted scheduler for unix, and used on pretty much any unix-based system I come across.

So cron seems like a natural candidate for triggering those job executions. But it’s not always the best solution.

In our case, we’ve used the whenever gem for rails successfully for a long while. The gem acts as a cron DSL and lets you inject and manage cron entries from your rails app.

The problem starts however when you start growing, and your app spans more than one server. Or even if you only use one server, but want to be able to fail-over, or switch from one server to another.

Why? suddenly you have more than one cron launcher, and jobs that should execute once end up executing once on each server. This can cause some weird and unexpected lockouts, duplication and other issues.

So what’s the alternative?

food marketing Technology

marketing lessons from the street market

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 27 January, 2019

When you walk inside the Ben Tanh market in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, you’ll eventually end up inside the food area. There are probably hundreds of stalls selling local food. Lots of delicious Banh Mi sandwiches, noodle soups, fruit juices and summer rolls.

One thing that you can’t ignore however, is that as soon as you walk around, you’ll get approached by one of the stall owners. They’ll simply hand you the menu to choose from.