GingerlimeMy wife and I are wannabe-minimalists. We try to reduce how much we consume, make our home a bit more organized and get rid of excess. We also like vintage items, so it’s always hard. Next to my desk, I have an old calculator from the 60s or 70s (I guess) that I picked up at a flea-market a few years ago. It’s just cool, but serves no purpose. Maybe I should get rid of it, but it’s still there. Next to my own Nokia 8210 from 1998 or so… I somehow got attached to this phone.
I never thought I’ll write something negative about Bitwarden. I love it. It’s an incredible password manager, and I even created envwarden: a small open-source wrapper to handle server secrets with Bitwarden.
But I recently bumped into a small issue that looks like Security through obscurity to me. And I thought it was odd for a security-focused product.
The issue was that I couldn’t export the items in my company’s vault. Even though I had access to the cards [1].
I contacted Bitwarden about it, and they said that:
An Organization user cannot export the Organization’s Vault without being an Admin or Owner.
After trying to understand why, since I did have access to cards in my organization, so why couldn’t I export them? I was told:
We do not allow people to export the Organization Vault unless they are an Admin simply because this has been requested by demand from our customers. Being able to dump all passwords in one quick action is different than having to access every one individually to copy them out.
I explained that this seems like Security through obscurity, since I had vault access, and also it’s trivial to dump all passwords using the Bitwarden CLI anyway.
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.
There’s an expression in Hebrew: “Baltam”. It’s a shorthand form for something unplanned, or more precisely, it strongly implies: [something that is] impossible to plan. I think it has its roots in the military. In the battle field, you always have to account for some surprises. You cannot possibly have everything planned. Israelis are also (in)famous for improvising. Not so famous for planning ahead.
As an (ex?) Israeli, I recently felt awkward, essentially being accused of being overly bureaucratic. And by a German colleague, of all people. Can you imagine it?? :)
Ok, and just to clarify one thing, this post isn’t about cultural stereotypes, but rather trying to figure out a practical approach to a real problem that my team is facing with new ideas and features:
How do you deal with new tasks or ideas, especially small ones?
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.
This post has been on the back of my head for a couple of years now. I think we actually switched-off Intercom in 2016 or so… But the reasons should still stand now, or might even be stronger. Of course, things might have shifted, so please forgive me if some features are totally different by now.
For those who don’t know intercom.io (now intercom.com), well, I think you probably do know it, but maybe not by name. It’s the technology (or company) that adds those little “bubbles” on websites, with friendly faces offering to help.
Of course, intercom.io isn’t the only one now, and there are a few competitors in this space. The principle is pretty similar though. I think intercom was the most successful company doing this, or the first, or both. But it’s not really important. It’s mostly about intercom as a concept, rather than a specific implementation.
The short, simple, and most crucial reason: it didn’t work. How do I know? We A/B tested it. Over a fairly long time and a large number of people.
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.
The book piqued my curiosity, so I picked it up and took a peek at the first page. It was written by a artist at the peak of her career.
As a non-native speaker, I guess when I pronounce any of those words: pick, peek, peak, or pique, they all sound the same. So it’s even harder for me to clearly memorise. I mostly get it right, but can occasionally confuse some forms.
Especially peek and peak.
It doesn’t happen with meet and meat, feet and feat, leek and leak though. I wonder why.
I recently finished reading “Bad Blood – Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup”, by John Carreyrou. It’s a remarkable piece of investigative journalism and an amazingly grabbing read. I just couldn’t let it off my hands.
I think it particularly stood out, because the amazingly stark contrast with another book I just recently wrote about: “It doesn’t have to be crazy at work”, by the co-founders of Basecamp.
This isn’t exactly a standard type of post for this blog, but then perhaps I shouldn’t be too strict with myself as far as things I write about. After all, it’s my personal blog. I make (and break) the rules. And anyway, nobody reads it. If you are reading this, consider yourself one of a very select few.
I’m no health specialist, and this is just a sample of one, and much less scientific than my A/B testing for coffee (which wasn’t scientific at all), but I’m totally crazy about Guava, and what I perceive to be its health benefits for me.
Growing up in Israel, guavas were kinda pungent, slightly mushy, yellowish fruit. It was also one of those things the local Israeli folklore qualified as “either you love it or you hate it” (we have no Marmite in Israel, not to my knowledge anyway. Or maybe there’s a strong consensus and everyone hates it? anyway, I digress).
I guess I was in the “love it” camp, but I don’t recall being particularly crazy about it either. I think the local wisdom was also that it causes constipation, so I guess I tried not to have too much of it.
I no longer live in Israel. But I also don’t come across Guavas. At all.
I lived in London for a number of years, and I don’t recall eating any there, or even seeing them. Maybe pink, artificial guava juice. And I now live in Berlin for several years, and I can’t think of seeing any here either. How come??
I do see them everywhere in Thailand and Vietnam though. It’s literally around every street corner. Every fruit stand would typically have them besides Papayas, Pineapples and Watermelon. You can also have a proper, fresh, guava juice or shake in lots of places.
