It’s good practice to run the deployment pipeline on a different server from the application host(s) so that the deployment instances can be kept private, unlike the public app hosts, and therefore can be better protected from external bad actors. It is also good practice because this separation of concerns means the deployment pipeline survives even if the app servers need to be torn down and reprovisioned.

Of course you will need some kind of agent running on the app servers to be able to receive the files, but that might be as simple as an SSH session for file transfer.

Yes, exactly that.

That’s probably okay! =) There’s some level of pragmatism, depending on the sort of project you’re working on.

If it’s a big app with lots of users, you should use automation because it helps reliability.

If there are lots of developers, you should use automation because it helps keep everyone organised and avoids human mistakes.

But if it’s a small thing with a few devs, or especially a personal project, it might be easier to do without :)

Sure, but having a hands-off pipeline for it which runs automatically is where the value is at.

Means that there’s predictability and control in what is being done, and once the pipeline is built it’s as easy as a single button press to release.

How many times when doing it manually have you been like “Oh shit, I just FTPd the WRONG STUFF up to production!” - I know I have. Or even worse you do that and don’t notice you did it.

Automation takes a lot of the risk out.

I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with the program at all =)

Modern webapp deployment approach is typically to have an automated continuous build and deployment pipeline triggered from source control, which deploys into a staging environment for testing, and then promotes the same precise tested artifacts to production. Probably all in the cloud too.

Compared to that, manually FTPing the files up to the server seems ridiculously antiquated, to the extent that newbies in the biz can’t even believe we ever did it that way. But it’s genuinely what we were all doing not so long ago.

Thanks for the confirmation that Buldak is, then, not really for me :)

Haha yeah, fair enough. Applogies for turning your deserved whinge into a serious question.

Wrangling annoying customers is always the most annoying part of the job isn’t it. How nice it would be to spend more time programming…

Technical requirements are often ambiguous when written as free text, the way someone would speak them, because as you have discovered the free text fails to capture where the linguistic stress would be that disambiguates in speech.

Instead, I suggest using a format that is more suited to text.

I would recommend a table. Email the customer back with your current interpretation of the requirements, with a column for outcome and a column for value. Ask them to check and sign off on the table, or to correct the table where it is wrong.

Example:

There are edge-cases with if outcome can be "Complete or Cncelled

I’ve basically decided to give up on Buldak.

I like spicy food, generally, but I ate the black one too and it was all spice and no taste.

I then tried one that was supposed to be cheese flavour (and not even the spicy cheese flavour, just regular normal cheese) and that was also somehow just spicy in a really boring way.

Yes, it absolutely is automated.

There are bots running constantly looking for things that match patterns for exploitable credentials in public commits.

AWS credentials

SSH keys

Crypto wallets

Bank card info

If you push secrets to a public github repo, they will be exploited almost immediately.

He’s not gonna shoot

As a developer who has worked on similar systems, I can see why it likely ended up that way. Not justifying it, only understanding it.

In the case of banks, it’s likely that;

• They needed to make 2FA mandatory for all customers, rather than opt-in. This means they needed an MFA method which a person of any technical competency can use. SMS is the “lowest common denominator” here, so they chose it.

• The cost of sending SMS messages is high, but banks are (unsurprisingly) rich and can afford it

It would be great if banks offered better MFA methods, but development time in old-school banks is often ridiculously long as it is a very risk-averse industry that is also slowed down a lot by bureaucracy. It’s likely they would choose something else on the roadmap, and stick with SMS as simply “good enough”

Looks so cool, but imagine if they need to drain the pool for any reason! Thousands of guests will be upset.

Could have been four separate pools and way more practical.

That Cloudflare were justifiably unhappy with the situation and wanted to take action is fine.

What’s not fine is how they approached that problem.

In my opinion, the right thing for Cloudflare to do would have been to have an open and honest conversation and set clear expectations and dates.

Example:

"We have recently conducted a review of your account and found your usage pattern far exceeds the expected levels for your plan. This usage is not sustainable for us, and to continue to provide you with service we must move you to plan x at a cost of y.

If no agreement is reached by [date x] your service will be suspended on [date y]."

Clear deadlines and clear expectations. Doesn’t that sound a lot better than giving someone the run-around, and then childishly pulling the plug when a competitor’s name is mentioned?

fi-nyan-shul advisor

Oh my God, he just ran in

Yes, but ascertaining liability and securing a payout is a process that may take many years of being dragged through the courts, if it is even successful at all.

The government making money available immediately does help get things going with less uncertainty about who can foot the bill.

Also paid anti-virus.

True facts lol

The article talks about factors like type of game and advancements in technology, but doesn’t mention what is surely a big factor - the age of their audience.

My personal intuition is that 10 to 20 years is the sweet spot because those people who played the original as a teenager will now be in their 20s and 30s, where they have disposable income and plenty of desire to spend it on reliving those happy childhood memories.

If you wait too long for a remake, the market will shrink again because those original players will be more likely to have family, other commitments, and less time to game.