As a 16-year-old, I made the decision to leave the UK due to my dislike of the politics and direction of Great Britain under the Conservative party, particularly under the leadership of Theresa May as Home Secretary. This decision was further solidified by the Brexit referendum and the actions of subsequent leaders such as Boris Johnson and Priti Patel. Over the past decade, my views have only been reinforced by the events and developments in British politics.

According to 419eater.com, scambaiting is “enter[ing] into a dialogue with scammers, simply to waste their time and resources. Whilst you are doing this, you will be helping to keep the scammers away from real potential victims and screwing around with the minds of deserving thieves”. These scammers aim to take advantage of the elderly, people with disabilities, and others. I occasionally engage in scambaiting, but particularly enjoyed the encounter I document here.

RSS, or RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary and most recently Really Simple Syndication, is a standard that allows readers to aggregate multiple blogs into one ‘reader’ interface, which displays these blogs posts in a standardised way. It’s an old standard, developed in 1999 at Netscape for use on their my.netscape.com portal. It allowed users to import RSS feeds from other websites and have their content appear on Netscapes feed syndicator.

Having speed makes others happy in the short term. Having velocity makes you happy in the long term. One of the biggest lessons I learned was to prioritise ‘velocity’ over ‘speed’. This probably sounds meaningless to you, but allow me to explain. At some point around a year ago, during my one to ones with my manager, we were discussing the fact that I was heavily distracted and finding it tough to concentrate on tasks I wanted to work on.

Knowing when and how to make breaking changes is tough. It is even tougher in the Go ecosystem. After being burned by making a breaking change and annoying people, I’m going to investigate how best to mitigate this annoyance. Disclaimer: This is mostly opinion, and only my opinion. This post is not associated with my employer in any way. You can contact me @normankev141 What even is a breaking change, anyway A simple definition of a breaking change is any change you make to your code that could break other code which directly or indirectly depends on it.

As a kid, I used to love playing Minecraft. I was technically precocious from a fairly young age, and naturally gravitated to attempting to host my own Minecraft server for me and my band of geeky pals to play on. The problem was, I had no idea what port forwarding was, nor how to log into a router. The solution I found was about as novel as it was dumb.

A long time ago I worked for an ISP as Tier 1 technical support. This is just one of many stories I have from my time here. These were originally published elsewhere on the internet, but are being reworked and republished here. Sometimes, the degree of insanity in a conversation can reach such a fever pitch that it is hard to recover. Sometimes, people can say things that leave you so flabbergasted that you aren’t sure if you’re being trolled or not.

I recently worked on a task which involved checking every single value in a Redis instance, and modifying ones which matched a certain format. This script needed to run in a fairly timely fashion, as it would need to be run frequently. Making requests sequentially didn’t cut it, so I learned about pipelining. This simple optimization meant that a script which I originally calculated to take over 50 hours to run ran in under 4 minutes!

It all started when I noticed these particular stickers absolutely everywhere all over London. I’d also seen them in other European cities! I was never curious enough to actually search for them, to figure out their meaning, so I just noticed, acknowledged my curiosity and moved on. I later did discover their meaning, but the way I discovered this was something I never expected. The ‘why suspect us.’ sticker in question

I personally don’t pay a massive amount of attention to cryptocurrency. This isn’t because I dislike them, more because they’re just not that interesting to me at the moment. I’ll occasionally hear about Bitcoin rallying or some Etherium app getting hacked, but other than that I avoid it. Recently, I’ve had a bunch of people who wouldn’t normally be interested in such things ping me about Initiative Q, asking what I thought of it.

I’ve personally been maintaining a policy that generally dumber tech is better. I don’t own any smart speakers, I don’t own any smart lightbulbs because I’m terrified of the prospect of having a web server in a light-socket, and I definitely don’t own any smart cameras or the such for similar reasons. I’m not opposed to such things existing, I just think they’ve got a long way to go before I’d trust them.

Few remember the Cybiko. In the year 2000, a Russian company unveiled a very strange looking device, adorned with a comically small keyboard and a retro antenna. They called it a handheld computer, and marketed it towards teens with some of the most insane advertising I’d personally ever seen. The device was an interesting one, and to describe just how far ahead of its time it really was, it will be useful to draw comparisons against smartphones of today.