Weeknotes 004

Jan 24 2021

Non-work

A fairly prosaic week this week.

I bumped into a phrase “met his Thermidor” this week and ended up learning about the Thermidorian Reaction.

Work

Work felt bitty this week and it seemed to lack cohesion. I bounced between discussions and meetings and community events. Lots of one to ones this week.

We had a long session with a large group of people to discuss what and how we see working at GDS. The session was well run and it was interesting to hear others’ perspectives about their work.

I conducted a couple of telephone interviews for developer positions we have open.

Probably the most interesting for me was a half hour with one of our fraud experts, discussing some typical indicators and patterns of web based fraud in the context of accounts.

A Ruby benchmark snippet out of idle curiosity:

require 'benchmark'

n = 5000000

Benchmark.bm do |x|
  x.report {n.times do; (n1 + n2).sort; end}
  x.report {n.times do; (n1 + n2).sort!; end}
end

    user     system      total        real
4.002936   0.003981   4.006917 (  4.010948)
3.734065   0.004691   3.738756 (  3.742245)

Reading

Strengthening Security Configurations to Defend Against Attackers Targeting Cloud Services which has a big list of bullet points. Putting in place many of their suggestions is a large upfront task for any system launch.

Bypassing MFA with pass-the-cookie.

Mutation testing and related Ruby library mutant.