Bill @bill@mastodon.technology

The economics of the gig economy in China mean it is not only possible but seems common to get someone to go to Starbucks and bring you your coffee in the morning.

The store is open, staff are making coffee but I’m the only customer here. Instead there are a steady stream of delivery riders turning up to collect orders.

It’s easy to miss just how quickly the tech giants have conquered payments in China. What stands out is how the humble QR code has enabled street vendors to take electronic payments with no investment in expensive card readers or payment terminals.

Day 15 and Advent of Code just took a step up in difficulty. At this point I’m going to stop trying to keep up each day but work through at my own pace.

Beijing’s air quality has been a frequent topic of conversation since I’ve been here and so I built myself a simple air quality indicator.

In building this, it surprised me was how quickly we adjust our definitions of normal. When freak events become regular occurrences they no longer stand out whatever colour we make them.

For all my work with ops, alerts and dashboards I’m not sure why this surprised me as much as it did.

‪This prompted me to loook up the origins of the phrase “Siamese twins”. Whilst I can see the connection with the picture, I had no idea that it can actually be used to refer to word pairs:‬
‪* milk and honey‬
‪* short and sweet‬
‪* fight or flight‬

‪https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siamese_twins_(linguistics)‬

‪China tech may just have gone too far. In this shopping mall you need to scan a QR code with WeChat to get a sheet of toilet paper 🧻 😱‬

你好，世界！ Greetings from Beijing 🇨🇳

LondonGophers November meet-up will be live in just under 10 minutes. Thanks to @RiverIsland@twitter.com for the venue: http://youtu.be/bW4aM7U5yt0?a
#GoLang

Trying to make banana bread whilst looking after a 4-month old wasn’t the best idea in the world. Completely forgot the eggs 😱 somehow it’s till edible. Cake anyone? 🍌 🍞

Pencilled in to give my first ever talk at a #GoLang meet-up. The theme... learning.

I'd love to hear your experiences: What helped you learn Go? What really got in the way? But above all, what projects did you invent just so that you could try things out?

I really like the sound of #SustainOSS. I don’t consider myself a project maintainer or a qualified contributor yet, but have a year to change that.

https://medium.com/@lpnotes/sustainoss-2018-notes-d679dd9785ca

Thanks for the great write-up @lpnotes@twitter.com.

London in 24 hours

It is not often I look at a snippet of code and marvel at it's simplicity. Curiosity led me to poke at the `sync.Once` type from the #GoLang standard library. Love it!

https://golang.org/src/sync/once.go

I'm not sure why I expect complexity, magic and wizardry from the standard library. It's reassuring to learn it isn't all a dark art.

*doh* Thought I'd try and familiarise myself with helm.sh. Turns out it's not available for ARM.

Dynamic DNS providers seem to have fallen by the wayside recently, either shutting down completely or competing to generate the most unwanted email. So I over-engineered a solution:
- Goggle App Engine service to give me external IP
- Go client to update Route53 hosted DNS when IP changes
- Packaged in a Docker container
- Deployed on Kubernetes
- Running on a Raspberry Pi cluster

There are a few tweaks to make mostly logging/metrics, but it seems to be working well so far.

Am curious as to how others handle the issue of sensitive data leaking into logs? When I faced this, there were three strong opinions:
1. Good developers don’t leak sensitive data - improve dev
2. Ops requires everything - secure access to the logs
3. Filter before indexing - regular expressions to the rescue

I like this side-car approach, but don’t see much open discussion on mitigating sensitive data in logs. Are we pretending this is a non-issue?
https://radu-matei.com/blog/filter-k8s-logs/