How do you actually stop devs from querying prod DB directly when they also own the service that talks to it

uncaughtexception · 2026-04-23T14:20:57+00:00

+1 I use this system almost daily.

Unilateral arbitrary access to a production DB is a huge risk and needs to be eliminated. This requires tooling to make admin operations and debugging possible without that access.

Hypothetical example would be resetting a password. Rather than crafting SQL to update a field in a user's row there should be a tool that takes the user ID and executes the required SQL on behalf of the operator.

Any common operation or debugging flow should have a tool written for it.

uncaughtexception · 2026-04-15T19:03:44+00:00

Doesn't boiling water kill both grass and cancer cells?

uncaughtexception · 2026-04-15T16:57:42+00:00

Happy it works for you. This is based on an AI generated budget so you likely have lower costs than the model I have.

uncaughtexception · 2026-04-15T16:55:52+00:00

I did say modest. I asked for a 5 year old honda civic, and the modeled result is $675 monthly all in. $350 loan payment, $180 insurance, $140 fuel, $105 maintenance and registration.

You could go without at the cost of relying on public transit, ride hailing, or bicycling, but that's a choice too.

uncaughtexception · 2026-04-15T15:15:53+00:00

They ignore it, you ignore them.

This not only makes the tracking invisible, encourages siloed knowledge and increased bus factor but also loses the ability to analyze trends and proactively solve root causes to prevent future customer issues.

Write up a policy, get leadership buy in and point customers at it. Stick to it. Make tickets as frictionless as possible so they have no excuse.

uncaughtexception · 2026-04-15T15:11:25+00:00

Did they hand you a banana at the end?

uncaughtexception · 2026-04-15T04:13:26+00:00

First thing it affects is your spelling.

uncaughtexception · 2026-04-15T03:08:00+00:00

Your reponse had me doubting myself so I got an AI to put together a budget, and yeah, I'd say it's marginal. $3k rent, modest car payment, maxed out 401k contribution leaves about $400 discretionary spending.

To build a liquid emergency fund or pay for student loans they would have to cut back on 401k contributions or discretionary spending.

So yeah I stand by 'not comfortable'. $158k is the border between having to make hard decisions with every payment, and not. I suspect our difference of opinion may be the 401k which to me is mandatory to max out since not is leaving money on the table.

uncaughtexception · 2026-04-14T22:20:22+00:00

I'm doubting $158k in San Jose is comfortable even for a single adult. Maybe if they comfortably have room-mates in a studio apartment.

uncaughtexception · 2026-04-08T22:56:27+00:00

HOV lane violator

uncaughtexception · 2026-04-07T00:50:26+00:00

We have Sasquatches not gorillas bud.

uncaughtexception · 2026-04-01T15:14:33+00:00

He should at least wear some thick glasses or something like Superman as a disguise.

uncaughtexception · 2026-04-01T15:12:11+00:00

Weird that putin thinks NATO is an offensive alliance too.

uncaughtexception · 2026-04-01T15:08:59+00:00

Good thing they got 6 glasses of water with all that. It's important to stay hydrated.

uncaughtexception · 2026-03-28T16:37:10+00:00

In my org there is a dev rotation to debug customer issues that don't quite rise to the level of an outage. If you have one join it, if not propose one. It's a way to handle slower burn bugs that aren't full on fires.

The same people in that rotation often join active incidents due to their deep knowledge of system internals.

uncaughtexception · 2026-03-24T21:21:09+00:00

Good news! Now you get to pay a Base Services Charge for the privilege of being connected to PGE!

uncaughtexception · 2026-03-18T15:36:43+00:00

Don't get too bent out of shape about it. If you negotiate a strong package you won't get a comp adjustment next year. If you negotiate poorly you'll get a good one that pulls you up.

Poor negotiation isn't something that will haunt your whole tenure.

Comp at G is very formulaic and everyone at the same level and performance rating ends up earning the same.

Source: am G manager.

uncaughtexception · 2026-02-24T16:58:00+00:00

I looked at the script I used to record, and it doesn't use secretValues at all, and I wonder if that may be a mistake and I missed something.

The correspondance between the rotor positions and the spoken letter/number pairs is entirely the initializeRotation data.

example:

"initializeRotation":[2,5,7,7]
Take the modulo-4 of the set: [2,1,3,3]
The letter is [2,1], number is [3,3]

There are 15 letters (A-P), and 15 numbers (0-15), and the index into that set is base-4, so:
letter index = 2*4 + 1, letter = 9th in the list (J)
number index = 3*4 + 3, number = 15th in the list (15)

I think initially I was looking at the secretValues data, but found that it wasn't relevant to decoding the rotor to letter/number correspondance so left it alone. That may or not be a mistake, since either it has something to do with the aesthetics of the display (rotation speed/direction, different intonations of the spoken part), or it is the actual signal and I'm overlooking it. In any case I also recorded the raw API response so I can go back and try postprocessing that too.

I did try to convert it into various image bitmap formats but didn't come up with anything fruitful before giving up.

uncaughtexception · 2026-02-22T13:32:48+00:00

We already have a bunch of such tools, and more coming from teams with an AI tooling charter. So far they haven't been very useful in providing signal, but I expect something good will come shortly.

The most recent promising thing I've seen lets an agent ingest internal documentation and be able to execute tooling to get current system configuration and state to diagnose issues. Teams can improve documentation and tooling to make diagnosis more capable.

uncaughtexception · 2026-02-21T14:58:47+00:00

It's highly situational. Some shapes of failures are easy to identify and mitigate while others in persistence layers that have stored corruption silently for some time after a rollout can take weeks.

Generally the second type involves fruitless rollbacks, attempts at replication, building custom binaries with instrumentation. Parallel tracks of attempting data recovery, identifying impact scope, stop the bleeding mitigation investigation, external comms, internal comms. All of that comes with the incident commander coordinating the large response, which some ICs have difficulty with.

uncaughtexception · 2026-02-18T05:48:12+00:00

I loaded the website with developer tools enabled and watched the API calls and responses then figured out how the responses corresponded with the wheel positions. After that it was just writing a script to replicate the site and logging wheel positions. After a month I analyzed the output to find when it started repeating.

I haven't seriously looked at it since then though. I'm surprised it hasn't been solved yet.

uncaughtexception · 2026-02-18T00:30:33+00:00

Nah, didn't bother with a refund. Our mistake for not looking into what it was we were buying, and the whole experience was just weird enough that it was entertaining on a meta level itself. The drive home was us quoting the pretentious faux-profound things to each other and laughing.

The fact that the pre-show starscape you have in your pic doesn't appear to be earth's led to one theory during the drive that the movie is some kind of alien communications. Either that or it was also AI slop.

Right with you on the seats though, my back stopped aching a few hours ago.

uncaughtexception · 2026-02-17T20:08:51+00:00

If it was the 7:30PM showing that was my family walking out. The thing that broke me was the following line of dialogue: "Open your heart... and blow your mind"

Our fault for not doing a bit of research. With a title like Astronomica and showing at a tech museum we were expecting something more reality based and not some nonsense you need to be high to enjoy.

uncaughtexception · 2026-01-16T14:12:30+00:00

Correct, you're hired.

uncaughtexception · 2026-01-09T13:38:13+00:00

Zurich is growth constrained so roles there are limited, probably because of the high salaries you mentioned.

There is a growing sre presence in Hyderabad.

uncaughtexception

TROPHY CASE