Life
- Ketchup
If you’re eating fast food, skip the little ketchup paper cups. Flip a drink lid over, and put the ketchup on there. Larger container, and it supports horizontal dipping. - Toothbrush
Choose a colour of toothbrush; only buy toothbrushes for yourself in that colour (several when they’re on sale). Mine are green, choose something else. I also buy one of a different colour to give to a house guest who has forgotten theirs. - Discounts
Just ask, I’ve had a fantastic success rate at hotels, and received one at a few clothing stores. - Be Nice
It’s always worth it for its own sake, and I’ve also received more extrinsic rewards like flight upgrades, free meals, or inside tips as a result. - Check bags at a hotel
Exploring a city? Need to ditch your baggage? Ask a hotel to check them for you. It will cost a few bucks, but most bellhops are willing to do it for an added tip. Don’t lie: be upfront that you’re not a guest. - Respond to complaints quickly
I hate dealing with customer complaints, especially when they’re framed in a rude or abrasive manner. Responding within minutes (even just to apologize, and say we’re looking into it) diffuses their anger most of the time. Joel Spolsky wrote a great post about customer service: Seven steps to remarkable customer service.
Technology
- Turning it on and off again really does help
Infinite wisdom from The IT Crowd. If something is broken, try turning it off and on again. - Salt doesn’t matter if you don’t throttle attempts
There’s been a lot of great posts about properly handling passwords lately. That’s fantastic. Analysis of the recent LinkedIn breach (an every other breach before it) has shown just how bad users are at selecting passwords. It doesn’t do much to protect an individual user if you don’t throttle login attempts. As an added bonus, you provide the computing power to compare the hashes, not the attacker. - Analyze actions when people are pushed out of their comfort zone
When I end up playing at being a systems administrator (sysadmin) for WonderProxy, Will and I sit down to discuss what I did, and how I could have done it better. I’ve started capturing logs from terminal and annotating them with my thoughts while things are fresh to ease the process. I’ve found them tremendously educational, and it has increased my competence when acting in this manner several fold. The last time I wore the sysadmin hat I received a nearly perfect grade on my actions.
My comments section is broken, but I'd love to hear yours on twitter @preinheimer or by email: paul@ this domain.
Last week I noticed an article on Hacker News titled “Latency numbers every programmer should know”. The post included the latency for a packet to travel from California to Netherlands and back. Since we’ve generated extensive ping statistics at WonderNetwork, including Los Angeles → Amsterdam, I replied to the gist with a link to our data.
Then the traffic came. Quite a bit of traffic, actually: by the end of the day our earlier traffic numbers were floored at zero by the new scale (this doesn’t bother me, we haven’t publicized the site much).
Here’s what our traffic looked like, broken down by visitors per hour:
As you can see, the gist traffic spiked fast and early, as the news post peaked on the front page of Hacker News, then fell away. The reddit traffic built a bit more slowly, gained steam when it hit the /r/programming front page, then trailed off more slowly. Even though the gist peak was much higher than reddit’s they provided less traffic overall. Over the period shown: reddit: 3161, gist 2249, t.co (twitter) 286.
Average time on site was just under three minutes: people experimented with our data! The bounce rate was good, average actions (which doesn’t include people interacting with the JS portion of the graph) was nice, and our site continued to perform fantastically even as it received hundreds of times more traffic than usual.
Unfortunately, we were in a horrible position to monetize that traffic. I added some random links to our other products to the ping data a while back, but it’s poorly integrated. But really, I’m fine with that. Our server performed fantastically, a lot of people got use of the data that we’ve published, and we’ve probably built a bit of name recognition. I’ll take that win.
I read an article a while back about the new policy “On Air, On Sale” in the UK where record companies start selling songs once they play on the radio. It mentioned how it would give sales charts a more organic feel, as previously demand would build before sales started so albums would debut high. This feels similar: the reddit traffic built with interest, and trailed off slowly; the gist (via Hacker News) traffic peaked hard when it hit the front page, then died off just as quickly when it fell of page 1.
