Early in my career I was assigned a project to introduce a new way of counting the bytes used by cell phones for the carrier I worked for. This project itself was a complete disaster, which is a story for a different time, but this project also helped me uncovered and understand a number of other network problems. The story I want to focus on today, covers degraded service, where for weeks, if not…
When working in Telecommunications, one of the things you learn is to be very careful in production. The companies are trying to chase something like 99.999% and higher availability numbers. So mistakes in production are to be avoided, but like anything else, team members get overconfident and make simple mistakes. One of these outages, was an accidental paste into a terminal. The result of which…
Last week, the CRTC made public a redacted version of the response Rogers filed with answers to the regulators questions. I started my career in wireless telecommunications for a competitor to Rogers here in Canada, and wanted to dig through the outage. I've been out of the industry for a few years now, but my outdated perspective may be of some use here. Unfortunately, the redacted version…
There isn't a huge deal of progress to talk about this week. Most of the progress has been in intangible areas. The product demo I've been working on is making steady progress, but it offers no security benefits. So it's more of a UX demo, and will need to be rebuilt to offer an actual MVP. So now that I'm able to demonstrate most UX patterns I'm thinking of for ShellGuard, I'm starting to…
This week, I decided to start a new project called ShellGuard. For the last year or so, I've had an itch. It all started with a customer at Teleport who had concerns about system administrators ability to access customer data on the systems they administer. My knee-jerk thought is this is an impossible problem. The security controls don't create a clear way to allow a user to change the system,…
When I used to work in Telecom networks, on technologies like LTE or UMTS, I was often tasked with investigating and resolving hard problems. A number of these outages were caused by the way Telecom networks use and deploy a DNS architecture separated from the internet. It's the same protocol, but runs on it's own networks with separate root servers and a few oddities you wouldn't expect on the…
Bitcoin can be a polarizing topic. There are certainly a strong following of bitcoin and derivatives, but many of the engineers I know are opposed to the technology. What motivated me to finally get this post out however, is the other week I encountered a non-engineer, non-technical advocate for Bitcoin. They were a restaurant worker, and explained they have a side gig of helping others gt into…
I suspect too many dev teams have gone a bit too far the mantra of code should be self documenting. When interviewing developers, this is something I often pick up as a negative signal, is poor commenting style. So this is just a reminder, that the code tells you what and how, and should be as clearly written as possible for other developers to follow using just the code. But this mantra doesn't…
Sometimes it's important to remind ourselves that we don't know what we don't know! I recently began to spend more effort considering and emphasizing what pieces might be missing from a particular engineering puzzle. Like many engineers, I rely heavily on mental models when tackling technical problems. The problem is, these mental models are seldom complete, with gaps or assumptions, which leads…