Anton Begehr abegehr

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't real

There are certain files created by particular editors, IDEs, operating systems, etc., that do not belong in a repository. But adding system-specific files to the repo's .gitignore is considered a poor practice. This file should only exclude files and directories that are a part of the package that should not be versioned (such as the node_modules directory) as well as files that are generated (and regenerated) as artifacts of a build process.

All other files should be in your own global gitignore file:

Create a file called .gitignore in your home directory and add any filepath patterns you want to ignore.
Tell git where your global gitignore file is.

Note: The specific name and path you choose aren't important as long as you configure git to find it, as shown below. You could substitute .config/git/ignore for .gitignore in your home directory, if you prefer.

XCTest and Optional Unwrapping

XCTest is the default test harness on iOS an Apple’s other platforms. It provides support for organizing test cases and asserting expectations in your application code, and reporting the status of those expectations. It's not as fancy as some of the BDD frameworks like Quick and Cedar, but it has gotten much better than it used to be, and is my preferred test framework these days.

The Problem

One place where the XCTest assertion utilities fall a bit short has been with managing Optional variables in swift. The default use of XCTAssertNotNil don't provide any mechanism for unwrapping, easily leading to assertion checks like this:

class TestCaseDefault: XCTestCase {

Exporting your 2FA tokens from Authy to transfer them into another 2FA application

IMPORTANT - Update regarding deprecation of Authy desktop apps

Past August 2024, Authy stopped supported the desktop version of their apps:
See Authy is shutting down its desktop app | The 2FA app Authy will only be available on Android and iOS starting in August for details.

And indeed, after a while, Authy changed something in their backend which now prevents the old desktop app from logging in. If you are already logged in, then you are in luck, and you can follow the instructions below to export your tokens.

If you are not logged in anymore, but can find a backup of the necessary files, then restore those files, and re-install Authy 2.2.3 following the instructions below, and it should work as expected.

Chromium on Vercel (serverless)

This is an up-to-date guide on running Chromium in Vercel serverless functions in 2022. What you will read below is the result of two days of research, debugging, 100+ failed deployments, and a little bit of stress.

Getting started

Step 1: Install dependencies

Use chrome-aws-lambda that comes with Chromium pre-configured to run in serverless, and puppeteer-core due to the smaller size of Chromium distributive.

	#!/bin/sh
	TABLE_SCHEMA=$1
	TABLE_NAME=$2

	mytime=`date '+%y%m%d%H%M'`
	hostname=`hostname \| tr 'A-Z' 'a-z'`
	file_prefix="trimax$TABLE_NAME$mytime$TABLE_SCHEMA"
	bucket_name=$file_prefix
	splitat="4000000000"
	bulkfiles=200

	import numpy
	import sympy

	from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
	import matplotlib
	from matplotlib import cm, colors
	from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

	branching_number = 2


	<template>
	<div id="map" class="map">
	<div class="button-bar">
	<button v-on:click="addMapLayer()">terrain</button>
	</div>
	</div>
	</template>

	<script>

	cd ~/
	mkdir .localhost-ssl

	sudo openssl genrsa -out ~/.localhost-ssl/localhost.key 2048
	sudo openssl req -new -x509 -key ~/.localhost-ssl/localhost.key -out ~/.localhost-ssl/localhost.crt -days 3650 -subj /CN=localhost
	sudo security add-trusted-cert -d -r trustRoot -k /Library/Keychains/System.keychain ~/.localhost-ssl/localhost.crt

	npm install -g http-server
	echo "
	function https-server() {


	// Encodes a js object as a url-safe base64 string.
	encodeURIComponent(btoa(JSON.stringify({ ... })))

	// Takes the previously generated string and returns a parsed js object.
	JSON.parse(atob(decodeURIComponent('...')))