Apple Business Essentials with AppleCare+ for 3 devices and 200GB iCloud storage is $19.99 per user/mo. That's the same price as AppleCare One alone.

From time to time I get the itch to improve my home network uptime, and I have to keep reminding myself that the current setup is fine.

It's fine, Capital One. I did open your emails, I just didn't load your shady tracking pixels.

Replacing an ingress controller in Kubernetes is also a well documented practice, with minimum or even zero downtime if you want to.

Generally, if your engineering team can reasonably keep things simple, it's good. However, business needs to grow and infrastructure needs to scale out. Sometimes trying too hard to be simple is, in my experience, how things become unmanageably complex.

I find well-engineered complexity to be much more pleasant to work with.

I have had a lot of friends amazed by the fact that when they connect to my home Wi-Fi they stop seeing ads. Zero of them interested in implementing something similar in their home.

I know about 10 people in real life that uses Handbrake. And 10 of them use it to rip Blu-ray discs and store media files on their NAS. It will piss them off if you hide all the codec settings and replace the main screen with a giant "convert to Facebook compatible video" button.

Instead, do it like how iina[1] packages mpv[2].

1. https://github.com/iina/iina

2. https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv

That's the most pleasant customer service call I have ever experienced. I wish more business could adopt similar approach. I don't mind talking to AI. In fact, instead of a live agent, I actually prefer to talk to your LLM, so my issue can be quickly triaged to the right human who actually understand my situation.

Also, my house is less secure than commercial data centers, so e2ee gives me greater peace of mind about data safety.

- Their alerts were not durable. The outage took out the alert system so humans were just eyeballing dashboards during the outage. What if your critical system went down along with that alert system, in the middle of night?

- The cloud marketplace service was affected by cloudflare outage and there's nothiing they could do.

- Tiered stroage was down, disk usage went above normal level. But there's no anomaly detection and no alerts. It survived because t0 storage was massively over provisioned.

- They took pride in using industry well-known designs like cell-based architecture, redundancy, multi-az...ChatGPT would be able to give me a better list

And I don't get whey they had to roast Crowdstrike at the end. I mean, the Crowdstrike incident was really amateur stuff, like, the absolute lowest bar I can think of.

Instead of editing some YAML files, in the "old" days these software vendors would've asked you to maintain a cronjob, ansible playbooks, systemd unit, bash scripts...

I get it that it's not always realistic to do, especially if the hiring manage reviews hundreds of applications for a hot role. But that's why take home assignment sucks. Some candidates may waste hours of their lives for nothing. Both sides need to be respectful of other people's time.

- I run it in Kubernetes with multiple replicas behind a load balancer for high availability.

- A companion iOS shortcut for family members to temporarily pause protection on all replicas for online shopping.

- Configuration as code, which gets mounted as a secret.

- Query logs from all replicas forwarded to loki for visualization and performance review.