rich text

Speak Alt Text on MacOS

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 13:01:24 -0400

I’ve been using Bluesky a lot lately (I’m @rich.lafferty.ca there), and one of the conventions there, like on Mastodon, is that images should have alt text.¹ I configure my account to require it so I don’t forget, especially on mobile.

But one challenge with alt text is that you don’t know what it will sound like to someone using speech-to-text, and while that’s not the only way people use alt text, it is one use case.

WIP limits in a nutshell

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 16:23:57 -0400

This is the whiteboard diagram I have repeated the most in my career. Stop doing so much at once and you’ll deliver value sooner.

Four stars and a horse ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️🐴

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 21:14:29 -0400

This is one of my favorite bugs, and because of various website redesigns it’s all but fallen off the internet, so noting here for posterity. I was reminded of it earlier today talking with a friend about what “four and a half nines” means in reliability, and I suggested “four nines and a horse” and got to introduce him to this bug!

Back in May 2014, Etsy had a bug where they accidentally replaced their half-star image in ratings with a horse. Twitter user marykuris thankfully posted a screenshot:

Four Kinds of Dates

Sat, 11 Nov 2023 16:38:51 -0400

Software engineers always seem to resist talking about dates. Estimating is hard, but it is also dangerous – sometimes you make an estimate and the next thing you know it’s a deadline that has consequences if missed! But you never committed to anything! What happened?

People are imprecise when they talk about dates, and interpret things to meet their needs. A while ago I learned¹ about a model of four kinds of dates which can help avoid misinterpretations. I’ve used it for a long time and it’s helped clear up a bunch of date-related confusion.

Alarm fatigue and ignorable warnings

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 20:45:27 -0300

We had a minor Major Incident^* today, and it was a nice little example of alarm fatigue.

A service — which was thankfully not in use yet — just up and stopped running in production. No sign of it where it used to be in Kubernetes or even in ArgoCD. Thankfully, when we spun up the major incident process, someone had an “oh… oh no” moment and realized that they’d done a terraform apply in what should’ve been an unrelated repo right around the time the incident started and proactively joined the call.

ChatGPT, Python and Misplaced Confidence

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 21:14:28 -0400

I had an amazing encounter with the ChatGPT AI today.

Someone on the Halihax slack who was working on today’s Advent of Code challenge was bemoaning the absence of a way to tell a Python list comprehension to stop after the first N iterations. That didn’t seem completely unreasonable, but I didn’t know how to do it, so I thought I’d find out if ChatGPT knew how.

For those unfamiliar with list comprehensions: in Python there is a convenient syntax for working with lists, so that instead of writing something like

Welcome

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 14:37:39 -0300

The problem with a brand-new blog is getting the first post out. Breaking the seal, so to speak. So to force myself through that, I figured I’d give a quick introduction.

I like hats.

I’m Rich Lafferty, a site reliability engineer in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, across the harbour from Halifax. I’ve been doing this kind of thing since 1999 under various titles like “sysadmin”, “ops engineer”, and now “SRE”, and spent a bit of time in a management role as well before returning to an engineering role at PagerDuty where I am currently a staff engineer.