Adding email to the Memex (and a Dynamo pagination gotcha)
A few hours after shipping the Memex over iMessage and Signal, I added email. The interesting part wasn't the feature — it was a DynamoDB pagination bug…
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Memex — a queryable second brain over my messages
I wanted to ask my own data questions like "when did I last hear from X?" or "what did we say about that lake house?" and get an actual answer. So I…
Read →Sketching a one-click honeypot installer
Honeypots are useful and almost nobody runs them, because the existing stacks are either too heavy (multi-container threat-intel platforms that need 16…
Read →Decrypting Signal Desktop's database on macOS
I wanted Signal Desktop's message history available for indexing in my personal search. Signal Desktop stores messages in a SQLCipher database, and the…
Read →Five identical schedules, thirteen SMS in ten minutes
09:33 to 09:43 on a Friday morning: thirteen SMS messages, several push notifications, all from my own safety app, all to me. The trigger was five…
Read →Per-day-of-week sleep windows for a safety app
A safety app I run was firing "missed check-in" pre-alerts at 7am on Saturdays. I don't get up at 7am on Saturdays. The fix was moving from one global…
Read →Auditing 22 references to GSIs that don't exist
A pre-release audit pass on a backend I run turned up 22 places where the code passed IndexName: foo-index to a DynamoDB query on a table where foo-index…
Read →Updating a DynamoDB row by the wrong key shape, for a year
A pre-release endpoint sweep on a backend I run turned up two 500s on the check-in respond and snooze endpoints. The cause was old: a composite-key table…
Read →PHP loose comparison turned an empty endpoint into a 500
A backend I run was returning 500s on GET /api.php with no endpoint= query param. Should obviously be a 400. Tracking it down landed me on one of those…
Read →Replacing a binary threshold cliff with a one-hour ramp
The inactivity-monitor cron on a side-project safety app was paging me at 7:01 AM, every morning, with "you haven't checked in." I was asleep. The cause…
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