September 2020 – alper.nl

Here come the scammers

After having been locked out of my Instagram account for months because of wrongful reports, I have just gotten back access to the account for a week or so and I already get the first people reporting me again.

And how do I know that they’re doing this? They are in my messages and telling me that they are doing it. This is extremely brazen.

I don’t know what they are thinking but let’s hope that Instagram has tweaked some of their abuse processes or that my additional protection will pay off.

And that is definitely not the only one. Though the other attempt (below) to retrieve my handle is so delusional that it’s almost cute.

I thought I had problems with my Instagram account. Turns out it can be a lot worse than that.

https://twitter.com/dannyjhall/status/1310231730591346689

I found out that there is a large secondary market where Facebook employees sell support and verification status to whoever can pay, but being able to commission an account to be stolen straight up is pretty extreme.

Turns out this guy got so much attention for his case that he got his account returned promptly but in the thread there are a bunch more people who are facing similar issues.

Another @firstname person losing theirs and then getting it back.

Another person being continuously hit by impersonation reports.

Getting @firstname back

So the Instagram handle that I thought I had lost was returned to me suddenly last week (thanks to a friend). Not sure whether I’ll get to keep it this time round, but let’s try.

At least this time I’ve copied most of my follows to my backup account and I’ll see if I can make a data backup at one point or another.

Once we expect leadership to come from everybody at work, engineers don’t have to switch to management anymore to be able to lead and be rewarded for it.

https://leaddev.com/not-all-engineering-leaders-are-engineering-managers

The government has made it clear that its main purpose is not to save lives or protect the vulnerable. It exists to ensure that assets never depreciate and that wealth is never redistributed downward. Capital has never seemed so fictitious.

https://rhizome.org/editorial/2020/apr/22/notes-from-quar-daniel-keller/

Canada and Russia are the big winners when it comes to climate change as can be seen in this piece about Climate Migration by Pro Publica.

https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/

A guide to designing an interviewing process tailored specifically to the staff engineer level.

https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-plus-interview-process

A simple solution to this: how about you don’t lie to your kids?

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/amp33379355/parenting-coronavirus-lying-to-kids/?__twitter_impression=true

“I am successful if I’m saying the right “No”s to my manager. If the ICs that report to my manager end up feeling like “I told you so”or “We knew this was a bad idea”and that wasn’t surfaced for a discussion, that’s on me.”

“I confidently trade on my manager’s authority in ways my teammates may struggle with. Because of my time and my deeper involvement in the technical details being discussed, it is my responsibility to step in and deescalate if a technical conversation is starting to circle the drain.”

I really like this explanation of the variety of things that a staff engineer can do (and does).

https://amyunger.com/blog/2020/09/10/staff-engineer-at-heroku.html

It sounds very familiar here that the mark of a senior is to have continuous pressure against getting anything done and then still getting stuff done.

One part of it is that if you’re capable in a platform, you should be able to get out the same amount of code in a fraction of the time.

I’d add glibly: if you’re getting stuff done, maybe you’re not a senior?

https://swizec.com/blog/why-senior-engineers-get-nothing-done/